ready to answer questions about the geological strata and their fossils; Dr. Jeffries Wyman to point out and interpret the common objects which present themselves to a sharp-eyed observer; and Mr. Boyd Dawkins to pilot me among the caves and cairns.  Then I should want a better pair of eyes and a better pair of ears, and, while I was reorganizing, perhaps a quicker apprehension and a more retentive memory; in short, a new outfit, bodily and mental.  But Nature does not care to mend old shoes; she prefers a new pair, and a young person to stand in them.

What a great book one could make, with such aids, and how many would fling it down, and take up anything in preference, provided only that it were short enough; even this slight record, for want of something shorter!

Not only did I feel sure that many friends would like to read our itinerary, but another motive prompted me to tell the simple story of our travels.  I could not receive such kindness, so great evidences of friendly regard, without a strong desire, amounting to a positive necessity, for the expression of my grateful sense of all that had been done for us.  Individually, I felt it, of course, as a most pleasing experience.  But I believed it to have a more important significance as an illustration of the cordial feeling existing between England and America.  I know that many of my countrymen felt the attentions paid to me as if they themselves shared them with me.  I have lived through many strata of feeling in America towards England.  My parents, full-blooded Americans, were both born subjects of King George III.  Both learned in their early years to look upon Britons as the enemies of their country.  A good deal of the old hostility lingered through my boyhood, and this was largely intensified by the war of 1812.  After nearly half a century this feeling had in great measure subsided, when the War of Secession called forth expressions of sympathy with the slaveholding States which surprised, shocked, and deeply wounded the lovers of liberty and of England in the Northern States.  A new generation is outgrowing that alienation.  More and more the older and younger nations are getting to be proud and really fond of each other.  There is no shorter road to a mother’s heart than to speak pleasantly to her child, and caress it, and call it pretty names.  No matter whether the child is something remarkable or not, it is her child, and that is enough.  It may be made too much of, but that is not its mother’s fault.  If I could believe that every attention paid me was due simply to my being an American, I should feel honored and happy in being one of the humbler media through which the good-will of a great and generous country reached the heart of a far-off people not always in friendly relations with her.

I have named many of the friends who did everything to make our stay in England and Scotland agreeable.  The unforeseen shortening of my visit must account for many disappointments to myself, and some, it may be, to others.