Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/181

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178
WIESBADEN.

stinctivelystretched out and the kind deed ready to follow it.

This suavity is not limited to any rank or condition. It extends all the way down from the prince to the poorest peasant. Some of our party driving out in a hackey-coach yesterday, met some German ladies in a coach with four horses, postillions, footmen in livery, and other marks of rank and wealth. What would Americans have done in a similar position? Probably looked away and seemed unconscious. And English ladies would have done the same, or, as I have seen them in Hyde Park, have leaned back in their carriages, and stared with an air of mingled indifference and insolence through their eyeglasses, as if their inferiors in condition could bear to be stared at. The German ladies bowed most courteously to the humble strangers in the hackney-coach.

Yesterday, at the table d'hôte, I observed a perpendicular old gentleman, who looked as if he had been born before any profane dreams of levelling down the steeps of aristocracy had entered the mind of man, and whose servant, in rich livery, as stiff as himself, was in waiting behind him, bow to the persons opposite to him as he took his seat, and to those on his right hand and his left. Soon after our landlord came to speak to him, and familiarly and quite acceptably, as it appeared, laid his hand on the nobleman's shoulder while addressing him.

Soon after we came here, a gentleman with whom we passed a few hours in a Rhine steamer met us