The Riddle of the Ivy - Page 2

fellow-traveller with whom I had fallen
into conversation felt the same freshness, though for another cause.
She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had
never yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm
in that simple and splendid way which is natural to Americans,
who are the most idealistic people in the whole world.
Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolator.
And the American has become so idealistic that he even idealises money.
But (to quote a very able writer of American short stories)
that is another story.

"I have never been in England before," said the American lady,
"yet it is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it
for a long time."

"So you have," I said; "you have been away for three hundred years."

"What a lot of ivy you have," she said. "It covers the churches
and it buries the houses. We have ivy; but I have never seen it
grow like that."

"I am interested to hear it," I replied, "for I am making a little
list of all the things that are really better in England.
Even a month on the Continent, combined with intelligence,
will teach you that there are many things that are better abroad.
All the things that the DAILY MAIL calls English are better abroad.
But there are things entirely English and entirely good.
Kippers, for instance, and Free Trade, and front gardens,
and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and hansom cabs,
and cricket, and Mr. Will Crooks. Above all, there is the happy
and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that
Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman
or a German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a
light bursts upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of
Mrs. Gallup and the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the
matter of a capital letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept
everything; bacon did write Shakespeare."

"I cannot look at anything but the ivy," she said,
"it looks so comfortable."

While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many
weeks an English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour
in which he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved
because it represented something in the nature of permanent public
opinion of England, above the ebb and flow of the parties.
Now Mr. Balfour is a perfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his
own point of view, thinks long and seriously about the public needs,
and he is, moreover, a man of entirely exceptionable intellectual power.
But alas, in spite of all this, when I had read that speech I
thought with a heavy heart that