erviewed and
spoke of her new telephone play without adding much to the national
stock of wisdom. A famous evangelist of the rough-house type proposed to
use the new apparatus for reaching distant settlements.

I don't think we took the news very seriously. We are, as I have said,
inured to wonders and inclined to let science do her worst. We belong
to that class of people who, although they keep silent on the subject,
hate science very heartily. My friend trumpets science loudly enough at
times, I know; but he hates her in his heart, for he loves children and
birds and flowers, and the colours of the distant hills when evening
falls. And like us, he admires Miss Fraenkel, perhaps the most
unscientific creature in the United States. He feeds her passion for
details of English life in the most shameless way. On this particular
evening he entranced her with a description of the Scottish custom of
sitting on the plinth of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and welcoming
the new year with bottles of whisky. Every Scotsman south of the Tweed
was under oath to appear in the churchyard in kilts and tartan-plaid at
midnight. Most of them, he added, wore red beards. Miss Fraenkel's fine
hazel eyes grew round as she visualized this frightful throng gathered
among the graves of the churchyard. It occurred to me that it only
showed, after all, how difficult it is to convey in words a just notion
of a foreign land, and how easy it is for "travellers' tales" to become
incredible fabrications. How would the quiet townships of rural England,
where the names of people and places go back to Saxon days, credit us if
we told them of our tavern known as Slovitzsky's, where citizens, of all
the races of Europe, sang "Auld lang Syne"? Not in kilts, it is true,
but in costumes even more surprising to the aforesaid quiet townships.
We get a good deal of fun out of Miss Fraenkel, no doubt, but it may be
that she, without ever giving away the secret, gets a good deal of fun
out of us. Sometimes there is a whimsical glint in her hazel eyes that
makes me reflect....

We were chatting quietly, after we had left her, full of good
resolutions, and we were climbing Pine Street, the deep snow making the
passage difficult, when we heard the strange sound of the rejoicing in
New York, twenty miles away. And it was without any thought of coming
peril, without any thought of our neighbours, that we paused at the top
of the ridge and looked across the valley. I