ST. MARTIN'S CHURCH, CANTERBURY 80 172 312 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL THE two books united in this volume are in one respect the slight result of an indefinitely larger intention. In going to England I had fancied making a study of American origins, visiting the places from which the different immigrations had derived, and learning to know these on their own ground in the earlier reasons as well as the later impulses of selfexile. But I found that the scheme, if faithfully carried out, would require much more time and work than I was able or willing to give; and so the plan remains. for some more leisured and more lettered student. I satisfied an easy conscience by suggestively, rather than exhaustively, looking up the sources of American emigration in London and in Old Boston, and for the rest I abandoned myself to the pleasure of being in England, which I was willing to share, so far as I could, with any reader willing to loiter and linger with me there. The sketches began to be written at London in the spring of 1904, as the first of them frankly confesses, in a lodging of Eton Terrace, hard by Pimlico, and continued, at such moments as I could find for them, at divers points in England, throughout the summer and in the winter of 1904-05 in Italy. I remember distinctly working on them in Great Malvern, where we had a fortnight; and in Aberystwyth, where we had a week; and in Llandudno, where we had two. But the greater part of London Films and some part of Certain |