o, the same story tells of the
Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside
to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose
anathematising the "lustful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward
once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days.

Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some
three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the
institutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated
trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that
they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great
thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has
been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but
it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to
express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their
commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.[214:1]
Rather ought Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists
to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the
well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the
wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and
strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in
the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown
dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.

We will not now potter again over the well-trodden paths of the
differences in phraseology in the two peoples which have been so
fruitful a source of "impressions" in successive generations of English
visitors to the United States, for the thing grows absurd when "car,"
and "store," and "sidewalk," and "elevator" are commonplaces on the lips
of every London cockney; nor is there any need here to thread again the
mazes of the well-worn discussion as to how far the peculiarities of
modern American speech are only good old English forms which have
survived in the New World after disappearance from their original
haunts.[215:1] The subject is worth referring to, however, for the very
reason that its discussion _has_ become almost absurd,--because by a
process which has been going on, as we have already said, on both sides
of the ocean simultaneously, the differences themselves are
disappearing, the tongues of the two peoples are coming together and
coalescing once more. The two currents into which t