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tobacco had lingered, down the generations, about its hall; but it looked warm, so in we went. We found ourselves at once in an atmosphere redolent not only of another people and time, but another continent.
    French was the only language we could hear in the shadowy chambers of this hostelry. The manager was a small bony man with black greased hair, who needed a shave but carried the unmistakable air of not intending to have one. He spoke to us in broken English that was barely understandable, and ushered us heavily upstairs. Nothing in this drab inn conformed with the American standard. On the landing there protruded from behind a calendar a gaudy picture of the Virgin, with some faded flowers pinned to it, and a scrap of a palm frond, relic of some distant festival. Our room was large and unornamented, with monochromatic coverings. The bathroom was far away, and its broken door had to be fastened from inside with a piece of string. Several Frenchmagazines (damp because someone had been reading them in the bath, tattered because someone had been tearing out the dress patterns) lay forlornly on a wicker chair.
    It was odd to find oneself so near in spirit to provincial Europe; for the predominantly English communities of the United States have long ago discarded their inheritances and developed mores of their own, so that you will search for a long time before you hear an echo of Moreton-in-the-Marsh, or recapture the stolid phlegm of an English pub. From downstairs, in this old French enclave, we could hear somebody practising the piano—an approximation of Rustle of Spring, some Chopin played very slowly and with soulful emotion, a snatch of a pompous marching song. I went down to the bar for a glass of beer, and found it thronged with whole families of French people, talking cheerfully in a muffled intestinal patois. A very old man with a bushy moustache, wearing a peaked cap, was playing shuffleboard with a pleasing swagger, followed everywhere by a couple of devoted urchins, and now and again from the darker recesses of the room he would arouse a murmur of admiration. The air was full of strong tobacco smoke, and there was a smell not of onions, but of potato chips.
    But even in such cultural islands the new Americanism sometimes intrudes. The escapist quality of that evening (which threatened to become a little maudlin) was rudely shattered by an expression of changing philosophies. As I sat sipping my beer, watching the old shuffieboard man, and occasionally exchanging indecipherable witticisms with my neighbours, I became aware of activity outside the door of the bar. Shadowy shapes passed by, there was the clink of cutlery, the sound of furniture being moved, a growing murmur of voices; until suddenly into the bar-room there burst the crash of an introductory chord on the piano, out of tune but immensely reverberant, and the heady opening lines, throatily delivered in male voice chorus, of America ‚ The Beautiful. The bar-room stiffened. The barman looked virtuous. The urchins pulled up their socks. Even the shuffleboard king removed his eye from the board. This was a moment pregnant with emotion and significance, familiar to all Americans from one shoreline to the other, whether they speak in a European dialect or a western drawl, the clipped pseudo-Oxford of Boston or the hideous distortions of Brooklyn: the Elks were beginning their weekly dinner.
    To the south of Vermont, in New Hampshire, I came across another cohesive society: a group of Shakers. In a pleasant country spot there stood a collection of brick buildings, grouped around a green, and among them moved a few middle-aged women dressed like Puritans, in roughgrey dresses and aprons, severely devoid of make-up, their hair austere and their figures (like the Amish ladies’) blameless of compulsion or pretence. These were members of “The American Shaker”, a celibate religious community, named for the physical tremors that used to result from the