Many more years than I like to acknowledge, have passed away since a day when my father caught me slinking out of his library with Mrs. Trollope’s “Travels in the United States” under my arm. He laughed at my absurd precocity, for I was little more than a child, and as he took the book away from me, he said, “My boy, that is not a book for you to read. It is not even true. You shall go to America yourself one day, when you’re a man, and you’ll know better than to write that kind of stuff.” It was a great hope that was stirred by that promise that I should go to America myself some day. I used to think about it, and wonder when I might look forward to being a man, and how it could be managed, and who would help me, and whether I should settle there and own a slave. A hundred times I have dreamt of Boston, and of Richmond, for somehow I never thought of New York, and there was no Chicago then, and no San Francisco. Perhaps, too, the United States might collapse before I ever grew to be a man, and that was a prospect that made my heart sick to think of. I have been told, indeed, that one night I awoke with a cry, and was heard to exclaim, “Pray, God, keep America till I’ve been and seen it!” And yet I never have seen America, and I am afraid I never shall see it now, though my youthful prayer has been answered, and America has been kept and seems in small danger of collapsing yet awhile. I have read a great many books about America since those days; but I am bound to say they have not made me much in love with the writers, and I am also bound to say that they have given me very, very little information upon exactly those points that I most wished to inquire into. Of late years I have altogether given up this kind of literature. I believe the last time I looked into any one of these so-called “Travels,” or “Tours,” or “Reminiscences,” was when Mr. Anthony Trollope’s volumes appeared, and I could not get through them. Somehow my father’s words on the mother’s book seemed to apply to the son’s, and spite of myself his voice seemed to be saying to me, “It is not even true!”