d really they
_do_ get more complicated and exciting every day. I shan't tell you much
about them just now, but will save that part of the narrative for by and
by, in case there's anything to add at half-past midnight. There
generally is news from the front about that time.

Meanwhile, Monty (who is as ignorant of this country as Jack was only
the other day) clamours for J.'s "impressions of America." Since Jack
can't put them on paper, I will. I know all his most topographical
thoughts, because he's trying them--not "on a dog" but on me, while I
drive the car to save his good right arm. "The Lightning Conductor
Discovering America" I call him, as everything surprises and interests
him so hugely, you would think he was an "O Pioneer!" Long Island isn't
your "pitch," Mercedes dear, and you don't know much about it from the
inside, so to speak. You may imagine, therefore, that it's a small,
sophisticated spot on the map for us to _discover_. But there's where
you're wrong, my dear! It's not small and it's not sophisticated. It may
look tiny on paper, but it feels far from tiny when you set forth to
motor over it. It feels about the size I used to picture England before
I went abroad.

[Illustration: LONG ISLAND "There's absolutely nothing like it on the
other side of the water, not even in Devonshire or Dorset"]

Jack fancied (he dared not say so to me till he could add "I made a big
mistake") that America was new and indigestible, like freshly baked
bread. As for Long Island, he visioned it as a seaside suburb of New
York. Now, he's so fascinated with Awepesha and its environment that
he's simply bolting history by the yard! You know, he always was keen on
that sort of thing when he travelled; but like most Britishers he
flattered himself that he had been _born_ knowing all that was worth
knowing in the history of the United States: a little about the
Revolution and the Civil War, and "--er--well really, what else _was_
there, you know, if you'd read Cooper and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' when you
were a boy?"

Now, he browses in Cousin John Randolph Payton's respectable library,
where every book is bound like every other book in "half calf," and he
sees that things began to wake up over here several hundreds of years
ago. He has even discovered that an ancestor of his was one of the first
important settlers of Long Island, apparently a perfect pig of a man who
was horrid to innocent Indians--charming Indians who believed th