We came at the end of the morning “to a port in France.”  From there we were to take the boat for England.  And it seemed to us that the whole place was bent on the same errand.  English soldiers going home on leave jammed the streets.  They filled the hotels; they crowded into the shops.  And the whole town was made over for them.  “French Spoken Here” was the facetious sign someone had stuck on a postcard shop near the grey old church on the main thoroughfare.  It is curious how the English put their trade mark upon the places they occupy.  These French ports filled with British soldiers look more English than England.  The English demand their own cooking, their own merchandise, their own tobacco, their own beer—­which is stale, flat and unprofitable enough these days—­and they demand their native speech.  When he gets in sight of his native land the British Tommy quits saying “Donny mo-i, de tabac!  Ma’mselle!” But bellows forth both loud and long, “I say, Lizz, gimme some makin’s! and look alive, please!” So when we went to bed in our boat in a French port, and slept through a submarine zone, and waked up in an English port, there was no vast difference in the places.  Today Southampton and Dover are much like Calais and Havre; for there the English do most congregate.  But back of the French ports it is all France, and back of the English ports is England, and worlds lie between them.  England, as one rides through it who lives beyond the seas, and uses the English tongue, always must seem like the unfolding of an old, old dream.  England gives her step-children the impression that they have seen it all before!  And they have; in Mother Goose, in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Thackeray, in Trollope, in the songs of British poets, in the landscapes of British artists!  At every turn of the road, in every face at the window, in every hedgerow and rural village is the everlasting reminder that we who speak the English tongue are bound with indissoluble links of our foster memories from the books and the arts, to ways of thinking and living and growing in grace that we call English.  It is more than a blood or breed, more even than a civilization, is this spiritual inheritance that comes from this English soil; it is the realization in life of a philosophy, the dramatization of a human creed.  It may be understood, but not defined, yet it is as palpable and substantial in this earth as any material fact.  Germany knows what this English philosophy means; and for half a century Germany has been preparing to combat it.  Napoleon knew it, and believed in it, when he declared three-fourths of every fact is its spiritual value.  France has it, new Russia is struggling for it.  American life has it as an ancient inheritance, and as we Americans rode through the green meadows of England up from the coast to London, for ever reviewing familiar scenes and faces and aspects of life that we had never seen before, we realized how much closer than blood or geography or politics men grow who hold the same creed.  So Henry, feeling that restraints no longer were necessary when we were as near home as England, began fussing with an Englishman about something a speaker had said in parliament the day before.  We may love the French, like the ladies, God bless ’em!  But we quarrel only with the English.