and Ezra and Kendrick out
of town."

So they would have done--in Bayport--but not in Mayberry or London.
Titles and rank and class in England are established and accepted
institutions, and are not laughed at, for where institutions of that
kind are laughed at they soon cease to be. Hephzy summed it up pretty
well when she said:

"After all, it all depends on what you've been brought up to, doesn't
it, Hosy. Your coat don't look funny to you because you've always worn
that kind of coat, but that tailor man thought 'twas funny because he
never saw one made like it. And a lord takin' his lordship seriously
seems funny to us, but it doesn't seem so to him or to the tailor.
They've been brought up to it, same as you have to the coat."

On one point she and I had agreed before coming to Mayberry, that was
that we must not expect calls from the neighbors or social intercourse
with the people of Mayberry.

"They don't know anything about us," said I, "except that we are
Americans, and that may or may not be a recommendation, according to the
kind of Americans they have previously met. The Englishman, so all the
books tell us, is reserved and distant at first. He requires a long
acquaintance before admitting strangers to his home life and we shall
probably have no opportunity to make that acquaintance. If we were to
stay in Mayberry a year, and behaved ourselves, we might in time be
accepted as desirable, but not during the first summer. So if they leave
us to ourselves we must make the best of it."

Hephzy agreed thoroughly. "You're right," she said. "And, after all,
it's just what would happen anywhere. You remember when that Portygee
family came to Bayport and lived in the Solon Blodgett house. Nobody
would have anything to do with 'em for a long time because they were
foreigners, but they turned out to be real nice folks after all. We're
foreigners here and you can't blame the Mayberry people for not takin'
chances; it looks as if nobody in it ever had taken a chance, as if it
had been just the way it is since Noah came out of the Ark. I never felt
so new and shiny in my life as I do around this old rectory and this old
town."

Which was all perfectly true and yet the fact remains that, "new and
shiny" as we were, the Mayberry people--those of our "class"--began to
call upon us almost immediately, to invite us to their homes, to show us
little kindnesses, and to be whole-souled and hospitable and friendly as
if we h