OURSELVES, AND OTHERS 203 



independent. In the words of the Western 

 Governor, quoted in a previous chapter, he 

 cries, ' What have we to do with foreign 

 nations, any way ?' Yet those who admire 

 and value the higher traits of American in- 

 dependence, and more especially those which 

 give free rein to the national kind-hearted- 

 ness, regardless of conventionalism or fashion, 

 regret the insidious encroachment of imported 

 manners and customs filtering down from the 

 Upper Four Hundred to what, for want of a 

 better word, we must call the great middle 

 class. We, who love the people for itself, sigh 

 over the evanishment of one distinctively 

 American custom after another, the loss of 

 simplicity, of marked characteristics, without 

 appreciable gain. The moral can be pointed 

 and the tale adorned by an illustration drawn 

 from life on one of the fashionable road- 

 ways of any large city ; a trivial illustration, 

 possibly, but not without its application to 

 graver matters. 



Rumbling slowly on its way towards us 

 comes a cumbrous vehicle English-built or 

 imitated, it matters not which which the 

 aspiring American has recently learned to 



