use the populace. But when
we slowed, our propellers covering the calm sea with acres of foam, and
the whole entire illuminations began to approach us in a body, I
perceived that my Coney Island was merely another craft, but a very
important and official craft. An extremely small boat soon detached
itself from this pyrotechnical craft and came with a most extraordinary
leisureness toward a white square of light that had somehow broken forth
in the blackness of our side. And looking down from the topmost deck, I
saw, far below, the tiny boat maneuver on the glinting wave into the
reflection of our electricity and three mysterious men climb up from her
and disappear into us. Then it was that I grew really excited,
uncomfortably excited. The United States had stretched out a tentacle.

In no time at all, as it seemed, another and more formidable tentacle
had folded round me--in the shape of two interviewers. (How these men
had got on board--and how my own particular friend had got on board--I
knew not, for we were yet far from quay-side.) I had been hearing all my
life about the sublime American institution of the interview. I had been
warned by Americans of its piquant dangers. And here I was suddenly up
against it! Beneath a casual and jaunty exterior, I trembled. I wanted
to sit, but dared not. They stood; I stood. These two men, however, were
adepts. They had the better qualities of American dentists. Obviously
they spent their lives in meeting notorieties on inbound steamers, and
made naught of it. They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite,
conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and how
to get it. Having got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printed
stories were brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive--though one of
them did let out that the most salient part of me was my teeth, and the
other did assert that I behaved like a school-boy. (Doubtless the result
of timidity trying to be dignified--this alleged school-boyishness!)

I liked these men. But they gave me an incomplete idea of the race of
interviewers in the United States. There is a variety of interviewers
very different from them. I am, I think, entitled to consider myself a
fairly first-class authority on all varieties of interviewer, not only
in New York but in sundry other great cities. My initiation was brief,
but it was thorough. Many varieties won my regard immediately, and kept
it; but I am conscious that