IV
After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came, one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it, was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman’s place not far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices of that friend of ours to be invited with them.
It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the western Welsh coast than on other shores of the “rainy isles,” but not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea, on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages, grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as well of us as those did.
I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees, and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.