assed and the carriage relapsed into silence, each
of the occupants becoming immersed in such reading-matter as he had with
him. Suddenly one of them aroused the others with the ejaculation:

"By Jove! If here isn't a picture of that very building you were talking
of!"

It was a _Graphic_ or _Illustrated London News_, or some other such
undoubtedly trustworthy London paper which he was reading, and he passed
it round for the inspection of the rest of the company. The American
looked at it. It was not his particular building but it did as well,
and there was the photograph before them, with the walls complete, to
window casing and every detail of ornament, on the eighth and ninth
floors, while not a brick had been laid from the second storey to the
seventh. A god from the machine had intervened to save the American's
reputation. Often have I seen incredulity steal over the faces of a
well-bred company in England at some statement from an American of a
fact in itself commonplace enough, when no such providential
corroboration was forthcoming.

Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural
districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American
as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he
includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota
when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I
think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was
evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come
from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
"Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people
might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a
million," I replied--the number being some few thousand less than the
figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard
anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their
population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to
at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely
looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and
walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my
contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically
called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family
of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the
depot." I