The Retrospect

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Ada Cambridge. The Retrospect

CHAPTER I. COMING HOME

CHAPTER II. ABOUT TOWN

CHAPTER III. IN BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND

CHAPTER IV. THE HOME OF CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER V. HALCYON DAYS

CHAPTER VI. EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS

CHAPTER VII. OLD TIMES AND NEW

CHAPTER VIII. SOME EARLY SUNDAYS

CHAPTER IX. MY GRANDFATHER'S DAYS

CHAPTER X. OUTDOOR LIFE

CHAPTER XI. AT THE SEASIDE

CHAPTER XII. EXCURSIONS TO SANDRINGHAM

CHAPTER XIII. A TRIP SOUTH

CHAPTER XIV. DEVON, GLORIOUS DEVON

CHAPTER XV. IN THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND

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How beautiful England is! The home-stayers do not know it, nor the stranger within her gates. One must have been long enough absent from her in a sharply contrasting environment to have become an outsider, a cosmopolitan connoisseur, while still not an alien but native to her soil – at any rate, imbued with her maternal influence – to appreciate her consummate charm. I think that Australians and Americans, her elder and younger offspring, who have so many points of view in common, do so more fully than other peoples of the world, although we "swear by" the lands where we have our ampler homes and opportunities – perhaps for that very reason. It is an impression I have gained from the literature of the States, which has supplied my chief reading for many years. Whether right or wrong, I shall feel, when I fall into rhapsodies on the subject – and really I cannot help it – that my American readers will understand me before them all.

That it is not a case of the rose-coloured spectacles is proved by the fact that we no sooner set foot in the beloved Old Country than we begin to sniff at a number of her little ways – little ways that are quite all right to less impartial critics. We even feel that we could teach our grandmother something about the sucking of eggs with good warrant for reversing the orthodox procedure; only that she is our grandmother, bless her, with the natural attributes of her time of life, and we do not want her different. Were she "younged up," as a member of my household describes the old lady who dresses to conceal her age, we should not love her more, and we might respect her less. Twice as "smart," she would not be half as beautiful.

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I returned to London at intervals between this sweet June day, when the rhododendrons in the Park were still abloom and the "Season" at its culmination, and the early winter evening of my last departure; but without those passages which must be "blacked out" the tale is but a tale of prosaic shoppings and the sort of country-cousin sightseeings at which the superior person lifts the nose of scorn. Even in the latter regard, I did not see half the things I had meant to see. The Royal Academy Exhibition was postponed and postponed until too late. The British Museum, the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey – even these I missed. The Tower, which I had never seen at all, that I can remember, I now saw only from the outside – except on the stage at Drury Lane, in the Marriages of Mayfair. The friend and hostess who took me to this play, as the wife of a Colonel of Grenadiers and intimately acquainted with the life of the place, answered for the accuracy of detail in the dramatic representation of it; furthermore, she arranged that I was to explore the great fortress in her company, and took my promise to accept no other guide. I was then within a fortnight of leaving England, and, to my keen regret, the press of last engagements crowded that one out.

Mention of the Tower reminds me of a circumstance that occurred the night before we made the futile compact, than which circumstance nothing happening to me in London impressed me more.

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