The Langham Hotel,
London, Nov. 2.
Dear Mother—Of course I know you are a grandmother now & I send my loving regards to the new cub & my loud & long continued applause to the parents.1 (Applause is what they want, you know, because this is a fresh thing to them, but you or me, now, would prefer not quite so much pow-wow & a little more condolence.)
How have I been received? Just the same as if I were a Prodigal Son getting back home again.2 These [English] men & women take a body right into the inner sanctuary, as it were—& when you have broken bread & eaten salt with them once it amounts to friendship. With a person they don’t know, it is said, ‸that‸ becoming acquainted is a slow & careful piece of work—but I am speaking of per myself whom they do know—all of them. But there’s not a particle of gush, not a bit of constraint, or acting, or embarrassment, or the infliction of embarrassment upon you—with the introductory bow you appear to drop into a vacancy in that social circle as comfortably & easily as if you were a plug that had been specially made for it. You honestly do just as you honestly please, & nobody takes any offense. In about 4 weeks, here, one learns to quit questioning people’s motives & trying to hunt out slights. He finds that these folks do not doubt each other’s truth, & that it does not occur to them to ascribe ill motives to each other. Of course this is by no means universal, but it amounts to the rule, I think. So when you hear a person blackguarding everybody & impugning everybody’s motives it arrests your attention.
I have had such a gorgeous time that I am all out of order, now, & can’t digest my food any more than a tin soldier could. But I don’t mind it. I go to the dinners, public & private, & steer clear of wine & food, & so I have just as good a time as ever chaffing & talking & making little speeches.
Been out to a stag hunt at the country village of Wargrave-near-Henley-on-the-Thames (I believe that is about all of its name)—for several [days. I] hunted that stag in a wagon—but I didn’t catch him. Neither did the red-coated, [pigskin-breeched] hunters—but it was fine to see the 250 scour over the hills & fields & sail over the hedges & fences like so many birds.3
One day we dined & breakfasted with a splendid fox-hunting squire named Broom in his quaint & queer old house that has been occupied 500 years—& on his table cutlery I noticed something like that, & presently remin figured out that it was a sprig of broom (the gentleman’s name). I knew that the broom-sprig ng (plant-à-genèt) was the cognizance & gave name to the Plantagenet kings, & [ I ] so I just asked him facetiously if he wasn’t a Plantagenet—but bless you he didn’t notice the facetiousness of it, & simply said he was.4 And his genealogical tree shows it, too. If Solon Severance will come over here we’ll make this man king— Why I it had all the seeming of hobnobbing in with the Black Prince5 in the flesh!—for this fellow is of princely presence & manners, & 35 years old. Now years ago it used to be a curious study to me, to follow the variations of a family name down through a p Peerage or a biography from the Roll of Battle-Abbey6 to the present day—& manifold & queer were the changes, too. But here within 2 miles of Mr. Broom, lives a family named Abear who still own & farm the same piece of ground their ancestors have owned & farmed for nine hundred & fifty years!7—without ever a break in the succession or a change of ownership!—& without ever a change of the style or pronunciation of the family name from King Alfred’s8 days to these! [There] is but one other case of the kind in England—another small farmer—for both families were always mere plebeian, undistinguished yeomen, albeit theirs is the longest & by all odds the purest & straightest lineage in Great Britain, the queen’s not excepted. People drop in, over yonder, & say “Good morning, Abear,” just as other folks walked over ‸the‸ same ground & said “Good morning Abear,” in the days of the Saxon Heptarchy.9 But it is Broom, now, instead of Plantagenet.
Please don’t let a word of this letter get into print—these things are from private conversations & the footprints must be all covered up carefully before they see the light. Americans have the reputation here of not sufficiently respecting private conversations.
Now if you’ll come over here in the spring with Livy & me, & spend the “London Season” (the summer,) you will have just the loveliest time you ever had in your life, & you will come to the conclusion that rural England is too absolutely beautiful to be left out doors—ought to be under a glass case. The Mayor of Stratford-on-Avon10 would make us at home & they say he lives like a the finest of fine old English gentlemen. As I was too busy to visit him now, I reserved the invitation. Come! Will you? We’ll dig up Shakspeare & cart him over to our side a spell.
Make Charley study drawing. Don’t fool away a good artist trying to make an inferior something else of him. Send my love to Mollie—& pray, you & all of you, the heads of th[e] house & the household,11 accept of measureless quantities of the same.
Samℓ.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L5, 204–208; MTMF, 165–68.
Provenance:see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
English • E English [‘E’ partly formed; corrected miswriting]
days. I • days.—|I
pigskin-breeched • pig-|skin-breeched
I • [partly formed]
There • Therere [corrected miswriting; possibly ‘Theirere’]
S • [partly formed]
