There is not the
slightest trace of democratic equality in their dress, their manners, or
their speech.
Take it all and all, America is a trying place of sojourn for the
aforesaid canny Scot--the man who without being stingy (oh, dear, no!)
has "all his generous impulses under perfect control." The sixpences do
not "bang" in this country: they crepitate, they crackle, as though shot
from a Maxim quick-firer. For instance, the lowest electric-trolley fare
is twopence-halfpenny. It is true that for five cents you can, if you
wish it, ride fifteen or twenty miles; but that advantage becomes
inappreciable when you don't want to ride more than half a mile. Take,
again, the harmless, necessary operation of shaving. In a good English
barber's shop it is a brief and not unpleasant process; in an American
"tonsorial parlour" it is a lingering and costly torture. One of the
many reasons which lead me to regard the Americans as a leisurely people
rather than a nation of "hustlers" is the patience with which they
submit to the long-drawn tyranny of the barber. In England, one grudges
five minutes for a shave, and one pays from fourpence to sixpence; in
America one can hardly escape in twenty-five minutes, and one pays (with
the executioner's tip)[G] from a shilling to eighteenpence.
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