Original The husband and father of the Bangley Coffins was a short, square-shouldered gentleman with bushy eyebrows, a large moustache, plaid trousers, and a grey tail-coat that was a very tight fit round the waist. He had an expression of deep sagacity, and he took from an inner pocket, and fondled now and then, a case containing six very large brown cigars. His look of peculiar anticipative intelligence, combined with the cigars, gave me the idea that we should not be overburdened with Mr. Bangley Coffin's society during the day--which proved to be a correct one. It did not seem to me, in spite of what Lady Torquilin had said, that it was at all unpopular to go to Ascot by rail. Trains were leaving the station every four or five minutes, all full of people who preferred that way of going; and our own car, which was what, I believe, you call a 'saloon carriage,' had hardly an empty seat. They looked nice respectable people, too, nearly all in Ascot frocks, though not perhaps particularly interesting. What surprised me in connection with the ride was the length of it; it was not a ride, as I had somehow expected, of twenty minutes or half an hour from London, but a journey of, I forget how many, interminable hours. And what surprised me in connection with the people was their endurance of it. They did not fuss, or grow impatient, or consult their watches as the time dragged by; they sat up, calm and placid and patient, and only looked occasionally, for refreshment, at their Ascot frocks. They seemed content to take an enormous amount of trouble for the amusement which might be supposed to be tickling their fancy at the other end of the trip--if there was any other end--to take it unshrinkingly and seriously. It gave me an idea of how difficult it is to be amused in England--unless you are a foreigner. Ascot to them was no light matter, and to me it was such a very light matter. I tried to imagine any fifty Americans of my acquaintance dressing up in their best clothes, and spending six or seven hours of a day in protracted railway journeys, for the sake of a little fun in between; and I failed. It's as much as we would do to inaugurate a president, or bury a general who saved the Union. We would consider the terms high. But, of course, it is impossible for me to say how we might behave if we had Distinguished Occasions, with Royal Inclosures inside them.