Midway in the course of them, 1908 was marked out for me, for whom a yearly visit to Italy or France, and occasionally to Germany, made the limits of possible travel, by the great event of a spring spent in the United States and Canada. We saw nothing more in the States than every tourist sees--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and a few other towns; but the interest of every hour seemed to renew in me a nervous energy and a capacity for enjoyment that had been flagging before. Our week at Washington at the British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce, as they then were, our first acquaintance with Mr. Roosevelt, then at the White House, and with American men of politics and affairs, like Mr. Root, Mr. Garfield, and Mr. Bacon--set all of it in spring sunshine, amid a sheen of white magnolias and May leaf--will always stay with me as a time of pleasure, unmixed and unspoiled, such as one's fairy godmother seldom provides without some medicinal drawback! And to find the Jusserands there so entirely in their right place--he so unchanged from the old British Museum days when we knew him first--was one of the chief items in the delightful whole. So, too, was the discussion of the President, first with one Ambassador and then with another. For who could help discussing him! And what true and admiring friends he had in both these able men who knew him through and through, and were daily in contact with him, both as diplomats and in social life. Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on behalf of the London Play Centers; Boston, with Mrs. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett--a pair of friends, gentle, eager, distinguished, whom none who loved them will forget; Cambridge, and our last sight of Charles Eliot Norton, standing to bid us farewell on the steps of Shady Hill; Hawthorne's house at Concord; and the lovely shore of Newport. The wonderful new scenes unrolled themselves day by day; kind faces and welcoming voices were always round us, and it was indeed hard to tear ourselves away. But at the end of April we went north to Canada for yet another chapter of quickened life. A week at Montreal, first with Sir William van Horne, then Ottawa, and a week with Lord and Lady Grey; and finally the never-to-be-forgotten experience of three weeks in the "Saskatchewan," Sir William's car on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which took us first from Toronto to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to Quebec. So in a swallow's flight from sea to sea I saw the marvelous land wherein, perhaps, in a far hidden future, lies the destiny of our race. Of all this--of the historic figures of Sir William van Home, of beloved Lord Grey, of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Robert Borden, as they were ten years ago, there would be much to say. But my present task is done.