Seven English Cities | Page 2

endless," and so I dare
say they are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our
day at Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.
Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant,
through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms
seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly
upright like the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow buttercups,
knee-deep, white American daisies, and red clover, and among the
sheep we had our choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally
abundant. Some of the blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns,
and over all the sky hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces
of air like an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at
Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed
on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell like that of
Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and at last radiantly
smiling.
II

The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous
American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on
account of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our
countrywomen were buying picture-postals of the rather suave
office-ladies, and helplessly fawning on them in the inept confidences
of American women with all persons in official or servile attendance.
"Let me stay here," one of them entreated, "because there's such a
draught at the other window. May I?" She was a gentle child of
forty-five or fifty; and I do not know whether she was allowed to stay
in the sheltered nook or not, tender creature. As she was in every one
else's way there, possibly she was harshly driven into the flaw at the
other window.
[Illustration: ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL]
The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the
arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English trains
bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many familiar
accents remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was full of a
nasal resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in our
East or West. I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped to
the congenial top of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate of
four miles an hour, to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither no
rumor of my native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my
wounded pride of country to note how pale and small the average type
of the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great part
of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and what
characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed to prevail.
You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without great adversity,
just as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool
evidently flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure
in the paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of
the brick villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed.
But then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance,
and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.
III
At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we
rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too

thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that
there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of a
pastry-cook's shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman
who kept it because she had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the
Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon;
this doubly satisfied us as cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name,
and she testified to a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the
population of Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the
Crusaders at Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not
find it. We found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby
is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the
intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not
yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple
neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long
minute till the tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard heart
of Liverpool.
I do