air of Hessians in thirteen," he said.
Viewing Mr. Page with the eye of an attendant, we should remark that he
is a Tartar. But a kindly, patient, courteous Tartar.

City directories, telephone "books," social registers, "Who's Whos,"
all are necessary to enable him to tell the addresses of his friends.
And these are inadequate. He wishes to send, as a token of his regard,
a book, affectionately inscribed, to his friend, let us say, J. M.
D----, Esq. We learn by the agency of the machinery to which we have
recourse that there reside in the City of New York four gentlemen of
this identical name: one on Madison Avenue, one on Ninety-first Street,
another in Brooklyn, the other somewhere else. Mr. Page is completely
bewildered as to which is his friend. "Well, I don't know," he says,
"but this man married former Senator So-and-So's daughter." Now, can't
we solve that, somehow? Historic Spirit! we cried that day,
impracticality of literary men for petty, mundane details, here hast
thou still thy habitat, a temple in Mr. Page!

Lor', how we do run on!

XIII

CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE

Whenever we go to England we learn that we "caun't" speak the language.
We are told very frankly that we can't. And we very quickly perceive
that, whatever it is that we speak, it certainly is not "the language."

Let us consider this matter. A somewhat clever and an amusingly
ill-natured English journalist, T. W. H. Crosland, not long ago wrote a
book "knocking" us, in which he says "that having inherited, borrowed
or stolen a beautiful language, they (that is, we Americans) wilfully
and of set purpose distort and misspell it." Crosland's ignorance of
all things American, ingeniously revealed in this lively bit of
writing, is interesting in a person of, presumably, ordinary
intelligence, and his credulity in the matter of what he has heard
about us is apparently boundless.

However, he does not much concern us. Well-behaved Englishmen would
doubtless consider as impolite his manner of expression regarding the
"best thing imported in the Mayflower." But however unamiably, he does
voice a feeling very general, if not universal, in England. You never
get around--an Englishman would say "round"--the fact over there that
we do not speak the English language.

Well, to use an Americanism, they,--the English,--certainly do have the
drop on us in the matter of beauty. Mr. Chesterton somewhere says that
a thing always to b