In the large matters of business the English have been accused of trickiness, which, however, may be but the voice of envious competition speaking; but in the small things they surely are most marvelously honest.  Consider their railroad trains now:  To a greenhorn from this side the blue water, a railroad journey out of London to almost any point in rural England is a succession of surprises, and all pleasant ones.  To begin with, apparently there is nobody at the station whose business it is to show you to your train or to examine your ticket before you have found your train for yourself.  There is no mad scurrying about at the moment of departure, no bleating of directions through megaphones.  Unchaperoned you move along a long platform under a grimy shed, where trains are standing with their carriage doors hospitably ajar, and unassisted you find your own train and your own carriage, and enter therein.

Sharp on the minute an unseen hand—­at least I never saw it—­slams the doors and coyly—­you might almost say secretively—­the train moves out of the terminal.  It moves smoothly and practically without jarring sounds.  There is no shrieking of steel against steel.  It is as though the rails were made of rubber and the wheel-flanges were faced with noise-proof felt.  No conductor comes to punch your ticket, no brakeman to bellow the stops, no train butcher bleating the gabbled invoice of his gumdrops, bananas and other best-sellers.

Glory be!  It is all so peaceful and soothing; as peaceful and as soothing as the land through which you are gliding when once you have left behind smoky London and its interminable environs; for now you are in a land that was finished and plenished five hundred years ago and since then has not been altered in any material aspect whatsoever.  Every blade of grass is in its right place; every wayside shrub seemingly has been restrained and trained to grow in exactly the right and the proper way.  Streaming by your car window goes a tastefully arranged succession of the thatched cottages, the huddled little towns, the meandering brooks, the ancient inns, the fine old country places, the high-hedged estates of the landed gentry, with rose-covered lodges at the gates and robust children in the doorways—­just as you have always seen them in the picture books.  There are fields that are velvet lawns, and lawns that are carpets of green cut-plush.  England is the only country I know of that lives up—­exactly and precisely—­to its storybook descriptions and its storybook illustrations.

Eventually you come to your stopping point; at least you have reason to believe it may be your stopping point.  As well as you may judge by the signs that plaster the front, the sides, and even the top of the station, the place is either a beef extract or a washing compound.  Nor may you count on any travelers who may be sharing your compartment with you to set you right by a timely word or two.