As the old song so happily put it:  My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean!  And a lot of others have lied over it too; but I will not—­at least not just yet.  Perhaps later on I may feel moved to do so; but at this moment I am but newly landed from it and my heart is full of rankling resentment toward the ocean and all its works.

I speak but a sober conviction when I say that the chief advantage to be derived from taking an ocean voyage is not that you took it, but that you have it to talk about afterward.  And, to my mind, the most inspiring sight to bewitnessed on a trip across the Atlantic is the Battery—­viewed from the ocean side, coming back.

Do I hear any seconds to that motion?

Chapter III

Bathing Oneself on the Other Side

My first experience with the bathing habits of the native Aryan stocks of Europe came to pass on the morning after the night of our arrival in London.

London disappointed me in one regard—­when I opened my eyes that morning there was no fog.  There was not the slightest sign of a fog.  I had expected that my room would be full of fog of about the consistency of Scotch stage dialect—­soupy, you know, and thick and bewildering.  I had expected that servants with lighted tapers in their hands would be groping their way through corridors like caves, and that from the street without, would come the hoarse-voiced cries of cabmen lost in the enshrouding gray.  You remember Dickens always had them hoarse-voiced.

This was what I confidently expected.  Such, however, was not to be.  I woke to a consciousness that the place was flooded with indubitable and undoubted sunshine.  To be sure, it was not the sharp, hard sunshine we have in America, which scours and bleaches all it touches, until the whole world has the look of having just been clear-starched and hot-ironed.  It was a softened, smoke-edged, pastel-shaded sunshine; nevertheless it was plainly recognizable as the genuine article.

Nor was your London shadow the sharply outlined companion in black who accompanies you when the weather is fine in America.  Your shadow in London was rather a dim and wavery gentleman who caught up with you as you turned out of the shaded by-street; who went with you a distance and then shyly vanished, but was good company while he stayed, being restful, as your well-bred Englishman nearly always is, and not overly aggressive.

There was no fog that first morning, or the next morning, or any morning of the twenty-odd we spent in England.  Often the weather was cloudy, and occasionally it was rainy; and then London would be drenched in that wonderful gray color which makes it, scenically speaking, one of the most fascinating spots on earth; but it was never downright foggy and never downright cold.  English friends used to speak to me about it.  They apologized for good weather at that season of the year, just as natives of a Florida winter resort will apologize for bad.