Along the cool, sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.”
Gray wrote a great poem. He never wrote another in the same class. His reputation is based on the Elegy, and that is enough. It made him famous, and he was offered the position of poet laureate to the king and declined it. A man who will decline a good job like that is almost as rare as a great poet.
We read the poem aloud out in the graveyard underneath the yew tree. It fitted exactly. Gray had touched the springs of sublimity by seeing through nature and telling just what he saw, no more.
In a field near Windsor I saw a mowing-machine, the first I have noticed in Europe. Everywhere else the hay and grass has been cut by hand. I mentioned this fact to the driver, and he was very bitter over the introduction of machinery because it kept men out of an opportunity to work. He told me he was going to America just as soon as he could “raise the funds.” The women do not work in the field in England, at least not much. But they are busy in the dairy, at the stores and behind the bar in the saloons. In every way I found England ahead of the continent in its ways of doing things, but there is still enough difference from our ways to make them seem queer. I also have a kick coming on another matter. A great many English people do not speak the English language. They think they do, but they not only drop their h’s when they should be on and put them on where they do not belong, but they pronounce the vowels and some of the consonants in a manner that would make a dictionary turn pale. It is often very difficult for me to understand them, and they are all at sea over my Kansas brogue. Of course this does not apply to the educated English people, who only speak differently from us in using a broad and pleasant accent.
Coming down the street on the way home I saw in a grocery-store window these signs: “Breakfast eggs, ten for a shilling;” “Recommended eggs, twelve for a shilling;” “Select eggs, fourteen for a shilling;” “Cooking-eggs, sixteen for a shilling.” The frankness of the signs surprised me. I suppose we have the same varieties of eggs in Kansas, but we don’t describe them so exactly and they all go at the same price. As eggs are a staple item on the bill of fare, I am wondering to-night whether my landlord buys “breakfast eggs” or “cooking-eggs,” or just plain “eggs.”
The English money is the hardest to understand in Europe. It is based on the shilling, worth about a quarter in our money. Four farthings make a penny, 12 pennies make a shilling, and 20 shillings make a pound ($4.80). The usual coins are the ½ penny, pronounced “ha-penny,” penny, “tuppence,” the 3-penny, pronounced “trippence,” the sixpence, the shilling, the 10-shilling, the pound, called a sovereign; the 5-shilling piece, called a crown, and the half-crown. You add 8 pence to 10 pence and it doesn’t make 18, it makes “one and six.” Add one and six to one and eight and it makes three and two—yes, it does! Figuring with English money for an American beginner is like turning handsprings.