First in the list of lost opportunities was that of making my bow to the Queen.  I had the honor of receiving a card with the invitation to meet Her Majesty at a garden-party, but we were travelling when it was sent, and it arrived too late.

I was very sorry not to meet Mr. Ruskin, to whom Mr. Norton had given me a note of introduction.  At the time when we were hoping to see him it was thought that he was too ill to receive visitors, but he has since written me that he regretted we did not carry out our intention.  I lamented my being too late to see once more two gentlemen from whom I should have been sure of a kind welcome,—­Lord Houghton and Dean Stanley, both of whom I had met in Boston.  Even if I had stayed out the whole time I had intended to remain abroad, I should undoubtedly have failed to see many persons and many places that I must always feel sorry for having missed.  But as it is, I will not try to count all that I lost; let me rather be thankful that I met so many friends whom it was a pleasure to know personally, and saw so much that it is a pleasure to remember.

I find that many of the places I most wish to see are those associated with the memory of some individual, generally one of the generations more or less in advance of my own.  One of the first places I should go to, in a leisurely tour, would be Selborne.  Gilbert White was not a poet, neither was he a great systematic naturalist.  But he used his eyes on the world about him; he found occupation and happiness in his daily walks, and won as large a measure of immortality within the confines of his little village as he could have gained in exploring the sources of the Nile.  I should make a solemn pilgrimage to the little town of Eyam, in Derbyshire, where the Reverend Mr. Mompesson, the hero of the plague of 1665, and his wife, its heroine and its victim, lie buried.  I should like to follow the traces of Cowper at Olney and of Bunyan at Elstow.  I found an intense interest in the Reverend Mr. Alger’s account of his visit to the Vale of Llangollen, where Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby passed their peaceful days in long, uninterrupted friendship.  Of course the haunts of Burns, the home of Scott, the whole region made sacred by Wordsworth and the group to which he belongs would be so many shrines to which I should make pilgrimages.

I own, also, to having something of the melodramatic taste so notable in Victor Hugo.  I admired the noble facade of Wells cathedral and the grand old episcopal palace, but I begged the bishop to show me the place where his predecessor, Bishop Kidder, and his wife, were killed by the falling chimney in the “Great Storm.”—­I wanted to go to Devizes, and see the monument in the market-place, where Ruth Pierce was struck dead with a lie in her mouth,—­about all which I had read in early boyhood.  I contented myself with a photograph of it which my friend, Mr. Willett, went to Devizes and bought for me.