We stayed a day at Bournemouth, to catch anew the flavour of the place. On the morning after our arrival we came down early to breakfast.

There was an American in the coffee-room. He was staying at the hotel, it seemed, with his wife and daughter. He did not, strange to say, wear striped trousers strapped over his boots, nor a star-spangled waistcoat, as in the comic papers, nor the supposedly-characteristic Yankee goatee. No, he had none of these things; he resembled that American of the caricatures no more than the Englishman resembles the John Bull of the leathern breeches and the top-boots, and the low-crowned beaver hat. He didn’t even chew nor spit on the walls (we must revise those caricatures). The only American traits about him were his sallow complexion, his restlessness, and his high cheek-bones. That is to say, when he was silent. When he spoke there was no excuse for mistaking his nationality.

He eyed us for some time with an ill-suppressed curiosity, which at length grew too acute for silence.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “I see your names in the visitors’ book of this hotel. You come from London?”

I said we did.

“Say, you’re not travelling on business, I guess?”

The Wreck replied that we were touring for pleasure, and that we walked. This was an indiscreet admission, I could see at once, for this free-born citizen of those States evidently, by his manner, did not quite appreciate walking for walking’s sake. It was evidently, to his view, the mark of the “mean white.” But his only comment was, “Wall, I’ll swear.”

For all this fall in his esteem, though, his curiosity was still rampant, and he was as eager to obtain personal details as though he had been an interviewer (which indeed he was not, for he informed us that he had made “his dollars” in some grain-elevating business or another in “Chicawgo,” and had come over to see this country).

“Well,” I said, in answer to his inquiries, “my friend here is nothing in particular, and I’m a journalist.”

“You don’t say!” he exclaimed. “What paper?”

“The —— and ——,” I replied; “but, indeed, any print that will use my stuff and pay at decent rates.”

“Wall, now! You’re like the flies, bumming around the sweetest lump of molasses, eh?”

I admitted that the case was somewhat similar, although I didn’t like the analogy.

“Ah!” exclaimed our American (whose name, by the way, was Hiram D. Cheasey, or something else equally humorous), “you ain’t got no paper over here to compare with the best New York papers: one of ’em ’specially.”

“Which one may that be?” I inquired of the stranger, who by now was beginning to exhibit symptoms of spread-eagleism.

“Sir,” he replied, “it is the organ through which America speaks to the hull civilized world.”

I suspect I must have been tempted of the devil, for I inquired, with apparent innocency—

“You mean the nasal organ, I presume?”

It was an unfortunate inquiry, for on account of it I never learned the name of the New York print which had so world-wide a voice: I wonder what is the title of that sheet, and what is its scale of remuneration?

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