the already overwhelming mass of conventional insincerity; but it might undoubtedly be well for him to consider whether it is not his positive duty to drop a little more of the oil of human kindness on the wheels of the social machinery, and to understand that it is perfectly possible for two strangers to speak with and look at each other pleasantly without thereby contracting the obligation of eternal friendship.  Why should an English traveller deem it worthy of special record that when calling at a Boston club, he found his friend and host not yet arrived, other members of the club, unknown to him, had put themselves about to entertain him?  An American gentleman would find this too natural to call for remark.

Whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge the fact that our brutal frankness, our brusqueness, and our extreme fondness for calling a spade a spade are often extremely disagreeable to our American cousins, and make them (temporarily at any rate) feel themselves to be our superiors in the matter of gentle breeding.  As Col.  T.W.  Higginson has phrased it, they think that “the English nation has truthfulness enough for a whole continent, and almost too much for an island.”  They think that a line might be drawn somewhere between dissembling our love and kicking them downstairs.  They also object to our use of such terms as “beastly,” “stinking,” and “rot;” and we must admit that they do so with justice, while we cannot assoil them altogether of the opposite tendency of a prim prudishness in the avoidance of certain natural and necessary words.  For myself I unfeignedly admire the delicacy which leads to a certain parsimony in the use of words like “perspiration,” “cleaning one’s self,” and so on.  And, however much we may laugh at the class that insists upon the name of “help” instead of “servant,” we cannot but respect the class which yields to the demand and looks with horror on the English slang word “slavey.”

On the other hand there are certain little personal habits, such as the public use of the toothpick, and what Mr. Morley Roberts calls the modern form of [Greek:  kottabos], which I think often find themselves in better company in America than in England.  Still I desire to speak here with all due diffidence.  I remember when I pointed out to a Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card, she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a distinguished English journalist, with a handle to his name, who recently made a successful lecturing tour in the United States, openly and deliberately moistened his thumb in the same ingenuous fashion to aid him in turning over the leaves of his manuscript.