present
observer do? Adds it. Adds it at once. Adds it, and labels it with this
innocent comment:

"This small fact is strangely significant."

It does seem to me that this kind of observing is defective.

Here is another curiosity which some liberal person made him a present
of. I should think it ought to have disturbed the deep slumber of his
suspicion a little, but it didn't. It was a note from a fog-horn for
strenuousness, it seems to me, but the doomed voyager did not catch it.
If he had but caught it, it would have saved him from several disasters:

"If the American knows that you are traveling to take notes, he
is interested in it, and at the same time rejoices in it, as in
a tribute."

Again, this is defective observation. It is human to like to be praised;
one can even notice it in the French. But it is not human to like to
be ridiculed, even when it comes in the form of a "tribute." I think a
little psychologizing ought to have come in there. Something like this:
A dog does not like to be ridiculed, a redskin does not like to be
ridiculed, a negro does not like to be ridiculed, a Chinaman does not
like to be ridiculed; let us deduce from these significant facts this
formula: the American's grade being higher than these, and the chain-of
argument stretching unbroken all the way up to him, there is room for
suspicion that the person who said the American likes to be ridiculed,
and regards it as a tribute, is not a capable observer.

I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional
is too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that
great art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks. Every now and then, at
half-hour intervals, M. Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies
and dissolves them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the
charge into a mould and turns you out a compact principle which will
explain an American girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn
for old things, or any other impossible riddle which a person wants
answered.

It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that
can be generalized and located here and there in the world and named
by the name of the nation where they are found. I wonder what they are.
Perhaps one of them is temperament. One speaks of French vivacity
and German gravity and English stubbornness. There is no American
temperament. The nearest that one