such favors as I received had I not remembered that I, in my time, had given my services freely for the benefit of those of my own calling.  If I refer to two names among many, it is for special reasons.  Dr. Wilson Fox, the distinguished and widely known practitioner, who showed us great kindness, has since died, and this passing tribute is due to his memory.  I have before spoken of the exceptional favor we owed to Dr. and Mrs. Priestley.  It enabled us to leave London feeling that we had tried, at least, to show our grateful sense of all the attentions bestowed upon us.  If there were any whom we overlooked, among the guests we wished to honor, all such accidental omissions will be pardoned, I feel sure, by those who know how great and bewildering is the pressure of social life in London.

I was, no doubt, often more or less confused, in my perceptions, by the large number of persons whom I met in society.  I found the dinner-parties, as Mr. Lowell told me I should, very much like the same entertainments among my home acquaintances.  I have not the gift of silence, and I am not a bad listener, yet I brought away next to nothing from dinner-parties where I had said and heard enough to fill out a magazine article.  After I was introduced to a lady, the conversation frequently began somewhat in this way:—­

“It is a long time since you have been in this country, I believe?”

“It is a very long time:  fifty years and more.”

“You find great changes in London, of course, I suppose?”

“Not so great as you might think.  The Tower is where I left it.  The Abbey is much as I remember it.  Northumberland House with its lion is gone, but Charing Cross is in the same old place.  My attention is drawn especially to the things which have not changed,—­those which I remember.”

That stream was quickly dried up.  Conversation soon found other springs.  I never knew the talk to get heated or noisy.  Religion and politics rarely came up, and never in any controversial way.  The bitterest politician I met at table was a quadruped,—­a lady’s dog,—­who refused a desirable morsel offered him in the name of Mr. Gladstone, but snapped up another instantly on being told that it came from Queen Victoria.  I recall many pleasant and some delightful talks at the dinner-table; one in particular, with the most charming woman in England.  I wonder if she remembers how very lovely and agreeable she was?  Possibly she may be able to identify herself.

People—­the right kind of people—­meet at a dinner-party as two ships meet and pass each other at sea.  They exchange a few signals; ask each other’s reckoning, where from, where bound; perhaps one supplies the other with a little food or a few dainties; then they part, to see each other no more.  But one or both may remember the hour passed together all their days, just as I recollect our brief parley with the brig Economist, of Leith, from Sierra Leone, in mid ocean, in the spring of 1833.