Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people.

One notices it all the more for the shock.

To get a prosaic answer from a man whose appearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated to dull that answer's effect.

Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues, cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeat it here.

He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master asked him what he thought of "That orbed maiden With white fires laden Whom mortals call the moon," replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in the mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes by the name of pidgin English).
Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as they appear to us at first sight.