There are twenty different Englands, every one of which it would be a delight to visit, and I should hardly know with which of them to begin.

The few remarks I have to make on what I saw and heard have nothing beyond the value of first impressions; but as I have already said, if these are simply given, without pretending to be anything more, they are not worthless.  At least they can do little harm, and may sometimes amuse a reader whom they fail to instruct.  But we must all beware of hasty conclusions.  If a foreigner of limited intelligence were whirled through England on the railways, he would naturally come to the conclusion that the chief product of that country is mustard, and that its most celebrated people are Mr. Keen and Mr. Colman, whose great advertising boards, yellow letters on a black ground, and black letters on a yellow ground, stare the traveller in the face at every station.

Of the climate, as I knew it in May and the summer months, I will only say that if I had any illusions about May and June in England, my fireplace would have been ample evidence that I was entirely disenchanted.  The Derby day, the 26th of May, was most chilly and uncomfortable; at the garden-party at Kensington Palace, on the 4th of June, it was cold enough to make hot drinks and warm wraps a comfort, if not a necessity.  I was thankful to have passed through these two ordeals without ill consequences.  Drizzly, or damp, or cold, cloudy days were the rule rather than the exception, while we were in London.  We had some few hot days, especially at Stratford, in the early part of July.  In London an umbrella is as often carried as a cane; in Paris "un homme a para-pluie" is, or used to be, supposed to carry that useful article because he does not keep and cannot hire a carriage of some sort.  He may therefore be safely considered a person, and not a personage.

The soil of England does not seem to be worn out, to judge by the wonderful verdure and the luxuriance of vegetation.  It contains a great museum of geological specimens, and a series of historical strata which are among the most instructive of human records.  I do not pretend to much knowledge of geology.  The most interesting geological objects in our New England that I can think of are the great boulders and the scratched and smoothed surface of the rocks; the fossil footprints in the valley of the Connecticut; the trilobites found at Quincy.  But the readers of Hugh Miller remember what a variety of fossils he found in the stratified rocks of his little island, and the museums are full of just such objects.  When it comes to underground historical relics, the poverty of New England as compared with the wealth of Old England is very striking.  Stratum after stratum carries the explorer through the relics of successive invaders.  After passing through the characteristic traces of different peoples, he comes upon a Roman pavement, and below this the weapons