Little mistakes sometimes cause us a deal of trouble.  This time it was the presence or absence of a single letter which led us to fear that an important package destined to America had miscarried.  There were two gentlemen unwittingly involved in the confusion.  On inquiring for the package at Messrs. Low, the publishers, Mr. Watts, to whom I thought it had been consigned, was summoned.  He knew nothing about it, had never heard of it, was evidently utterly ignorant of us and our affairs.  While we were in trouble and uncertainty, our Boston friend, Mr. James R. Osgood, came in.  “Oh,” said he, “it is Mr. Watt you want, the agent of a Boston firm,” and gave us the gentleman’s address.  I had confounded Mr. Watt’s name with Mr. Watts’s name.  “W’at’s in a name?” A great deal sometimes.  I wonder if I shall be pardoned for quoting six lines from one of my after-dinner poems of long ago:—­

  —­One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt,
  One trivial letter ruins all, left out;
  A knot can change a felon into clay,
  A not will save him, spelt without the k;
  The smallest word has some unguarded spot,
  And danger lurks in i without a dot.

I should find it hard to account for myself during our two short stays in London in the month of August, separated by the week we passed in Paris.  The ferment of continued over-excitement, calmed very much by our rest in the various places I have mentioned, had not yet wholly worked itself off.  There was some of that everlasting shopping to be done.  There were photographs to be taken, a call here and there to be made, a stray visitor now and then, a walk in the morning to get back the use of the limbs which had been too little exercised, and a drive every afternoon to one of the parks, or the Thames Embankment, or other locality.  After all this, an honest night’s sleep served to round out the day, in which little had been effected besides making a few purchases, writing a few letters, reading the papers, the Boston “Weekly Advertiser” among the rest, and making arrangements for our passage homeward.  The sights we saw were looked upon for so short a time, most of them so very superficially, that I am almost ashamed to say that I have been in the midst of them and brought home so little.  I remind myself of my boyish amusement of skipping stones,—­throwing a flat stone so that it shall only touch the water, but touch it in half a dozen places before it comes to rest beneath the smooth surface.  The drives we took showed us a thousand objects which arrested our attention.  Every street, every bridge, every building, every monument, every strange vehicle, every exceptional personage, was a show which stimulated our curiosity.  For we had not as yet changed our Boston eyes for London ones, and very common sights were spectacular and dramatic to us.  I remember that one of our New England country boys exclaimed, when he first saw a block of city dwellings, “Darn it all, who ever see anything like that ‘are?  Sich a lot o’ haousen all stuck together!” I must explain that “haousen” used in my early days to be as common an expression in speaking of houses among our country-folk as its phonetic equivalent ever was in Saxony.  I felt not unlike that country-boy.