in the room near the door. It was 5 o'clock and Mr. Puckey had retired later than midnight, and his house was crowded with emigrants. I lay on a bench till half-past six, when I awoke to find the house all astir, some going, some coming, some cooking and others eating. I could remember mornings when I had felt better, but I braced up and ate some ham and eggs and drank some tea and began to pack my trunks to be in readiness to contend with baggage men, steamship clerks, sailors, tenders, ships, stewards and the rude, rolling waves of the stormy Atlantic. CHAPTER XXXVI. MEN AND THINGS BEYOND THE SEA. FRAGMENTS COLLECTED COINS OF TWO NATIONS-ENGLISH PEOPLE; READING, DRESSING, EATING, DRINKING, MANNERS-COOL-NO FLIES—PLEASURES AND PALACES-ONLY ONE AMERICA-HER STARRY BANNERS WAVE BENEDICTIONS IN DISTANT LANDS-GREAT BRITAIN'S HEADQUARTERS-KINGDOM'S ADMIRED- In former chapters I have at least partially promised to mention the prices of some things, and also other matters that came under my observation. This chapter, then, may be composed chiefly of fragments and things taken almost at random from my note-books and my memory. In giving prices I shall call two cents equal to an English penny. The smallest coin really current in England is the copper half-penny, which is about the size and worth of our old-fashioned large copper cent. The next is the copper penny, somewhat larger than our fifty-cent piece; then comes the three-penny silver piece, then the six-pence, and so on up to the gold five-pound piece, coined first last year, the jubilee year. My cousins and friends gave me some farthing pieces and also two, four and fivepenny pieces in silver, but these I understand are hot now being coined. They gave me coins up to the crown piece, which is worth about one dollar and twenty-five cents. Our English friends have heard of the "Almighty Dollar." In fact, they know most of our pet and slang phrases and most of our jests. I presume this knowledge is gathered from the almost omnipotent and omnipresent newspaper, for I found the English, all classes, to be much given to reading papers, and books, too. The great, powerful and good-everywhere British coin is the gold sovereign, or pound piece, worth nearly five dollars. I presume they are called sovereigns because they bear upon one side, the head of the reigning sovereign, king or queen, as the case may be, at the time of their coinage. I found people in England, and indeed throughout the British Isles, to be very generally well-dressed, and when you saw a church filled with people you saw a company well and neatly clad. Nearly every man you meet, except those engaged in rough labor, has his shoes (they call them boots if they are not low shoes) nicely blacked, and I found that when I met women they almost instantly glanced to my shoes to see if I were a gentleman. In the families of the middle and lower classes the women blacken the shoes every morning, and they do not thank their own people nor visitors for going out with soiled shoes. It was quite a cross for me to have women blacken my "boots," but I learned to submit. Now, in this brave, free land I can polish my own shoes or pay ten cents to a bootblack in the streets for making them "shine." I found the fashions in eating and drinking much the same as in America. As to drinking, I may say that nearly all the houses you enter in Britain will soon offer you wine, beer, ale or whiskey, and also something to eat. Still you travel for days without seeing a drunken man. They seem to think a welcome must be acted, not merely spoken. I did not see a mosquito while abroad and was not annoyed by flies nor anything in that line. I have told you how cool and delightful I found the weather in England, although they said it was the warmest, dryest summer they had had in many years. It was a wonder to me how wheat, rye and barley could ripen at all, and generally they do not ripen until September. I like England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and was somewhat pleased with fair, fickle, fun and wineloving France, which are grand countries in which to travel, visit, learn and rest, for there you may travel amid "pleasures and palaces" for a life-time. But there is no place like home; I mean great, grand, broad, beautiful, picturesque, wealthy, enterprising, intelligent, free America. Yes, it is grand to wander amid palaces, parks, museums, monuments, castles and cathedrals crowded with rare works of art, things old, curious and beautiful, but when you are set to work you come to yourself and say: "I will arise and go home to America," that great land stretching from the great sea in the east to the vast ocean in the west. I found people who work in these lands beyond the sea rather better off than I expected. In this age of intelligence, cheap papers and cheap, rapid travel, and wonderful machinery for production and destruction, men are not willing to starve or serve for naught. I believe that America blesses the earth, and that hopes and benedictions fall from her flags as they wave and flap in all parts of our world. The overworked and under-paid in many climes say, as the starry banner shakes its fair folds in the sky: "There is a happy land, though far, far away, where 'a man's a man for a' that,' and if I am too much oppressed here I will go there." It is said that when a child throws a pebble into the mighty Pacific a wave circles out which never ceases one instant until all the seas of earth have trembled and heaved their broad, sweet breasts a little nearer the bright, loving heavens; so the words and work, and life and death of quite an ordinary person may, and often does, "do good like a medicine" in far-off lands, where great cities roar with business and |