usted with my wearing myself out in such a manner, but I said, "I
am so grateful to them for _caring_, after the indifference of all
these other self-sufficient countries, that I am willing to sacrifice
myself at it if necessary."

We never realized how little we knew about America until we discovered
the Russian capacity for asking unexpected questions. I bought an
American history in Russia, and sat up nights trying to remember what
my father had tried to instil into my sieve-like brain. After a week
of witnessing my feverish enthusiasm, even my companion's dormant
national pride was roused. She, too, was ashamed to say, "I don't
know," when they asked us these terrible questions. When we get into
the clutches of a party of women we trust to luck that they cannot
remember our statistics long enough to tell their husbands and
brothers (I have a horror of men's accuracy in figures), and we calmly
guess at the answers when our exact knowledge gives out.

One night they attacked my companion on the school question. Now, she
does not know one solitary thing about the public-school system, but,
to my utter amazement, I heard her giving the number of children
between the ages of eight and ten who were in the public schools in
the State of Illinois, and then running them off by counties. I was
afraid she would soon begin to call the roll of their names from
memory, so I rescued her and took her home. I suppose we must have an
air of intelligence which successfully masks our colossal ignorance of
occult facts and defunct dates, because they rely on us to inform them
off-hand concerning everything social, political, historical, sacred
and profane, spirituous and spiritual, from the protoplasm of the
cliff-dwellers to the details of the Dingley bill, not skipping
accurate information on the process of whiskey-making in Kentucky, a
crocodile-hunt in Florida, suffrage in Wyoming, a lynching-bee in
Texas, polygamy in Utah, prune-drying in California, divorces in
Dakota, gold-mining in Colorado, cotton-spinning in Georgia,
tobacco-raising in Alabama, marble-quarrying in Tennessee, the number
of Quakers in Philadelphia, one's sensations while being scalped by
Sioux, how marriages are arranged, what a man says when he proposes,
the details of a camp-meeting, a description of a negro baptism, and
the main arguments on the silver question.

They get some curious ideas in their heads concerning us, but they are
so amazingly well infor