uld
at Queenstown, or as I would at Boston with an American. Their faces did
not arraign me, but they forbade me. It was very curious, and I may have
misread them."

"Oh, probably not," we lightly mocked. "They were taking it out of you
for ages of English oppression; they were making you stand for the Black
Cromwell."

"Oh, very likely," our friend said, in acceptance of our irony, because
he liked irony so much. "But, all the same, I thought it a pity, as I
think it a pity when I meet a surly Italian here, who at home would be
so sweet and gentle. It is somehow our own fault. We have spoiled them
by our rudeness; they think it is American to be as rude as the
Americans. They mistake our incivility for our liberty."

"There is something in what you say," we agreed, "if you will allow us
to be serious. They are here in our large, free air, without the
parasites that kept them in bounds in their own original habitat. We
must invent some sort of culture which shall be constructive and not
destructive, and will supply the eventual good without the provisional
evil."

"Then we must go a great way back, and begin with our grandfathers, with
the ancestors who freed us from Great Britain, but did not free
themselves from the illusion that equality resides in incivility and
honesty in bluntness. That was something they transmitted to us intact,
so that we are now not only the best-hearted but the worst-mannered of
mankind. If our habitual carriage were not rubber-tired by irony, we
should be an intolerable offence, if not to the rest of the world, at
least to ourselves. By-the-way, since I came back I have been reading a
curious old book by James Fenimore Cooper, which I understand made a
great stir in its day. Do you know it?--_Home as Found?_"

"We know it as one may know a book which one has not read. It pretty
nearly made an end of James Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His
fellow-countrymen fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn't take so kindly
to criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely tickles the fat
on our ribs, and we respond with the ironic laughter you profess to like
so much. What is the drift of the book besides the general censure?"

"Oh, it is the plain, dull tale of an American family returning home
after a long sojourn in Europe so high-bred that you want to kill them,
and so superior to their home-keeping countrymen that, vulgarity for
vulgarity, you much prefer the vulgarity of the Americans wh