An Old, Old Story
by HC BunnerGenre: Comedy
Setting: America
Format of Original Source: Short Story
Recommended Adaptation Length:
Candidate for Adaptation? Not Reviewed
EXCERPT:
I suppose the Tullingworth-Gordons were good Americans at heart; but the Tullingworth-Gordons were of English extraction, and, as somebody once said, the extraction had not been completely successful-a great deal of the English soil clung to the roots of the family tree.
They lived on Long Island, in a very English way, in a manor-house which was as English as they could make it, among surroundings quite respectably English for Americans of the third or fourth generation.
They had two English servants and some other American “help”; but they called the Americans by their last names, which anglified them to some extent. They had a servants’ hall, and a butler’s pantry, and a page in buttons, and they were unreasonably proud of the fact that one of their Tory ancestors had been obliged to leave New York for Halifax, in 1784, having only the alternative of a more tropical place of residence. I do not know whether they really held that the signers of the Declaration of Independence committed a grave error; but I do know that when they had occasion to speak of Queen Victoria, they always referred to her as “Her Majesty.”
“I see by the Mail to-night,” Mr. Tullingworth-Gordon would say to his wife, “that Her Majesty has presented the poor bricklayer who saved seventeen lives and lost both arms at the Chillingham-on-Frees disaster with an India shawl and a copy of the Life of the Prince Consort.”
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