"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers."

This was said as seriously as the circumstance demanded; but my wife turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to her intuitions in these matters.

She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "not at home" would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out of our way to be courteous.

I saw a great deal of our neighbors, nevertheless. Their cottage lay between us and the post-office, where he was never to be met with by any chance, and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working in the garden. Floriculture did not appear so much an object as exercise. Possibly it was neither; maybe they were engaged in digging for specimens of those arrowheads and flint hatchets which are continually coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which the plowshare has not turned up some primitive stone weapon or domestic utensil, disdainfully left to us by the red men who once held this domain, an ancient tribe called the Punkypoags, a forlorn descendant of which, one Polly Crowd, figures in the annual Blue Book, down to the close of the Southern war, as a state pensioner. I quote from the local historiographer.

Whether they were developing a kitchen-garden, or emulating Professor Schliemann at Mycenæ, the new-comers were evidently persons of refined musical taste: the lady had a voice of remarkable sweetness, although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by the high gate and listen to her executing an operatic air, conjecturally at some window up-stairs, for the house was not visible from the public road. The husband, somewhere about the grounds, would occasionally respond with two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business. They seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds whatever of

There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest in the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who had run off and got married clandestinely. I willingly acquitted them, the one and the other, of having no legal right to do so; for, to change a word in the lines of the poet, "It is a joy to think the best We may of human kind." Admitting the hypothesis of elopement, there was no mystery in their neither But sending nor receiving letters. where did they get their groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them,

that is an enigma apart, but the groceries themselves. No express wagon, no butcher's cart, no vehicle of any description, was ever observed to stop at their domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment in the village, an inexhaustible little bottle of a shop which (I advertise it gratis) can turn out anything in the way of groceries, from a handsaw to a pockethandkerchief. I confess that I allowed this unimportant detail of their housekeeping to occupy more of my speculation than was creditable to me.

In several respects our neighbors reminded me of those inexplicable persons we sometimes come across in great cities, though seldom or never in suburban places, where the field may be supposed too restricted for their operations, persons who have no perceptible means of subsistence, and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold no government bonds, they possess no real estate [our neighbors did own their house], they toil not, neither do they spin; yet they reap all the numerous soft advantages that usually result from honest toil and skillful spinning. How do they do it? But this is a digression, and I am quite of the opinion of the old lady in David Copperfield, who says, "Let us have no meandering!"

Though my wife had declined to risk a ceremonious call on our neighbors as

a family, I saw no reason why I should not speak to the husband as an individual, when I happened to encounter him by the wayside. I made several approaches to do so, when it occurred to my penetration that my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. I resolved to put the suspicion to the test, and one forenoon, when he was sauntering along on the opposite side of the road, in the vicinity of Fisher's sawmill, I deliberately crossed over to address him. The brusque manner in which he hurried away was not to be misunderstood. Of course I was not going to force myself upon him.

It was at this time that I began to form uncharitable suppositions touching our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some of my choicest fruit trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe to pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference between meum et tuum does not seem to be very strongly developed in the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.

I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was -well, not exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at intervals, and passed him without recognition; at rarer intervals I saw the lady.

After a while I not only missed my occasional glimpses of her pretty, slim figure, always draped in some soft black stuff with a bit of scarlet at the throat, but I inferred that she did not go about

.

the house singing in her light-hearted manner, as formerly. What had happened? Had the honeymoon suffered eclipse already? Was she ill? I fancied she was ill, and that I detected a certain anxiety in the husband, who spent the mornings digging solitarily in the garden, and seemed to have relinquished those long jaunts to the brow of Blue Hill, where there is a superb view combined with sundry venerable rattlesnakes with twelve rattles.

As the days went by it became certain that the lady was confined to the house, perhaps seriously ill, possibly a confirmed invalid. Whether she was attended by a physician from Canton or from Milton, I was unable to say; but neither the gig with the large white allopathic horse, nor the gig with the homeopathic sorrel mare, was ever seen hitched at the gate during the day. If a physician had charge of the case, he visited his patient only at night. All this moved my sympathy, and I reproached myself with having had hard thoughts of our neighbors. Trouble had come to them early. I would have liked to offer them such small, friendly services as lay in my power; but the memory of the repulse I had sustained rankled in me. So I hesitated.

One morning my two boys burst into the library with their eyes sparkling.

"You know the old elm down the road?" cried one.

"Yes."

"The elm with the hang-bird's nest?" shrieked the other.

"Yes, yes!"

"Well, we both just climbed up, and there's three young ones in it!"

Then I smiled to think that our new neighbors had got such a promising little family.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

"When they call on us," she replied lightly.

"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers."

This was said as seriously as the circumstance demanded; but my wife turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to her intuitions in these matters.

She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "not at home" would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out of our way to be courteous.

I saw a great deal of our neighbors, nevertheless. Their cottage lay between us and the post-office, where he was never to be met with by any chance, and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working in the garden. Floriculture did not appear so much an object as exercise. Possibly it was neither; maybe they were engaged in digging for specimens of those arrowheads and flint hatchets which are continually coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which the plowshare has not turned up some primitive stone weapon or domestic utensil, disdainfully left to us by the red men who once held this domain, - an ancient tribe called the Punkypoags, a forlorn descendant of which, one Polly Crowd, figures in the annual Blue Book, down to the close of the Southern war, as a state pensioner. I quote from the local historiographer.

Whether they were developing a kitchen-garden, or emulating Professor Schliemann at Mycenæ, the new-comers were evidently persons of refined musical taste: the lady had a voice of remarkable sweetness, although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by the high gate and listen to her executing an operatic air, conjecturally at some window up-stairs, for the house was not visible from the public road. The husband, somewhere about the grounds, would occasionally respond with two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business. They seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds whatever of

the community in which they had settled themselves.

There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest in the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who had run off and got married clandestinely. I willingly acquitted them, the one and the other, of having no legal right to do so; for, to change a word in the lines of the poet, "It is a joy to think the best We may of human kind." Admitting the hypothesis of elopement, there was no mystery in their neither But sending nor receiving letters. where did they get their groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them,

that is an enigma apart, but the groceries themselves. No express wagon, no butcher's cart, no vehicle of any description, was ever observed to stop at their domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment in the village, an inexhaustible little bottle of a shop which (I advertise it gratis) can turn out anything in the way groceries, from a handsaw to a pockethandkerchief. I confess that I allowed this unimportant detail of their housekeeping to occupy more of my speculation than was creditable to me.

of

In several respects our neighbors reminded me of those inexplicable persons we sometimes come across in great cities, though seldom or never in suburban places, where the field may be supposed too restricted for their operations, persons who have no perceptible means of subsistence, and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold no government bonds, they possess no real estate [our neighbors did own their house], they toil not, neither do they spin; yet they reap all the numerous soft advantages that usually result from honest toil and skillful spinning. How do they do it? But this is a digression, and I am quite of the opinion of the old lady in David Copperfield, who says, "Let us have no meandering!"

Though my wife had declined to risk a ceremonious call on our neighbors as

a family, I saw no reason why I should not speak to the husband as an individual, when I happened to encounter him by the wayside. I made several approaches to do so, when it occurred to my penetration that my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. I resolved to put the suspicion to the test, and one forenoon, when he was sauntering along on the opposite side of the road, in the vicinity of Fisher's sawmill, I deliberately crossed over to address him. The brusque manner in which he hurried away was not to be misunderstood. Of course I was not going to force myself upon him.

It was at this time that I began to form uncharitable suppositions touching our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some of my choicest fruit trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe to pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference between meum et tuum does not seem to be very strongly developed in the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.

I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was -well, not exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at intervals, and passed him without recognition; at rarer intervals I saw the lady.

After a while I not only missed my occasional glimpses of her pretty, slim figure, always draped in some soft black stuff with a bit of scarlet at the throat, but I inferred that she did not go about

the house singing in her light-hearted manner, as formerly. What had happened? Had the honeymoon suffered eclipse already? Was she ill? I fancied she was ill, and that I detected a certain anxiety in the husband, who spent the mornings digging solitarily in the garden, and seemed to have relinquished those long jaunts to the brow of Blue Hill, where there is a superb view combined with sundry venerable rattlesnakes with twelve rattles.

As the days went by it became certain that the lady was confined to the house, perhaps seriously ill, possibly a confirmed invalid. Whether she was attended by a physician from Canton or from Milton, I was unable to say; but neither the gig with the large white allopathic horse, nor the gig with the homeopathic sorrel mare, was ever seen hitched at the gate during the day. If a physician had charge of the case, he visited his patient only at night. All this moved my sympathy, and I reproached myself with having had hard thoughts of our neighbors. Trouble had come to them early. I would have liked to offer them such small, friendly services as lay in my power; but the memory of the repulse I had sustained rankled in me. So I hesitated.

One morning my two boys burst into the library with their eyes sparkling.

"You know the old elm down the road?" cried one.

VI.

I AM not Feste, and yet the Malvolios of literature might say of me, with more reason than their prototype said of him, that I am a barren rascal, and that unless some one ministers occasion to me I am gagged. But again, in the selfperfection of their characters, they furnish me occasion themselves. Since the writing of my last article upon my present subject, the following illustration of the prevalent British ignorance upon it has appeared. A letter professing to be written by an American was published in the London World, about hotels in that city. Upon this the London Figaro undertakes to show that the writer is not an American," because, while trying to assume the Yankee style of expression, he shows a lack of familiarity with peculiarly American phrases." The point in itself is well taken, and if maintained it would be fatal to the pretense of the "American" origin of the letter. But to accomplish this the critic must have a double knowledge as to the phrases which are the grounds of his criticism, that they are or are not used by "Americans," and that they are or are not used by Englishmen. As to his possession of this knowledge we shall see. "For example," he says, "Americans say railroad, not railway; they say a hotel, not an hotel; andirons, not fire-dogs; that's so, not that is so; baggage, not luggage; parquet or reserved seats, not stalls; right away, not right off the reel; shirt bosom, not shirt front; on hand or on deck, not to the fore; and many other things besides." What the other things are I do not know. I have seen neither the letter nor the criticism in situ, but quote the latter from a New York paper in which it is presented as settling completely the question at issue. Now whether the letter was written by a Yankee or not I shall not undertake to say; that matter is nothing to my purpose.

But I shall show by a few illustrations lying just at hand that this formidable attack upon its origin based upon internal evidence is quite futile, and that the British critic was not sufficiently informed as to what are peculiarly "American" phrases.

As to the use of railway being evidence of non-American origin, see the following passages, the first from the most American of newspapers:

"The Board of Fire Commissioners of the District [of Columbia] has refused to recognize Mr. W. B. Reed. The funds for paying for the Railway Mail Service will run short in December." (New York Tribune, October 23, 1878.)

"Whenever the Greeks have tried to establish railway communication with the rest of the world, they have been met by the opposition of Turkey," etc. (Speech of General Reed, United States minister to Greece, in London Week, September 21, 1878.)

I have before me a letter dated Paris, September 12, 1878, from a gentleman now traveling in France, one who till four months ago had never been out of New England or New York, and in it are these passages:

"We took a bottle of old Beaune into the railway carriage, which we had to ourselves," etc.

"In France they set the clocks in front of the railway stations ten minutes in advance, so everybody shall come early."

Clearly, a letter may be written by an "American" of the most pronounced type although its writer uses railway and not railroad. On the other hand, see the following evidence that Englishmen use railroad. In the very London journal which on one page quotes the American minister's speech containing railway is the following passage:

"For investors are not so well situated, and therefore the descriptions of American railroad securities are to be