he Speech of American Women Henry

Part Three

James

LEAR remains with me yet a particular impression received years ago -so many that I might, in the absence of fresher and corroborative ones, hesitate now to produce it. The corroborative abound, however, and them too I shall presently treat as mentionable. A quarter of a century has elapsed, but the appearance then presented to me has visibly not changed -and all the less, doubtless, that it was presented in Boston, the city, as we had then at least learned to think, of supremely conservative instincts. I was spending there three months of the springtime, and it so happened that, living in rooms ostensibly furnished, but as nearly as possible void of any enhancement of domestic service or other household ministration, I used to sally forth for my breakfast, to which convenience prescribed thus a late hour, and then walk back, to work, across the pleasant Common and down the spacious slope of Mount Vernon Street. This caused my passage almost invariably to coincide with the hour of "recess" of a seminary for young ladies flourishing hard by, the attendants at which, in the fine weather, were, for purposes of sport, in possession of the public scene. Nobody else, no doubt, during that part of the morning, was much in possession-so that the vociferous pupils (those of the "most fashionable school in Boston," as I heard their establishment described,) had the case all in their hands. My point is simply that, being fashionable, they yet were vociferous, and in conditions that, as they ingenuously shrieked and bawled to each other across the street and from its top to its bottom, gave the candid observer much to think of. They were freely and happily at play, they, had been turned out for it to the pavements of the town, and with this large scale of space about them for intercourse they could scarce do other than hoot and howl. They romped, they conversed, at the top of their lungs, from one side of the ample avenue to the other; they sat on doorsteps and partook of scraps of luncheon, they hunted each other to and fro and indulged in innocent mirth quite as if they had been in a private garden or a play-room.

And yet the scene, alike for its implications and explanations, was of high interest; it gave one in a moment the key to so much of the surrounding speech. It was to connect itself too, I remember, with a word caught in much later years, the amusing mention on the part of an American friend, a lady who had married in Europe and was settled there, of a remark made to her during a visit that, after a long absence, she had just paid her native city. Her old friends there had mustered in force, had rejoicingly crowded about her, shrieking à l'envi and talking all at once, while she, naturally responsive and rising to the occasion, had mingled her own highest note with the inimitable choir. A near relation, tried perhaps, as the inhabitants of the native place are in general tried by indications of divergence in the reobserved absentee, had been present at two or three of these concerts and then had trium-: phantly spoken. "How you do, my dear, after all, still enjoy a good yell!" On which my friend had, of course, explained that any emphasis at all, or indeed any audibility, had necessarily, in such conditions, to take the form of the shout: which plea, however, it had had to be owned, was a dishonest evasion-the charge being not simply that she had yelled, but that she had yelled with gusto. "That then is what the little schoolgirls, the littler and

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