I

"The girl at the desk in the hotel gave me your name," she replied. made no comment on the doubtfulness of her statement, nor on the obvious fact that the hotel in question was far away in another part of the city, with many churches between. There were several points in her story which seemed a bit out of harmony, and besides I had an ill-defined suspicion that the woman had been drinking, though I could find no real signs to support it.

I excused myself for a moment and went in the next room to my telephone. Carefully closing the door, I called up the hotel where she was supposed to

I

further questioning, only to find the room deserted and the door ajar. Evidently some bits of my telephone conversation had filtered through.

The amusing part of it came later when I was chatting informally one day with two or three others of the clergy. During the conversation I casually mentioned the incident.

ing to leave town for my summer 11⁄2cation. She told precisely the same story, and I was suspicions, just as you were. I also used the telephone, but when I found her registered at cheap hotel I didn't stop to go further, as I was in a hurry to catch my train She got two dollars out of me."

And a very human sense of mor enveloped that little group of the clergy.

Whether this woman went further with her attempts on the ministry I do not know. There are those whɔ make a business of it. I have known men detected in false representations in my home to go directly across the street to the home of a minister of a neighboring church and make another trial of their luck. The labor some

I repeated it.

lars would earn them a comfortable living in any legitimate field of work.

game of deception which gives added

too?"

He laughed heartily. "She came to me one evening just as I was prepar

T is, as I have said before, thirtythree years since I first visited America, and I have been trying to recollect what I thought of it then and what changes I have noticed since 1887. Never having kept a diary, I must rely on a memory which at times is apt to be treacherous.

I know I crossed in the Alaska, which was then known as the "Greyhound of the Atlantic." I left Liverpool in Christmas week and the "Greyhound" took some twelve days of stormy weather before it entered New York Harbor. In those days ships were not well ventilated, and were lit with oil lamps, which not only smelled abominably, but when the ship rolled one way they rolled the other. These circumstances did not promote a healthy appetite, and I was looking forward to my first meal ashore, little knowing what was ahead of me. I took refuge in the Windsor Hotel, which was then fairly uptown on Fifth Avenue, and was burned down, I understand, many years ago. I have vivid memories of the man who took your hat outside the dining-room door. In those days, so it seems to my memory, everybody wore top-hats, and the hat-keeper prided himself on handing back to the wearer the right hat, which was in no way "checked."

There was an old story of a diner, who received back what he took to be

the wrong hat, saying to the attendant, "That's not my hat." The attendant replied, "Don't know whether it's your hat or not; it's the hat you give me." Having got rid of one's hat, one was shown into a large dining-room where many hundreds of eaters were eating in deathly silence. I was set at a table of some fourteen fellow-guests, and each of us was surrounded by some dozen or more little dishes, rather like soapdishes. These severally contained portions of each item on the menu. Nothing would induce the waiter to serve the courses in sequence. Everything must be brought in at once and dumped before you on a tray, and while the hot things grew cold the ice-cream grew warm. When one reached it, one felt inclined to exclaim with Disraeli under similar circumstances, "Thank God, there's something hot at last!" The meal was certainly depressing, but it was before the time of prohibition, and I gathered that the male portion of the guests, after it was over, restored their spirits by recourse to the bar.

Thirty-three years ago most of the hotels, though by no means all, were run upon the American system, and except during certain stated hours one could get nothing whatever to eat, a highly inconvenient arrangement if one had come off a long journey just "after hours." The changes between

THE

the American hotel of the late eighties and those gilded palaces of the present day are as marked as anything in American life. Delmonico's was then the fashionable restaurant, and I well remember seeing there a gentleman who, having performed some slight service to the proprietors, was given a free dinner any night he chose to claim it, at a table specially reserved for himself alone. Since those days Sherry's has risen and collapsed; a few years ago one would readily expect it to have outlived Delmonico's. Its premises at present are an example of the latest word in business offices.

Central Park was then a favorite resort, but I have no recollection of the American Museum of Natural History, nor of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art. The elevated railway was there, supplemented by curiously slow horse cars, but there was no subway. At the present time the state of crowding in New York is so appalling that one is inclined to think that Professor Langley's prophecy will prove true, and that the leading business men will arrive downtown in airplanes. Some weeks ago two friends of mine flew down from the neighborhood of West Point to the city in a few minutes over half an hour. Business men are living at increase! distances from their offices. Thous of them have to leave home befor past seven to be in the city t

o'clock, and they take another hour and a half in returning; eighteen hours of the week, or two working days, spent in the train! Of course this hardly seems an economy of time, but very likely it is rendered imperative by the conditions of modern American life.

I think Mr. Pullman's attention should be drawn to his cars. I cannot recollect that they have very greatly improved in comfort since my first visit, except that they are now lit by electricity. I feel quite confident that the genius of the American people could devise something a great deal better than the existing cars. They are ill ventilated, and the conditions of life in them are too rigid. There is no provision for the unusual or the unexpected. I have known a European hatbox upset the comfort of the whole carful of people. The berths, when you once get in them, are not uncomfortable, and, although you lie down with the firm conviction that you will never get to sleep, you are very soon asphyxiated by the atmosphere of the car, and, as a matter of fact, if you are lucky enough to secure a lower berth, you generally sleep uncommonly well. The upper berth is not so comfortable, though when somebody remarked this to a German traveler he replied, "My wife has not comblained." I think Americans are the most patient people. They put up without grumbling with inconveniences which would drive the European to blasphemy. Overheating of the cars and hotels causes as much trouble to the European as the underheating of similar institutions in Europe causes American travelers, and it is no use complaining to the colored gentleman who regulates the temperature. The last time I complained of the heat he replied, definitely and finally, "Wall, it suits me."

America is so large and its population so numerous that the war has left but

little superficial mark on the country. Paper, however, has markedly deteriorated, and I doubt if their newspapers filed in their libraries will survive for long the effects of time. The paper they are printed on is certainly inferior to that which obtains in Great Britain, and is far less inflammable. The small print of the paper is also trying for "tired eyes." The postage-stamps have deteriorated as much as our own, and, like our own, are backed by a "mucilage" which is anything but adhesive.

It is quite impossible to write of the innumerable institutions and buildings set apart for bettering the lot of suffering humanity. Not being hidebound by traditions, Americans love new experiments. Many of these are successful, and in the bigger cities their

nitals and clinics are superior in

number and equipment to those of Europe. In the more modern of these the students, dressers, and house surgeons wear suits of spotless white. After all, if the nurses are expected to wear uniforms, why should not the other helpers in the good work?

"The material installation," as Mat thew Arnold called it, of their schools leaves nothing to be desired, but the teachers are underpaid and are increasingly difficult to obtain. The problem of educating the millions of children of varied birth is perhaps the biggest problem before the American people. One feature struck me in the schools, and it also struck me in the hotels and in private houses, and that is the avoidance of sunlight. A well-conducted window in America must have lace curtains drawn across it, and two blinds, one brown and one green, pulled accurately half-way down. Even in the great country houses, where no could look in, and no one look without seeing spacious lawns and flower-beds, the curtains are closed and the blinds are drawn half-way down. Living in them is like living in the house of an owner who is half dead.

one

out

The electric light is all the time turned on full. Even in the hotels if you leave your room for half an hour, having raised your blinds, you will find them carefully drawn down again on returning. The large number of folks

clerks in offices, workers in factories, attendants on elevators, bellboys and hotel clerks-who live their life in artificial light forms a large percentage of the population, and this absence of outdoor life may account to some extent for the pallid and sallow complexion of those who have to endure it. It certainly cannot be healthy. "Dové va il sole non va il medico."

Another feature cannot fail to strike the visitor from Europe. Very crowded as are the great cities of that Continent, the overcrowding in America Fabulous even more acute.

seems

are

prices are paid for small flats in New York; on the railways the cars always full. The higher the rates are, the more folks seem to travel. People have money now who never had money before. Profiteers or, as the Chinamen call them, "those who have grown prematurely rich owing to the disorders of their country," are constantly moving about, and make themselves felt, not only by their ostentatious wealth, but by their lack of certain conventions which alone make travel tolerable.

The crowd on the subways and on many of the elevators in the big business buildings is terrible. As more and more passengers force their way in, each gradually becomes hexagonal in cross-section from neutral pressure. Such overcrowded conveyances are a fruitful source of infection, and probably account for the widely and rapidly spread epidemic of influenza which devastated the States two years ago.

A while ago I published a little book on a tour I made in America during war time. I dedicated it "To the kindest people in the world," and I put the dedication in Latin to spare their blushes. Should I write another work of the same kind, I think I should dedicate it "To the most goodnatured, tolerant, and patient people in the world." Although as the election grew imminent interest in it became keen and discussion eager, still I only once heard an acute disagreement between the supporters of the rival candidates, and this was between a husband and wife. It seemed based upon a fundamental difference of opinion on that most innocuous and unexciting fluid, milk.

As a rule the discussions were most amicable, and usually finished up, after the method of Lincoln, in a joke or a story. Their toleration equals their humor. good They bear patiently every variety of religious dogma; these are almost as numerous in the United States as are patent medicines. They quietly endure and ignore the most infernal noises. Owing to the enormous distances one has to traverse in the States, one spends a considerable part of one's time on the train, and it is this reason which possibly accounts for the fact that Americans persist in talking on the cars. Mr. Lucas has recently reminded us that Carlyle bequeathed certain books to Harvard University because of his esteem and regard for the American people "particularly more silent part of them." The latter exist not only in the imagination of the Chelsea philosopher. They are perhaps not very numerous, still they exist.

the

The habit in their great cities of pulling down huge and commodious buildings which seem to the stranger in the first blossom of youth and replacing them by still huger structures is accompanied by an amount of interference with the traffic which is almost incredible. Clouds of fine dust and the closing of the sidewalk are accompanied by the most appalling clang and clatter. Owing to the habit they have acquired of putting up a steel skeleton which is riveted together on the spot, one feels as though ship-building docks have been transferred to the sidewalks. Nobody seems to mind, and indeed noAt first one body takes any notice.

is a little shy of asking for help or guidance, for the Americans cultivate the type of "the strong silent man" familiar to us in the drama; but once you get over a certain shyness and approach them, they are kindness itself, taking infinite trouble to put you on your way, even at considerable inconvenience to themselves. Of the hospitality one received in the United States it is difficult to speak. It is not only the hospitality of the heart, but of the brain. The inhabitants seem to be always trying to think out how they can give you a really good time.