in the company.”  As the Senator said this he was grieving in his heart at the trouble he had occasioned, and was almost repenting the duties he had imposed on himself; but, yet, his voice was bellicose and antagonistic.  The conversation was carried on till Morton found himself constrained to say that though he entertained great personal respect for his guest he could not go with him again into society.  He was ill at the time,—­though neither he himself knew it nor the Senator.  On the next morning Mr. Gotobed returned to London without seeing his host, and before the day was over Mr. Nupper was at Morton’s bedside.  He was already suffering from gastric fever.

The Senator was in truth unhappy as he returned to town.  The intimacy between him and the late Secretary of Legation at his capital had arisen from a mutual understanding between them that each was to be allowed to see the faults and to admire the virtues of their two countries, and that conversation between them was to be based on the mutual system.  But nobody can, in truth, endure to be told of shortcomings,—­either on his own part or on that of his country.  He himself can abuse himself, or his country; but he cannot endure it from alien lips.  Mr. Gotobed had hardly said a word about England which Morton himself might not have said,—­but such words coming from an American had been too much even for the guarded temper of an unprejudiced and phlegmatic Englishman.  The Senator as he returned alone to London understood something of this,—­and when a few days later he heard that the friend who had quarrelled with him was ill, he was discontented with himself and sore at heart.

But he had his task to perform, and he meant to perform it to the best of his ability.  In his own country he had heard vehement abuse of the old land from the lips of politicians, and had found at the same time almost on all sides great social admiration for the people so abused.  He had observed that every Englishman of distinction was received in the States as a demigod, and that some who were not very great in their own land had been converted into heroes in his.  English books were read there; English laws were obeyed there; English habits were cultivated, often at the expense of American comfort.  And yet it was the fashion among orators to speak of the English as a worn-out, stupid and enslaved people.  He was a thoughtful man and all this had perplexed him;—­so that he had obtained leave from his State and from Congress to be absent during a part of a short Session, and had come over determined to learn as much as he could.  Everything he heard and almost everything he saw offended him at some point.  And, yet in the midst of it all, he was conscious that he was surrounded by people who claimed and made good their claims to superiority.  What was a lord, let him be ever so rich and have ever so many titles?  And yet, even with such a popinjay as Lord Rufford, he himself felt the lordship.