it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture in England--that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may not be safe to draw an analogous conclusion in the case of the American people. A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who, arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his shirt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d----d London and South-Western Railway." An American variant of, or pendant to, the same story tells of the Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose anathematising the "lustful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days. Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the institutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.[214:1] Rather ought Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.