Home Life in America (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE AMERICAN CHILD NOTHING illustrates better the way America takes hold of a national fault and tries to remedy it than the remodelling of the type of child among our prosperous classes. A foreigner, asked off-hand to give an example of an imp, will reply unhesitatingly, "An American child aged between two and fourteen years "; and in many hotels on the Continent there is a standing rule never to admit American children. A careful look-out is kept, and if a family of American tourists accompanied by children presents itself, they are respectfully directed elsewhere. The American child has a bad reputation abroad. It was Max O'Rell, I believe, who wondered how it was possible that such little demons as the American children became such passable men and women. It used to be hard work to convince the visitor to the United States that the majority of these little demons, tearing about the city streets, playing in " front yards" without a vestige of fence or hedge, and of vast discomfort indoors to every one except their parents, to whom they were a source of unrestrained satisfaction did not end in prison, were not kidnapped nor molested, and did, in fact, turn out well. I shall never forget the momentary look of horror that swept an Englishman's face when the six-years' old son of his American host, to whom he was extending]an invitation, jumped up and down, and, pulling his father's coat, demanded shrilly, "Makehim say when, dad ! make him say when !" or the near approach to collapse of a titled English woman, when the young hopeful of an American household interrupted dinner-table conversation to ask, " How it is, being from England, you don't drop your aitches ?" But this type of American child is happily changing. Some one has said that St. George was particularly...