ivaled ornament of her career on earth; for no other child in the
vicinity had a professional humorist for parent. Her gestures and accent
typified for me the general attitude of youngest America, in process of
education, toward the older generation: an astonishing, amusing,
exquisite, incomprehensible mixture of affection, admiration, trust, and
rather casual tolerating scorn. The children of most countries display a
similar phenomenon, but in America the phenomenon is more acute and
disconcerting than elsewhere.

One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking down the main road of
a residential suburb, and observing the fragile-wheeled station-wagons,
and the ice-wagons enormously labeled "DANGER" (perhaps by the gastric
experts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-style dwellings, and
the "tinder" boarding-houses, and the towering boot-shine stands, and
the roast-chestnut emporia, and the gasometers flanking a noble and
beautiful river--I was observing all this when a number of young men and
maids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed possession of
the street. It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful
sight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so
interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any
conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so
gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that
the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled
thereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as
this gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It
was the sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street and
across the badly laid tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it. I
immediately desired to visit schools. Profoundly ignorant of educational
methods, and with a strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know
and understand all about education in America in one moment--the
education that produced that superb stride and carriage in the street! I
failed, of course, in my desire--not from lack of facilities offered,
but partly from lack of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and
from lack of time. My experiences, however, though they left my mind
full of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked to inspect one of the best
schools in New York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological student, I
should probably have asked to inspe