or manner is thoroughly Yankee; and
many New Englanders intend to express a considerable lack in what is
essential when they say of men and women that they are very Southern.
When the Yankee is produced he may turn out a cosmopolitan person of the
most interesting and agreeable sort; and the Southerner may have traits
and peculiarities, growing out of climate and social life unlike the New
England, which are altogether charming. We talked once with a Western man
of considerable age and experience who had the placid mind that is
sometimes, and may more and more become, the characteristic of those who
live in flat countries of illimitable horizons, who said that New
Yorkers, State and city, all had an assertive sort of smartness that was
very disagreeable to him. And a lady of New York (a city whose dialect
the novelists are beginning to satirize) was much disturbed by the
flatness of speech prevailing in Chicago, and thought something should be
done in the public schools to correct the pronunciation of English. There
doubtless should be a common standard of distinct, rounded, melodious
pronunciation, as there is of good breeding, and it is quite as important
to cultivate the voice in speaking as in singing, but the people of the
United States let themselves be immensely irritated by local differences
and want of toleration of sectional peculiarities. The truth is that the
agreeable people are pretty evenly distributed over the country, and
one's enjoyment of them is heightened not only by their differences of
manner, but by the different, ways in which they look at life, unless he
insists upon applying everywhere the yardstick of his own locality. If
the Boston woman sets her eyeglasses at a critical angle towards the
'laisser faire' flow of social amenity in New Orleans, and the New
Orleans woman seeks out only the prim and conventional in Boston, each
may miss the opportunity to supplement her life by something wanting and
desirable in it, to be gained by the exercise of more openness of mind
and toleration. To some people Yankee thrift is disagreeable; to others,
Southern shiftlessness is intolerable. To some travelers the negro of the
South, with his tropical nature, his capacity for picturesque attitudes,
his abundant trust in Providence, is an element of restfulness; and if
the chief object of life is happiness, the traveler may take a useful
hint from the race whose utmost desire, in a fit climate, would be fully
sa