a deep interest in what they call
"politics," and why he is so vaguely and generally proud of the country
that enables him to be so comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty
chalet, with smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry curtains,
hot and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby
crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose gently
hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August evening--how
can such a man despair of the Republic, or descend into the streets on
voting days and mix cheerfully with "the boys"?

No, it is the stranger--the homeless jackal of a stranger--whose
interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a
railway-ticket, that can run from Dan to Beersheba, crying:--"All is
barren!"

Every good American wants a home--a pretty house and a little piece of
land of his very own; and every other good American seems to get it.

It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling with this question
that I confirmed a discovery half made in the West. The natives of
most classes marry young--absurdly young. One of my informants--not the
twenty-two-year-old husband I met on Lake Chautauqua--said that from
twenty to twenty-four was about the usual time for this folly. And
when I asked whether the practice was confined to the constitutionally
improvident classes, he said "No" very quickly. He said it was a general
custom, and nobody saw anything wrong with it.

"I guess, perhaps, very early marriage may account for a good deal of
the divorce," said he, reflectively.

Whereat I was silent. Their marriages and their divorces only concern
these people; and neither I travelling, nor you, who may come after,
have any right to make rude remarks about them. Only--only coming from
a land where a man begins to lightly turn to thoughts of love not before
he is thirty, I own that playing at house-keeping before that age rather
surprised me. Out in the West, though, they marry, boys and girls, from
sixteen upward, and I have met more than one bride of fifteen--husband
aged twenty.

"When man and woman are agreed, what can the Kazi do?"

From those peaceful homes, and the envy they inspire (two trunks and
a walking-stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia are not
satisfactory, any way you look at them), I turned me to the lake front
of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain elevators, and the
locomotives yell to the coal-shutes, and the