Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/185

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182
WIESBADEN.

dangling from one side of their mouths, and their incessant "Ja," "Ja woh!" (yes—yes, indeed), dropping from the other. Our friend's female fellow-passengers, in caps without bonnets, had ensconced themselves in a little nook, where they were knitting as if they were neither part nor parcel of this stirring world.

But what a contrast to this quietude, the English traveller! You may know him by the quantity and variety of his luggage, by every ingenious contrivance for comfort (alas! comfort implies fixture), impregnable English trunks, travelling-bags, dressing-cases, cased provisions for all the possible wants that civilization generates, and all in travelling armour. There is no flexibility about an Englishman, no adaptation to circumstances and exigencies. He must stand forth, wherever he goes, the impersonation of his island-home. I said his luggage betrayed him; I am sure his face and demeanour do. His muscles are in a state of tension, his nerves seem to be on the outside of his coat, his eyebrows are in motion, he looks, as my friend says she felt when she first came to such a place as this, "as if all the people about her were rats;" his voice is quick and harsh, and his words none of the sweetest, so that you do not wonder the Continental people have fastened on him the descriptive soubriquet of "Monsieur God-d—n."

An interesting little episode to me in this bustling scene was Miss W., the very essence of refinement and English gentlewomanliness, running hither and