native elms.  Ours is not a very long-lived tree; between two and three hundred years is, I think, the longest life that can be hoped for it.  Since I have heard of the fragility of the English elm, which is the fatal fault of our own, I have questioned whether it can claim a greater longevity than ours.  There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in the two elms as compared to each other.  It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the compactness and robustness about the English elm, which are replaced by the long, tapering limbs and willowy grace and far-spreading reach of our own, might find a certain parallelism in the people, especially the females of the two countries.

I saw no horse-chestnut trees equal to those I remember in Salem, and especially to one in Rockport, which is the largest and finest I have ever seen; no willows like those I pass in my daily drives.

On the other hand, I think I never looked upon a Lombardy poplar equal to one I saw in Cambridge, England.  This tree seems to flourish in England much more than with us.

I do not remember any remarkable beeches, though there are some very famous ones, especially the Burnham beeches.

No apple-trees I saw in England compare with one next my own door, and there are many others as fine in the neighborhood.

I have spoken of the pleasure I had in seeing by the roadside primroses, cowslips, and daisies.  Dandelions, buttercups, hawkweed looked much as ours do at home.  Wild roses also grew at the roadside,—­smaller and paler, I thought, than ours.

I cannot make a chapter like the famous one on Iceland, from my own limited observation:  There are no snakes in England. I can say that I found two small caterpillars on my overcoat, in coming from Lord Tennyson’s grounds.  If they had stayed on his premises, they might perhaps have developed into “purple emperors,” or spread “the tiger moth’s deep damasked wings” before the enraptured eyes of the noble poet.  These two caterpillars and a few house-flies are all I saw, heard, or felt, by day or night, of the native fauna of England, except a few birds,—­rooks, starlings, a blackbird, and the larks of Salisbury Plain just as they rose; for I lost sight of them almost immediately.  I neither heard nor saw the nightingales, to my great regret.  They had been singing at Oxford a short time before my visit to that place.  The only song I heard was that which I have mentioned, the double note of the cuckoo.

England is the paradise of horses.  They are bred, fed, trained, groomed, housed, cared for, in a way to remind one of the Houyhnhnms, and strikingly contrasting with the conditions of life among the wretched classes whose existence is hardly more tolerable than that of those quasi-human beings under whose name it pleased the fierce satirist to degrade humanity.  The horses that are driven in the hansoms of London are the best I have seen in any public conveyance.  I cannot say as much of those in the four-wheelers.