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Show AMERICAN INVASION OF A BRITISH COLONY. I do not know just why the American Ameri-can prices should prevail so In Bermuda. Ber-muda. It costs no more than ever to raise things there, and tho Bermudans, who are mostly peopie of comparatively compara-tively small incomes, must suffer from the rise in the cost of living more than the American visitors or sojourners. sojourn-ers. Even In tho shops, where they used to pay English prices for English Eng-lish goods, they now pay American prices, quite as if they had an American Am-erican tariff to enable the local manufacturers manu-facturers to make fortunes and go abroad and marry their daughters to noblemen. Otherwise I do not know that our nation does the Bermudans much harm. We swarm upon them by tho thousand, three times a week, when the New York steamers come, in a lump, as It were, on three successive suc-cessive days, instead of spreading themselves over the seven days; and we romp up and down their quiet streets, to the music of our cat-bird twang. At these times we have rather rath-er a wild look, and talk loudly, and laugh more than wo need, If we are women: but that is because the beauty beau-ty and tho strangeness of the placo have gone to our heads, sometimes, perhaps not too strong at home. If wo aro men, we sound a different nasal, nas-al, a drv. sarcastic note, and wear an ironic smile with the new straw hats we have bought. We are mostly, I thing, from familiar country places, or Inland cities, and have not been abroad before. We mean nothing wrong, and many of us are charmingly kind and good, and even Intelligent. But tho whole business Is a delightful delight-ful joke for us, whether we stroll up and down the clean, white streets between be-tween the clean, white houses, or drive lavishly, out over the land fn the pleasant victories, and try too audibly aud-ibly to extract misinformation from the obliging colored drivers. If we go home tho next day, we do not quiet down, but if we stay a week wo become of an almost Bermudan calm. A fortnight makes us over in the imago im-ago of tho colonial English who have been in tho islands for generations. W. D. Howells in Harper's Magazine. |