Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

No American, complexly speaking, finds himself in England for the first / time, unless he is one of those many Americans who are not of English / extraction. It is probable, rather, that on his arrival, if he has not / yet visited the country, he has that sense of having been there before / which a simpler psychology than ours used to make much of without making / anything of. His English ancestors who really were once there stir / within him, and his American forefathers, who were nourished on the / history and literature of England, and were therefore intellectually / English, join forces in creating an English consciousness in him. / Together, they make it very difficult for him to continue a new-comer, / and it may be that only on the fourth or fifth coming shall the illusion / wear away and he find himself a stranger in a strange land. But by that / time custom may have done its misleading work, and he may be as much as / ever the prey of his first impressions. I am sure that some such result / in me will evince itself to the reader in what I shall have to say of my / brief stay with the English foster-mother of our American Plymouth; and / I hope he will not think it altogether to be regretted.

My first impressions of England, after a fourth or fifth visit, began / even before I landed in Plymouth, for I decided that there was something / very national in the behavior of a young Englishman who, as we neared / his native shores, varied from day to day, almost from hour to hour, in / his doubt whether a cap or a derby hat was the right wear for a / passenger about landing. He seemed also perplexed whether he should or / should not speak to some of his fellow-passengers in the safety of / parting, but having ventured, seemed to like it. On the tender which / took us from the steamer to the dock I fancied another type in the / Englishman whom I asked which was the best hotel in Plymouth. At first / he would not commit himself; then his humanity began to work in him, and / he expressed a preference, and abruptly left me. He returned directly to / give the reasons for his preference, and to excuse them, and again he / left me. A second time he came back, with his conscience fully roused, / and conjured me not to think of going elsewhere.

I thought that charming, and I afterwards found the hotel excellent, as / I found nearly all the hotels in England. I found everything delightful / on the way to it, inclusive of the cabman's overcharge, which brought / the extortion to a full third of the just fare of a New York cabman. I / do not include the weather, which was hesitating a bitter little rain, / but I do include the behavior of the customs officer, who would do not / more than touch, with averted eyes, the contents of the single piece of / baggage which he had me open. When it came to paying the two hand-cart / men three shillings for bringing up the trunks, which it would have / cost me three dollars to transport from the steamer to a hotel at home, / I did not see why I should not save money for the rest of my life by / becoming naturalized in England, and making it my home, unless it was / because it takes so long to become naturalized there that I might not / live to economize much.

It was with a pleasure much more distinct than any subliminal intimation / that I saw again the office-ladies in our hotel. Personally, they were / young strangers, but officially they were old friends, and quite as I / had seen them first forty years ago, or last a brief seven; only once / they wore bangs or fringes over their bright, unintelligent eyes, and / now they wore Mamie loops. But they were, as always, very neatly and / prettily dressed, and they had the well-remembered difficulty of / functionally differencing themselves to the traveller's needs, so that / which he should ask for a room and which for letters and which for a / candle and which for his bill, remains a doubt to the end. From time to / time with an exchange of puzzled glances, they unite in begging him to / ask the head porter, please, for whatever it is he wants to know. They / all seem of equal authority, but suddenly and quite casually the real / superior appears among them. She is the manageress, and I never saw a / manager at an English hotel except once, and that was in Wales. But the / English theory of hotel-keeping seems to be house-keeping enlarged; a / manageress is therefore more logical than a manager, and practically the / excellence of English hotels attests that a manager could not be more / efficient.