“Pretty well blown—eh?” said her lord.
Her affectionate son—“Quite knocked-up, in fact!”
Yet these were gentlemen in blood and reputation.
I do not defend the ways and means by which the Travelling American makes his name, and, too often, that of his country a by-word and a hissing in the course of the European tour, which is, in his parlance, “just about the thing” for the opulent butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker, now-a-days. I do affirm that, judging him by the representative of the class corresponding to his in the Mother Country, he is no more blatant and objectionable to people of education and refinement than the Briton who is his fellow-traveller. In aptness and general intelligence he will assuredly bear off the palm. If the American of a higher grade be slow to abandon his provincial accent, and his wife her shrill, “clipping” speech; if what Bayard Taylor termed “the national catarrh” be obstinate in both,—the Englishman has his “aws” and “you knows,” and lumbering articulation; calls the garçon who cannot comprehend his order at the table d’hôte “a stupid ass,” in the hearing of all, declares the weather to be “nosty,” the wine “beastly,” and the soup “filthy,” while I have seen his wife bring her black-nosed pug to dinner with her, and feed him and herself with blanc mange from the same spoon.
We received much courtesy and many kindnesses from English people in their own country and upon the continent; formed friendships with some the memory of which must warm our hearts until they cease to beat. Their statesmen, their scholars, and their philanthropists have, as such, no equals in any clime or age. If we wince under censures we feel are unjust, and under sarcasms that cut the more keenly because edged with truth:—if, when they tell us we are “young,” we are disposed to retort that they are old enough to know and to do better, let us, in solemn remembrance of our kinship in blood and in faith, borrow, in thought, my friend’s advice, and “be merciful.”
CHAPTER XI.
Over the Channel.
I LAUGHED once on the route from Dover to Calais. The fact deserves to be jotted down as an “Incident of Travel.” For the boat was crowded, the wind brisk, and we had a “chopping sea” in the Channel. Words of woe upon which we need not expatiate to those who have lost sight of Shakspeare’s Cliff in like circumstances. The voyage was filled with disgust as Longfellow’s Night with music, and with untold misery to all of our party excepting Caput, to whom smooth and turbulent seas are as one. If he has a preference, it is for the latter. He led off in the laugh that extended even to the wretched creature I had known in calmer hours, as Myself.