have lingered long, feeling these to be not only of prime importance and
wide application, but also to be quite beyond my power to make lucid in
short compass. I trust that they have been made lucid. I must now get on
to further anecdotes, illustrating other and less subtle causes of
misunderstanding; and I feel somewhat like the author of Don Juan when he
exclaims that he almost wishes he had ne'er begun that very remarkable
poem. I renounce all pretense to the French virtue of discretion.

Evening dress has been the source of many irritations. Englishmen did not
appear to think that they need wear it at American dinner parties. There
was a good deal of this at one time. During that period an Englishman,
who had brought letters to a gentleman in Boston and in consequence had
been asked to dinner, entered the house of his host in a tweed suit. His
host, in evening dress of course, met him in the hall.

"Oh, I see," said the Bostonian, "that you haven't your dress suit with
you. The man will take you upstairs and one of mine will fit you well
enough. We'll wait."

In England, a cricketer from Philadelphia, after the match at Lord's, had
been invited to dine at a great house with the rest of his eleven. They
were to go there on a coach. The American discovered after arrival that
he alone of the eleven had not brought a dress suit with him. He asked
his host what he was to do.

"I advise you to go home," said the host.

The moral here is not that all hosts in England would have treated a
guest so, or that all American hosts would have met the situation so well
as that Boston gentleman: but too many English used to be socially