In one end of their boat is a little melodion apparently built for river travel, for I never saw one anywhere else.  They have in addition velvet collection-boxes on long poles whereby to reach the upper decks of the house-boat for our coins.  These things look for all the world like the old-fashioned collection-boxes which the deacons used to pass in church.

There was one set of Geisha girls who were masked below the eyes, one of whom sang what she fondly imagined was a typical American song calculated to captivate her American audience.  She sang through her nose, the better to imitate the nasal voices which to the British mind is the national characteristic of the American, and her song had the refrain beginning “For I am an Ammurikin Girl,” telling how this “Ammurikin Girl” had come to England to marry a title and had finally secured an Earl, and ending with the statement that she had done all this “like the true Ammurikin Girl.”  This song, especially the nasal part, was received with such ill-concealed joy by our usual stolid river audience that one afternoon I took it upon myself to avenge our house-boat family for these truly British politenesses.  So I went to the railing after our audience had thoroughly collected and said through my nose: 

“Won’t you please sing that pretty song of yours about the ’Ammurikin Girl?’ You know we are ‘Ammurikin girls,’ and we do so love the way you take off our ‘Ammurikin’ voices.”

At the same time I dropped a lot of small silver into their boat without waiting for the collection-box.  I was delighted to see that some of it went overboard, for their consternation at that and at my having turned the tables on them put them into such a flutter that they couldn’t sing at all, and they pulled away, saying that they would be back in half an hour.  Our audience, too, suddenly remembered urgent business a mile or two up the river, and scattered as if by magic.

Jimmie was deeply pleased by this rencontre, for the prejudice of the middle-class Britons (for the sake of occasionally being moderate, I will say middle class) against all classes of Americans is just about as deeply rooted and ineradicable as the prejudice of middle-class Americans against everything that flies the Union Jack.  The travelled upper classes are inclined to be more moderate in their prejudice and to see fit either for political or social reasons to affect a friendship.  But seriously I myself question if there is a nation more thoroughly foreign to America than the English.

This, I take it, is because the middle classes of both countries are not abreast of the times, and take little notice of the trend of events.  They are still influenced by the prejudice engendered by the wars of a century ago, which has partly been inherited and partly enhanced by marriages with England’s hereditary foes, who take refuge with us in such numbers.