She Says 'conserv't'ry' And 'observ't'ry'; She
Calls The Chambermaid 'Mairy,' Which Is Infinitely Softer, To Be
Sure, Than The
American 'Mary,' with its over-long a; she ejaculates
'Quite so!' in all the pauses of conversation, and
Talks of smoke-
rooms, and camisoles, and luggage-vans, and slip-bodies, and trams,
and mangling, and goffering. She also eats jam for breakfast as if
she had been reared on it, when every one knows that the average
American has to contract the jam habit by patient and continuous
practice.
This instantaneous assimilation of English customs does not seem to
be affectation on Salemina's part; nor will I wrong her by fancying
that she went through a course of training before she left Boston.
From the moment she landed you could see that her foot was on her
native heath. She inhaled the fog with a sense of intoxication that
the east winds of New England had never given her, and a great throb
of patriotism swelled in her breast when she first met the Princess
of Wales in Hyde Park.
As for me, I get on charmingly with the English nobility and
sufficiently well with the gentry, but the upper servants strike
terror to my soul. There is something awe-inspiring to me about an
English butler. If they would only put him in livery, or make him
wear a silver badge; anything, in short, to temper his pride and
prevent one from mistaking him for the master of the house or the
bishop within his gates.
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