His
English Seemed Meant To Open The Way For Talk, And We Were Willing He
Should Do The Talking.
He spoke without a trace of accent, and we at
once imagined circles in which it was now as _chic_ for Spaniards to
speak English as it once was to speak French.
They are said never to
speak French quite well; but nobody could have spoken English better
than this gentleman, not even we who were, as he said he supposed,
English. Truth and patriotism both obliged us to deny his conjecture;
and when He intimated that he would not have known us for Americans
because we did not speak with the dreadful American accent, I hazarded
my belief that this dreadfulness was personal rather than national. But
he would not have it. Boston people, yes; they spoke very well, and he
allowed other exceptions to the general rule of our nasal twang, which
his wife summoned English enough to say was very ugly. They had suffered
from it too universally in the Americans they had met during the summer
in Germany to believe it was merely personal; and I suppose one may own
to strictly American readers that our speech _is_ dreadful, that it is
very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no reason and no wish to wound;
and they could never know what sweet and noble natures had been
producing their voices through their noses there in Germany. I for my
part could not insist; who, indeed, can defend the American accent,
which is not so much an accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang?
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