They were not a bit dreadful, but very quick to see what kind of a man Henry was. In a minute he was on the best of terms with them. He had on what I used to call his best "Jingle" manner--a manner full of refinement, bonhomie, elegance and geniality. "Have a cigar--have a cigar." That was the first remark of Henry's, which put every one at ease. He also wanted to be at ease and have a good smoke. It was just the right merry greeting to the press representatives of a nation whose sense of humor is far more to be relied on than its sense of reverence. "Now come on, all of you!" he said to the interviewers. He talked to them all in a mass and showed no favoritism. It says much for his tact and diplomacy that he did not "put his foot in it." The Americans are suspicious of servile adulation from a stranger, yet are very sensitive to criticism. "These gentlemen want to have a few words with you," said Henry to me when the reporters had done with him. Then with a mischievous expression he whispered: "Say something pleasant! Merry and bright!" Merry and bright! I felt it! The sense of being a stranger entering a strange land, the rushing sense of loneliness and foreignness was overpowering my imagination. I blew my nose hard and tried to keep back my tears, but the first reporter said: "Can I send any message to your friends in England?" I answered: "Tell them I never loved 'em so much as now," and burst into tears! No wonder that he wrote in his paper that I was "a woman of extreme nervous sensibility." Another of them said that "my figure was spare almost to attenuation." America soon remedied that. I began to put on flesh before I had been in the country a week, and it was during my fifth American tour that I became really fat for the first time in my life. When we landed I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House. There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then. The building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first evidence of _beauty_ in the city. There were horse trams instead of cable cars, but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy side-walks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the elevated railway, the first sign of _power_ that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot remember New York without it. I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless _hansoms_ of London plying in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars, unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by charging two dollars (8_s._) for a journey which in London would not cost fifty cents (2_s._)!