When they had wondered at the sight of it the Chautauquans
and their friend were made free of the charming seventeenth-
century house, which would be old for this country, but which in
the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the
casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in
England do, in the pictured faces of the past, and in the
memorials which only the centuries can leave behind them, but was
too graceful to seem rich. "A home of ancient peace," it looked,
in its mild gray stone amidst its lawns and shrubberies, the
larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces through which the
Chautauquans followed from it.
VI
At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I
noticed was the difference of the people from the people over the
English border in their attitude toward their betters. They might
stand only five feet in their stockings, but they stood straight,
and if they were respectful, they were first self-respectful. In
our run from Shrewsbury, their language first made itself
generally heard at Newport, and it increased in the unutterable
names of the stations westward, the farther we passed into their
beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be
civil, though never servile.
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