but have they not the same freezing and the same boiling point?  To be sure, each thinks his own scale is the true standard, and at home they might get into a contest about the matter, but here in a strange land they do not think of disputing.  Now, while they are talking about America and their own local atmosphere and temperature, there comes in a second Boston Fahrenheit.  The two of the same name look at each other for a moment, and rush together so eagerly that their bulbs are endangered.  How well they understand each other!  Thirty-two degrees marks the freezing point.  Two hundred and twelve marks the boiling point.  They have the same scale, the same fixed points, the same record:  no wonder they prefer each other’s company!

I hope that my reader has followed my illustration, and finished it off for himself.  Let me give a few practical examples.  An American and an Englishman meet in a foreign land.  The Englishman has occasion to mention his weight, which he finds has gained in the course of his travels.  “How much is it now?” asks the American.  “Fourteen stone.  How much do you weigh?” “Within four pounds of two hundred.”  Neither of them takes at once any clear idea of what the other weighs.  The American has never thought of his own, or his friends’, or anybody’s weight in stones of fourteen pounds.  The Englishman has never thought of any one’s weight in pounds.  They can calculate very easily with a slip of paper and a pencil, but not the less is their language but half intelligible as they speak and listen.  The same thing is in a measure true of other matters they talk about.  “It is about as large a space as the Common,” says the Boston man.  “It is as large as St. James’s Park,” says the Londoner.  “As high as the State House,” says the Bostonian, or “as tall as Bunker Hill Monument,” or “about as big as the Frog Pond,” where the Londoner would take St. Paul’s, the Nelson Column, the Serpentine, as his standard of comparison.  The difference of scale does not stop here; it runs through a great part of the objects of thought and conversation.  An average American and an average Englishman are talking together, and one of them speaks of the beauty of a field of corn.  They are thinking of two entirely different objects:  one of a billowy level of soft waving wheat, or rye, or barley; the other of a rustling forest of tall, jointed stalks, tossing their plumes and showing their silken epaulettes, as if every stem in the ordered ranks were a soldier in full regimentals.  An Englishman planted for the first time in the middle of a well-grown field of Indian corn would feel as much lost as the babes in the wood.  Conversation between two Londoners, two New Yorkers, two Bostonians, requires no foot-notes, which is a great advantage in their intercourse.