In this particular
shop now the chairs were hard, wooden chairs; the looking-glass
- you could not rightly call it a mirror - was cracked and bleary;
and an apprentice boy went from one patron to another, lathering
each face; and then the master followed after him, razor in hand,
and shaved the waiting countenances in turn. Flies that looked
as though they properly belonged in a livery stable were buzzing
about; and there was a prevalent odor which made me think that all
the sick pomade in the world had come hither to spend its last
declining hours. I said to myself that this place would bear
further study; that some day, when I felt particularly hardy and
daring, I would come here and be shaved, and afterward would write
a piece about it and sell it for money. So, the better to fix its
location in my mind, I glanced up at the street sign and, behold!
I was hard by Drury Lane, where Sweet Nelly once on a time held
her court.
Another time I stopped in front of a fruiterer's, my eye having
been caught by the presence in his window of half a dozen
draggled-looking, wilted roasting ears decorated with a placard
reading as follows:
AMERICAN MAIZE OR INDIAN CORN
A VEGETABLE - TO BE BOILED AND THEN
EATEN
I was remarking to myself that these Britishers were surely a
strange race of beings - that if England produced so delectable a
thing as green corn we in America would import it by the shipload
and serve it on every table; whereas here it was so rare that they
needs must label it as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, lest
people should think it might be an animal - when I chanced to look
more closely at the building occupied by the fruiterer and saw
that it was an ancient house, half-timbered above the first floor,
with a queer low-browed roof. Inquiring afterward I learned that
this house dated straight back to Elizabethan days and still on
beyond for so many years that no man knew exactly how many; and I
began to understand in a dim sort of way how and why it was these
people held so fast to the things they had and cared so little for
the things they had not.
Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a
sense and realization of the splendor of England's past when you
go to Westminster Abbey and stand - figuratively - with one foot on
Jonson and another on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of
so much dead-and-gone greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a
trespass on the last resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody
of equal consequence.
