Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

From the 10th to the 20th of July the heat was as great in London as the / nerves ever register in New York. It was much more continuous, for our / heat seldom lasts a week, and there it lasted nearly a fortnight, with a / peculiar closeness from the damp and thickness from the smoke. That was / why we left London, and went to Great Malvern, for a little respite.

Our run was through a country which frankly confessed a long drouth, / such as parches the fields at home in exceptional summers. Rain had not / fallen during the heat from which we were escaping, and the grain had / been cut and stacked in unwonted safety from mould. There is vastly more / wheat grown in England than the simple American, who expects to find it / a large market-garden, imagines, and the yield was now so heavy that the / stacked sheaves served to cover half the space from which they had been / reaped. The meadow-lands were burned by the sun almost as yellow as the / stubble; the dry grass along the railroad banks had caught fire from the / sparks of the locomotive, and the flames had run through the hedges, / into the pasturage and stubble, and at one place they had kindled the / stacks of wheat, which farm-hands were pulling apart and beating out. / The air was full of the pleasant smell of their burning, and except that / the larks were spiring up into the dull-blue sky, and singing in the / torrid air, it was all very like home.

I ventured to say as much to the young man whom I found sleeping in the / full blaze of the sun in his corner of our carriage, and to whom I / apologized for the liberty I had taken in drawing his curtain so as to / shade his comely fresh face. He pardoned me so gratefully that I felt / warranted in thinking he might possibly care to know of the resemblance / I had noted. He said, "Ah! " in the most amiable manner imaginable, / "which part of America? " But just as I was going to tell him, the train / drew into the station at Oxford, and he escaped out of the carriage.

Before this he had remarked that we should find the drouth much worse as / we went on, for we were now in the Valley of the Thames, which kept the / land comparatively moist. But I could not see that the levels of harvest / beyond this favored region were different. Still the generous yield of / grain half covered the ground; the fires along the embankments continued / in places; in places the hay was just mown, and women were tossing it / into windrows; at a country station where we stopped there were fat, / heavy-fleeced sheep panting wofully in the cattle-pens; but the heat was / no worse than it had been. The landscape grew more varied as we / approached Worcester, where we meant to pass the night; low hills rose / from the plain, softly wooded; and I find from my note-book that the / weather was much mitigated by the amenity of all the inhabitants we / encountered. I really suppose that the underlined record, "_universal / politeness_," related mainly to the railway company's servants, but / there must have been some instances of kindness from others, perhaps / fellow-travellers, which I grieve now to have forgotten.

I have not forgotten the patience with which the people at the old / inn-like hotel in Worcester bore our impatience with the rooms which / they showed us, and which we found impossibly stuffy, and smelling of / the stables below. The inn was a survival of the coaching days, when the / stables formed an integral part of the public-house, but did not perfume / the fiction which has endeared its ideal to readers. The dining-room was / sultry, and abounded with the flies which love stables of the olden / times, or indeed of any date. We sat by our baggage in an outer room / till a carriage could be called, and then we drove back to the station, / through the long, hot, dusty street by which we had come, with a / poorish, stunted type of work-people crowding it on the way home to / supper.

Somewhere in the offing we were aware of cathedral roofs and towers, and / we were destined later to a pleasanter impression of Worcester than that / from which we now gladly fled by the first train for Great Malvern. Our / refuge was only an hour away, and it duly received us in a vast, modern / hotel, odorous only of a surrounding garden into which a soft rain was / already beginning to fall. A slow, safe elevator, manned by the very / oldest and heaviest official in full uniform whom I have ever seen in / the like charge, mounted with us to upper chambers, where we knew no / more till we awoke in the morning to find the face of nature washed / clean by that gentle rain, and her breath fresh and sweet, coming from / the grateful lips of the myriad flowers which embloom most English / towns.

I may as well note at once that it was not a bracing air which we / inhaled from them, and I do not suppose that the air is any more an / adjunct of the healing waters at Great Malvern than the air at Carlsbad, / for instance, where it is notoriously relaxing. The companionable / office-lady at our hotel, who was also a sort of lady-butler, and carved / the cold meats, candidly owned that the air at Great Malvern was / lifeless, and she boldly regretted the two years she had passed in New / England, as matron of a boys' reformatory. She said, quite in the teeth / of an English couple paying their bill at the same time, that she was / only living to get back there. They took her impatriotism with a large / imperial allowance; and I shall always be sorry I did not ask them what / kind of bird it was they had with them in a cage; I think they would / have told me willingly, and even gladly, before they drove away.