When I strolled along the village street the male villagers, especially the older ones, touched their hats to me. The old women bowed or courtesied. Also they invariably paused, when I had passed, to stare after me. The group at the blacksmith shop--where the stone coping of the low wall was worn in hollows by the generations of idlers who had sat upon it, just as their descendants were sitting upon it now--turned, after I had passed, to stare. There would be a pause in the conversation, then an outburst of talk and laughter. They were talking about the “foreigner” of course, and laughing at him. At the tailor's, where I sent my clothes to be pressed, the tailor himself, a gray-haired, round-shouldered antique, ventured an opinion concerning those clothes. “That coat was not made in England, sir,” he said. “We don't make 'em that way 'ere, sir. That's a bit foreign, that coat, sir.” Yes, I was a foreigner. It was hard to realize. In a way everything was so homelike; the people looked like people I had known at home, their faces were New England faces quite as much as they were old England. But their clothes were just a little different, and their ways were different, and a dry-goods store was a “draper's shop,” and a drug-store was a “chemist's,” and candies were “sweeties” and a public school was a “board school” and a boarding-school was a “public school.” And I might be polite and pleasant to these people--persons out of my “class”--but I must not be too cordial, for if I did, in the eyes of these very people, I lost caste and they would despise me. Yes, I was a foreigner; it was a queer feeling.