Your fellow passengers may pity you for your ignorance and your perplexity, but they would not speak; they could not, not having been introduced.  A German or a Frenchman would be giving you gladly what aid he might; but a well-born Englishman who had not been introduced would ride for nine years with you and not speak.  I found the best way of solving the puzzle was to consult the timecard.  If the timecard said our train would reach a given point at a given hour, and this was the given hour, then we might be pretty sure this was the given point.  Timetables in England are written by realists, not by gifted fiction writers of the impressionistic school, as is frequently the case in America.

So, if this timecard says it is time for you to get off you get off, with your ticket still in your possession; and if it be a small station you go yourself and look up the station master, who is tucked away in a secluded cubbyhole somewhere absorbing tea, or else is in the luggage room fussing with baby carriages and patentchurns.  Having ferreted him out in his hiding-place you hand over your ticket to him and he touches his cap brim and says “Kew” very politely, which concludes the ceremony so far as you are concerned.

Then, if you have brought any heavy baggage with you in the baggage car—­pardon, I meant the luggage van—­you go back to the platform and pick it out from the heap of luggage that has been dumped there by the train hands.  With ordinary luck and forethought you could easily pick out and claim and carry off some other person’s trunk, provided you fancied it more than your own trunk, only you do not.  You do not do this any more than, having purchased a second-class ticket, or a third-class, you ride first-class; though, so far as I could tell, there is no check to prevent a person from so doing.  At least an Englishman never does.  It never seems to occur to him to do so.  The English have no imagination.

I have a suspicion that if one of our railroads tried to operate its train service on such a basis of confidence in the general public there would be a most deceitful hiatus in the receipts from passenger traffic to be reported to a distressed group of stockholders at the end of the fiscal year.  This, however, is merely a supposition on my part.  I may be wrong.

Chapter XVII

Britain in Twenty Minutes

To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs.  The average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things.  If an Englishman’s business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them—­and learns them well.  Otherwise your Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or may not do.