After giving me
an excellent cigar, he proceeded to drive me about the town, to
various points of interest, including the municipal abattoir, where
he gave me another excellent cigar, the Carnegie public library, the
First National Bank (the courteous manager of which gave me an
excellent cigar) and the Second Congregational Church where I had the
pleasure of meeting the pastor. The pastor, who appeared a man of
breadth and culture, gave me another cigar. In the evening a dinner,
admirably cooked and excellently served, was tendered to me at a
leading hotel." And of course he took it. After which his statement
that he carried away from the town a feeling of optimism explains
itself: he had four cigars, the dinner, and half a page of
impressions at twenty cents a word.
Nor is it only by the theft of impressions that we suffer at the
hands of these English discoverers of America. It is a part of the
system also that we have to submit to being lectured to by our
talented visitors. It is now quite understood that as soon as an
English literary man finishes a book he is rushed across to America
to tell the people of the United States and Canada all about it, and
how he came to write it. At home, in his own country, they don't care
how he came to write it. He's written it and that's enough. But in
America it is different. One month after the distinguished author's
book on The Boyhood of Botticelli has appeared in London, he is seen
to land in New York very quietly out of one of the back portholes of
the Olympic.
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