a connection between the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic constitution of English society. This aristocratic constitution of English society is the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger: there is hardly a detail of English life that does not appear in some degree to point to it. It is really only in a country in which a good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are too genteel, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing, quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own: they have those special resources which I mentioned a while since. They are always rich, and are naturally independent of communistic pleasures. If you can sit on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have your _café noir_ handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in powder and plush, you have hardly a decent pretext for going to a public-house. In France and Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will sally forth and encamp for the evening under a row of colored lamps upon the paving-stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess live on a single floor up several pairs of stairs. They are, however, I think, not appreciably affected by considerations which operate potently in England. An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we could look straight into the English consciousness we should be interested to find how serious a danger it appears. It is not of the fear of contact with the great herd of one's unknown fellow-citizens that I speak: it is of the possibility of meeting individuals with whom in the business of life one has had some sort of formal relations--one's grocer, one's bootmaker, one's apothecary, even one's solicitor. To an American, a Frenchman, an Italian, there is of necessity nothing alarming in such an incident: there is at the worst a way of taking it easily. But as it looms up before an Englishman it has the power of making him extremely uncomfortable; and, combined with a corresponding anxiety on the part of the inferior himself, this prospective discomfort operates as a chronically deterrent force. These, however, are mysteries which I should not have allowed myself to deal with so parenthetically. I have ventured to do so because there is a very familiar illustration of the phenomenon I speak of. It may be found in the usual demeanor of English servants. If you "meet" an English servant--that is, if you encounter him at a moment when he is not literally executing an order for you--if