ose salt through constant iteration. They
breathed heavily through their noses, and stared straight in front of
them--impassive as flat fish.

VII. AMERICA'S DEFENCELESS COASTS

JUST suppose that America were twenty days distant from England. Then a
man could study its customs with undivided soul; but being so very
near next door, he goes about the land with one eye on the smoke of the
flesh-pots of the old country across the seas, while with the other he
squints biliously and prejudicially at the alien.

I can lay my hand upon my sacred heart and affirm that up to to-day I
have never taken three consecutive trips by rail without being delayed
by an accident. That it was an accident to another train makes no
difference. My own turn may come next.

A few miles from peaceful, pleasure-loving Lakewood they had managed to
upset an express goods train to the detriment of the flimsy permanent
way; and thus the train which should have left at three departed at
seven in the evening. I was not angry. I was scarcely even interested.
When an American train starts on time I begin to anticipate disaster--a
visitation for such good luck, you understand.

Buffalo is a large village of a quarter of a million inhabitants,
situated on the seashore, which is falsely called Lake Erie. It is a
peaceful place, and more like an English county town than most of its
friends.

Once clear of the main business streets, you launch upon miles and miles
of asphalted roads running between cottages and cut-stone residences of
those who have money and peace. All the Eastern cities own this fringe
of elegance, but except in Chicago nowhere is the fringe deeper or more
heavily widened than in Buffalo.

The American will go to a bad place because he cannot speak English,
and is proud of it; but he knows how to make a home for himself and his
mate, knows how to keep the grass green in front of his veranda, and how
to fullest use the mechanism of life--hot water, gas, good bell-ropes,
telephones, etc. His shops sell him delightful household fitments
at very moderate rates, and he is encompassed with all manner of
labor-saving appliances. This does not prevent his wife and his daughter
working themselves to death over household drudgery; but the intention
is good.

When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these homes
and the insides of a few score, you begin to understand why the American
(the respectable one) does not take