be a good deal worse after the Union; and we had to come home, anyway, and start our own poets. Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to be born.'
"'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said, 'though personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of honor.'
"'Very probably,' I remarked, as thoroughly angry now as he intended I should be. 'We cannot expect you to appreciate all the American poets; indeed, you cannot appreciate all of your own, for the same nation doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers. Take your precious Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning Clubs in America, and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.'
"'No,' he retorted, 'I dare say; but there is a good deal in belonging to a people who can understand him without clubs!'"
"Oh, Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright among my pillows. "How could you give him that chance! How could you! What did you say?"
"I said nothing," she replied mysteriously. "I did something much more to the point,—I cried!"
"Cried?"
"Yes, cried; not rivers and freshets of woe, but small brooks and streamlets of helpless mortification."
