o have not
been away. The author's unconsciousness of the vulgarity of his
exemplary people is not the only amusing thing in the book. They arrive
for a short stay in New York before they go to their country-seat
somewhere up the State, and the sketches of New York society as it was
in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century are certainly
delightful: society was then so exactly like what it is now in spirit.
Of course, it was very provincial, but society is always and everywhere
provincial. One thing about it then was different from what it is now: I
mean the attitude of the stay-at-homes toward the been-abroads. They
revered them and deferred to them, and they called them Hajii, or
travellers, in a cant which must have been very common, since George
William Curtis used the same Oriental term for his _Howadji in Syria_
and his _Nile Notes of a Howadji_."

"We must read it," we said, with the readiness of one who never intends
to read the book referred to. "What you say of it is certainly very
suggestive. But how do you account for the decay of the reverence and
deference in which the Hajii were once held?"

"Well, they may have overworked their superiority."

"Or?" we prompted.

"The stay-at-homes may have got onto the been-abroads in a point where
we all fail, unless we have guarded ourselves very scrupulously."

"And that is?"

"There is something very vulgarizing for Americans in the European
atmosphere, so that we are apt to come back worse-mannered than we went
away, and vulgarer than the untravelled, in so far as it is impoliter to
criticise than to be criticised."

"And is that why your tone has been one of universal praise for your
countrymen in the present interview?"

Our friend reached for his hat, smoothed a ruffled edge of the crown,
and blew a speck of dust from it. "One reasons to a conclusion," he
said, "not from it."

IX

NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE

Our friend came in with challenge in his eye, and though a month had
passed, we knew, as well as if it were only a day, that he had come to
require of us the meaning in that saying of ours that New York derived
her inspiration from the future, or would derive it, if she ever got it.

"Well," he said, "have you cleared your mind yet sufficiently to 'pour
the day' on mine? Or hadn't you any meaning in what you said? I've
sometimes suspected it."

The truth is that we had not had very much meaning of the sort that you