“At Genoa, sir. I like Genoa,—they 're a wide-awake, active set there. They 've got trade, sir, and they know it.”
“The city, I take it, is far more prosperous than pleasant, for strangers?”
“Well now, sir, that ere remark of yours strikes me as downright narrow, and, if I might be permitted, I 'd call it mean illiberal. Why should you or I object to people who prefer their own affairs to the pleasant task of amusing us?”
“Nay, I only meant to observe that one might find more agreeable companions than men intently immersed in money-getting.”
“Another error, and a downright English error too; for it's one of your national traits, stranger, always to abuse the very thing that you do best. What are you as a people but a hard-working, industrious, serious race, ever striving to do this a little cheaper, and that a little quicker, so as to beat the foreigner, and with all that you 'll stand up and say there ain't nothing on this universal globe to be compared to loafing!”
“I would hope that you have not heard this sentiment from an Englishman.”
“Not in them words, not exactly in them terms, but from the same platform, stranger. Why, when you want to exalt a man for any great service to the state, you ain't satisfied with making him a loafer,—for a lord is just a loafer, and no more nor no less,—but you make his son a loafer, and all his descendants forever. What would you say to a fellow that had a fast trotter, able to do his mile, on a fair road, in two forty-three, who, instead of keeping him in full working condition, and making him earn his penny, would just turn him out in a paddock to burst himself with clover, and the same with all his stock, for no other earthly reason than that they were the best blood and bone to be found anywhere? There ain't sense or reason in that, stranger, is there?”
“I don't think the parallel applies.”
“Maybe not, sir; but you have my meaning; perhaps I piled the metaphor too high; but as John Jacob Byles says, 'If the charge has hit you, it don't signify a red cent what the wadding was made of.'”
“I must say I think you are less than just in your estimate of our men of leisure,” said the Englishman, mildly.