ou that here is the
mechanism. I gave up asking questions. If it pleases Providence to make
a car run up and down a slit in the ground for many miles, and if for
twopence halfpenny I can ride in that car, why shall I seek the reasons
of the miracle? Rather let me look out of the windows till the shops
give place to thousands and thousands of little houses made of wood (to
imitate stone), each house just big enough for a man and his family. Let
me watch the people in the cars and try to find out in what manner they
differ from us, their ancestors.

It grieves me now that I cursed them (in the matter of book piracy),
because I perceived that my curse is working and that their speech is
becoming a horror already. They delude themselves into the belief that
they talk English--the English--and I have already been pitied for
speaking with "an English accent." The man who pitied me spoke, so far
as I was concerned, the language of thieves. And they all do. Where we
put the accent forward they throw it back, and vice versa where we
give the long "a" they use the short, and words so simple as to be past
mistaking they pronounce somewhere up in the dome of their heads. How do
these things happen?

Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee school-marm, the cider and
the salt codfish of the Eastern States, are responsible for what he
calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from across the
water without paying for 'em, and the snort of delight was fixed in
their nostrils forever by a just Providence. That is why they talk a
foreign tongue to-day.

"Cats is dogs, and rabbits is dogs, and so's parrots. But this 'ere
tortoise is an insect, so there ain't no charge," as the old porter
said.

A Hindoo is a Hindoo and a brother to the man who knows his vernacular.
And a Frenchman is French because he speaks his own language. But the
American has no language. He is dialect, slang, provincialism, accent,
and so forth. Now that I have heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret
Harte is being ruined for me, because I find myself catching through the
roll of his rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar fatherland. Get
an American lady to read to you "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's
Bar," and see how much is, under her tongue, left of the beauty of the
original.

But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It happened this way. A reporter asked
me what I thought of the city, and I made answer suavely that it was
hallowed ground t