One day on an omnibus I asked the conductor where I should get off to reach a certain place.  “Oh, that’s the journey’s end, sir,” he replied.  Now that is poetry.  It sounds like Christina Rossetti.  What would an American car conductor have said?  “Why, that’s the end of the line.”  “Could you spare me a trifle, sir?” asks the London beggar.  A pretty manner of requesting alms.  Little boys in England are very fond of cigarette pictures, little cards there reproducing “old English flowers.”  I used to save them to give to children.  Once I gave a number to the ringleader of a group.  I was about to tell him to divide them up.  “Oh, we’ll share them, sir,” he said.  At home such a boy might have said to the others:  “G’wan, these’re fer me.”  Again, when I inquired my way of a tiny, ragged mite, he directed me to “go as straight as ever you can go, sir, across the cricket field; then take your first right; go straight through the copse, sir,” he called after me.  The copse?  Perhaps I was thinking of the “cops” of New York.  Then I understood that the urchin was speaking of a small wood.

Of course he, this small boy, sang his sentences, with the rising and falling inflection of the lower classes.  “Top of the street, bottom of the road, over the way”—­so it goes.  And, by the way, how does an Englishman know which is the top and which is the bottom of every street?

Naturally, the English caun’t understand us.  “When is it that you are going ’ome?” asked my friend, the policeman in King’s Road.

“Oh, some time in the fall,” I told him.

“In the fall?” he inquired, puzzled.

“Yes, September or October.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, “in the autumn, yes, yes.  At the fall of the leaves,” I heard him murmur meditatively.  Meeting him later in the company of another policeman, “He,” he said to his friend, nodding at me, “is going back in the fall.”  Deliciously humorous to him was my speech.  Now it may be mentioned as an interesting point that many of the words imported in the Mayflower, or in ships following it, have been quite forgotten in England.  Fall, as in the fall of the year, I think, was among them.  Quite so, quite so, as they say in England.

Yes, in the King’s Road.  For, it is an odd thing, Charles Scribner’s Sons are on Fifth Avenue, but Selfridge’s is in Oxford Street.  Here we meet a man on the street; we kick him into it.  And in England it is a very different thing, indeed, whether you meet a lady in the street or on the street.  You, for instance, wouldn’t meet a lady on the street at all.  In fact, in England, to our mind, things are so turned around that it is as good as being in China.  Just as traffic there keeps to the left kerb, instead of to the right curb, so whereas here I call you up on the telephone, there you phone me down.  It would be awkward, wouldn’t it, for me to say to you that I called you down?