refinement; all you had to do was to allow your mind to lapse from one conception to another, and then, lifting your languorous eyelids, behold! there you were--as Mr. James would say. But I set out to tell not of noblemen's country-seats, but of Rock Park. Rock Park was one of the typical abodes of the English respectable middle-class, and the English middle-class, respectable, or not altogether respectable, is the substance of England. Not until you have felt and smelt and tasted that do you know what England really is. Fifty years ago, the people in question were dull, ignorant, material, selfish, prejudiced, conventional; they were hospitable, on conventional lines; they were affable and even social, so long as you did not awaken their prejudices; they were confidential and communicative, if you conceded at the outset that England was the best of all countries and the English the leading nation of the world. They read a newspaper resembling in every particular themselves; usually several of them united in a subscription to a single copy, which passed solemnly from hand to hand. They were slow and methodical, never taking short-cuts across lots; but they were punctual; they knew their own business and business associates, their circle of relatives, their dwelling and social place, and Burke's Peerage; but they knew nothing else. In a group of intelligent persons of this degree, question was raised, once upon a time, of two English poets; but not one of the group had heard of either; the poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. This may seem merely absurd or apocryphal; but consider the terrible power of concentration which it implies! And consider the effect which the impact against such a clay wall must make upon a man and an American like my father! Well, the very surprise and novelty of the adventure amused and interested him, and even won a good deal upon his sympathies. He loved the solid earth as well as the sky above it, and he was glad of the assurance that this people existed, though he might be devoutly thankful that two hundred years of America had opened so impassable a gulf between him and them. Indeed, the very fact of that impassability may have made his intercourse with them the easier--at any rate, on his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would probably not have regarded him at all. Of course they--the Rock Park sort of people--had never read his books; literary cultivation was not to be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father, therefore, was never obliged to say, "I'm glad you liked it" to them. And that relief, of itself, must have served as a substantial bond of fellowship.