e surprised than to
come upon him the other day in a side-street, where he was positively
having his boots polished _in public_ by a ragged gamin who offered to
'shine' me for a 'dime.' He behaved sensibly about it,--betrayed no
embarrassment, though he must have felt excessively annoyed, made no
apologies, and only remarked that he had been out in the country, and
did not wish to be taken for a miller in the town.

"I was led to believe before coming here that I should not be able to
tell that Boston was not an English town. It did not so impress me on a
surface-view, but it was not long before I recognized that the warp and
woof of the social fabric is that of our looms, though the pattern is a
little different,--a good sort of stuff, I think, warranted _to wash_
and wear. The variation, such as it is, tried by what I call my
differential nationometer, gives to the place its own peculiar,
delightful quality." The rigid gentleman, who was a great deal at the
Porters', was rather inclined to insist upon the great purity and beauty
of his English, to which he repeatedly invited attention, and, as Mr.
Ramsay would have said, "went in for" certain philological refinements
which Sir Robert had never heard before, and thoroughly disliked. But as
there are more Scotchmen in London than in Edinburgh, and better oranges
can be bought for less money in New York than in New Orleans, so it may
be that if you want to find really superior English you must leave
England altogether,--abandon it to its defective but firmly-rooted
_patois_, and seek in more classic shades for the well--spring of Saxon
undefiled. But Sir Robert was not inclined to do this. There were limits
to his liberality and spirit of investigation. When the rigid gentleman
instanced certain words to which he gave a pronunciation that made them
bear small resemblance to the same words as spoken by any class of
people laboring under the disadvantage of having been born and bred in
England, Sir Robert got impatient, and testily dismissed the subject
with, "Oh, come, now! I can stand a good deal, but I can't stand being
told that we don't know how to speak English in England." Something,
however, must be pardoned to a foreigner. If Sir Robert would not
consent to set Emerson a little higher than the angels, as some other
Bostonians could have wished, and had never so much as heard of Thoreau
and other American celebrities not wholly insignificant, he had an
immense admi