nt in diplomacy by journalism.

Across the river lies Battery, even more remote from the world of greed
and competition than Portsmouth. Here at last you discover what so often
eludes you in America--the real countryside. The rough pleasant roads
like English lanes, the beautiful wooden houses half hidden amid
towering trees, and the gardens (or yards as they are called) not
trim, like our English gardens, but of an unkempt beauty all their
own,--these, with the memory of a gracious hospitality, will never fade
from my mind. At Kittery, as at Portsmouth, you live in the past.
There is nothing save an electric trolley and the motor engines of the
fishing-boats to recall the bustle of to-day. Here is Fort M'Clary,
a block-house built two centuries ago to stay the incursion of the
Indians. There is the house of Pepperell, the hero of Louis-burg. Thus,
rich in old associations, happy in its present seclusion, Kittery has a
kind of personal charm, which is intensified by an obvious and striking
contrast.

It was from Newport that I went to Kittery, and passed in a few hours
from the modern to the ancient world. Not even New York gives a more
vivid impression of the inappropriateness which is America's besetting
sin, than Newport, whose gay inhabitants are determined, at all costs,
to put themselves at variance with time and place. The mansions, called
"cottages" in proud humility, are entirely out of proportion to
their site and purpose. On the one hand you see a house as large as
Chatsworth, bleak and treeless, with nothing to separate it from its
ambitious neighbours but a wooden palisade. It suggests nothing so much
as that it has lost its park, and mislaid its lodges. On the other, you
see a massive pile, whose castellated summit resembles nothing else than
a county jail. And nowhere is there a possibility of ambush, nowhere a
frail hint of secrecy. The people of Newport, moreover, is resolved to
live up to its inappropriate environment. As it rejoices in the wrong
kind of house, so it delights in the wrong sort of costume. The vain
luxury of the place is expressed in a thousand strange antics. A new
excitement is added to seabathing by the ladies, who face the waves in
all the bravery of Parisian hats. To return unsullied from the encounter
is a proof of the highest skill. Is it not better to preserve a
deftly-poised hat from the mere contact of the waves than to be a
tireless and intrepid swimmer?

Newport, in fact,