y in size and splendour to the last new insurance
company's building in New York. She has been a favourite character in
fiction, and the name of the artist who first imagined her has long been
lost. Perhaps she was Daisy Miller's grandmother. In reality, in spite
of that lack of reverence which is undoubtedly a national American
characteristic, the average American woman has an almost passionate love
for those glories of antiquity which her own country necessarily lacks,
such as few Englishwomen are capable of feeling.

"How in our hearts we envy you the mere names of your streets!" said an
American woman to me once. It is not easy for an English man or woman to
conceive what romance and wonder cluster round the names of Fleet Street
and the Mall to the minds of many educated Americans. We, if we are
away from them for half a dozen years, long for them in our exile and
rejoice in them on our return. The American of sensibility feels that
he--and more especially she--has been cut off from them for as many
generations and adores them with an ardour proportionately magnified.
But he (or she) would not exchange Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Euclid
Avenue or the Lake Shore Drive, as the case may be, for all London.

It was once my fortune to show over Westminster Abbey an American woman
whose name, by reason of her works--sound practical common-sense
works,--has come to be known throughout the United States, and I heard
"the wings of the dead centuries beat about her ears." I took her to
Poet's Corner. She turned herself slowly about and looked at the names
carved on either side of her, and then looked down and saw the names
that lay graven beneath her feet; and she dropped sobbing on her knees
upon the pavement. Johnson was not kind to the American colonies in his
life. Those tears which fell upon his name, where it is cut into the
slab of paving, were part of America's revenge.

We all remember Kipling's "type-writer girl" in San Francisco,--"the
young lady who in England would be a Person,"--who suddenly quoted at
him Theophile Gautier. It is an incident which many Englishmen have read
with incredulity, but which has nothing curious in it to the American
mind. A stenographer in my own offices subsequently, I have heard,
married a rich owner of race-horses and her dinners I understand are
delightful. She was an excellent stenographer.

In all frontier communities, where women are few and the primitive
instincts have freer