In the course of this day's journey, as on subsequent occasions, we
encountered some Englishmen (small farmers, perhaps, or country
publicans at home) who were settled in America, and were travelling
on their own affairs. Of all grades and kinds of men that jostle
one in the public conveyances of the States, these are often the
most intolerable and the most insufferable companions. United to
every disagreeable characteristic that the worst kind of American
travellers possess, these countrymen of ours display an amount of
insolent conceit and cool assumption of superiority, quite
monstrous to behold. In the coarse familiarity of their approach,
and the effrontery of their inquisitiveness (which they are in
great haste to assert, as if they panted to revenge themselves upon
the decent old restraints of home), they surpass any native
specimens that came within my range of observation: and I often
grew so patriotic when I saw and heard them, that I would
cheerfully have submitted to a reasonable fine, if I could have
given any other country in the whole world, the honour of claiming
them for its children.
As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured
saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise,
that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and
expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable,
and soon became most offensive and sickening.
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