world events, and thus learn at first hand,
from acknowledged authorities, about the subjects that interest
them--which is to say, everything.

"He frankly admired America. I don't mean that he said so for the sake
of courtesy to me, but that he has--or did have, then--an immense and
rather romantic interest in this country. A great many Germans used to
resent this trait in him. America held in his mind the same romantic
position that the idea of monarchy did in the minds of some of us. I
mean that the average American went for romance to stories of monarchy,
but that the Kaiser, being used to the monarchial idea, found his
romance over here. (I am, of course, speaking of him as he was five or
six years ago.) He wished to come to America, but was never able to do
so, since German law forbids it. And, perhaps because he could not come,
America was the more a sort of dream to him.

"He asked me about some of the things in Berlin which I had noticed as
being different from things at home, and when I mentioned the way that
history was kept alive in the very streets of Berlin, his eyes danced,
and he said that was one of the things he had tried to accomplish by the
erection of the numerous monuments which have been placed in Berlin
during his reign. He told me of other means by which history was kept
alive in Germany: among them that every officer has to know in detail
the history of his regiment, and that German regiments always celebrate
the anniversaries of their great days.

"He speaks English without an accent, though we might say that he spoke
it with an English accent. He told me that he had learned English before
he learned German, and had also caused his children to learn it first.
He reads Mark Twain, or had read him, and he enjoyed him, but he said
that when he met Mark Twain the latter had little or nothing to say, and
that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he got him to talk at
all. He subscribed, he told me, to 'Harper's Magazine,' and he was in
the habit of reading short stories aloud to his family, in English. He
admired the American short story, and I remember that he declared: 'The
Americans know how to plunge into a short story. We Germans are too
long-winded.'"

When Professor Smith talks about the Kaiser, you say to yourself: "I
know that it is growing late, but I cannot bear to leave until I have
heard the rest of this"; when he drifts presently to O. Henry, you say
the same; and so it