My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden with pig-iron, and she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never roll too much for me! I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves does not give me any sensation of melancholy. What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America I hardly remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel shirts and carried bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street! From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an ugly, noisy place. Ugly! When I first saw that marvelous harbor I nearly cried--it was so beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequaled approach to New York I wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London! How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames and the wooden toy lighthouse at Dungeness to the vast, spreading Hudson with its busy multitude of steamboats, and ferryboats, its wharf upon wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and bustle of the sea traffic of the world! That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal and enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers"--what a brutal name it is when one comes to think of it!--so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883, but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883 and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no longer beat the records! There is a vast difference between one of the old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the still more amazing Flat Iron Building, which is said to oscillate at the top--it is so far from the ground--there is very little difference. I hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time. I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in America have to struggle with the Custom-house officials--a struggle as brutal as a "round in the ring," as Paul Bourget describes it. We were taken off the _Britannic_ in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Laurence Barrett, and many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters.