Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[23] some one else pointed it out for him—that, whereas in his London scientific lectures he always had to repeat his explanations three times; first telling his audience in advance what his experiments were to accomplish, then during the process explaining what was being accomplished, and then at last recapitulating what had actually been done; he found it best, in America, to omit one, if not two, of these expositions. In much the same way, the director of a company of English comedians complained to a friend of mine that American audiences laughed a great deal too soon for them, and took the joke long before it was properly elucidated. In the same way an American author, who had formerly been connected with the St. Nicholas magazine, was told by a London publisher that the plan of it was all wrong. ‘These pages of riddles at the end, for instance: no child would ever guess them.’ And though the American assured him that they were guessed regularly every month in twenty thousand families, the Englishmen still shook his head. Certainly the difference between the national temperament will be doubted by no American public speaker