the slow formation of the habit of realising that not
to submit to disappointment was no use, could have produced the almost
SERENITY of their attitude. It is all very well for newborn republican
nations--meaning my native land--to sniff sternly and say that such a
state of affairs is an insult to the spirit of the race. Perhaps it
is now, but it was not apparently centuries ago, which was when it all
began and when 'Man' and the 'Race' had not developed to the point of
asking questions, to which they demand replies, about themselves and
the things which happened to them. It began in the time of Egbert
and Canute, and earlier, in the days of the Druids, when they used
peacefully to allow themselves to be burned by the score, enclosed
in wicker idols, as natural offerings to placate the gods. The modern
acceptance of things is only a somewhat attenuated remnant of the
ancient idea. And this is what I have to deal with and understand.
When I begin to do the things I am going to do, with the aid of your
practical advice, if I have your approval, the people will be at first
rather afraid of me. They will privately suspect I am mad. It
will, also, not seem at all unlikely that an American should be of
unreasoningly extravagant and flighty mind. Stornham, having long
slumbered in remote peace through lack of railroad convenience, still
regards America as almost of the character of wild rumour. Rosy was
their one American, and she disappeared from their view so soon that
she had not time to make any lasting impression. I am asking myself how
difficult, or how simple, it will be to quite understand these people,
and to make them understand me. I greatly doubt its being simple. Layers
and layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow
through. They look simple, they do not know that they are not simple,
but really they are not. Their point of view has been the point of view
of the English peasant so many hundred years that an American point of
view, which has had no more than a trifling century and a half to form
itself in, may find its thews and sinews the less powerful of the
two. When I walk down the village street, faces appear at windows, and
figures, stolidly, at doors. What I see is that, vaguely and remotely,
American though I am, the fact that I am of 'her ladyship's blood,'
and that her ladyship--American though she is--has the claim on them of
being the mother of the son of the owner of the land--stirs