Very different is this from the similar stage in the case of the English boy, which I have considered, and which also has its manly discipline; but is marked by long separations from home, direful fagging at public schools, and the restraints of a conventionalism, which is only not Chinese. In looking back, I am very sure it was good for me to be taken away early from scenes of so much indulgence; and I would, if I knew how, subject my boys to a collar somewhat stiffer than that in which I spent my adolescence. Say what you will, young blood needs the pressure of a stern discipline, to induce self-denial, the germ of all self-command; so I can rejoice in hardships now they are over. Yet, in those days, it was but hypocritically that I hummed over the _Olim meminisse juvabit_. I am writing among the same spring zephyrs, and gorgeous vegetation of the South, spectacles on nose, and my feet in list slippers; but I can leap over a long intercalation, and live over again the hours of the eighteenth century. My departure had, however, the bitterness of an exile. CHAPTER III. The tear forgot as soon as shed. Gray. The vessel in which I sailed was a round-sterned bark, very black, and English built, with hogsheads of tobacco for Bristol. I was under the care of Mr. Moir, a clergyman from the south of Virginia, who was returning to get orders for his son from the Bishop of London. The son and his brother were twins, and were gay companions. We were out seven weeks, and were several times in great peril. But I forgot all when I saw England in mid May. The transition is peculiarly strong in contrasts for one who goes from a region not abounding in greensward and roadside flowers, and equally destitute of the castle and the cottage. In June I heard a nightingale near Warwick castle, and took my first lesson in cricket on the green near Hampton Court; I dined at the Mitre, and shortly after looked at the Eton boys shooting their “four-oars” on the Thames. London was all mapped off in my head; and the impression had not been forestalled by a previous sight of Philadelphia, then our only great city. I was acquainted with Sir Roger de Coverley’s haunts; I knew where to go for the Boar’s Head, which had not yet been thrust aside for a king’s statue. The very names of the streets were redolent of memories; St. Swithin’s Lane, Aldermanbury, the Minories. Billingsgate was in its full Aristophanic glory; not yet invaded by a lordly structure of brick market-houses. “O rare Ben Jonson!” how I gloated over thy memorial in the Poet’s Corner! Though roses no longer bloom in the Temple Garden, yet I walked there as proud as if my veins carried the red and white of York and Lancaster. Methinks I was an antiquary before my time; but certain it is that I whiled away whole weeks in the odd, out-of-the-way corners of old London, and almost venerated