d leave your place before the denouement is reached. My own
pleasure all winter, I confess, has been partly marred by a bad
conscience: I have felt a kind of shame at my inability to profit by a
brilliant opportunity to make up my mind. This inability, however, was
extreme, and my regret was not lightened by seeing every one about me
set an admirable example of decision, and even of precision. Every one
about me was either a Russian or a Turk, the Turks, however, being
greatly the more numerous. It appeared necessary to one's self-respect
to assume some foreign personality, and I felt keenly, for a while,
the embarrassment of choice. At last it occurred to me simply that as
an American I might be an Englishman; and the reflection became
afterward very profitable.

When once I had undertaken the part, I played it with what the French
call _conviction_. There are many obvious reasons why the role,
at such a time as this, should accommodate itself to the American
capacity. The feeling of race is strong, and a good American could not
but desire that, with the eyes of Europe fixed upon it, the English
race should make a passable figure. There would be much fatuity in his
saying that at such a moment he deemed it of importance to give it the
support of his own striking attitude, but there is at least a kind of
filial piety in this feeling moved to draw closer to it. To see how
the English race would behave, and to hope devoutly it would behave
well,--this was the occupation of my thoughts. Old England was in a
difficult pass, and all the world was watching her. The good American
feels in all sorts of ways about Old England: the better American he
is, the more acute are his moods, the more lively his variations. He
can be, I think, everything but indifferent; and, for myself, I never
hesitated to let my emotions play all along the scale. In the morning,
over the _Times_, it was extremely difficult to make up one's mind.
The _Times_ seemed very mealy-mouthed--that impression, indeed, it
took no great cleverness to gather--but the dilemma lay between one's
sense of the brutality and cynicism of the usual utterances of the
Turkish party and one's perception of the direful ills which Russian
conquest was so liberally scattering abroad. The brutality of the
Turkish tone, as I sometimes caught an echo of it in the talk of
chance interlocutors, was not such as to quicken that race-feeling
to which I just now alluded. English society