I well remember a chance remark of mine which led to my crossing the ocean.

"Well, if I can get a cabin in your boat, we'll go too, but I'm afraid it's too late now, at the eleventh hour."

That was said to Irving and Ellen Terry, who were preparing to leave on their first visit to the States in 1883.

I had never given a trip to America a serious thought; a consultation¹ at Cook's office and subsequent trunk-packing usually meant a flight to the sunny South or the glorious East; but a new country, and a civilised one into the bargain, had failed to attract me. I had heard over and over again that the Americans were a practical people, and that, to be sure, meant inartistic, and I knew they could talk, build, and make money-piles bigger than we can, and that again did not predispose me in their favour. In fact I may say, without boasting, that I cherished about as many prejudices as does the average Englishman when he seeks to form his opinion regarding those unhappily not included in the magic circle to which he belongs, and I felt that, if ever I visited my young American cousins, it would be to give them the benefit of my superior old-world experience.

I may say at once that I had not been in the country long, before I found it desirable to climb down, discovering that it was quite as much as I could do to keep my footing at all on one or the other of the scaling ladders I had tried to ascend³. But for all my ups and downs, one thing is certain: it was a happy thought that led me to take my passage to New York, and a specially⁴ happy one to cross with Irving and Ellen Terry.
"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends."
—Richard II.

So wrote Irving in my album, dating the lines from the "Atlantic Ocean, 20th October 1883."

It was indeed a time of good and friendly relations we had on that Atlantic, meeting at a sort of poet's corner of the captain's table at dinner-time, and later again, when we could discuss the merits of the nocturnal Welsh rarebit, or of the comforting nightcap. Those expressive⁵ legs of his, with which we are all so familiar, were a constant source of delight to me. In the smoking saloon he would know how to stretch them till they gave you a sense of absolute rest; and when he got up, you felt they must originally have been designed for sea-legs. When sometimes I paced the deck by their side, I felt I could now really boast of being in the same boat with my illustrious friend, and of more than that: for once in a way, I was actually treading the same boards with him.

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