No thoughtful man can behold such a colony as this without finding something at once pathetic and inspiring in the spectacle. A great rugged continent, lying hidden in the distant Pacific main, is encountered by human enterprise; and in a few years we witness towns and cities thronging its seaboard, and all along the surf-beaten shores is heard the hum of industry. We mark the inalienable love of home, of the mother-country, in a thousand tokens, and find the measureless ocean bridged by sympathy and memory, and Old England renewed in such forms as make us scarcely conscious of our distance from it; though sometimes thought itself, when the thousand leagues of waters that flow between are remembered, seems almost powerless to present our beloved home to us as something real, so vague, so dim, so inaccessibly remote has it become since we left its shores. Signs of remembered things are about us. We think of the home love which gave that name to that street; which reared yonder house in the likeness of one in the far-off land, that enshrines the emigrant’s most precious memories of childhood; which parcelled out yonder garden in the fashion of the little tract of land in the distant country, whose soil is sacred to the mind as the favoured retreat of a beloved parent. The very nomenclature by which the colonist dignifies some mean spot or small building by the name of a noble city or a spacious edifice in the old home, is full of pathos, since it can signify no more than a deep-rooted affection (not to be weakened nor divorced by the harshest recollection of the impracticable struggle for bread which drove whole families across the sea) for England, and a tender impulse to give permanent form to memories which survive through many generations, and create loyalty and patriotism among a people who owe nothing to the country and the sovereign whom they reverence, and would at any moment serve. British faces are around us; British accents sound in our ears; and on all sides we behold signs of that British courage, audacity, and genius, which grow sublime under our gathering appreciation of the difficulties which have been conquered and the triumphs which have been achieved. CHAPTER XIX. HOMEWARD BOUND. In the year 1832, within a week or two of the date that would make the time exactly five years since the “Meteor” lay off Gravesend, waiting to embark her captain and start for the port it was her doom never to reach, a large ship was sailing slowly up the river, her poop crowded with passengers, and many heads ranged along her bulwarks.