A London Suburb

One of our English summers looks, in the retrospect, as if it had been
patched with more frequent sunshine than the sky of England ordinarily
affords; but I believe that it may be only a moral effect,--a "light that
never was on sea nor land," caused by our having found a particularly
delightful abode in the neighborhood of London. In order to enjoy it,
however, I was compelled to solve the problem of living in two places at
once,--an impossibility which I so far accomplished as to vanish, at
frequent intervals, out of men's sight and knowledge on one side of
England, and take my place in a circle of familiar faces on the other, so
quietly that I seemed to have been there all along. It was the easier to
get accustomed to our new residence, because it was not only rich in all
the material properties of a home, but had also the home-like atmosphere,
the household element, which is of too intangible a character to be let
even with the most thoroughly furnished lodging-house. A friend had
given us his suburban residence, with all its conveniences, elegances,
and snuggeries,--its drawing-rooms and library, still warm and bright
with the recollection of the genial presences that we had known there,--
its closets, chambers, kitchen, and even its wine-cellar, if we could
have availed ourselves of so dear and delicate a trust,--its lawn and
cosey garden-nooks, and whatever else makes up the multitudinous idea of
an English home,--he had transferred it all to us, pilgrims and dusty
wayfarers, that we might rest and take our ease during his summer's
absence on the Continent. We had long been dwelling in tents, as it
were, and morally shivering by hearths which, heap the bituminous coal
upon them as we might, no blaze could render cheerful. I remember, to
this day, the dreary feeling with which I sat by our first English
fireside, and watched the chill and rainy twilight of an autumn day
darkening down upon the garden; while the portrait of the preceding
occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his
lifetime) scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if
indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there.
Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode
as much a stranger as I entered it. But mow, at last, we were in a
genuine British home, where refined and warm-hearted people had just been
living their daily life, and had left us a summer's inheritance of slowly
ripened days, such as a stranger's hasty opportunities so seldom permit
him to enjoy.

Within so trifling a distance of the central spot of all the world
(which, as Americans have at present no centre of their own, we may allow
to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of St.