no doubt about the confusion of tongues. But in truth the very
reverse is true of most of the buildings in America. I had no sooner
passed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than I
began to see something else quite contrary and far more curious. I saw
forests upon forests of small houses stretching away to the horizon as
literal forests do; villages and towns and cities. And they were, in
another sense, literally like forests. They were all made of wood. It
was almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had been all made
of cardboard. I had long outlived the silly old joke that referred to
Americans as if they all lived in the backwoods. But, in a sense, if
they do not live in the woods, they are not yet out of the wood.

I do not say this in any sense as a criticism. As it happens, I am
particularly fond of wood. Of all the superstitions which our fathers
took lightly enough to love, the most natural seems to me the notion it
is lucky to touch wood. Some of them affect me the less as
superstitions, because I feel them as symbols. If humanity had really
thought Friday unlucky it would have talked about bad Friday instead of
good Friday. And while I feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, I am
not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates to fill the
places of the Twelve Apostles. But the idea that there was something
cleansing or wholesome about the touching of wood seems to me one of
those ideas which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic. It
is probable enough that the conception came originally from the healing
of the wood of the Cross; but that only clinches the divine coincidence.
It is like that other divine coincidence that the Victim was a
carpenter, who might almost have made His own cross. Whether we take the
mystical or the mythical explanation, there is obviously a very deep
connection between the human working in wood and such plain and pathetic
mysticism. It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to
the tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy. In the same fashion
a child fancies that mysterious and sinister horse, which was the
downfall of Troy, as something plain and staring, and perhaps spotted,
like his own rocking-horse in the nursery.

It might be said symbolically that Americans have a taste for
rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste for rocking-chairs. A
flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so