ly
fortunate in the glimpses I have obtained of American home life, or else
there is something amiss with my friend's generalisation. Perhaps he
brought away with him from England in the early seventies a conception
of the "patria potestas" which he would now find out of date there as
well as here. No doubt the migratory habit is stronger in America than
in England, and family life is not apt to flourish in hotels or
boarding-houses. The Saratoga trunk is not the best cornerstone for the
home: so much we may take for granted. But the American families who are
content to go through life without a threshold and hearthstone of their
own must, after all, be in a vanishing minority. They very naturally cut
a larger figure in fiction than in fact. It has been my privilege to see
something of the daily life of a good many families living under their
own roof-tree, and in every case without exception I have been struck
with the beauty and intimacy of the relation between parents and
children. When my friend laid down his theory of the intractable
American boy, I could not but think of a youth of twenty whom I had seen
only two days before, whose manner towards his father struck me as an
ideal blending of affectionate comradeship with old-fashioned
respect.[E] True, this was in Philadelphia, "the City of Homes," and
even there it may have been an exceptional case. I am not so illogical
as to pit a single observation against (presumably) a wide induction; I
merely offer for what it is worth one item of evidence.

Again, it has been my good fortune here in New York to spend an evening
in a household which suggested a chapter of Dickens in his tenderest and
most idyllic mood. It was the home of an actor and actress. Two
daughters, of about eighteen and twenty, respectively, are on the stage,
acting in their father's company; but the master of the house is a
bright little boy of seven or eight, known as "the Commodore." As it
happened, the mother of the family was away for the day; yet in the
hundred affectionate references made to her by the father and daughters,
not to me, but to each other, I read her character and influence more
clearly, perhaps, than if she had been present in the flesh. A more
simple, natural, unaffectedly beautiful "interior" no novelist could
conceive. If the family tie is seriously relaxed in America, it seems an
odd coincidence that I should in a single month have chanced upon two
households where it is se