"What must it to say when I have such a fear, such a fear, that I speak not?" asked one of the Parsees.
"Say you're dickey on your pins," laughed Australia.
"Say you feel all of a goneness," spoke up Columbia.
"No; that is Americanese," flouted Britannia: "say you're in a beastly funk!"
That our Parsees improved under such tuition was somewhat remarkable. The lingual advance of one of them was quite startling. Our young ladies had striven to teach him "good-by." One day, therefore, as the ladies were departing from the dining-room, leaving the gentlemen to their wine, our Parsee opened the door with grave, Oriental courtesy, and, bowing to the rustling covey, said solemnly, "By god, ladies, by god!"
During a political discussion in which English and Australians took chief parts, a Melbourne girl exclaimed excitedly, "Thank goodness, I'm not English!"
"Not Engleesh!" exclaimed her neighboring Parsee. "What are you but the small little brat of the mother-country?"
Not until we laughed did our grave Oriental remember that "brat" and "child" are not strictly synonymous.
Said one of our English girls afterward to me, with tact and taste pre-eminently British, "She glad she is not English! Really, I'd almost as soon be American as Australian."
Our Parsees were not our only peculiar people. We Americans found quite as much food for sly laughter in the queerness of our English habitués as they did in ours. Our English contingent was largely feminine, therefore, as goes without saying, very High-Church, very dévote, and excessively Tory, worshipping the English aristocracy vastly more than that of celestial courts. Everybody knows the two diseases that virulently assail young Englishwomen,—"scarlet fever" and "black vomit,"—maladies provoked by association with red-coated officers and black-coated curates.