RETURN TO JOURNALISM Miss Spartali and I were married in the Spring of 1871, and in justice to her I came to the hazardous decision to make my home in England, and there to devote myself to general literature and correspondence with America. As my financial condition at that moment, thanks to the various contributions to it, was better than it had ever been before, I had the courage needed to face the great change in my life. I brought with me from Lowell a letter to Leslie Stephen, whose friendship has ever since been one of the pleasantest things in my English life. Mrs. Stephen, the elder daughter of Thackeray, was to us an angel of goodness, and never since has the grateful recognition of her loving hospitality in thought and deed diminished in my mind. Our debt to her was a debt of the heart, and those are never paid. Her sister, later Mrs. Ritchie, added much to the obligations of our early life in London, and still remains our friend. Mr. Stephen gave me an introduction to the "Pall Mall Gazette," then under the charge of Greenwood, and I contributed in incidental ways to its columns; and with contributions to "Scribner's" and other magazines it seemed that we might forgather, and we decided to bring the children out. An article on the Cretan insurrection, printed while I was still in the island, had led the way to an acquaintance with Froude, in whose magazine it appeared, and I had been put on the staff of the "Daily News," which had printed a contribution on the Greek question as a leading article; so that, on the whole, the venture did not seem too rash for a man who never looked far ahead for good fortune. My friendship with Froude lasted as long as he lived. He was a warm and sincere friend, always ready with word or deed to help one who needed it, and one of the men for whom I retain the warmest feeling of all I knew at this epoch of my life. In New York I had made an arrangement with Dr. Holland to hold the literary agency for "The Century" (then "Scribner's") for England, and on returning to London we took a small furnished house at Notting Hill Way, where our daughter Effie was born. In the following spring we moved out to Clapham Common, to be near the parents of my wife, and in the comparative quiet of that then delightful neighborhood we gave our experiment full scope. The life as a literary life was ideal, but as a practical thing it failed. Here I had the pleasure of extending hospitality to Emerson on his way to Egypt, and Lowell on the way to Madrid. To make the acquaintance of Lowell we had Professor and Mrs. Max Müller to meet him at dinner, and Tom Taylor was of the company, he living as a near neighbor.