If it would not be too long a digression, I would explain how this is a cardinal principle of the American business mind. The disposition of every American is to take over a whole contract _en bloc_, which in England, where every man is a specialist, would be split into twenty different transactions. The American thinks in round numbers: "What will the whole thing come to?" he asks; while the Englishman wants to know the items. This habit permeates American life in every department. It is labour-saving. Few things amuse or irritate the American visitor to England more than the having to pay individually for a number of small conveniences which at home he is accustomed to have "thrown in"; and the first time when he is presented with an English hotel bill (I am not speaking of the modern semi-American hotels in London) with its infinite list of items, is an experience that he never forgets. All of which is only to explain that the distinguished physician, when he spoke of the absence of _tables d'hote_ in America, was talking parsnips. His experience had been limited to a few hotels and restaurants in New York and one or two other large towns. If only it were possible to catch in some great "receiver" or "coherer," or some similar instrument, all the things that were said in London in the course of twenty-four hours about the United States by people who had been there, and all the things that were said in New York in the same period about England by people of equal experience, and set them down side by side, it would make entertaining reading. The wonder is, not that we misunderstand each other as much as we do, but that somehow we escape a vast mutual, international contempt. Several times in the course of my residence in the United States I have had said to me: "What! Are you an Englishman? But you don't drop your H's!" Which is ridiculous, is it not, English reader? But before you smile at it, permit me to explain that it is no whit worse than when you say:--"What! Are you an American? But you don't speak with an accent!" Or possibly you call it a "twang" or you say "speak through your nose."