no notion of
what it meant. I have heard even from Americans about five different
conjectures about its meaning. But though I do not understand it, I do
sincerely believe that if I did understand it, I should understand
America.

It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would require a book to
itself, even considered as a background. The State of Oklahoma is a
district in the south-west recently reclaimed from the Red Indian
territory. What many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America is
really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no history. It is glowing
with the sense of having a great future--and nothing else. People are
just as likely to boast of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich;
people are just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But in
Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure, arrogantly
affirming that it wasn't there last week. It was against the colours of
this crude stage scenery, as of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the
fantastic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note of
interrogation. I was strolling down the main street of the city, and
looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the news of crime, when a
stranger addressed me; and asked me, quite politely but with a curious
air of having authority to put the question, what I was doing in that
city.

He was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a shabby tropical
traveller, with a grey moustache and a lively and alert eye. But the
most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered
with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars
and crescents. I was well accustomed by this time to Americans adorning
the lapels of their coats with little symbols of various societies; it
is a part of the American passion for the ritual of comradeship. There
is nothing that an American likes so much as to have a secret society
and to make no secret of it. But in this case, if I may put it so, the
rash of symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man, in a
fashion that indicated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minor
mystery, however, his first few sentences offered a provisional
explanation. In answer to his question, touching my business in
Oklahoma, I replied with restraint that I was lecturing. To which he
replied without restraint, but rather with an expansive and radiant
pride, 'I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy.'

So far