easure all the
rest of the world. It never seems to occur to people in one locality that
the manners and speech of those of another may be just as admirable as
their own, and they get a good deal of discomfort out of their
intercourse with strangers by reason of their inability to adapt
themselves to any ways not their own. It helps greatly to make this
country interesting that nearly every State has its peculiarities, and
that the inhabitants of different sections differ in manner and speech.
But next to an interesting person in social value, is an agreeable one,
and it would add vastly to the agreeableness of life if our widely spread
provinces were not so self-centred in their notion that their own way is
the best, to the degree that they criticise any deviation from it as an
eccentricity. It would be a very nice world in these United States if we
could all devote ourselves to finding out in communities what is likable
rather than what is opposed to our experience; that is, in trying to
adapt ourselves to others rather than insisting that our own standard
should measure our opinion and our enjoyment of them.

When the Kentuckian describes a man as a "high-toned gentleman" he means
exactly the same that a Bostonian means when, he says that a man is a
"very good fellow," only the men described have a different culture, a
different personal flavor; and it is fortunate that the Kentuckian is not
like the Bostonian, for each has a quality that makes intercourse with
him pleasant. In the South many people think they have said a severe
thing when they say that a person or manner is thoroughly Yankee; and
many New Englanders intend to express a considerable lack in what is
essential when they say of men and women that they are very Southern.
When the Yankee is produced he may turn out a cosmopolitan person of the
most interesting and agreeable sort; and the Southerner may have traits
and peculiarities, growing out of climate and social life unlike the New
England, which are altogether charming. We talked once with a Western man
of considerable age and experience who had the placid mind that is
sometimes, and may more and more become, the characteristic of those who
live in flat countries of illimitable horizons, who said that New
Yorkers, State and city, all had an assertive sort of smartness that was
very disagreeable to him. And a lady of New York (a city whose dialect
the novelists are beginning to satirize) was much distu