I knew that in "brutal" Old England every one of them would have been
out on the sidewalk to lighten the load.

In England that admirable body of men popularly known as Quakers are
indissolubly associated in the public mind with a pristine simplicity
of life and conversation. My amazement, therefore, may easily be
imagined, when I found that an entertainment given by a young member
of the Society of Friends in one of the great cities of the Eastern
States turned out to be the most elaborate and beautiful private ball
I ever attended, with about eight hundred guests dressed in the height
of fashion, while the daily papers (if I remember rightly) estimated
its expense as reaching a total of some thousands of pounds. Here the
natural expansive liberality of the American man proved stronger than
the traditional limitations of a religious society. But the opposite
art of cheese-paring is by no means unknown in the United States.
Perhaps not even canny Scotland can parallel the record of certain
districts in New England, which actually elected their parish paupers
to the State Legislature to keep them off the rates. Let the opponents
of paid members of the House of Commons take notice!

Amid the little band of tourists in whose company I happened to enter
the Yosemite Valley was a San Francisco youth with a delightful
baritone voice, who entertained the guests in the hotel parlour at
Wawona by a good-natured series of songs. No one in the room except
myself seemed to find it in the least incongruous or funny that he
sandwiched "Nearer, my God, to thee" between "The man who broke the
bank at Monte Carlo" and "Her golden hair was hanging down her back,"
or that he jumped at once from the pathetic solemnity of "I know that
my Redeemer liveth" to the jingle of "Little Annie Rooney." The name
Wawona reminds me how American weather plays its part in the game of