A Search for America

I Emigrate


I was twenty-four years old when one day in the month of July I
took passage from Liverpool to Montreal. I was not British-born;
but my mother had been a Scotswoman, and from my earliest childhood
I had been trained to speak the English of fashionable governesses.
I had acquired--by dint of much study of English literature--a
rather extensive reading and arguing vocabulary which however
showed--and, by the way, to this day shows--its parentage by a
peculiar stiff-necked lack of condescen...