ed, well-mannered, excellently bred in every tone and
movement. You wonder dimly if you have not met them somewhere. At all
events you would very much like to meet them. They are infinitely more
distressed than you at the behaviour of the American party which has
just come in--because they are Americans also. And I may add that they
will not be in the least flattered, if you should be lucky enough to
meet them, by your telling them that you "never would have thought it."

Perhaps, English reader, you have lived long enough in some other
country than England to have learned what a loathsome thing the
travelling Englishman often appears. Possibly you have been privileged
to hear the frank and unofficial opinion of some native of that
country--an opinion not intended for your ears, but addressed to a
compatriot of the speaker--of English people in general, based upon his
experience of those whom he has seen. Such an experience is quite
illuminating. I know few things more offensive than the behaviour of a
certain class of German when he is in Paris. The noisy, nasal American
at the Carlton or Savoy is no more representative of America than the
loud-voiced, check-suited Englishman at Delmonico's or the
Waldorf-Astoria is the man by whom you wish your nation to be judged. It
may be a purposeful provision of a higher Power that the people of all
countries should appear unprepossessing when they are abroad, for the
fostering in each nation of the spirit of patriotism; for why should any
of us be patriots if all the foreigners who came to our shores were as
inoffensive as ourselves? The truth is that those who are inoffensive
pass unnoticed. It is the occasional caricature--the parody--of the
national type that catches our eye; and on him we too often base our
judgment of a whole people.

Those Englishmen who only England know are inclined to think that the
check-suited fellow countryman is a creation of the French and German
comic press. Those who have lived outside of England for some
considerable number of years have learned better. The late Senator Hoar
in his _Autobiography of Seventy Years_ has some very shrewd remarks
about Matthew Arnold. The Senator had a cordial regard for Matthew
Arnold--"a huge liking" he calls his feeling,--and he has this
delightful sentence in regard to him: "I do not mean to say that his
three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest literary work of
our time. But I think, on the whole, t