With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of _Robert Elsmere_"--"typical of his strong points," as Lord Bryce describes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had no sooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. But it was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the moment my one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we took our eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland for the first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick with miraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall," and that gorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to the east!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of the mere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strain and sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked over the Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys of eleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautiful Maggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party. Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic, the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, after it was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leaving Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseus that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave. Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among all classes of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!" (Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-American copyright.)