III

All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but that which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the fancy of other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately band of tall men in evening dress and top- hats, with musical instruments in their grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We called the Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she gave a glad cry: "Oh, they're the Neegurs! They're the white Neegurs!" and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the familiar music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the cornfield, as well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich moment, and I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the American Sufferance.

But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded in calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the pseudonym of the friend who came to see us, and to have read his writings in the Welsh Gazette, treating our proposed triumph in his distinction with the fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had been an old-fashioned Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing; but when we had been taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and finally took leave of us without rancor.

The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer's boy to whom our friend presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me understand what an englyn was. I am able now to explain that it is a polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers, or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes at both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh glory in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance was of so dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he said at last, "Let us go into this grocery. There's a boy here who will show you what an englyn is," and after I was introduced the kind youth did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue (for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical stanza that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston grocer's boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten, about the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the living bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little land, the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As Jones, or Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up and down all Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are honored according to their poetic worth.

IV

After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came, one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it, was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman's place not far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices of that friend of ours to be invited with them.

It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the western Welsh coast than on other shores of the "rainy isles," but not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea, on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages, grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as well of us as those did.

I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees, and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.

V

There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn, backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with a casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began. Fitly, if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with prayer; then a Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she sang in Welsh or English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang divinely; and then came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by our friend, who was the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this trust, unless it was King Arthur's knights, and I am not sure whether the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since.



After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me that she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans' hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good sense and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but will prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry, nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps personally Welsh. It seems that the cup had been famed throughout the countryside for the miraculous property by which whoever drank from it was cured of his or her malady, and it had been passed freely round to all sufferers ever since it came into her family's keeping. That they might make doubly sure of the miracle, it was the custom of the sick not only to empty the cup, but to nibble a little bit of the wood, and swallow that, so that in whatever state the monks of Strata Florida had confided it, the vessel was now in the state we saw. Saying this the lady opened the casket holding it, and showed us the crescent-shaped rim of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a cocoanut shell; all the rest had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom it had restored to health.

I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight of it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming seventeenth- century house, which would be old for this country, but which in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do, in the pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the centuries can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. "A home of ancient peace," it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its lawns and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces through which the Chautauquans followed from it.

VI

At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was the difference of the people from the people over the English border in their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful, they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.

The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track, there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King's Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too literally.

Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes. Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the picture- postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear hard, shiny black straw hats like the men's. Amongst the throng of Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a day of pleasure rather than praise.

VII

All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring all Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from Lincolnshire to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables and chairs, tools, hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the payment of such part of the Dissenters' taxes as would go to the support of the Church schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk Out of the Welsh Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I heard mentioned as of imperial importance, though what caused it or came of it I do not know.

Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round, so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach. Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls, though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have not the statistics for saying. All the visitors may have been people of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief outings alone have. The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore. There was not much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.

The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.

VIII

I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle, and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one of Cromwell's lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth in half a day or half an hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the week was up for which we had taken our lodging. It appeared from a house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was none we would have. Our successors were impending; and though I think our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her ideal was lodgers who would go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in her nature. We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to Llandudno.

* * * * *



LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE

Froissart's saying, if it was Froissart's, that the English amuse themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I do not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places of amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we call summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the English call watering- places. Of these I should like to take as a type the charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.

I

The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their double l and their French u, Thlandidno. According to another, we cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much matter, for the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful George Borrow's, who says that the Welsh ll is the same as the Spanish ll, but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if you pronounce it lhl you will come as near it as any Saeseneg need. It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix Llan speckles the map all over, owing to that multitude of Saints who peopled the country in the times when a Saint's sons were every one saints, and none was of particularly holy, or even good life, because he was known for a saint. Like a continental noble, he inherited his title equally with all his brothers.

But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it, and with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a more symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue, or its sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is more constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with the sight of his country's flag floating over a tennis-ground at the neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before one of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in his house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of Rhyl flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was indeed that gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves peculiarly dear to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from Chicago, or Boston, or Denver, that the English would wish to see as often as possible the symbol of our successful revolt from the princes and principles to which they have religiously adhered.



Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second- best we decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer the native life. The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were, in fact, two elderly Church-of- England sisters from Dublin, who had named their house out of a novel they had read. They said they believed the name was Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were very truly and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of girls, who tied their hair up with shoe-strings, and were forbidden, when about their work, to talk Welsh together, lest they should speak lezing of those Irish ladies. The rogues were half English, but the gentle creature who served our table was wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed, intelligent, who suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British Isles, but kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on several other tables, for the house was full of lodgers, all rather less permanent than ourselves, who were there for a fortnight; we found our landladies hoping, when we said we were going, to have had us with them through the winter.

II

Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing- room floor was frankly set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we never knew what it was about.

Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: "At least we think so," but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day before, my actual Cymric youth said, "Then he asked you too little," which seemed a non sequitur but was really an unexpected stroke of logic.

It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno. They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies, are never able to produce anything which is not direly mechanical and vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the hopes he never fulfils, so that his Wild Wales is a desert of blighted literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost without the offices of the composer.

III

One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go to hear it, not being good for a week's music without intermission. At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers, which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from France and the other from these States. Their passion for our colored minstrelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well enough, and Pierrots are amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they dote upon Niggers, as they call them with a brutality unknown among us except to the vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves in moments of exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the vigor of undying youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands of Niggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of their presence as a nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in the bottle. The decay of their gay science began among us with the fall of slavery, and the passing of the old plantation life; but as these never existed in Great Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy is not affected by their disappearance. It is like the English tradition of the Red Skins, which has all but vanished from our superstition, but remains as powerful as ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.

The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers are English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a spread of scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere else in nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling their fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at Aberystwyth went to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the White Neegurs. At Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute, so that it almost darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the crescent of the beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it. They were followed by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen's apprentices, donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the watering-place, to the music of their banjos and the sound of their singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the spectators' chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they sang their songs; the songs were newer than the jokes, but they were both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney accent, and without an aspirate in its place. But it was all richly acceptable to the audience, who laughed and cheered and joined in the chorus when asked. Here, as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in songs of the sloppiest sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.



On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain her peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the leader of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband's. It was indeed a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have been friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread over the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or more enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping on it, and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and all the points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the limits of the beautiful beach, Great Orme's Head, and Little Orme's Head, are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and manageable beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little Orme's Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight was not long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme's Head I was on terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went the length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you may descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous crowd listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you have the favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy is helping herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will have a charming glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will notice that the cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the dog implicitly; it is their Old World convention.

IV

From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power- house, said it was from the giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very old, we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied climbing purblindly out when the legions left Britain, and not joining very loudly in the general lamentation at their withdrawal, but probably tempering the popular grief with the reflection that the heathen Saxons could not be much worse.

The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually holidaying on their island, and who were always kind to their children when they had them, and to each other when they had not. They were commonly in couples, very affectionate and inoffensively young. They wandered about, and from time to time went and had tea at one of the tea-houses which are always at hand over there. Except the view there was not much to see; the ways were rough; now and then you came to a pink cottage or a white one where the peasantry, again, sold tea. At one place in our walk over the occiput of Great Orme's Head into the Happy Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey to a conspiracy of boys selling mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette trust, or syndicate, confining its commerce to that flower.

I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme's Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to be coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached by the stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was no particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I did not see the national emblem in any Welshman's hat—to be sure, it was not St. David's Day—it must have been boiling in every Welshman's pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this remove, in the poor English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as much as about the Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for joking. There are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall witch-hats, with one of them saying: "I wass enjoying myself shocking, look you." There was, of course, nothing serious in this joking; the Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly sold the manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing over them.

The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors at Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of love-making, I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and mothers who used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their different sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought the children charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair of the sand castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now seems strange that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in England subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice little boys would have come to me for money in America. Besides the entertainment of lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it in canopied penny chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages and sexes in the circus prevailing somewhere in the background, and advertising itself every afternoon by a procession of six young elephants neatly carrying each in his trunk the tail of the elephant before him. There were also the delightful shows of the amusement pier where one could go and see Pierrots to one's heart's content, if one can ever get enough of Pierrots; I never can.



Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one of which I saw Mr. Barrie's Little Mary given better than in New York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner decolletee, and what appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying, after what seems the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get something out of her hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them; and their playful contest went on through a whole act to the distraction of the spectators, who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested the misgiving that perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer outing as well as good; but there was no interference by the police or the management with this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene, all or any of them, too high in rank to be lightly molested in their lively event; or were they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy, but all the same their interlude was a contribution to the evening's entertainment which would not have been so placidly accepted in, say, Atlantic City, or Coney Island, or even Newport, where people are said to be more accustomed to the caprices of society persons, and more indulgent of their whims.

V

A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the indigenous life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself the day of our visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on our offering to see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle, we were met at the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling gate money, because of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was holding in the interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a chance which we would not have missed on any account. There was a large tent set up in the old castle court, and a table spread with home-made dainties of many sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who served one with tea or whatever else one liked, all for that generously inclusive shilling. They were Welsh, they told us, and they were speaking their language to right and left of us, while they were so courteous to us in English. It was quite like a church fair in some American village, where, however, it could not have had the advantage of a ruined Norman castle for its scene, and where it would not have provided a range for target practice with air-guns, or grounds for running and jumping.

The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle. I must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of people rather than places, though I may note that if there is any more interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them, but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress, however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its shoulder to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it, but without enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as soon the bridge had not tried.

All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as one can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the castle. The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets wander up and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that beautiful old Tudor house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without rival in its kind. It was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers, among whom one could easily find one's self incommoded without feeling one's self a part of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was the assurance of comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion, such as the Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the dining-room a corner of the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn away, and a much-elbowed architect, who was taking measurements of the chimney, agreed that this carf was the effect of the host or the butler flying to the place and sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of venison or round of beef was toward. It was a fine memento of the domestic past, and there was a secret chamber where the refugees of this cause or that in other times were lodged in great discomfort. Besides, there was a ghost which was fairly crowded out of its accustomed quarters, where so far from being able to walk, it would have had much ado to stand upright by flattening itself against the wall.

VI

In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction of Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately eager to sign their names in the guest- book. They scarcely left space in the sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling photographs and ironically inviting her visitors' guests to a glimpse of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be seen. She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement, and could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it was built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to leave, and there, not far off, was the "briny beach" where the Walrus and the Carpenter walked together,—

"And wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand."

For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that Through the Looking-Glass was written.

There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are not hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that Llandudno is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any dear and honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the even tenor of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our love of literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place with the memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We thought with him that Penmaenmawr was "the most charming watering-place in Wales," and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where I know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and jam en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of the yellow- jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as peaceful as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for they did not offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to our jam: to be sure, we thought best to leave it to them.



It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November. All the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in summer, whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill on which immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather boldly stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness of nature when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no upholsterer or paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow and purple in the decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt the eye in a transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any arrangement of colors would have pleased.

VII

It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now and then one found one's self among harvest- fields, where the yield of wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile, and the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the outside. They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as in the Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of slate, and not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much gathered into villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it is out of such houses that the farmers' boys and girls go to the co-educational colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the preference of the farmers that their sons should be educated for the ministry, which in that country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for every color of contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet disestablished English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in speech. The Welsh will have their service and their sermon in their own tongue, and when an Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he must do what he can to conform to the popular demand. It is said that in one case, where the incumbent long held out against the parish, he compromised by reading the service in Welsh with the English pronunciation. But the Welsh churches are now supplied with Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for the Welsh to cling so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English, offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb back into its Gaelic shell.



I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from Chester to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh manners or of English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly below gentlewoman, but very personable and well dressed, got into our carriage where there was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but she was not so old as the American who offered her his seat. She refused it, but consented to sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for her, and so remained till she left the train, while a half-grown boy and several young men kept their countenances and their places, not apparently dreaming of offering her a seat, or if they thought of her at all, thought she was well punished for letting the guard crowd her in upon us. By her stature and complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and these youth from theirs were as undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the incident had better be offered as an illustration of Welsh and English manners combined.

* * * * *



GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER

Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with "a little Latin and less Greek" from his earliest visitors and invaders. This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.

I

No error of the Englishman's latest invader is commoner than the notion, which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American, tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a possible future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort of Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King, or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to prevail. The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no case does he spell American. He prefers, as far as he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said "geole," the Conquered print "gaol," which the American invader must pronounce "jail," not "gayol."

The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago—say, fifteen or twenty—it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment for "the free peoples of antiquity" rather than from the Commonwealth. Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen's subjects when the Prince of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as prime among the civic virtues and duties. The notion took the general fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, "Oh yes, but you know that it is only your people that choose the President, but God gave us the King." Nothing could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the churches of the eldest faith the humble worshipper could not well be told that the picture or the statue of his adoration was not itself sacred. In fact, it is not going too far, at least for a very adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with the English is a sort of religious principle. What is with us more or less a joke, sometimes bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the powers that be in the person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most serious thing, at which no man may smile without loss.

I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, "What is loyalty? How did you come by it? Why are you loyal?"—I felt that it would be embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in the English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used to be mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at. That sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the King, or any of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill bred, and quite unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to criticism. Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must all the while be smiling at the notion of anything sacred in the Sovereign.



II

Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable, perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of society which hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family counts for much with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it counts for nothing at all in comparison with the face value at which it is current in England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when we are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as the commoners of England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is nonsense. A very rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of the paragrapher, the awful example of the preacher; his money is found to smell of his methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman is, the greater his honor. The American mother who imagines marrying her daughter to an English duke, cannot even imagine an English duke—say, like him of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him of Norfolk—with the social power and state which wait upon him in his duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared Him; and, though they are potent political magnates, they mainly rule as the King himself does, through the secular reverence of those beneath them for their titles and the visible images of their state. They are wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that, when one now and then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their wealth alone would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth does no such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is much desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor than it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for, though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people into or out of the administration, it is always—or so nearly always that the exception proves the rule—family that rules, from the King down to the least attache of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had never occurred to anybody before, "Yes, isn't it strange that those few families should keep it all among themselves!" It was a slender female voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a curious usage of some realm of faery.

III

England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That justifies it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything; though I hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less justifiable: that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets. But it is the universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of the state that constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The whole population, both the great and the small, by a common effort of the will, agree that there is a man or a woman of a certain line who can rightfully inherit the primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated through this right to live the life of a god, to be so worshipped and flattered, so cockered about with every form of moral and material flummery, that he or she may well be more than human not to be made a fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of volition, the inhabitants of the enchanted island universally agree that there is a class of them which can be called out of their names in some sort of title, bestowed by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forthwith be something different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing process, the realm of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have any existence in nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most absolute of human facts.

It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even with ourselves, who by a seven years' struggle burst the faery dream a century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it has reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know very well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England stands for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both of these, there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly inconceivable to the natives of a country where there are only millionaires to revere.

IV

The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course, do so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France of the Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always been smiling in each other's faces when they were by themselves. But the faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old dream. Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even honors them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure of the faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up among the other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After that he has standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that psychological moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody tries to forget him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if it has not the fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as he keeps to it. Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal independence, without aggression, as in England. There is apparently nothing of it in Germany; in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind that there is no question of it; in the French Republic and in our own, it exists in an excess that is molestive and invasive; in England alone does it strike the observer as being of exactly the just measure.

Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will not insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are slight and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble have to go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in England they were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated. At a railroad junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up stairs and down, and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the company's servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers this way and that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women, who came up, in the midst of their torment, and pestered them with questions as to the time when trains that had not arrived would leave after they did arrive. I shuddered to think what would have at least verbally happened to such inquirers with us; but, there, not only their lives but their feelings were safe, and they could go away with such self-respect as they had quite intact.

V

In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there, passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other people's trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think it no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons, have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom fail to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab, and, duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction, my porter seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not unconsidered appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At the next station, the company telegraphed back at its own cost the voluminous message of my anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that the next train would bring my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I arrived at Edinburgh, I casually mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I had not seen before. He asked how the bags were marked, and then he said they had come with us. My porter had run with them to my train, but in despair of getting to my car with his burden, had put them into the last luggage- van, and all I had to do was now to identify them at my journey's end.

Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people's baggage, I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in this, the deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery dream, operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that could otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard paid for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were offensively asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we attempted to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the nearest junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the keeping of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and said that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he was provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our hard case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place as good as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he saw it, and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to him, there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought it best to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When a force of guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against the intruder, who could not, or did not, say that he did not know the compartment was engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had sufficiently stood, or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others precipitated themselves upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of fishing- tackle, such as a gentleman carries who has been asked to somebody's fishing, and bore it away to another part of the train. They left one piece behind, and the porter who came back for it was radiantly smiling, as if the struggle had been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke of his antagonist without the least exasperation; evidently, he regarded him as one who had justly defended himself from corporate aggression; his sympathies were with him rather than with us, perhaps because we had not so vigorously asserted ourselves.

VI

A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid into the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time the train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude with a cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out. But, after waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer to admit us, we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly at home. When it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up her belongings, and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there was a typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or whether of the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed itself to this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born, not nearly so high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess her, and who, when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the morrow, which was to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us inspired by some small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest such a possibility for so sacred a day.

I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering to give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization is shown in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and railway folk, who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when they wish your attention. The like happened to me only once in England, and that was at Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands on me instead of speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen American influences of a port at which we arrive so abundantly and indiscriminately. I did not resent the touch, though it is what every one is expected to do, if aggrieved, and every one else does it in England. Within his rights, every one is safe; though there may be some who have no rights. If there were, I did not see them, and I suppose that, as an alien, I might have refused to stand up and uncover when the band began playing God Save the King, as it did at the end of every musical occasion; I might have urged that, being no subject of the King, I did not feel bound to join in the general prayer. But that would have been churlish, and, where every one had been so civil to me, I did not see why I should not be civil to the King, in a small matter. In the aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I suppose that the stranger always finds the patriotism of a country molestive. Patriotism is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole exception of our own, which we are constantly wishing to share with other people, especially with English people. We spare them none of it, even in their own country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am myself being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them. Upon the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other, they take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it were a thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the present or recent entente cordiale. None of their idiosyncrasies is more notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they do not take it out of us when we are away.

We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the most deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot always be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers, the English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The average level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest, and I am always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought me to the distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the mannerless uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from high to low, or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much more than we infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which sweetens casual intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect, almost unknown to us, which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity that democracy, being the fine thing it essentially is, should behave so rudely. Must we come to family government, in order to be filial or fraternal in our bearing with one another? Why should we be so blunt, so sharp, so ironical, so brutal in our kindness?

VII

The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to the instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we are not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But there is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes his perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the sense of always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried expectation that there is really something in what you say which, will be clear by-and-by.

Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen I have known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those story- telling Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless. It is true that, wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon lump, the expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose delicate gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself of a heavier and grosser fibre.

No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than half-way for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile spirits are shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are also of such an exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit is funny, they will not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our jokers. But, if you have something fine and good in you, you need not be afraid they will fail of it, and they will not be so long about finding it out as some travellers say. When it comes to the grace of the imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you. But in their extreme of impersonality they will leave the initiative to you in the matter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your peculiar humor than they will name you in speaking with you.

VIII

Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with in fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the birds in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights. In fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over and kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for the joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by easy chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness of the barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw him standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like a statue of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic death and martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the peril of poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many gunners pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows how shy the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt from the same coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I had almost indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink coats and the flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were mine by a kind of sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.

IX

Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances, I heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public, and that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him about his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and girlish she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her glove the window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our cabman we might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal uninsistence largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy exist; the figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background, and appear from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at races, or teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad, and invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.

Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a nobleman who had somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors that they were not his friends, and regularly voted down his men, whether they stood for Parliament or County Council, and whether they were better than the popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was said that they were really better, but the people would not have them because they were his; and one of the theories of English manliness is that the constant pressure from above has toughened the spirit and enabled Englishmen to stand up stouter and straighter each in his place, just as it is contended elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the human race have been heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the struggle of life.

For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and coarser for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social inequality is such that there are not four men in London who are not snobs, it cannot boast itself greater than the success of economic inequality with ourselves, among whom the fight for money has not produced of late a first-class poet, painter, or sculptor. The English, if they are now the manliest people under the sun, have to thank not their masters but themselves, and a nature originally so generous that no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no political absurdity spoil it. But if this nature had been left free from the beginning, we might see now a nation of Englishmen who, instead of being bound so hard and fast in the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would be the first in a world-wide altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout that it may well pass itself off upon them for a religious emotion, instead of the superstition which seems to the stranger the implication of an England in the next world as well as in this.

X

We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that is a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life, as the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and as distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in the cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison. At home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed in the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with other men, and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad time-tables will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the limits of Lent; you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays, and the minor saints' days. When once you have mastered this difficult science, you will realize what a colossal transaction the disestablishment of the English Church in England would be, and how it would affect the whole social fabric.

But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as that knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever to question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has moved in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one has always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a sort of despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who perceives that he never will be able to speak English. The American is rather worse off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form even the wish to pronounce some English words as the English do. He has, for example, always said "financier," with the accent on the last syllable; and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there was no choice for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by the head of a college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns on asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had better let the verb "to be" govern the accusative as the English do, and be done with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or stop! He must not "telegraph," he must "wire."

XI

As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping one's aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning. Like the wrong breathing, it is social death "to any he that utters it," not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing a woman call herself "a lydy." It may indeed be the contagion of the National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop their aitches.

The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them, any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings, which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization (if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage, for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a race.

XII

What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently. We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul, the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are "the prize liars of the universe." He was an expert accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame the others.