n the fall?" he inquired, puzzled.

"Yes, September or October."

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "in the autumn, yes, yes. At the fall of the
leaves," I heard him murmur meditatively. Meeting him later in the
company of another policeman, "He," he said to his friend, nodding at
me, "is going back in the fall." Deliciously humorous to him was my
speech. Now it may be mentioned as an interesting point that many of
the words imported in the _Mayflower_, or in ships following it, have
been quite forgotten in England. Fall, as in the fall of the year, I
think, was among them. Quite so, quite so, as they say in England.

Yes, in the King's Road. For, it is an odd thing, Charles Scribner's
Sons are on Fifth Avenue, but Selfridge's is in Oxford Street. Here we
meet a man on the street; we kick him into it. And in England it is a
very different thing, indeed, whether you meet a lady in the street or
on the street. You, for instance, wouldn't meet a lady on the street
at all. In fact, in England, to our mind, things are so turned around
that it is as good as being in China. Just as traffic there keeps to
the left kerb, instead of to the right curb, so whereas here I call you
up on the telephone, there you phone me down. It would be awkward,
wouldn't it, for me to say to you that I called you down?

England is an island; and though the British government controls one
fifth, or something like that, of the habitable globe, England is a
very small place. Most of the things there are small. A freight car
is a goods van, and it certainly is a goods van and not a freight car.
So when you ask what little stream this is, you are told that that is
the river Lea, or the river Arun, as the case may be, although they
look, indeed, except that they are far more lovely, like what we call
"cricks" in our country. And the Englishman is fond of speaking in
diminutives. He calls for a "drop of ale," to receive a pint tankard.
He asks for a "bite of bread," when he wants half a loaf. His "bit of
green" is a bowl of cabbage. He likes a "bit of cheese," in the way of
a hearty slice, now and then. One overhearing him from another room
might think that his copious repast was a microscopic meal. About this
peculiarity in the homely use of the language there was a joke in
_Punch_ not long ago. Said the village worthy in the picture: "Ah, I
used to be as fond of a drop o' beer as any one, but nowadays if I do
take two or dree gallons it do kn