lf inches high, is
forty-eight inches, four good feet, in girth around the chest, weighs
two hundred pounds, and yet has not the least appearance of portliness,
rather the contrary. He is the only man I ever met whose friendly grip
was rather more than I liked to bear. I spoke to his wife about his
strength and his figure, and she told me that when he went to get his
life insured here the surgeons said that they very rarely saw such a
powerful, finely formed, and perfectly healthy man as he is, and never
any finer or healthier. That would be impossible. And as he is so was
his father. Were they exceptions? Only of a sort that constantly occur
among real Yankees--"Americans" whose families have been in the country
for generations, and who are the only proper examples of the influence
of the climate and the social conditions of the country.

I have, perhaps, said too much upon this subject of the comparative
physical condition of the race in the two countries; but I have been
led to do so because of the very great inconsistency I found between
the facts and the common notion as to stout Englishmen and lean
"Americans," blooming, buxom Englishwomen and pale, slender "American"
women--a notion which one writer has repeated, parrot-like, after the
other, until even we ourselves have accepted it without question. Like
many other notions which no one disputes, it is false. But the world
has gone on accepting it and assuming it to be true until it has so
taken possession of the general mind that if in a room full of English
people only one man were found ruddy and burly, and only one woman
blooming and well rounded (and this or something very like it I have
seen more than once), they would be picked out and spoken of as
English-looking, to the disregard of all the others. The exceptions
would be taken as examples of the rule; and this even by the English
themselves, so swayed are we by tradition and authority, even in such
an everyday matter. Nay, even I myself, skeptical and carping, was thus
misled. The steamer, going out, was filled chiefly with English people.
Two of my fellow passengers I selected in my mind as notably and
typically English, not only in person, but in bearing. They proved to
be, one a Massachusetts Yankee and the other a Western man; but both
had from association contracted English habits of dress and of manner.
Two Englishwomen, however, attracted my particular attention. One was,
I think, the very larges