ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 47 



always safe logic, but here I seemed to perceive a natural 

 connection of cause and effect. Now, a few days before I 

 had been so tickled with a paper (professedly written by a 

 benevolent American clergyman) certifying that the bearer, 

 a hard-working German, had long sofered with rheumatic 

 paints in his limps/ that, after copying the passage into my 

 note-book, I thought it but fair to pay a trifling honorarium 

 to the author. I had pulled the string of the shower-bath ! 

 It had been running shipwrecked sailors for some time, but 

 forthwith it began to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. 

 I could not help associating the apparition of my new friend 

 with this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. I 

 accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and 

 modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impecunio- 

 sity to the full as strong as his own. He took a high tone 

 with me at once, such as an honest man would naturally take 

 with a confessed repudiator. He even brought down his 

 proud stomach so far as to join himself to me for the rest of 

 my townward walk, that he might give me his views of the 

 American people, and thus inclusively of myself. 



I know not whether it is because I am pigeon-livered and 

 lack gall, or whether it is from an overmastering sense of 

 drollery, but I am apt to submit to such bastings with a 

 patience which afterwards surprises me, being not without 

 my share of warmth in the blood. Perhaps it is because I 

 so often meet with young persons who know vastly more 

 than I do, and especially with so many foreigners whose 

 knowledge of this country is superior to my own. However 

 it may be, I listened for some time with tolerable composure 

 as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail his opinions 

 of my country and its people. America, he informed me, 

 was without arts, science, literature, culture, or any native 

 hope of supplying them. We were a people wholly given to 

 money-getting, and who, having got it, knew no other use 

 for it than to hold it fast. I am fain to confess that I felt a 

 sensible itching of the biceps, and that my fingers closed 

 with such a grip as he had just informed me was one of the 

 effects of our unhappy climate. But happening just then to 

 be where I could avoid temptation by dodging down a by 

 street, I hastily left him to finish his diatribe to the lamp 

 post, which could stand it better than I. That young man 

 will never know how near he came to being assaulted by a 



