es and unlikenesses and striving
to measure the feeling of each for the other, there is always danger of
talking what I will ask to be permitted to call "parsnips."

* * * * *

When I first went to the United States I carried with me a commission
from certain highly reputable English papers to incorporate my
"impressions" in occasional letters. Among the earliest facts of any
moment which I was enabled to communicate to English readers was that
the middle classes in America (I was careful to explain what the "middle
classes" were in a country where none existed)--that the middle classes,
I say, lived almost entirely on parsnips. I had not arrived at this
important ethnological fact with any undue haste. I had already lived in
the United States for some three months, half of which time had been
spent in New York hotels and boarding houses and half in Northern New
York and rural New England, where, staying at farms or at the houses of
families in the smaller towns to which I bore letters of introduction, I
flattered myself that I had probed deep--Oh, ever so deep!--below the
surface and had come to understand the people as they lived in their own
homes. And my ripened judgment was that the bulk of the well-to-do
people of the country supported life chiefly by consumption of parsnips.

Some fifteen years later I was at supper at the Century Club in New
York and the small party at our table as we discussed the scalloped
oysters (which are one of the pillars of the Century) included a
well-known American author and journalist and an even better known and
much-loved artist. But why should I not mention their names? They were
Montgomery Schuyler and John La Farge. Both had been to Europe that
year--La Farge to pay his first visit to Italy, while Schuyler, whether
with or without La Farge I forget, had made a somewhat extensive trip
through rural England in, I think, a dog-cart. The conversation ran
chiefly on their experiences and suddenly Schuyler turned to me with:
"Here, you Englishman, why do the middle classes of England live chiefly
on parsnips?"

The thing is incredible--except that it happened. Schuyler, no less than
I fifteen years before, spoke in the fulness of conviction arising from
what he, no less than I, believed to have been wide and adequate
experience. The memory of that experience has made me tolerant of the
cocksure generalisations with which the Englishman who has visited