Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a sense and realization of the splendor of England’s past when you go to Westminster Abbey and stand—­figuratively—­with one foot on Jonson and another on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of so much dead-and-gone greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a trespass on the last resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody of equal consequence.  More imposing even than Westminster is St. Paul’s.  I am not thinking so much of the memorials or the tombs or the statues there, but of the tattered battleflags bearing the names of battles fought by the English in every crack and cranny of the world, from Quebec to Ladysmith, and from Lucknow to Khartum.  Beholding them there, draped above the tombs, some faded but still intact, some mere clotted wisps of ragged silk clinging to blackened standards, gives one an uplifting conception of the spirit that has sent the British soldier forth to girth the globe, never faltering, never slackening pace, never giving back a step to-day but that he took two steps forward to-morrow; never stopping—­except for tea.

The fool hath said in his heart that he would go to England and come away and write something about his impressions, but never write a single, solitary word about the Englishman’s tea-drinking habit, or the Englishman’s cricket-playing habit, or the Englishman’s lack of a sense of humor.  I was that fool.  But it cannot be done.  Lacking these things England would not be England.  It would be Hamlet without Hamlet or the Ghost or the wicked Queen or mad Ophelia or her tiresome old pa; for most English life and the bulk of English conversation center about sporting topics, with the topic of cricket predominating.  And at a given hour of the day the wheels of the empire stop, and everybody in the empire—­from the king in the counting house counting up his money, to the maid in the garden hanging out the clothes—­drops what he or she may be doing and imbibes tea until further orders.  And what oceans of tea they do imbibe!

There was an old lady who sat near us in a teashop one afternoon.  As well as might be judged by one who saw her in a sitting posture only, she was no deeper than any other old lady of average dimensions; but in rapid succession she tilted five large cups of piping hot tea into herself and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew, stunned by the spectacle.  She must have been fearfully long-waisted.  I had a mental vision of her interior decorations—­all fumed-oak wainscotings and buff-leather hangings.  Still, I doubt whether their four-o’clock-tea habit is any worse than our five-o’clock cocktail habit.  It all depends, I suppose, on whether one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled.  But we are getting bravely over our cocktail habit, as attested by figures and the visual evidences, while their tea habit is growing on them—­so the statisticians say.