he
facts as narrated their due proportion in the landscape.

More than a quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a
very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three
or four others that the small town from which he came in the far
Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric
lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in
the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the
time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the
way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and what the
American had said was strictly true--true, I doubt not, to a single
candle-power and to a fraction of a foot of mast. And a costly and
indifferent method of lighting, for a whole town, it may be remarked, it
was.

In an earlier stage of my youth I lost all confidence in an elderly and
eminently respectable friend of the family who had travelled much
because he once informed me that the Japanese watered their horses out
of spoons. Of course I knew that the old gentleman was a liar.

An American travelling in an English railway carriage fell into
conversation with the other occupants, who were Englishmen. Among divers
pieces of information about things in the United States which he gave
them he told (it was at the time when the steel construction of high
buildings was still a novelty) of a twenty-storey "sky-scraper" which he
passed daily on his way to and from his office on which, to save time,
the walls were being put up simultaneously at, perhaps, the second,
eighth, and fifteenth floors, working upwards from each point, the
intervening floors being in the meanwhile left untouched. He explained
that, in the system of steel construction, the walls did not support the
building; that being done by the skeleton framework of metal, on which
the walls were subsequently hung as a screen. They might, theoretically,
be of paper; though as a matter of fact the material used was generally
terra-cotta or some fire-proof brick. The American said that it was
queer to see a house being built at the eighth storey in midair, as it
were, with nothing but the thin steel supports and open sky below.

"I should imagine it would look very queer," said the Englishman whom he
was addressing, with obvious coolness; and the American was entirely
aware that every person in that carriage regarded him as a typical
American liar. Time p