Now I must say I began to bristle at being spoken to like that.  I’m as proud of being an American as anybody can be, but I don’t like the home of the free thrown into my teeth every time I open my mouth.  There’s no knowing what money Jone and I have lost through giving orders to London cabmen in what is called our American accent.  The minute we tell the driver of a hansom where we want to go, that place doubles its distance from the spot we start from.  Now I think the great reason Jone’s rumbling worked so well was that it had in it a sort of Great British chest-sound, as if his lungs was rusty.  The waiter had heard that before and knew what it meant.  If he had spoken out in the clear American fashion I expect his voice would have gone clear through the waiter without his knowing it, like the person in the story, whose neck was sliced through and who didn’t know it until he sneezed and his head fell off.

“Yes, ma’am,” said I, answering her with as much of a wearied feeling as I could put on, “our wealth is all very well in some ways, but it is dreadful wearing on us.  However, we try to bear up under it and be content.”

“Well,” said she, “contentment is a great blessing in every station, though I have never tried it in yours.  Do you expect to make a long stay in London?”

As she seemed like a civil and well-meaning woman, and was the first person who had spoken to us in a social way, I didn’t mind talking to her, and I told her we was only stopping in London until we could find the kind of country house we wanted, and when she asked what kind that was, I described what we wanted and how we was still answering advertisements and going to see agents, who was always recommending exactly the kind of house we did not care for.

“Vicarages are all very well,” said she, “but it sometimes happens, and has happened to friends of mine, that when a vicar has let his house he makes up his mind not to waste his money in travelling, and he takes lodgings near by and keeps an eternal eye upon his tenants.  I don’t believe any independent American would fancy that.”

“No, indeed,” said I; and then she went on to say that if we wanted a small country house for a month or two she knew of one which she believed would suit us, and it wasn’t a vicarage either.  When I asked her to tell me about it she brought her chair up to our table, together with her mug of beer, her bread and cheese, and she went into particulars about the house she knew of.

“It is situated,” said she, “in the west of England, in the most beautiful part of our country.  It is near one of the quaintest little villages that the past ages have left us, and not far away are the beautiful waters of the Bristol Channel, with the mountains of Wales rising against the sky on the horizon, and all about are hills and valleys, and woods and beautiful moors and babbling streams, with all the loveliness of cultivated rurality merging into the wild beauties of unadorned nature.”  If these was not exactly her words, they express the ideas she roused in my mind.  She said the place was far enough away from railways and the stream of travel, and among the simple peasantry, and that in the society of the resident gentry we would see English country life as it is, uncontaminated by the tourist or the commercial traveller.