al, and that his system of perspective will be
absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly
attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.
Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we
observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity.

A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right off that the
carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. He
was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost
nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his
perspective. He returned home and announced that Paris was a place where
people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the
first time--and no English person would ever guess the phenomenon which
vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. She saw a cat
walking across a street. The vision excited her. For in Paris cats do
not roam in thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses with
gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement
of cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very early and
making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn in quest of
interesting material. And the one note I gathered was that the ground in
front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I
needed then was an operation for cataract. I also remember taking a man
to the opera who had never seen an opera. The work was _Lohengrin_. When
we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all
he did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His
observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those
literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of
syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel
under survey is not wholly tedious.

But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large number of
facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of observation. I have
read, in some work of literary criticism, that Dickens could walk up one
side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in
their order the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an
illustration of his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great
observer, but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
he be