I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic economies of an English barber shop.  I use the word economies in this connection advisedly; for, compared with the average high-polished, sterilized and antiseptic barber shop of an American city, this shop seemed a torture cave.  In London, pubs are like that, and some dentists’ establishments and law offices—­musty, fusty dens very unlike their Yankee counterparts.  In this particular shop now the chairs were hard, wooden chairs; the looking-glass —­you could not rightly call it a mirror—­was cracked and bleary; and an apprentice boy went from one patron to another, lathering each face; and then the master followed after him, razor in hand, and shaved the waiting countenances in turn.  Flies that looked as though they properly belonged in a livery stable were buzzing about; and there was a prevalent odor which made me think that all the sick pomade in the world had come hither to spend its last declining hours.  I said to myself that this place would bear further study; that some day, when I felt particularly hardy and daring, I would come here and be shaved, and afterward would write a piece about it and sell it for money.  So, the better to fix its location in my mind, I glanced up at the street sign and, behold!  I was hard by Drury Lane, where Sweet Nelly once on a time held her court.

Another time I stopped in front of a fruiterer’s, my eye having been caught by the presence in his window of half a dozen draggled-looking, wilted roasting ears decorated with a placard reading as follows: 

American Maize or Indian corn
A vegetable—­to be boiled and then
eaten

I was remarking to myself that these Britishers were surely a strange race of beings—­that if England produced so delectable a thing as green corn we in America would import it by the shipload and serve it on every table; whereas here it was so rare that they needs must label it as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, lest people should think it might be an animal—­when I chanced to look more closely at the building occupied by the fruiterer and saw that it was an ancient house, half-timbered above the first floor, with a queer low-browed roof.  Inquiring afterward I learned that this house dated straight back to Elizabethan days and still on beyond for so many years that no man knew exactly how many; and I began to understand in a dim sort of way how and why it was these people held so fast to the things they had and cared so little for the things they had not.