hells in the smoking car or read the runes about
Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the Toonerville
Trolley and the Prince Albert ads--these mean nothing to him. He will
never compile an anthology of New York theatrical notices: "The play
that makes the dimples to catch the tears." Careful and adroit
propaganda, begun twenty years ago by the Department of State, might
have won him back, but now it is impossible to repatriate him. The
exquisite humours of our American life are faded from his mind. He has
gone across the great divide that separates a subway from an
underground and an elevator from a lift. I wonder does he ever mourn
the scrapple and buckwheat cakes that were his birthright?

Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" describes a
famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he and Pearsall
Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two gentlemen who are
now Master of Balliol and British Minister of Education. The Balliol don
attributed the British defeat in this international tourney to the fact
that his tennis shoes (shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and
he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. But though Major
Putnam and his young ally won the set of _patters_ (let us use the
Wykehamist word), the Major allowed the other side to gain a far more
serious victory. They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him
in England until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was
badly done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now
we shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a lift,
and he will never write an American "Trivia."

PREFACES

It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function of
authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant than
dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all the dreary
months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to the intentions
of the book; allusions to the unexpected difficulties encountered during
composition; neatly phrased gratitude to eminent friends who have given
gracious assistance; and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth
who has done the indexing--one of the trials of the wives of literary
men not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that
topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition
should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homel