to entertain, to
make you laugh by the recital of comical truths; so without system I am
going to tell you of these Americans as I found them, day by day, month
by month, officially, socially; in their homes, in politics, trade,
sorrow, despair, and in their pleasures.

You will remember when the Evil Spirit is asked by the modest Spirit of
Good to indicate his possessions he tucks the earth under one arm,
drops the sun into one pocket, the moon into another, and the stars into
the folds of his garment. In a word, to use the saying of my friends, he
"claims everything in sight"; and this is certainly a characteristic of
the American: he is all-perspective, he claims to have all the virtues,
and in his ancestry embraces the entire world. At a dinner at the ----
in Washington during the egg stage of my experience I sat next to a
charming lady; and having been told that it was a custom of the French
to compliment women, I remarked that her cheeks bloomed like our poppy
of the Orient. She laughed, and responded, "Yes, I get that from my
English grandfather." "But your eyes are like black pearls," I
continued, seeing that I was on what a general on my right called the
"right trail." "I got them from my Italian grandmother," she replied.
"And your hair?" I pressed. "Must be Irish," was the answer, "for my
paternal grandmother was Irish and her husband Scotch." It is true that
this charmingly beautiful and composite goddess (at least she would have
been one had she not been naked like a geisha at a men's dinner) was the
product of a dozen nations, and a typical American.

The original Americans appear to have been English, despite the fact
that the Spaniards discovered the country, though a high official, a
Yankee whom I met at a reception, told me that this was untrue. His
ancestor had discovered North America, and I believe he had written a
book to prove it. (_En passant_, all Americans write books; those who
have not, fully intend to write one.) I listened complacently, then
said, "My dear ----, if I am not mistaken the Chinese discovered
America." I recalled the fact to his mind that the northwestern Eskimos
and the Indians were essentially Asiatic in type; and it is true that he
had never heard of the ethnologic map at his National Museum, which
shows the location of Chinese junks blown to American shores within a
period of three hundred years. I explained that junks had been blown
over to America for the last _three th