We're not nearly so closely knit together here, save in certain spots, especially the old spots.

In Boston they understand each other with very few words said.

So they do in Charleston.

But these spots of condensed and hoarded understanding lie far apart, are never confluent, and also differ in their details; while the whole of England is confluent, and the details have been slowly worked out through centuries of getting on together, and are accepted and observed exactly like the rules of a game.
In America, if the American didn't know, he would have answered, "I don't know.

I think you'll have to ask the conductor," or at any rate, his reply would have been longer than the Englishman's.