ngling within a foot of their noses.

Another curious contrast to the practical, material, matter-of-fact
side of the American is his intense interest in the supernatural, the
spiritualistic, the superstitious. Boston, of all places in the world,
is, perhaps, the happiest hunting-ground for the spiritualist medium,
the faith healer, and the mind curer. You will find there the most
advanced emancipation from theological superstition combined in the
most extraordinary way with a more than half belief in the
incoherences of a spiritualistic seance. The Boston Christian
Scientists have just erected a handsome stone church, with chime of
bells, organ, and choir of the most approved ecclesiastical cut; and,
greatest marvel of all, have actually had to return a surplus of
$50,000 (L10,000) that was subscribed for its building. There are two
pulpits, one occupied by a man who expounds the Bible, while in the
other a woman responds with the grandiloquent platitudes of Mrs. Eddy.
In other parts of the country this desire to pry into the Book of Fate
assumes grosser forms. Mr. Bryce tells us that Western newspapers
devote a special column to the advertisements of astrologers and
soothsayers, and assures us that this profession is as much recognised
in the California of to-day as in the Greece of Homer.

It seems to me that I have met in America the nearest approaches to my
ideals of a _Bayard sans peur et sans reproche_; and it is in this
same America that I have met flagrant examples of the being wittily
described as _sans pere et sans proche_--utterly without the
responsibility of background and entirely unacquainted with the
obligation of _noblesse_. The superficial observer in the United
States might conceivably imagine the characteristic national trait to
be self-sufficiency or vanity (this mistake _has_, I believe, been
made), and his opinion might be strengthened should he find, as I did,
in an arithmetic published at Richmond during the late Civil War, such
a modest example as the following: "If one Confederate soldier can
whip seven Yankees, how many Confederate soldiers will it take to whip
forty-nine Yankees?" America has been likened to a self-made man,
hugging her conditions because she has made them, and considering
them divine because they have grown up with the country. Another
observer might quite as easily come to the conclusion that diffidence
and self-distrust are the true American characteristics. Certainly