“If the creatures could have been driven off by a woman, we could have done it ourselves.  I don’t know why you should think you could do it any better than we could.”

I must say, madam, that at that minute I was a little humble-minded, for I don’t mind confessing to you that the idea of one American woman plunging into a conflict that had frightened off three English women, and coming out victorious, had a good deal to do with my trying to drive away those hogs; and now that I had come out of the little end of the horn, just as the young women had, I felt pretty small, but I wasn’t going to let them see that.

“I think that English hogs,” said I, “must be savager than American ones.  Where I live there is not any kind of a hog that would not run away if I shook a stick at him.”  The young woman at the other end of the gate now spoke again.

“Everything British is braver than anything American,” said she; “and all you have done has been to vex those hogs, and they are chewing up our drawing things worse than they did before.”

Of course I fired up at this, and said, “You are very much mistaken about Americans.”  But before I could say any more she went on to tell me that she knew all about Americans; she had been in America, and such a place she could never have fancied.

“Over there you let everybody trample over you as much as they please.  You have no conveniences.  One cannot even get a cab.  Fancy!  Not a cab to be had unless one pays enough for a drive in Hyde Park.”

I must say that the hogs charging down on me didn’t astonish me any more than to find myself on top of a gate with a young woman charging on my country in this fashion, and it was pretty hard on me to have her pitch into the cab question, because Jone and me had had quite a good deal to say about cabs ourselves, comparing New York and London, without any great fluttering of the stars and stripes; but I wasn’t going to stand any such talk as that, and so I said: 

“I know very well that our cab charges are high, and it is not likely that poor people coming from other countries are able to pay them; but as soon as our big cities get filled up with wretched, half-starved people, with the children crying for bread at home, and the father glad enough that he’s able to get people to pay him a shilling for a drive, and that he’s not among the hundreds and thousands of miserable men who have not any work at all, and go howling to Hyde Park to hold meetings for blood or bread, then we will be likely to have cheap cabs as you have.”

“How perfectly awful!” said the young woman nearest me; but the one at the other end of the gate didn’t seem to mind what I said, but shifted off on another track.

“And then there’s your horses’ tails,” said she; “anything nastier couldn’t be fancied.  Hundreds of them everywhere with long tails down to their heels, as if they belong to heathens who had never been civilized.”