Excerpt from Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches Such, in short, was the dusky and stifled chamber in which I Spent wearily a considerable portion of more than four good years of my existence. At first, to be quite frank with the reader, I looked upon it as not altogether fit to be tenanted by the commercial representative of so great and prosperous a country as the United States then were; and I should speedily have transferred my head-quarters to airier and loftier apart ments, except for the prudent consideration that my Govern ment would have left me thus to support its dignity at my own personal expense. Besides, a long line of distinguished pre decessors, of whom the latest is now a gallant general under the Union banner, had found the locality good enough for them; it might certam be tolerated, therefore, by an individual so little ambitions of external magnificence as myself. So I settled quietly down, striking some of my roots into such soil as I could find, adapting myself to circumstances; and with so much success, that, though from first to last, I hated the very sight of the little room, I should yet have felt a singular kind of reluctance in changing it for a better. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.