with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its

      cathedral;

      with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the

    criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal

        shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has

        been

    extracted; and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of

      modified illusions:

      and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly” in

    whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was

        originally one’s

        object—substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its

        emotional

    shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its

      imperturbability,

      all of museum quality: and America where there

    is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are

        smoked on the

        street in the north; where there are no proof readers, no

        silkworms, no digressions;

    the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less

      country—in which letters are written

      not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand

    but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter “a”

        in psalm and calm when

        pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very noticeable

        but

    why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by

      the

      fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools

    which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of

        mettlesomeness which may be

        mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no

        con-

    clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to have

      confessed

      that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom

    of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion

        compressed

        in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is

        able

    to say, “I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fish

      than

      I do,”—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi-

    ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one

        imagine

        that it is not there? It has never been confined to one

        locality.