ish on you. I don't want to seem pessimistic,
but I have seen hundreds of boys graduate from college and go over with
the same idea, and they didn't bring back a great deal except a few
trunks of badly fitting clothes. Seeing the world is like charity--it
covers a multitude of sins, and, like charity, it ought to begin at
home.

Culture is not a matter of a change of climate. You'll hear more about
Browning to the square foot in the Mississippi Valley than you will in
England. And there's as much Art talk on the Lake front as in the Latin
Quarter. It may be a little different, but it's there.

I went to Europe once myself. I was pretty raw when I left Chicago, and
I was pretty sore when I got back. Coming and going I was simply sick.
In London, for the first time in my life, I was taken for an easy
thing. Every time I went into a store there was a bull movement. The
clerks all knocked off their regular work and started in to mark up
prices.

They used to tell me that they didn't have any gold-brick men over
there. So they don't. They deal in pictures--old masters, they call
them. I bought two--you know the ones--those hanging in the waiting-room
at the stock yards; and when I got back I found out that they had been
painted by a measly little fellow who went to Paris to study art, after
Bill Harris had found out that he was no good as a settling clerk. I
keep 'em to remind myself that there's no fool like an old American fool
when he gets this picture paresis.

The fellow who tried to fit me out with a coat-of-arms didn't find me so
easy. I picked mine when I first went into business for myself--a
charging steer--and it's registered at Washington. It's my trade-mark,
of course, and that's the only coat-of-arms an American merchant has any
business with. It's penetrated to every quarter of the globe in the last
twenty years, and every soldier in the world has carried it--in his
knapsack.

I take just as much pride in it as the fellow who inherits his and can't
find any place to put it, except on his carriage door and his
letter-head--and it's a heap more profitable. It's got so now that every
jobber in the trade knows that it stands for good quality, and that's
all any Englishman's coat-of-arms can stand for. Of course, an
American's can't stand for anything much--generally it's the
burned-in-the-skin brand of a snob.

After the way some of the descendants of the old New York Dutchmen with
the hoe and the English