Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/590

584 the battle of Ayacucho, the resemblances between the faults that were found with us fifty years ago and those that are noticeable among the South Americans of to-day, are too striking to be merely coincidences. It is surely not for us to say that there is anything inherently wrong with our southern neighbors if their shortcomings are such as we ourselves had not long ago, and possibly have to-day.

The first criticism that one hears and the first one is likely to make after getting beyond the pale of official good breeding in South America, is that the manners of the ordinary South American are very bad. Let the traveler who is inclined to take such a state of affairs too seriously, read what Dickens wrote about us and our ways in 1855 in "American Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." It was a faithful picture of a certain phase of American life. Furthermore, it paints a condition of affairs worse than anything seen in South America.

Travelers who are prone to find fault with the service at South American hotels and restaurants, should ponder on Dickens's description of the dining room of a New York boarding house in his day.

It is indeed hard to overlook the table manners of the average South American. But how many years is it since North Americans were all reading and conning "Don't! A Guide to Good Manners"? It is less than a quarter of a century since our self-conscious use of the fork on all possible (and impossible) viands showed that we felt the need of improvement.

To one inclined to criticize the speed with which a company of South Americans will dispose of their food, let me recommend Dickens's American boarding house table where

Very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time tomorrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished; whole cucumbers at once, like sugar-plums; and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and awful thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges; feeding, not themselves, but broods of night-mares, who were continually standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks, came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry.