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Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946

"Secret Places of the Heart"

And
the next day too I want to show you something of our old River Severn.
We will come right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There
we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which the tobacco
comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set sail thither--was it
yesterday or the day before? You will understand at Bristol how it
is that the energy has gone out of this dreaming land--to Africa and
America and the whole wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the
bye, with their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour
problem. Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester, mother of I
don't know how many American Gloucesters. Bath we'll get in somehow.
And then as an Anglo-American showman I shall be tempted to run you
northward a little way past Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here
and there and show you monuments bearing little shields with the stars
and stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the Washington
family monuments."
"It was not only from England that America came," said Miss Grammont.
"But England takes an American memory back most easily and most
fully--to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the emperors and the
Corinthian columns that smothered Latin Europe....


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