!_"

I am still wondering whether my lectures are so subtle as to need
praying over, or whether that audience was so dull that they needed
praying for.

Whichever it was, the prayer was heard, for the audience proved warm,
keen, and thoroughly appreciative.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XV.

REFLECTIONS ON THE TYPICAL AMERICAN.

_New York, January 23._

I was asked to-day by the editor of the _North American Review_ to write
an article on the typical American.

The typical American!

In the eyes of my beloved compatriots, the typical American is a man
with hair falling over his shoulders, wearing a sombrero, a red shirt,
leather leggings, a pair of revolvers in his belt, spending his life on
horseback, and able to shoot a fly off the tip of your nose without for
a moment endangering your olfactory organ; and, since Buffalo Bill has
been exhibiting his Indians and cowboys to the Parisians, this
impression has become a deep conviction.

I shall never forget the astonishment I caused to my mother when I first
broke the news to her that I wanted to go to America. My mother had
practically never left a lovely little provincial town of France. Her
face expressed perfect bewilderment.

"You don't mean to say you want to go to America?" she said. "What for?"

"I am invited to give lectures there."

"Lectures? in what language?"

"Well, mother, I will try my best in English."

"Do they speak English out there?"

"H'm--pretty well, I think."

We did not go any further on the subject that time. Probably the good
mother thought of the time when the Californian gold-fields attracted
all the scum of Europe, and, no doubt, she thought that it was strange
for a man who had a decent position in Europe, to go and "seek fortune"
in America.

Later on, however, after returning to England, I wrote to her that I had
made up my mind to go.

Her answer was full of gentle reproaches, and of sorrow at seeing that
she had lost all her influence over her son. She signed herself "always
your loving mother," and indulged in a postscript. Madame de Sevigne
said that the gist of a woman's letter was to be found in the
postscript.

My mother's was this:

"P.S.--I shall not tell any one in the town that you have gone to
America."

This explains why I still dare show my face in my little native town.

* * * * *

The typical American!

First of all, does he exist? I do not think so