The more uniform good health of English women is thought to be a matter of exercise in the open air, as walking, riding, driving, but the prime reason is mainly a climatic one, uniform habits of exercise being more easily kept up in that climate than in this, and being less exhaustive, one day with another.  You can walk there every day in the year without much discomfort, and the stimulus is about the same.  Here it is too hot in summer and too cold in winter, or else it keys you up too tight one day and unstrings you the next; all fire and motion in the morning, and all listlessness and ennui in the afternoon; a spur one hour and a sedative the next.

A watch will not keep as steady time here as in Britain, and the human clock-work is more liable to get out of repair for the same reason.  Our women, especially, break down prematurely, and the decay of maternity in this country is no doubt greater than in any of the oldest civilized communities.  One reason, doubtless, is that our women are the greatest slaves of fashion in the whole world, and, in following the whims of that famous courtesan, have the most fickle and destructive climate to contend with.

English women all have good-sized feet, and Englishmen, too, and wear large, comfortable shoes.  This was a noticeable feature at once:  coarse, loosefitting clothes of both sexes, and large boots and shoes with low heels.  They evidently knew the use of their feet, and had none of the French, or American, or Chinese fastidiousness about this part of their anatomy.  I notice that, when a family begins to run out, it turns out its toes, drops off at the heel, shortens its jaw, and dotes on small feet and hands.

Another promoter of health in England is woolen clothes, which are worn the year round, the summer driving people into no such extremities as here.  And the good, honest woolen stuffs of one kind and another that fill the shops attest the need and the taste that prevail.  They had a garment when I was in London called the Ulster overcoat,—­a coarse, shaggy, bungling coat, with a skirt reaching nearly to the feet, very ugly, tried by the fashion plates, but very comfortable, and quite the fashion.  This very sensible garment has since become well known in America.

The Americans in London were put out with the tailors, and could rarely get suited, on account of the loose cutting and the want of “style.”  But “style” is the hiatus that threatens to swallow us all one of these days.  About the only monstrosity I saw in the British man’s dress was the stove-pipe hat, which everybody wears.  At first I feared it might be a police regulation, or a requirement of the British Constitution, for I seemed to be about the only man in the kingdom with a soft hat on, and I had noticed that before leaving the steamer every man brought out from its hiding-place one of these polished brain-squeezers.  Even the boys wear them,—­youths of nine and ten years with little stovepipe hats on; and at Eton School I saw black swarms of them:  even the boys in the field were playing football in stove-pipe bats.