Again, it has been my good fortune here in New York to spend an evening
in a household which suggested a chapter of Dickens in his tenderest and
most idyllic mood. It was the home of an actor and actress. Two
daughters, of about eighteen and twenty, respectively, are on the stage,
acting in their father's company; but the master of the house is a
bright little boy of seven or eight, known as "the Commodore." As it
happened, the mother of the family was away for the day; yet in the
hundred affectionate references made to her by the father and daughters,
not to me, but to each other, I read her character and influence more
clearly, perhaps, than if she had been present in the flesh. A more
simple, natural, unaffectedly beautiful "interior" no novelist could
conceive. If the family tie is seriously relaxed in America, it seems an
odd coincidence that I should in a single month have chanced upon two
households where it is seen in notable perfection, to say nothing of
many others in which it is at least as binding as in the average English
home.
POSTSCRIPT.--The American university system is a very large subject, to
which none but a specialist could do justice, and that in a volume, not
a postscript.
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