like one. In the "native" an American

feels that he sees a caricature of himself.

This misguided being, so strangely resembling him, believes in "plain living and high thinking," considers a professor of philosophy an attractive person, "applauds anything that 's called a sonata," goes unblushingly to a Unitarian meetinghouse, and, when he dies, leaves seventyfour dollars, twelve thousand musty volumes, and an autograph letter from Ibsen to Browning-or so the American fancies. Why? It is difficult to guess.

Every spring and again every autumn, Americans, obsessed with that fallacious prepossession, pour across New England. From what they see, and with their genius for overlooking the distinction between facts and truths, they might as logically think New England illiterate. illiterate. Tramps, pensioners, curmudgeons, and indigent space-writers overrun her grandest library. Italians, not New-Englanders, most prize Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Her Boston Opera Company perished of inanition. New England villages breathlessly await the next novel by Mr. Harold Bell Wright. Hearst newspapers thrive. Her favorite artist, so an outsider might suspect, is the creator of "Mutt and Jeff," her favorite actor Mr. Charles Chaplin. The boldest defense of the Reverend Billy Sunday is signed by a distinguished Unitarian. Another, when consulted regarding the future of Unitarianism in New England, declares, "It will be extinct in fifty years." Meanwhile, she has her Elijah II, her Holy Rollers, and sects that keep watch for the end of the world.

This, if one naïvely substitutes facts for truths, is the reality back of the mythical New England, whose "much learning hath made her mad," though some, Dr. Rainsford among them, attribute her supposed lunacy to pie, doughnuts, boiled dinner, and baked beans. By recalling manifestly unrepresentative menus, I might feign to support that theory. At breakfast, in a Vermont farm-house, I experienced apple-pie seasoned with catnip. In a Massachusetts farm-house the habitual

Sunday breakfast was oyster-stew. Beans abound, and beans particularly virulent; no authentic New England baked bean has ever yet migrated. Moreover, there is "the clam before the storm." Hence that remarkable definition of New-Englanders as "an insane race to whom Americans intrust the higher education of their young."

Although New England, while undeniably well educated as a whole, is incurably sane and sensible as a whole, Americans are in for a few shocks, nevertheless. I have personally met the New-Englander who enriched the literature of his country with a volume compounded of laundrylists, astrology, board-bills, and remarks on the fourth dimension; also the NewEnglander who reverses the stars and stripes as a flag for the "Nu Tru Ju" nation, of which he is the founder. In every New England city half a dozen of these harmless originals roam at large. Has the West such lunatics? Has the South? Yes, caged. In New England, where wealth is several generations old, it now and then happens that a family can support an unfortunate at home and give him his freedom. This explains. It explains completely.

But what, pray, accounts for the New England intellect as betrayed by its tongue? The broad a dominates. The final r, silenced where it belongs, recurs where it does not; witness "lawr and awda." Vermont talks "caow." Maine talks "paultics." Quincys are "Quinzys"; Pierces, "Purses." Saco is "Sawco." Billerica becomes "Bill Ricka" and on intimate acquaintance "Bill Ricky." One speaks of a "horse and team." Says the ashman, "I bang the barrel down, like this, on the edge of the team." A long, lean, melancholy omnibus is a "barge." A "lumper," discussing the collapse of a wrecked vessel, declares, "She lasted quick.” quick." In rural New England clever means "not over 'n' above bright." One ends by quoting the Earl of Pawtucket: "Do you suppose these people know they 're foreigners?"

Foreigners they are by inheritance

land, while I doubt if you will find anything like the same number of people who speak good English. As for the English of the Back Bay, it delightfully recalls that of Westminster Abbey, the London stage, and the Houses of Parliament, though a marked difference remains. To my ear, the Back Bay speaks more charmingly. So I acquit New England of verbal affectation and perversity, just as I acquit her of wholesale madness and unpardonable over-intellectuality. Chicago, not Boston, "made culture hum.”

With equal cordiality I acquit New England of aristocratic exclusiveness. No one has "wanted to know who my grandfather was." Far from indicating a worship of ancestors, the "Transcript's" genealogical page indicates a tardy and unexcited reaction against a long neglect of ancestors even in the district peppered over with tablets, statues, monuments, and memorial edifices. Unearthing an ancestor at the Genealogical Library, one no more boasts of him than a Virginian boasts of belonging to a "grand old Southern family." Why, bless 'em! they all do.

Nevertheless, there is some pertinence in the observation that a New-Englander dreads being "introduced to any one he has not already met," and squirms when at stranger approaches. In hotel lobbies, what silence! Address a New-Englander across a restaurant table, and, nine chances in ten, you salute a box-turtle. But there are abundant reasons for this. All the adventurous New-Englanders went West. Pioneer life, which breeds a sense of interdependence among mortals and therefore a free-and-easiness sometimes indelicate, vanished from New England generations ago. A stationary population removes the impulse to court new friends. lest old friends move away. A New-Englander finds it an undertaking to keep up with those he already has. Yet see how these "exclusive" New-Englanders behave. if you take along an Airedale or a fine fouryear-old boy. Actually, they pick you up.

Shyness, not pride, makes them appear cold. "Their faces are masks," said a San-Franciscan, unjustly enough; later

on

came the fire, and San Francisco thanked Heaven for warm hearts in New England. "They lack bounce," said "Cyclone" Ellis, who has since been fairly lionized for his ebullience, his originality, and his captivating, cantankerous WildWesternism. New-Englanders adore flavor. Not long ago there arrived in Boston a gentleman brigand, with cavalry legs, a sombrero, a Belgravia accent, and a habit of barking, "Caramba!" "Me plan," he explained, "is to take Bolivia, smash Ecuador, move upon Peru, and South America is mine. I shall not be king, but I shall be the power behind the throne." Once I heard him remark, "When I see a pretty girl in a window, I simply buy the house." A questionable person, very; yet New-Englanders, for the sheer prank of it, clasped him to their bosoms, wined him, dined him, and bewailed his too sudden departure. Secure in their positions, they could afford to. For real "exclusiveness," armed to the teeth and shaking in its boots, apply to the parvenus of Middle Western cities; for real democratic cordiality, to New-Englanders of blue blood, a formal exterior, and some remnant of the celebrated New England conscience.

"Ah, that conscience!" sighs the American. "How Puritanical!" Mistaking facts for truths, he finds evidence unlimited. In Massachusetts, cow-boy swearwords deleted by censor from a play by Mrs. Beulah Dix Flebbe. At New England book-stores no Boccaccio. At her picture-shops grim memories of Bouguereau and of a dealer heavily fined. In a minor city the Y. M. C. A. debating, "Is bowling a Christian game?" In Connecticut hardly a train on Sunday. And yet, if I myself may substitute facts for truths, there is hope for the New-Englanders despite all this. Under pressure, they make capital smugglers and nimble enough taxdodgers. Few surpass a New Hampshire farmer at "deaconing" a "caow." Here and there some scapegrace New-Englander turns bandit. Observing the streets of Boston, a philosopher gasped, "These people seem morbidly Puritanical about everything but their vices."

omitted) smokes a pipe. At the shore a Puritan maiden appeared in the one-piece shocker worn by Trouville demi-mondaines. Says an acquaintance of mine, "I was quite a prig in the West, but New England has taken it out of me."

I report these highly exceptional phenomena because belief in a frightfully overworked pervasive New England conscience is a sorrow to many and dies hard. Mrs. Wiltshire of Pittsburgh, who has a villa in New England, sends napkins to be laundered as soon as they have been used once. Mrs. Abner Sykes, her New England laundress, irons them without washing, and returns them with bill. Tell this to Mrs. Wiltshire, and it will not alter her idea of the New England conscience. Summer boarders cling tenaciously to that idea, fleeced though they are. It is an idée fixe, originating, perhaps, in the fame of New England reformers. Some queer, queer reformers she has at present. In spare moments I my self have reformed things, so I can speak freely.

After signing, but not reading, a petition, a reformer beheld it next morning in the newspaper, where it began, "We, the parents of colored children." Reformers still belaud prohibition; how wisely you

may judge by a recent despatch from Portland, Maine: "As the Republican state convention is in session here, the mayor has ordered the chief of police to close all saloons at five P.M." When a distinguished anti-imperialist was chidden for possessing few facts concerning the Philippines, he replied: "We don't go much on facts. We flatter ourselves that we have got hold of some eternal principles."

In his autobiography the late Charles Francis Adams, who magnificently represented New England in the uprightness of his character, and misrepresented it outrageously with his pen, quotes a letter in which Lowell observed, "The Adamses have a genius for saying even a gracious thing in an ungracious way." Instead of resenting it, Mr. Adams returned thanks for the moral and esthetic gratification it afforded, and there are reformers, I suspect, who glory in their "disagreeable goodness." When a new administration comes in, they "hope for the worst." Cheerfully they protest, "Whatever is, is wrong." Forgive them. They inherit reform from bygone generations. It runs in their blood. By comparison, it runs thin; hardly a great social movement but originated in New England, hardly a