A good square American meal would give them a fit, and they would go to a hospital and die if the meal could not be got out of them.
Gosh, but I was glad to get out of the White Chapel district, and I kept looking back for fear one of the men or women would slit me up the back with a butcher knife, and laugh like an insane asylum inmate.
Do you know, those people who drink gin and go hungry are different from our American murderers. Our murderers will assault you with a smile, rob you with a joke on their tongue's end, and give you back car fare when they hold you up, and if they murder you they will do it easy and lay you out with your hands across on your breast and notify the coroner, but your White Chapel murderer wants to disembowel you and cut you up into chunks, and throw your remains head first into something nasty, and if you have money enough on your person to buy a bottle of gin your murderer is as well satisfied as though he got a roll. Some men in our country commit murders in order to get money to lay away so they can live a nice, respectable life and be good ever afterwards, but your slum murderer in London just kills because his stomach craves a drink, and when he gets it he is tame, like a tiger that has eaten a native of India.
You may think this letter is a solemn occasion because I tell you about things that are not funny, but if you ever traveled abroad you will find that there is no fun anywhere except in America unless you make it or buy it.
We are taking in the solemn things first in order to get dad's mind in a condition so he can be cured of things he thinks ail him. I took dad to the Tower of London, and when we got out of it he wanted to have America interfere and have the confounded place burned down and grass sown on the site and a park made of it.
The tower covers 13 acres of ground, and there are more things brought to a visitor's attention that ought to be forgotten than you ever thought about.
I remember attending the theater at home and seeing Richard the Third played, and I remember how my sympathies were aroused for the two little boy princes that were murdered by Richard the Third, but I thought it was a fake play, and that there was nothing true about it, but, by gosh, it was right here in the Tower of London that the old hump-backed cuss murdered those little princes, and dad and I stood right on the spot, and the beef-eater who showed us around told us all the particulars. Dad was indignant, and said to the beef-eater:
