Americas. Within the Federal boundary lies British Massachusetts, where live Americans; Spanish New Mexico and California, where live Americans; Teutonic, Slavic, and Scandinavian Middle West, where live Americans. The son of the Polish Jew on First Avenue is an American; the son of the Alabama negro is an American. The son of the Pilgrims at Cape Cod is an American. My desire is to find out what unites these varied people, what keeps them together where no man pursueth, what views are held on one ocean, yet not denied on the other. Briefly, I want to effect a synthesis of the American mentality; to arrive at such a clarity as will enable me to say, "This is an American idea" with as much assurance as I now say, "This is an English idea." Now, this cannot be done by coursing between railway stations. A man's knowledge is not measured by the miles he travels. In this case I feel that all I can do is to select a few patches of America-viz., New England, New York, Chicago, a farm in Kansas, a fruit ranch in California, an oil well in Oklahoma, a Pennsylvania mansion, and to cancel those traits which do not appear in all of them. The tendencies, the ideas which recur everywhere will indicate (as nearly as human vanity can tolerate truth) the main lines of the American cosmos. Briefly, I want to co-ordinate impressions, and then to suggest that these co-ordinations make up the picture. That is why I stand in Nashua, interested in two old Colonial houses whose shallow verandas rest on slender pillars; I cannot see through the prudent lace of the curtains, and yet I must learn to see, if ever I am to understand this American people, of which I can say already that it finds no rival to its charm, except its strangeness.

AN AMERICAN UNDER A TREE

found a man lying on the grass under a tree. He was neither smoking nor sleeping nor reading. He merely lay under a tree, presumably thinking. You will gauge the effect upon me of the three days in New York and the four in New England which prefaced this incident, when I tell you that I found it amazing that an American should lie under a tree doing nothing. I had been going about for a week, and while in England you will everywhere behold people doing nothing (and doing it with great intensity), in America this sad spectacle is very rare. For a moment I wondered if the man were dead. That would be one explanation. Or he might be English, which would be another explanation But he hailed me to ask the time, in a language that is fast growing familiar. No, the idle man was American. There is no explanation; so I enter him here. as the exception which proves the rule, that Americans are always active because they are invariably vital.

Few Americans conceive the effect of their vitality upon the English writer who meditated in Nashua. At first America was awful. It was like being posted: I was bagged by the pier officials, stamped by the customs, sorted by porters, rebagged by a taxi, restamped by the reception clerk, and at incredible speed delivered into a bedroom through something that looked like a mine shaft. And the Elevated roared, the locomotives rang their bells, the trolley cars and the omnibuses rang something else. And when I tried to be funny because my room number was 1921, and (forgetting the date) said, "That's handy to remember; same number as the year," the porter reproved me with: "No, not this year. Next year.". Even y bedroom was a year ahead of the period! I realized that I really was in America.

It isn't as bas that in Nashua, even though possesses factories. But re is activity; things are ched; their owners tele

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phone; women think of careers; young men buy automobiles, and people walk with decision as if they were busier in Nashua than we in London town. I am smitten by the restlessness, the enthusiasm, the passion for improvisation of this amazing America; I realize vaguely all sorts of new qualities that contradict one another-warm heart and cool mind, audacity and prudence, organization and makeshift., I feel an America so ruthless that she will strip me of my shirt; a. nerira kindly that she will give

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important dish of one's own period. I began with New England so as to resist the overwhelming pull of New York, and I began badly, on the following lines of Whittier:

Oh! may never a son of thine,
Where'er his wandering steps incline,
Forget the sky which bent above
His childhood, like a dream of love,
Or hear unmoved the taunt of scorn
Breathed o'er the brave New England born.

As I dislike poetry-which impresses me as the coward's escape from the difficulties of prose through the back door of melody-I cannot say whether this is one of the couplets that should never have been rhymed; but I objected to its rhapsodic air. Also, several New-Englanders at once assured me that their childhood was not overhung by a dream of love. But though they were all sober people, who evoked the gentler side of the Scottish temperament, they did set up for me another picture, which I venture to call "The Hypnosis of History," of "The Legend of New England." Subsequently, a few New-Yorkers and Westerners showed that they had accepted the legend.

You may ask what I mean by the "hypnosis" of history. One might answer in a sentence that the educated American is infinitely more conscious of his national origins than is the denizen of any other part of the world. The past of his country acts as the shadow of his present and the danger signal of his future. For instance, where an American can trace back his pedigree several generations he will almost invariably reveal the fact to his English guest-exhibit the crest on his signet ring, the arms on a piece of old plate, and dilate a little sentimentally on the virtues and sufferings of his forebears. One strand in the psychology of this impulse is undoubtedly to make the English visitor feel at home among heirs of an identical tradition; the other and more important strand is the romantic reverence the American feels for the pioneers. Am

ica knows three main sources of romance love, business, and the pioneer.

Thus, the American gives relief to traditions that his English cousin assumes or to which he is indifferent until they are attacked; in the matter of descent he is not cynical, and seldom holds the French point of view-that it may be as well if one doesn't know one's great-grandfathers, as one of the four would be bound to be disreputable. Indeed, the pedigreed American, call himself a democrat if he likes, knows and cares much more about the ancient local families than does the Englishman. As a rule, he knows his local history, he entreats you not to miss Emerson's house at Concord, describes the contents of the Salem East India Museum, and knows the casualties at the Lexington riot. Lexington riot. Almost invariably he forgets the South, and seldom has a memory for the pioneers who were wiped out at Jamestown; the Mayflower and its cargo of prayer books and plowshares serve him as the mythology that all men must create who would capture illusion.

It is mythology! I listen, and all about me, in the hotel, youthful Americans, big sophomores and boyish plebes, fluffy girls and young matrons, play golf, tennis, croquet; ride, bathe, paddle canoes, dance, drive automobiles, airplanes; but also declare that So-and-so is on the pig's back, while Millicent knows how to hand out the dope. I listen to the friend who describes the record where it is stated that John Robinson . . . and wonder what it is preserves the capacity to nurture the belief that New England still exists. New England does not seem to me to exist, save in the shape of a Newer England that the romantics do not perceive.

It was in Salem that I asked myself what it was supported the legend of New England; wha mosses held together the roof of the manse. T's does not runt Jroject an att on New la' but i must br lisnmar cannot

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