Some Amusing Remarks Were Made Upon England By Some Of The "Buckeyes," As
The Inhabitants Of Ohio Are Called.
On trying to persuade a lady to go
with me to St. Louis, I observed that it was only
Five hundred miles.
"Five hundred miles!" she replied; "why, you'd tumble off your paltry
island into the sea before you got so far!" Another lady, who got into the
cars at some distance from Cincinnati, could not understand the value
which we set upon ruins. "We should chaw them up," she said, "make roads
or bridges of them, unless Barnum transported them to his museum: we would
never keep them on our own hook as you do." "You value them yourselves,"
I answered; "any one would be 'lynched' who removed a stone of
Ticonderoga." It was an unfortunate speech, for she archly replied, "Our
only ruins are British fortifications, and we go to see them because they
remind us that we whipped the nation which whips all the world." The
Americans, however, though they may talk so, would give anything if they
could appropriate a Kenilworth Castle, or a Melrose or a Tintern Abbey,
with its covering of ivy, and make it sustain some episode of their
history. But though they can make railways, ivy is beyond them, and the
purple heather disdains the soil of the New World. A very amusing ticket
was given me on the Mad River line. It bore the command, "Stick this check
in your - - ," the blank being filled up with a little engraving of a hat;
consequently I saw all the gentlemen with small pink embellishments to the
covering of their heads.
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