To A Man Hailing From A Land Where Everything Is So New That Quite
A Good Deal Of It Has
Not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing
to turn off a main-traveled road into one of the
Crooked byways
in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come,
full face, on a house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal
history or epochal literature of the English-speaking race. It
is a still greater joy to find it - house or court or pump or what
not - looking now pretty much as it must have looked when good Queen
Bess, or little Dick Whittington, or Chaucer the scribe, or Shakspere
the player, came this way. It is fine to be riding through the
country and pass a peaceful green meadow and inquire its name of
your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it is a place
called Runnymede. Each time this happened to me I felt the thrill
of a discoverer; as though I had been the first traveler to find
these spots.
I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic
economies of an English barber shop. I use the word economies in
this connection advisedly; for, compared with the average
high-polished, sterilized and antiseptic barber shop of an American
city, this shop seemed a torture cave. In London, pubs are like
that, and some dentists' establishments and law offices - musty,
fusty dens very unlike their Yankee counterparts.
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