lt up English houses, which otherwise threatened to fall into
decay. Then the American faculty of adaptability came into play.
Anglo-American wives became sometimes more English than their husbands.
They proceeded to Anglicise their relations, their relations' clothes,
even, in time, their speech. They carried or sent English conventions to
the States, their brothers ordered their clothes from West End tailors,
their sisters began to wear walking dresses, to play out-of-door games
and take active exercise. Their mothers tentatively took houses in
London or Paris, there came a period when their fathers or uncles,
serious or anxious business men, the most unsporting of human beings,
rented castles or manors with huge moors and covers attached and
entertained large parties of shooters or fishers who could be lured to
any quarter by the promise of the particular form of slaughter for which
they burned.

"Sheer American business perspicacity, that," said Salter, as he marched
up and down, thinking of a particular case of this order. "There's
something admirable in the practical way they make for what they want.
They want to amalgamate with English people, not for their own sake,
but because their women like it, and so they offer the men thousands of
acres full of things to kill. They can get them by paying for them,
and they know how to pay." He laughed a little, lifting his square
shoulders. "Balthamor's six thousand acres of grouse moor and Elsty's
salmon fishing are rented by the Chicago man. He doesn't care twopence
for them, and does not know a pheasant from a caper-cailzie, but his
wife wants to know men who do."

It must be confessed that Salter was of the English who were not pleased
with the American Invasion. In some of his views of the matter he was a
little prehistoric and savage, but the modern side of his character
was too intelligent to lack reason. He was by no means entirely modern,
however; a large part of his nature belonged to the age in which men
had fought fiercely for what they wanted to get or keep, and when the
amenities of commerce had not become powerful factors in existence.

"They're not a bad lot," he was thinking at this moment. "They are
rather fine in a way. They are clever and powerful and interesting--more
so than they know themselves. But it is all commerce. They don't come
and fight with us and get possession of us by force. They come and
buy us. They buy our land and our homes, and our