Ingenuity is much better shown in contrivances for making our daily life more comfortable.  I was on the lookout for everything that promised to be a convenience.  I carried out two things which seemed to be new to the Londoners:  the Star Razor, which I have praised so freely, and still find equal to all my commendations; and the mucilage pencil, which is a very handy implement to keep on the writer’s desk or table.  I found a contrivance for protecting the hand in drawing corks, which all who are their own butlers will appreciate, and luminous match-boxes which really shine brightly in the dark, and that after a year’s usage; whereas one professing to shine by night, which I bought in Boston, is only visible by borrowed light.  I wanted a very fine-grained hone, and inquired for it at a hardware store, where they kept everything in their line of the best quality.  I brought away a very pretty but very small stone, for which I paid a large price.  The stone was from Arkansas, and I need not have bought in London what would have been easily obtained at a dozen or more stores in Boston.  It was a renewal of my experience with the seafoam biscuit.  “Know thyself” and the things about thee, and “Take the good the gods provide thee,” if thou wilt only keep thine eyes open, are two safe precepts.

Who is there of English descent among us that does not feel with Cowper,

  “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still”?

Our recently naturalized fellow-citizens, of a different blood and different religion, must not suppose that we are going to forget our inborn love for the mother to whom we owe our being.  Protestant England and Protestant America are coming nearer and nearer to each other every year.  The interchange of the two peoples is more and more frequent, and there are many reasons why it is likely to continue increasing.

Hawthorne says in a letter to Longfellow, “Why don’t you come over, being now a man of leisure and with nothing to keep you in America?  If I were in your position, I think I should make my home on this side of the water,—­though always with an indefinite and never-to-be-executed intention to go back and die in my native land.  America is a good land for young people, but not for those who are past their prime. ...  A man of individuality and refinement can certainly live far more comfortably here—­provided he has the means to live at all—­than in New England.  Be it owned, however, that I sometimes feel a tug at my very heart-strings when I think of my old home and friends.”  This was written from Liverpool in 1854.