ntative of a leading American paper before I left the
shores of England. I was told that I would find the most charming and
best-dressed women in the world. That promise is more than realised.

[Illustration: "SANDY."]

"I find New York as bright as Paris, as busy as London, as interesting
as Rome, and, in fact, I am so delighted and bewildered with everybody
and everything that, like the old lady's parrot, I don't say much, but I
think a deal; and now my difficulty is to convey those thoughts to the
public through the medium of your valuable papers."

Scores of Columbuses arrive at Sandy Hook every week to discover America
for themselves, from Charles Columbus Dickens to Rudyard Columbus
Kipling, to say nothing of Tom, Dick, Harry Columbus Brown, Jones,
Robinson. It is hardly fair to say that they go over with their pockets
full of letters of introduction to their American cousins, who receive
them with open arms and unlimited hospitality, and then that these Toms,
Dicks, and Harrys bring back in exchange notes for columns of ridicule
and abuse of their Transatlantic friends. If our Americans _have_ a
fault, it is a very slight one. They are too sensitive. They seem to
forget that they receive and honour some of our countrymen as critics
and satirists, but they expect that on leaving their shores their late
guests will wash off the critical and satirical sides of their natures
just as an actor removes his paint and make-up on leaving the boards.

Americans, both publicly and privately, are incessantly interviewing the
stranger: "What do you think of our great country? What do you think of
ourselves?" They live in a glass house filled with forced young plants,
from out of which house they may throw stones at the stranger, but woe
betide the critic who has the temerity to cast one in return. He gets
his impressions from the hothouse society snobs reared in the hotels of
the cities, the dollar worshipper, the vulgar millionaire, made more
obnoxious by the newer European importation, happily a plant not true to
the American soil. We strangers too often see but the cut flowers,
showy, glaring, to-day; jaded, gone to-morrow. We do not see the
cultured orchid or the natural wild flowers of America, for the simple
reason we do not look for them in seeing that wonderful country in a
hurry.

My first impression of New York was that of a faded back-cloth in a
melodrama; but when you get upon the stage, or, in other words, int