<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</h2></div>
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<p>Powder <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">versus</i> Primroses.—The American Lounger.—“Home,
Sweet Home.”</p>
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<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">It</span> was just time to leave London. The elm-trees
in the parks were beginning to put forth their
earliest and greenest leaves; innumerable people
were flocking into town because custom ordained
that the country must be quitted when the spring
is at its finest; as though the odour of primroses
had something pestilential about it, and anything
in the shape of violets except violet powder
was terribly injurious to feminine beauty.</p>
<p>Youthful cosmopolites with waxed moustaches
had apparently decided to compromise with the
spring, and to atone for their abandonment of the
country by making a miniature flower-garden of
their button-holes. It was the last day of April,
and ere the summer leaves had yellowed along the
edge of the great sub-Arctic forest, my winter hut
had to be hewn and built from the pine-logs of
the far-distant Saskatchewan.</p>
<p>In the saloon or on the after-deck of a Cunard
steamship steering west, one sees perhaps more of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">9</span>
America’s lounging class than can be met with on
any other spot in the world; the class is a limited
one, in fact it may be a matter of dispute, whether
the pure and simple lounger, as we know him in
Piccadilly or Pall Mall, is to be found in the New
World; but a three, or six, or twelve months’
visit to Europe has sufficiently developed the
dormant instincts of the class in the New York
or Boston man of business, to give colour to the
assumption that Columbia possesses a lounger.</p>
<p>It is possible that he is a lounger only for
the moment. That one glimpse of Bunker, one
echo of Wall Street, will utterly banish for ever
the semblance of lounging; but for the present
the Great Pyramid <em>minus</em> Bunker’s Hill, the
Corso <em>minus</em> Wall Street, have done something
towards stamping him with the air and manner
of the idler. For the moment he sips his coffee,
or throws his cigar-end overboard, with a half-thoughtful,
half-<i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">blasé</i> air; for the moment he has
discovered that the sun does not rise and set
exclusively in the United States, and that there
were just a few shreds and patches of history
in the world prior to the declaration of American
independence: still, when the big ship has steamed
on into the shallow waters which narrow into
Sandy Hook or Plymouth Sound, and the broad
panorama twixt Long Island and Staten, or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">10</span>
Plymouth and Nahant opens on the view, the old
feeling comes back with the old scenes again.</p>
<p>“Sir, the Bay of New York closely resembles
the Bay of Naples.” There is not the slightest
use in telling him that it is quite as like the Bey
of Tunis, or the Hospodar of Bulgaria—so we let
it be.</p>
<p>“There, sir, is Bunker’s Hill.”</p>
<p>“Ah, indeed!” drawled a genuine British
lounger, with that superb ignorance only to be
attained after generations of study, as he quietly
scanned the ridge through his lazily-arranged eye-glass.
“Bunker—who was Bunker? and what
did he do on his hill?”</p>
<p>Yet, ere we hasten away to the North, another
word anent our cousin. These things are, after
all, the exception; the temptation to tell a good
story, or what we may deem such, must not blind
us to the truth; the other side of the question
must not be forgotten. An English traveller in
America will have so much to thank American
travel for that he can well afford to smile at such
things.</p>
<p>It was an American who painted for us the
last scenes of Moorish history, with a colouring as
brilliant as that which the Hall of the Lions could
boast of in the old days of Grenada’s glory. To-day
an American dwelling in Rome recalls for us in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">11</span>
marble the fierce voluptuous beauty of the Egyptian
Queen. Another catches the colouring of
Claude, in his “Twilight in the Wilderness.”
And if, as I have somewhere heard, it is to the
writer of the ballad-song that true poetic fame
belongs, that song which is heard at lonely camp-fires,
which is sung by sailors at the wheel as the
canvas-clouded ship reels on under the midnight
gloom through the tumbling seas,—the song
which has reached the heart of a nation, and lives
for ever in the memory of a people,—then let us
remember, when we listen to those wondrous
notes on whose wings float the simple words,
“Be it ever so humble, there is no place like
home;” let us remember the land whose memory
called them forth from the heart of an American
exile.</p>
<p>And now we must away.</p>
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<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">12</span></p>
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