It was a very pretty story of pride and vanity and I liked it. But just at this interesting moment, one of those great blast furnaces, which I have been telling you about and which seemed to stretch for miles beside the track, flashed past in the night, its open red furnace doors looking like rubies, and the frosted windows of its lighted shops looking like opals, and the fluttering street lamps and glittering arc lights looking like pearls and diamonds; and I said: behold! these are the only jewels of the poor and from these come the others. And to a certain extent, in the last analysis and barring that unearned gift of brain which some have without asking and others have not at all, so they do. It was seven or eight when we reached Paddington. For one moment, when I stepped out of the car, the thought came to me with a tingle of vanity--I have come by land and sea, three thousand miles to London! Then it was gone again. It was strange--this scene. I recognized at once the various London types caricatured in _Punch_, and _Pick Me Up_, and _The Sketch_, and elsewhere. I saw a world of cabs and ‘busses, of porters, gentlemen, policemen, and citizens generally. I saw characters--strange ones--that brought back Dickens and Du Maurier and W. W. Jacobs. The words “Booking Office” and the typical London policeman took my eye. I strolled about, watching the crowd till it was time for us to board our train for the country; and eagerly I nosed about, trying to sense London from this vague, noisy touch of it. I can’t indicate how the peculiar-looking trains made me feel. Humanity is so very different in so many little unessential things--so utterly the same in all the large ones. I could see that it might be just as well or better to call a ticket office a booking office; or to have three classes of carriages instead of two, as with us; or to have carriages instead of cars; or trams instead of street railways; or lifts instead of elevators. What difference does it make? Life is the same old thing. Nevertheless there was a tremendous difference between the London and the New York atmosphere--that I could see and feel. “A few days at my place in the country will be just the thing for you,” Barfleur was saying. “I sent a wireless to Dora to have a fire in the hall and in your room. You might as well see a bit of rural England first.” He gleamed on me with his monocled eye in a very encouraging manner. We waited about quite awhile for a local or suburban which would take us to Bridgely Level, and having ensconced ourselves first class--as fitting my arrival--Barfleur fell promptly to sleep and I mused with my window open, enjoying the country and the cool night air. CHAPTER VI THE BARFLEUR FAMILY I am writing these notes on Tuesday, November twenty-eighth, very close to a grate fire in a pretty little sitting-room in an English country house about twenty-five miles from London, and I am very chilly.