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"You Are An American"
by
At length it was the hour for bed. I followed my heavy host with his candle up difficult stairs. “I think they’re all asleep,” he said.
“They’re all asleep!” I exclaimed. “Who are?”
“Why,” replied my landlord, “there are five of them, you know. But they are nice quiet fellows. Something like yourself,” he added. “I think you will like them.”
In that shadowed, gabled room were the noises of many sunk in slumber. Well, they were, I found in the morning, rather inoffensive young fellows, all cyclists, and indeed not altogether unlike myself. It was after my bacon and eggs that I found on my way a place for a “wash and brush up, tuppence.”
“Traveller, sir?” inquired the publican, in response to my knock and peering cautiously out at his door. For it was Sunday, after three o’clock in the afternoon and not yet six; and to obtain refreshment at a public house at that hour one must be a “traveller over three miles’ journey.” “I’m a traveller all the way from the U.S.A.,” said I.
I stood my battered shilling ash stick in a corner and looked out again from my window over the old red roofs and at the back of the house where he dwelt who when the Queen had commanded his presence said, “I’m an old man, ma’am, and I’ll take a seat.” When Annie, the maid, had brought my “shaving water, sir,” in a kind of a tin sprinkling can and when I had used it I took up my Malacca town cane and went out to see how old Father Thames was coming on.
I thought I would buy some writing paper and I went into a drug store kind of a place. “I see you are an American, sir,” said the shopman. “This is a chemist’s shop,” he explained; “you get paper at the stationer’s, just after the turning, at the top of the street.”
Hurrying for my passport, I inquired as to the location of such and such a street–whatever the name of it is–where, I understood, the place was where this was to be had. “Ah!” said he whom I addressed, “you want the American Consul-General.”