Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/166

 upon us from the rear, extending a pink sheet and crying in dolorous tones, "Terrible accident in the Stites!—Brooklyn Bridge falls—Thousands killed!" While we were sounding in our Scotch tweeds for the big red coppers, the youth explained, with an ingratiating grin, that he knew we were "good-natured Yankees," then pocketed our gratuity and ran on with his sporting extra. There is only one way to account for his penetration of our disguise: he recognized our style—incessu patuit dea, or as Virgil might have said, in American, "You could pipe the dame by the way she operated her stilts."

If an American can so easily be identified in an English crowd, it should seem to follow that an Englishman may by similar tests be identified in an American crowd. And as a matter of fact, on the "colorful" coast of California, where the sea washes up Mexican pottery, Hawaiian flowers and music, Japanese gods, jade, ivory, ginger, blue-and-tawny rugs from China, Russian tea, fire opals from South Africa, and some sun-loving Odysseus or other from every land, I have detected the English style in an Australian who was disguised by a good American tailor and an accent levelled by long colonial and American residence. Something more indelible than garb, vocabulary, or accent betrayed him: it was a latent quality of his entire gait and manner as he accosted our American Pierce-Arrow bus; it was some ineffaceable hint of the British Isles in his quiet scrutiny of his fellow passengers, and even