riendship.
But seriously I myself question if there is a nation more thoroughly
foreign to America than the English.

This, I take it, is because the middle classes of both countries are not
abreast of the times, and take little notice of the trend of events.
They are still influenced by the prejudice engendered by the wars of a
century ago, which has partly been inherited and partly enhanced by
marriages with England's hereditary foes, who take refuge with us in
such numbers.

However, the people could be influenced through their sympathies, and in
the to-be-expected event of the death of England's queen, or a calamity
of national importance on our own shores, the sympathy which would be
extended from each to each, through the medium of the press, would do
more to educate the masses along lines of sympathy between the two great
English-speaking nations than any amount of statecraft or diplomacy. The
people must be taught by the way of the heart, and touched by their
emotions. Their brains would follow.

As it is, the differences still exist. Take, for instance, their
language, from which ours has so far departed and become so much more
pure English, and has been enriched by so many clean-cut and descriptive
adjectives that certain sentences in English and in American will be
totally unintelligible to each other. On one occasion, going with a
party of eight English people to the races, Bee looked out of the car
window at the landscape, and said:

"How thoroughly finished England is. Here we are running through a hill
country where they are so complete and so neat in their landscape that
they even sod the cuts. It is like going through a terraced garden."

It may be that the phrase she used was academic, but I am at least
reasonable in thinking that the average American would know what she
meant. Not one of those eight English people caught even the shadow of
her meaning, and when she explained what she meant by "sod your cuts,"
they said that she meant "turf your cuttings." She replied that
"cutting" with us was a greenhouse term and meant a part clipped from a
plant or a tree. They said the word "cut" meant a cut of beef or
mutton, to which she retorted that we might also use the term "cut" in a
butcher shop, but when travelling in a hill country and looking out of
the train window it meant the mountain cut. They said they never heard
of the word sod, except used as a noun. She replied that she never heard
the wo