who seemed to find no inconvenience in a room-temperature
of eighty degrees, and have been nigh frozen to death in open-air
drives in which the same individuals seemed perfectly comfortable. Men
appear at the theatre in orthodox evening dress, while the tall and
exasperating hats of the ladies who accompany them would seem to
indicate a theory of street toilette. From New York to Buffalo I am
whisked through the air at the rate of fifty or sixty miles an hour;
in California I travelled on a train on which the engineer shot
rabbits from the locomotive, and the fireman picked them up in time to
jump on the baggage-car at the rear end of the train. At Santa Barbara
I visited an old mission church and convent which vied in quaint
picturesqueness with anything in Europe; but, alas! the old monk who
showed us round, though wearing the regulation gown and knotted cord,
had replaced his sandals by elastic-sided boots and covered his
tonsure with a common chummy.[4]

Few things in the United States are more pleasing than the widespread
habits of kindness to animals (most American whips are, as far as
punishment to the horse is concerned, a mere farce). Yet no American
seems to have any scruple about adding an extra hundred weight or two
to an already villainously overloaded horse-car; and I have seen a
score of American ladies sit serenely watching the frantic straining
of two poor animals to get a derailed car on to the track again, when
I knew that in "brutal" Old England every one of them would have been
out on the sidewalk to lighten the load.

In England that admirable body of men popularly known as Quakers are
indissolubly associated in the public mind with a pristine simplicity
of life and conversation. My amazement, therefore, may easily be
imagined, when I found that an entertainment given by a young member
of the Society of Friends in one of the great cities of the Eastern
States turned out to be the most elaborate and beautiful private ball
I ever attended, with about eight hundred guests dressed in the height
of fashion, while the daily papers (if I remember rightly) estimated
its expense as reaching a total of some thousands of pounds. Here the
natural expansive liberality of the American man proved stronger than
the traditional limitations of a religious society. But the opposite
art of cheese-paring is by no means unknown in the United States.
Perhaps not even canny Scotland can parallel the record of certain
d