courses from one end to the other of a six-mile street. They
turn corners almost at right angles, cross other lines, and for
aught I know may run up the sides of houses. There is no visible
agency of their flight, but once in awhile you shall pass a
five-storied building humming with machinery that winds up an
everlasting wire cable, and the initiated will tell you that here
is the mechanism. I gave up asking questions. If it pleases
Providence to make a car run up and down a slit in the ground for
many miles, and if for twopence halfpenny I can ride in that car,
why shall I seek the reasons of the miracle? Rather let me look
out of the windows till the shops give place to thousands and
thousands of little houses made of wood (to imitate stone), each
house just big enough for a man and his family. Let me watch the
people in the cars and try to find out in what manner they differ
from us, their ancestors.

It grieves me now that I cursed them (in the matter of book
piracy), because I perceived that my curse is working and that
their speech is becoming a horror already. They delude
themselves into the belief that they talk English--the
English--and I have already been pitied for speaking with "an
English accent." The man who pitied me spoke, so far as I was
concerned, the language of thieves. And they all do. Where we
put the accent forward they throw it back, and vice versa where
we give the long "a" they use the short, and words so simple as
to be past mistaking they pronounce somewhere up in the dome of
their heads. How do these things happen?

Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee school-marm, the cider
and the salt codfish of the Eastern States, are responsible for