e cosmopolitans. But very often the exiles bring with
them not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths.

Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these strange souls in
crude American garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of New York.
In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian;
and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have already
protested sufficiently, before American audiences, against the pedantry
of perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested to my American
friends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian in its historical
sense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We might
be expected to say, 'I'm afraid Henry has got into very Czecho-Slovakian
habits lately,' or 'Don't bother to dress; it's quite a Czecho-Slovakian
affair.' Anyhow my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense;
he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as such in his criticisms
of America, which were both favourable and unfavourable. He was a squat
man, with a sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were like
dark pools in the depth of a darker forest, but I do not think he had
ever been deceived by the lights of Broadway.

But I found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasant
among the sky-signs, in another part of the same establishment. He was a
much leaner man, equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce
black moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the costume of a
waiter, which is a smarter edition of the costume of a lecturer. As he
was serving me with clam chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech
with him and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like, 'I'm
afraid I don't know as much as I ought to about Bulgaria. I suppose most
of your people are agricultural, aren't they?' He did not stir an inch
from his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice and
said, 'Yes. From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when
people get away from that they are lost.'

To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an epoch in the life
of an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. To see him clear away the
clam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an
automaton or like nothing on earth except an American waiter (for piling
up ice is the cold passion of their lives), and all this after having
uttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so