II

AN EMINENT AMERICAN

After dinner I asked Herr Grundschnitt what headway he was making in his
studies of American life. The professor was in more than his usually
mellow mood. He had enjoyed his dinner. He liked his cigar. He confided
to me that he was hard at work on a volume of sketches dealing with the
career of representative successful Americans, and he offered to read me
one of his early chapters. If the following summary of Herr
Grundschnitt's account of the life of Wallabout Smith can even suggest
the extraordinary impression which the original produced upon me, I am
content.

Wallabout Smith did not attain recognition until late in life. I gather
that he must have been well over fifty when a former President of the
United States declared that Wallabout Smith, by raising a family of four
sons and two daughters, had done more for his country than all the laws
enacted by the Legislatures of all the New England and Middle Atlantic
States since the Spanish-American War. Fame came rapidly after this. The
college professors repeated what the former President said. The
newspapers repeated what the college professors said. The playwrights
repeated what the newspapers said. The pulpit repeated what the
playwrights said. Interviewers descended upon Wallabout Smith. They wore
out his front lawn, the hall carpet, and the maid-servant's temper; but
they always found Smith himself patient, affable, ready to say whatever
they wished him to say.

The reporters would usually begin by asking Wallabout Smith what were
his lighter interests in life. "I find my greatest pleasure," Smith
would reply, "in common things. For instance, I have never ceased to be
intensely interested in the cost of shoes and stockings. The subject is
fascinating and inexhaustible. One gets tired of most things, but there
has never been a time in which the cost of shoes and stockings has
failed to appeal with peculiar force to me. My odd moments on the train
have as a rule been taken up with that question. If you have ever
thought upon this subject, you must have been struck with the fact that,
putting food aside, shoes and stockings constitute the most permanent
and persistent human need. They begin with the first few weeks of our
life, and they continue to the end; the size alone changes. It is a
subject, too, that opens up such wide horizons. For while a man of
comparatively little leisure can confine himself to the simple topic of
shoes and