gale the occupants with the latest music hall songs.

In one end of their boat is a little melodion apparently built for river
travel, for I never saw one anywhere else. They have in addition velvet
collection-boxes on long poles whereby to reach the upper decks of the
house-boat for our coins. These things look for all the world like the
old-fashioned collection-boxes which the deacons used to pass in church.

There was one set of Geisha girls who were masked below the eyes, one of
whom sang what she fondly imagined was a typical American song
calculated to captivate her American audience. She sang through her
nose, the better to imitate the nasal voices which to the British mind
is the national characteristic of the American, and her song had the
refrain beginning "For I am an Ammurikin Girl," telling how this
"Ammurikin Girl" had come to England to marry a title and had finally
secured an Earl, and ending with the statement that she had done all
this "like the true Ammurikin Girl." This song, especially the nasal
part, was received with such ill-concealed joy by our usual stolid river
audience that one afternoon I took it upon myself to avenge our
house-boat family for these truly British politenesses. So I went to the
railing after our audience had thoroughly collected and said through my
nose:

"Won't you please sing that pretty song of yours about the 'Ammurikin
Girl?' You know we are 'Ammurikin girls,' and we do so love the way you
take off our 'Ammurikin' voices."

At the same time I dropped a lot of small silver into their boat without
waiting for the collection-box. I was delighted to see that some of it
went overboard, for their consternation at that and at my having turned
the tables on them put them into such a flutter that they couldn't sing
at all, and they pulled away, saying that they would be back in half an
hour. Our audience, too, suddenly remembered urgent business a mile or
two up the river, and scattered as if by magic.

Jimmie was deeply pleased by this _rencontre_, for the prejudice of the
middle-class Britons (for the sake of occasionally being moderate, I
will say middle class) against all classes of Americans is just about as
deeply rooted and ineradicable as the prejudice of middle-class
Americans against everything that flies the Union Jack. The travelled
upper classes are inclined to be more moderate in their prejudice and to
see fit either for political or social reasons to affect a f