For instance, he
wondered why we don't drink tea for breakfast. Miss Pondar had made it
for him, knowing he'd want it, and he wonders why Americans drink
coffee when such good tea as that was comes in their reach.
Now, if I had considered Mr. Poplington as a lodger it might have
nettled me to have him tell me I didn't know what was good, but
remembering that we was giving him hospitality, and not board, and
didn't intend to charge him a cent, but was just taking care of him out
of neighborly kindness, I was rather glad to have him find a little
fault, because that would make me feel as if I was soaring still higher
above him the next morning, when I should tell him there was nothing to
pay.
So I took it all good-natured, and said to him, "Well, Americans like
to have the very best things that can be got out of every country.
We're like bees flying over the whole world, looking into every blossom
to see what sweetness there is to be got out of it. From the lily of
France we sip their coffee, from the national flower of India, whatever
it is, we take their chutney sauce, and as to those big apple tarts,
baked in a deep dish, with a cup in the middle to hold up the upper
crust, and so full of apples, and so delicious with Devonshire clotted
cream on them that if there was any one place in the world they could
be had I believe my husband would want to go and live there forever,
they are what we extract from the rose of England."
Mr. Poplington laughed like anything at this, but said there was a
great many other things that he could show us and tell us about which
would be very well worth while sipping from the rose of England.
After breakfast he went to church with us, and as we was coming
home - for he didn't seem to have the least idea of going to the inn for
his luncheon - he asked if we didn't find the services very different
from those in America.
"Yes," said I, "they are about as different from Quaker services as a
squirting fountain is from a corked bottle. The Methodists and
Unitarians and Reformed Dutch and Campbellites and Hard-shell Baptists
have different services too, but in the Episcopal churches things are
all pretty much the same as they did this morning.
