al and
affable with every human soul you meet, and that you will
never be betrayed into an argument--on _any American
subject_, mind--with any living being, from the bartender
up. It is not so hard a rule, old man, and observing it
vehemently day and night will make all the wide difference
to you between miserable failure and a fine and substantial
success.

You will meet two classes of men--scholarly men like my
friends, who will take you to clubs where writers, thinkers,
students, etc., congregate, and less scholarly but not
less likeable ordinary newspaper men. Live your life as
much as possible among these two classes. You will catch
swiftly enough the shades of difference between the two. It
is the difference between, say, the Athenaeum and the
Savage. Only there is next to no caste spirit, and points of
similarity or even community crop up there between the two
which couldn't be here. The golden key to both is unvarying
amiability.

You are better calculated than most men I know to charm and
captivate them all. They will delight in your conversation
and in you, and they will see to it that you have a perfect
time and coin money--if only you lay yourself out to be
uniformly nice to them, and watch carefully to see that you
seem to be doing about as they do.

A good many minor people--hotel baggagemen, clerks, etc.,
tram conductors, policemen and the like--will seem to you
to be monstrously rude and unobliging. You will be right;
they are undoubtedly God-damned uncivil brutes. That is one
of the unhappy conditions of our life there. _Don't_ be
tempted even to wrangle with them or talk back to them. Pass
on, and keep still. If you try to do anything else, the
upshot will be your appearing somewhere in print as a damned
Britisher for whom American ways are not good enough. The
whole country is one vast sounding board, and it vibrates
with perilous susceptibility in response to an English
accent.

Don't mention the word Ireland. Perhaps that is most
important of all. You will hear lots of Americans--good men,
too--damning the Irish. Listen to this, and say nothing,
unless something amiable about the Irish occurs to you.
Because here is a mysterious paradox. The America always
damns the Irishman.