whole hillside is luminously and transparently pale, and re ticulated with mineral veins that are blue and green like sea water. I want to see that marvel again, that mountain that is made of metal, that looks as if you could put your hand through it. I want to go back, just as I want to go back to San Francisco, which is a day and a night further west from Bingham. For that is like the Bay of Naples, but it is all done in the delicate pastel shades and the gentle greyness of Edinburgh. Sailing ships lie in the harbor, with their lovely rigging. There is a dead volcano looking over the Bay at the city, whose musical name is Tamalpais; she is shaped like Fujiyama, and I am enough in love to swear she is as beautiful. Round her are daughterly green hills running down to the indenting waters, their slopes blue and white with wild lupins. I love these places.

It is real love. One has been fond of European places, but the affection has been mild and reasonable. I have imagined that I loved Rome and Granada, but there they are, both within two days and two nights of London, for no undue expenditure, and I have visited neither for the last two years. But I know that I am capable of getting up and going to have a look at San Francisco at a time when I ought not, though it means five days on the water and five days and five nights on the train, and many pounds and more dollars than I can afford to spend on merely going to have a look at anything.

This is the real unreasonable thing that is called love. And mind you, it is not only one that feels it. I am not telling you about myself; I am telling you about the American people. For this love that their Continent has the power to evoke is one of the most powerful factors in the moulding of their lives. It makes them wanderers. And that is the thing that marks them off from all other modern peoples. They are migrating. They are nomads. It makes their cities enchanting. For each of these marks an occasion when these wanderers have fallen so deeply in love with a place that for a time they abandoned their nomadism. This is a most romantic country.

It is at first hard for the stranger to realize how nomadic the Americans are, because one is apt to draw a false conclusion of stability from the facts that, in the towns at least, they

have the best homes in the world, and that their women are incomparably the best housekeepers. But unlike the successful domestic women of other climes, the American housewife is not tethered to the cooking stove. She is astonishingly mobile. Of an evening, after dinner, should she and her husband be alone, the weather will have to be pretty bad before they will settle down before the fire. They are more likely to take the automobile out for a run of a length that would be considered a whole day's expedition in this country. If they live in Salt Lake City they will have a marvellous homecoming. Beautifully did the Mormons build on this perfect site that they found after their thousand mile trek through the desert, a city of broad lawny streets with a Capitol that stands out against the sunset on a ledge on a hill as finely as any building raised by the old Romans; widely stretches the plain that was desert till the Mormons came, that is green and plenteous because of their tillage and irrigation, in the East to the feet of the mountains whose arms are now blue with nightfall, in the West to the great Salt Lake where the last light lies rosy on the peaks of the unvisited islands where buffalo still roam. There is romance for you. You would go out and look at it if it were at your backdoor. Even if you lived on the prairies of Nebraska, that are as flat as the mud at Southend, you would still take that nocturnal ride. For here, as always on the plains, what one loses on the swings one makes up on the roundabouts. What the landscape lacks in interest, the cloudscape supplies. It is good to drive there by night, under bright stars that look as if they were nailed onto the dark roof of some not too elevated tent.

The mobility of the American housewife manifests itself of course in much more startling ways than that. She will up at any moment and start out at a few hours' notice on an automobile trip of several days, up into the mountains or across the desert, and serve her family with a succession of meals that the English mind cannot conceive as being born of the casualness of a picnic. Lovely it is to travel on the Ridge Route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, high among the blue mountains with sharp spiny ridges that lie up against each other like so many vast lizards; or to cross the Nevadan

desert and see the mirage change a peak as big as Ben Nevis to an island floating on a lake whose magic waters are drunk at their not-existing shore by horses never to be bridled by tangible riders. These are love-affairs with the American continent that are worth having; there are other, more extensive ones, that she has. American summer holidays are longer than ours and run, indeed, to a full three months.

Then the American housewife takes up her house and lifts it any distance up to a thousand or fifteen hundred miles. The Salt Lake City woman will take her family up to the far North West in Oregon. The Nebraska woman will find a summer home in the woods of Maine, in New England. There is a difference between these transcontinental leaps and our nervous August toddles to Newquay or Aldeburgh. And what is even more remarkable is the way that elderly people will leave the districts where they have lived all their lives and start over again in some strange place that has caught at their imagination. There is a town in southern California, Los Angeles, which is developing an enormous belt of suburbs that rather resemble one of our riverside towns like Maidenhead in their expanses of cheerful houses with flowery gardens. It is populated largely by retired farmers and their families from Iowa, which is in the Middle West. I cannot imagine a fashion springing up among Essex farmers for settling in the south of France or on the Italian Riviera; yet the distance is not more great.

They run up and down their continent, they run across it. They are wooing her beauty, they are seeking the adventures she gives them with both hands. It is in their blood. The history of their country is the history of that chase. Firstly there was the settlement of the East; then the more vigorous stocks pushed out for the Middle West. Then there was a double movement: of the gentler spirits who wanted to found an American culture, back to the East; of the bolder spirits, who wanted to extend the United States, out West. That adventurous spirit spills sometimes outside the cup; up to the gold-mines in the Klondike. It is a strong and beautiful thing, as lovely in its way as the English love of stability and a settled home.

I mean to go back to America again and again. I want to see more of these love-affairs between America and the American people.

THE DECLINE OF THE GRACES 1

Max Beerbohm

HAVE you read The Young Lady's Book? You have had plenty of time to do so, for it was published in 1829. It was described by the two anonymous Gentlewomen who compiled it as "A Manual for Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits." You wonder they had nothing better to think of? You suspect them of having been triflers? They were not, believe me. They were careful to explain, at the outset, that the Virtues of Character were what a young lady should most assiduously cultivate. They, in their day, laboring. under the shadow of the eighteenth century, had somehow in themselves that high moral fervour which marks the opening of the twentieth century, and is said to have come in with Mr. George Bernard Shaw. But, unlike us, they were not concerned wholly with the inward and spiritual side of life. They cared for the material surface, too. They were learned in the frills and furbelows of things. They gave, indeed, a whole chapter to "Embroidery." Another they gave to "Archery," another to "The Aviary," another to "The Escrutoire." Young ladies do not now keep birds, nor shoot with bow and arrow; but they do still, in some measure, write letters; and so, for sake of historical comparison, let me give you a glance at "The Escrutoire." It is not light reading.

"For careless scrawls ye boast of no pretence; Fair Russell wrote, as well as spoke, with sense." Thus is the chapter headed, with a delightful little woodengraving of "Fair Russell," looking preeminently sensible, at her desk, to prepare the reader for the imminent welter of rules for "decorous composition." Not that pedantry is approved. "Ease and simplicity, an even flow of unlabored

'From Yet Again. Copyright, Alfred A. Knopf & Co. Reprinted by permission.

diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious sentiments" is the ideal to be striven for. "A metaphor may be used with advantage" by any young lady, but only "if it occur naturally." And "allusions are elegant," but only "when introduced with ease, and when they are well understood by those to whom they are addressed.' “An antithesis renders a passage piquant;" but the dire results of a too-frequent indulgence in it are relentlessly set forth. Pages and pages are devoted to a minute survey of the pitfalls of punctuation. But when the young lady of that period had skirted all these, and had observed all the manifold rules of calligraphy that were here laid down for her, she was not, even then, out of the wood. Very special stress was laid on "the use of the seal." Bitter scorn was poured on young ladies who misused the seal. "It is a habit of some to thrust the wax into the flame of the candle, and the moment a morsel of it is melted, to daub it on the paper; and when an unsightly mass is gathered together, to pass the seal over the tongue with ridiculous haste-press it with all the strength which the sealing party possesses-and the result is, an impression which raises a blush on her cheek."

Well! The young ladies of that day were ever expected to exhibit sensibility, and used to blush, just as they wept or fainted, for very slight causes. Their tears and their swoons did not necessarily betoken much grief or agitation; nor did a rush of color to the cheek mean necessarily that they were overwhelmed with shame. To exhibit various emotions in the drawing-room was one of the Elegant Exercises in which these young ladies were drilled thoroughly. And their habit of simulation was so rooted in sense of duty that it merged into sincerity. If a young lady did not swoon at the breakfasttable when her Papa read aloud from The Times that the Duke of Wellington was suffering from a slight chill, the chances were that she would swoon quite unaffectedly when she realized her omission. Even so, we may be sure that a young lady whose cheek burned not at sight of the letter she had sealed untidily-"unworthily" the Manual calls itwould anon be blushing for her shamelessness. Such a thing as the blurring of the family crest, or as the pollution of the