goes
John Bradford," and when I meet a crafty looking old Chinaman this
whimsy comes to me, "If Deacon Bushnell who passed the plate in the
Centerville Methodist Church had been a Chinaman this is the way he
would have looked." They are such small town folks. Even with the steady
cycle of tourists they gaze at each newcomer as though he were the
latest comer to Podunk. One day with a friend I called on a Chinese
girl, and all the large family and their friends gathered around and
discussed us and laughed among themselves and pointed at us. It was
embarrassing but I was never once conscious of rudeness, simply a
childlike curiosity and honesty.

In Chinatown the other day a peddler was selling spectacles and somehow
the old men trying them on and squinting for "near" and for "far,"
seemed so quaint and countrified and like a lot of old Yankees around a
country store trying to get a "new pair of eyes, by Heck." In Chinatown
the tong men do not seem at all real and the hair raising movie serial
with its Chinatown terrors, Buddhist idols that open and swallow the
movie actors and floors that drop into dungeons, seem very remote.

Bags or Sacks

"Do you like cafeterias?" I asked.

"Don't know," he answered, "I've never played them."

"What religion do you follow?" another man asked me.

In a mining camp they told me to take such and such a "trail."

The point is, that we did not talk that way where I came from. Of
course, I hasten to say, we doubtless talked some other way just as
peculiar. And if I could detect our colloquialisms I would write a lot
about them but alas I can't. I was in the West two years before I
noticed that a "trolley" is a "street car."

A woman in a mining camp said to the stage driver, "I want out at the
bank because I don't want to pack this sack of silver." In the first
place we wouldn't have had a sack of silver and if we had, it would have
been in a "bag" not a "sack," and we never "pack" things and we never
"want out."

In the East we never refer to our locality as "this country," as in the
West and South. We do not take the name of our state either as
"Californian" or "Kentuckian." One never hears of a "Connecticutian" or
a "Massachusettisian." I do not profess to give any reasons for these
peculiarities.

In the West, speech is more brief. "Autos go slow" is the warning while
on the Fenway in Boston the signs read--"Motor Vehicles, Proceed
Slowly." I wouldn't swear to the