at home I had associated only with country boys, and not even with them latterly.  The smartness and knowingness and a certain hardness or keenness of our city youths,—­there was no trace of it at all in this young Cockney.  But he liked American travelers better than those from his own country.  They were more friendly and communicative,—­were not so afraid to speak to “a fellow,” and at the hotel were more easily pleased.

The American is certainly not the grumbler the Englishman is; he is more cosmopolitan and conciliatory.  The Englishman will not adapt himself to his surroundings; he is not the least bit an imitative animal; he will be nothing but an Englishman, and is out of place—­an anomaly—­in any country but his own.  To understand him, you must see him at home in the British island where he grew, where he belongs, where he has expressed himself and justified himself, and where his interior, unconscious characteristics are revealed.  There he is quite a different creature from what he is abroad.  There he is “sweet,” but he sours the moment he steps off the island.  In this country he is too generally arrogant, fault-finding, and supercilious.  The very traits of loudness, sharpness, and unleavenedness, which I complain of in our national manners, he very frequently exemplifies in an exaggerated form.

The Scotch or German element no doubt fuses and mixes with ours much more readily than the purely British.

The traveler feels the past in England as of course he cannot feel it here; and, along with impressions of the present, one gets the flavor and influence of earlier, simpler times, which, no doubt, is a potent charm, and one source of the “rose-color” which some readers have found in my sketches, as the absence of it is one cause of the raw, acrid, unlovely character of much that there is in this country.  If the English are the old wine, we are the new.  We are not yet thoroughly leavened as a people, nor have we more than begun to transmute and humanize our surroundings; and as the digestive and assimilative powers of the American are clearly less than those of the Englishman, to say nothing of our harsher, more violent climate, I have no idea that ours can ever become the mellow land that Britain is.

As for the charge of brutality that is often brought against the English, and which is so successfully depicted by Dickens and Thackeray, there is doubtless good ground for it, though I actually saw very little of it during five weeks’ residence in London, and I poked about into all the dens and comers I could find, and perambulated the streets at nearly all hours of the night and day.  Yet I am persuaded there is a kind of brutality among the lower orders in England that does not exist in the same measure in this country,—­an ignorant animal coarseness, an insensibility, which gives rise to wife-beating and kindred offenses.  But the brutality of ignorance and stolidity is not the worst form of the evil.  It is good material