Across the barrier the classes can and do exchange much more kindness
than we at a distance imagine; and I do not see why this is not a good
time to say that the English manner to dependants is beyond criticism.
The consideration for them seems unfailing; they are asked to do things
if they please, and they are invariably and distinctly thanked for the
smallest service. There are no doubt exceptions to the kindness which
one sees, but I did not see the exceptions. The social machinery has so
little play that but for the lubrication of these civilities the grind
of class upon class might be intolerable. With us in America there is no
love lost between rich and poor; unless the poor are directly and
obviously dependent on the rich our classes can be frankly brutal with
one another, as they never seem in England. Very possibly that perfect
English manner from superiors is also a convention, like the respect of
the inferiors, but it is a becoming one.

This is getting rather far away from the birds, not to say my landlord,
who told me that when he first took that house a flock of starlings used
to visit him in the spring. He did not tell me that his little house
stood in the region of Nell Gwynne's mulberry-gardens; his knowledge was
of observation, not of reading; and he was a gossip only about
impersonal things. Concerning his lodgers he was as a grave for silence,
and I fancy this is the strict etiquette of his calling, enforced by the
national demand for privacy. He did, indeed, speak once of a young
German lodger whom he had kept from going to a garden-party in full
evening-dress, but the incident was of a remoteness which excused its
mention. What had impressed him in it was the foreigner's almost tearful
gratitude when he came home and acknowledged that he had found everybody
in the sort of frock-coat which the landlord had conjured him to wear.

[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]