Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1877 — An Unsophisticated Traveler. [ARTICLE]

An Unsophisticated Traveler.

I see Americans everywhere who still smell of salt water, and who are yet trying to appear as though they had been abroad every year of their lives. For there is nothing an American is so much afraid of as of seeming green. For my part I rather like to be a greenhorn. I’ve made up my mind to it. I tell everybody in the omnibus that I’m an American ana not used to this sort of thing, and then every man and woman in the ’bus is so delighted to find one of those poor benighted Americans willing to confess his ignorance, that I am straightway overwhelmed with all sorts of information. I get up alongside the driver and say: “ You don’t often get a Yankee up here that don’t know anything about London, do you ?” Then coachee swings his whip and nudges me —he always nudges before he speaks—and begins to tell me that the Duke o’ Well’nton lives here on the left, and the Marq’s o’ Wes’mins’er lives there. One of the drivers told me that lie “ s’posed Gen. Grant ’ud go back very much hawner’d since ’eed dined with the Lawd Mayor." I told him I did not doubt it. The pronunciation of the better classes here is rather better in some regards than our own—the vowels are fuller and broader. But I am astonished at some words. Tho plural “ days” is almost if not quite identical with the Latin “ dies," in the ordinaiy pronunciation. Of course the illiterate cockney is quite as amusing to an American as tne unlettered American is to the English traveler. It took me some time to find out that Someretouee meant “ Somerset House,” and when a driver pointed out what he called “ the assy erection," I had to guess from the looks of the building that it was the House of Correction. I try to keep away from Americans. I am in a very good hotel, but one of the most old fashioned of English hotels. “ The Golden Cross” used to be a startingplace for the post-coaches, say in Pickwick's time, but it is now a rather uppish “ family hoto',”retaining, however, many old ways. I am, after a week’s experience, beginning to learn how to manage things. I am never so well pleased as when I succeed in making some mistake sufficiently ridiculous to bring a smile to the face of an attache of the place. They look so deadly solemn—these English folks about hotels—that I am driven to desperation with a desire to see them laugh—just to see if they can.— Edward Eggleston’s London Letter to Brooklyn Timet.