There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores, newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and there was one united florist's and fruiterer's which I particularly liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence, as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he said one day, "Ah, the Americans are clever people." Then he added, "I hope you won't mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are rather harder than our English ladies, sir."
"Yes," I eagerly assented. "How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?"
"More practical? More business-like?" I pursued.
"Well, I shouldn't like to say that, sir. But--they seem rather harder, sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather harder, sir."
We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty, and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their advantage with the summer hardness of our women.
It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to lose one's self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of streets except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness, if it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they captured it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the Angles kept it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its streets and call them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to be called bars, or else the stranger might take them for streets. If he asked another wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get to the point he aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always amuse himself in them; they would take a friendly interest in him, and show him the old houses and churches which the American stranger prefers. They abound in the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just as they do in the poorer sorts of people, but in their simpler courts and squares and expanses they have often dignified mansions of that Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is known here in our older edifices as there in their newer. Some of them are said to have "richly carved ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms, chimneypieces with paintings framed in the over-mantel, dentilled cornices, and pedimented doors," and I could well believe it, as I passed them with an envious heart. There were gardens behind these mansions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know not what damp social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.