hatever you may do, you can't
succeed in bullying the English. They have too much of the bull-dog
breed in their bones. They're always at their best, Peter declares,
when they're fighting. "But from an Englishwoman trying to be
kittenish," he fervently added, "good Lord, deliver us all!"

And that started us talking about the English. Peter, of course, is too
tolerant to despise his cousins across the Pond, but he pregnantly
reminded me that Lady Allie had asked him what sort of town Saskatchewan
was and he had retorted by inquiring if she was fond of Yonkers,
whereupon she'd looked puzzled and acknowledged that she'd never eaten
one. For Peter and Lady Allie, it seems, had had a set-to about American
map-names, which her ladyship had described as both silly and unsayable,
especially the Indian ones, while Peter had grimly proclaimed that any
people who called Seven-Oaks _Snooks_ and Belvoir _Beever_ and Ruthven
_Rivven_ and Wrottesley _Roxly_ and Marylebone _Marrabun_ and
Wrensfordsley _Wrensley_ had no right to kick about American
pronunciations.

But Peter is stimulating, even though he does stimulate you into
opposition. So I found myself defending the English, and especially
the Englishman, for too many of them had made me happy in their lovely
old homes and too many of their sons, aeons and aeons ago, had tried
to hold my hand.

"Your Englishman," I proclaimed to Peter, "always acts as though he
quite disapproves of you and yet he'll go to any amount of trouble to
do things to make you happy or comfortable. Then he conceals his
graciousness by being curt about it. Then, when he's at his crankiest,
he's apt to startle you by saying the divinest things point-blank in
your face, and as likely as not, after treating you as he would a
rather backward child of whom he rigidly disapproves, he'll make love
to you and do it with a fine old Anglo-Saxon directness. He hates
swank, of course, for he's a truffle-hound who prefers digging out his
own delicacies. And it's ten to one, if a woman simply sits tight and
listens close and says nothing, that he'll say something about her
unrivaled powers of conversation!"

_Sunday the Fourth_

Peter, as we sat out beside the corral on an empty packing-case
to-night after supper, said that civilization was a curse. "Look what
it's doing to your noble Red Man right here in your midst! There was a
time, when a brave died, they handsomely killed that