felt to be their own in the last resort.

As for my countrymen, I grew better acquainted with many of our national
characteristics during those four years than in all my preceding life.
Whether brought more strikingly out by the contrast with English manners,
or that my Yankee friends assumed an extra peculiarity from a sense of
defiant patriotism, so it was that their tones, sentiments, and behavior,
even their figures and cast of countenance, all seemed chiselled in
sharper angles than ever I had imagined them to be at home. It impressed
me with an odd idea of having somehow lost the property of my own person,
when I occasionally heard one of them speaking of me as "my Consul"!
They often came to the Consulate in parties of half a dozen or more, on
no business whatever, but merely to subject their public servant to a
rigid examination, and see how he was getting on with his duties. These
interviews were rather formidable, being characterized by a certain
stiffness which I felt to be sufficiently irksome at the moment, though
it looks laughable enough in the retrospect. It is my firm belief that
these fellow-citizens, possessing a native tendency to organization,
generally halted outside of the door to elect a speaker, chairman, or
moderator, and thus approached me with all the formalities of a
deputation from the American people. After salutations on both sides,--
abrupt, awful, and severe on their part, and deprecatory on mine,--and
the national ceremony of shaking hands being duly gone through with, the
interview proceeded by a series of calm and well-considered questions or
remarks from the spokesman (no other of the guests vouchsafing to utter a
word), and diplomatic responses from the Consul, who sometimes found the
investigation a little more searching than he liked. I flatter myself,
however, that, by much practice, I attained considerable skill in this
kind of intercourse, the art of which lies in passing off commonplaces
for new and valuable truths, and talking trash and emptiness in such a