ve it, owing to
reasons that I cannot reveal, without paying my account, has occasioned
unnecessary and dangerous comment. I connect it, in fact, with the
singular attitude adopted by the B. hotel on my arrival in New York, to
which I have already referred.

I have therefore been compelled to fall back on revelations and
disclosures. Here again I find the American atmosphere singularly
uncongenial. I have offered to reveal to the Secretary of State the
entire family history of Ferdinand of Bulgaria for fifty dollars. He
says it is not worth it. I have offered to the British Embassy the
inside story of the Abdication of Constantine for five dollars. They say
they know it, and knew it before it happened. I have offered, for little
more than a nominal sum, to blacken the character of every reigning
family in Germany. I am told that it is not necessary.

Meantime, as it is impossible to return to Central Europe, I expect to
open either a fruit store or a peanut stand very shortly in this great
metropolis. I imagine that many of my former colleagues will soon be
doing the same!

II. Father Knickerbocker: A Fantasy

It happened quite recently--I think it must have been on April the
second of 1917--that I was making the long pilgrimage on a day-train
from the remote place where I dwell to the city of New York. And as we
drew near the city, and day darkened into night, I had fallen to reading
from a quaint old copy of Washington Irving's immortal sketches of
Father Knickerbocker and of the little town where once he dwelt.

I had picked up the book I know not where. Very old it apparently was
and made in England. For there was pasted across the fly-leaf of it an
extract from some ancient magazine or journal of a century ago, giving
what was evidently a description of the New York of that day.

From reading the book I turned--my head still filled with the vision
of Father Knickerbocker and Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown--to examine
the extract. I read it in a sort of half-doze, for the dark had fallen
outside, and the drowsy throbbing of the running train attuned one's
mind to dreaming of the past.

"The town of New York"--so ran the extract pasted in the little
book--"is pleasantly situated at the lower extremity of the Island
of Manhattan. Its recent progress has been so amazing that it is now
reputed, on good authority, to harbour at least twenty thousand souls.
Viewed from the sea, it presents, even at the distance