MUCH to my regret the Herr Director did not sleep well that second night in the United States. His nerves had suffered from those first thronging impressions, he looked pale and was decidedly irritable; “for how could a man sleep or be expected to sleep in this business canyon, loud from the thunder of the elevated, and bright from the flashing of illuminated signs?” Together they had the effect of an electric storm upon him.

When he did fall asleep he dreamed that the Metropolitan Tower, the Woolworth Building and St. Patrick’s Cathedral were dancing Tango upon his chest.

This nightmare may have been due to the fact that just before retiring we witnessed an exhibition of this modern madness, which seemed to be indulged in everywhere except in the churches and possibly the barber shops. Partly also, perhaps, because the Herr Director insisted upon eating lobster shortly before midnight, in spite of the fact that I warned him against that indulgence. It was one of those generous, United States lobsters, and not the diminutive shell-fish with which cultured Europeans merely tickle their palates.

The Herr Director had repeatedly pointed out our bad habit of leaving a great deal of food on our plates, and to impress upon me his better manners, he had eaten the entire lobster.

I had not slept well that night either, in spite of the fact that I had eaten sparingly. I think it was the Herr Director himself who had “got on my nerves,” and I was finding this task of “showing off” my beloved United States difficult and exacting.

That morning we were to leave New York and I would introduce my guests to the great American out-of-doors, and the prospect added to my already uncomfortable frame of mind.

If only we might start from that marvellous Central Station in the heart of the city; but in order to reach our destination, which was Lake Mohonk, we had to cross the West Side where it is irredeemably tawdry and ugly, and take one of the ferry-boats to Weehawken. This somewhat inconvenient procedure made the Herr Director doubly critical.

The Fates were against us, for it was a hot, humid day, the car was crowded, and the start from Weehawken anything but auspicious.

In Europe the Herr Director travels second class when he travels officially (the first, as is well known, being reserved for Americans and fools), and third when he travels incognito, for he is a thrifty soul. Nevertheless, he did not like our cars, they were “obtrusively decorated,” and privacy was impossible. Why should he have to look at a hundred or more human heads variously “frisired”?

I suggested that we take seats in front, which we succeeded in doing, and then he found that if he wished to take off his collar, he would have to do it with two hundred or more human eyes fastened upon him, when the hundred people possessing them had no business to see what he was doing.

I have already confessed how sensitive I am to criticism of anything American, no matter how just the criticism may be. So sensitive am I, that had he reflected upon the good looks of my wife, he could scarcely have hurt me more than when he reflected upon the beauty and arrangement of an American railway car.

And yet I have often wondered why our American genius seems to have exhausted itself when it evolved the present type of car, having done nothing to it except adding or taking away some of its “gingerbread.” Nevertheless I lost my patience and told him that if he liked to travel cooped in with seven other passengers, four of whom he must face and two of whom might at any moment poke their elbows into his ribs; if he preferred to breathe air polluted by seven other people, and have a fresh supply of ozone only at periods and in quantities regulated by law, I did not admire his taste. As far as I was concerned I preferred to travel in this big room on wheels, rather than in a jail-like box to which the conductor alone had the key. Anyway this represented American democracy with its unpartitioned space; but if he really wanted it, I could get him a stateroom in the Pullman, and he could ride in isolated splendor and be aristocratically stuffy and uncomfortable.

When the Frau Directorin in typical German phraseology complained about the draft: “Um Gottes Willen ein Zug!” I decided to save the day, and we retreated to the Pullman stateroom.

There they rested themselves back and looked tolerably happy while I, silently but fervently, prayed that this particular train would not disgrace itself by “committing” an accident.

The big, American out-of-doors, even where it is old and its waste spaces are cultivated and hedged about, has something which is characteristically American. Of course nature knows no political boundary; the grass is green everywhere, the sky is blue, cattle and sheep, like man, have a long and honorable ancestry. Yet there is a difference which may not be due to what nature is, but to man’s attitude towards her and his treatment of her.

I have noticed this in passing through Europe; how unerringly one knows where Germanic boundaries end and those of the Slav begin. German fields and forests are trim and orderly; Slavic territory so ill kept and ill used that when one has a glimpse of a village even from the swift moving train, the difference is obvious.

Sometimes I am inclined to believe that this attitude of man affects his environment as much as we know the environment affects him. I wonder just how much of the American out-of-doors, with its generous but not gentle aspect, its subdued but untamed spirit, is due to those valiant men who came from across the sea, and in so doing restored a bit of their long-lost courage, and made masters of men who so long had been serfs and knaves.

I had hoped that the sudden burst of the Hudson upon my guests’ vision would thrill them; but if they were thrilled, they were careful to conceal it. When I suggested the likeness of the Hudson to the Rhine, the Herr Director took it as a personal affront and said you might as well compare St. Patrick’s Cathedral and that of Cologne. They are both churches and Gothic; the Hudson and the Rhine are two rivers, and both are big.

Nevertheless I insisted that there is an evident resemblance which would be complete if the Hudson had a ruined castle here and there, or a picturesquely cramped village huddling against the hillside.

“Yes, and beside castles and picturesque villages,” the Herr Director replied tartly, “you need a thousand years of culture and the same traditions which make the shores of the Rhine sacred to us; you also need generations of patiently plodding peasants who have made a sacrament of their toil. One glance at your rotting boats lying along the shore, at the untilled, gaping spaces and glaring, inartistic sign-boards which disfigure it, is sufficient to distinguish the two rivers or perhaps even the two countries.”

Having thus forcefully delivered himself, he scornfully pointed out the waste places and the unkempt-looking fields, asking me whether I still dared compare anything in this out-of-doors with the fine economy and splendid supervision of the natural resources of his own country.

Shamefacedly I acknowledged my country’s guilt, and the guilt which was evident on the majestic shores of the Hudson. We are wasteful, extravagant and reckless—great defects in our national spirit, and most in evidence in our treatment of nature’s beauty and wealth. We shall have to remedy that, in fact we are just beginning to do it; if not from any sense of guilt, from the same sheer necessity which makes the nations of the Old World careful of their national wealth.

“The Conservation of our National Resources” is a fine phrase; it represents not only an economic, but a spiritual gain—this feeling of responsibility for the next generation. It is a new and most valuable asset of our national spirit; yet I must confess that I fear the coming of a day when we, too, shall have to practice the sordid little economies of the Old World and think with anxiety about the to-morrow.

It has always seemed to me that here the miracle of the loaves and fishes might be performed indefinitely, and that there always would be left over the baskets full of fragments. Somehow, in common with the rest of mankind, I have associated generous plenty with the American spirit, and I trust we shall never have just our dole and no more.

I recall walking one evening with the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin through the well-regulated, officially trimmed and “Streng Verboten” forest which encircles his native city. My children were with us—young, vigorous, American savages, who have a superabundance of the American spirit although they have not a drop of American blood in their veins. We passed a small mound of freshly mown hay and they promptly jumped into it, tossing a few handfuls as an offering to their aboriginal deity, the wind. If they had dashed into the plateglass window of a jeweler’s shop or had desecrated the most holy shrine, they could not have caused greater consternation.

“Um Gottes Himmels Willen die Polizei!” cried the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin echoed: “Die Polizei!”

Although this happened about ten years ago, my children have not forgotten their fright.

I suppose we still lack this virtue of economy, and yet I hope we may not lose that certain largeness of nature and that generosity of spirit which have characterized us.

I love the generous spaces, the unfenced lawns, which make of the whole village one common park; the grass and clover free to the touch of our children’s feet, the fragrant flowers wasting their bloom, and berries and cherries enough for the wild things of the woods. May the future not bring more high walls and narrow lanes, big game preserves for the rich, and scant patches of soil for the poor; castles for capital and tenements for labor. And may we never see written over every blade of grass: “Streng Verboten.”

I realized that the Herr Director spoke truly when he said that what we lack over here is a healthy class spirit, which the German farmer has. A sort of pride in his calling which makes him care for the soil and nourish it with a lover’s passion. To him robbing the soil is as great a crime as it would be to rob his children. It is not only the Emperor who regards himself as a partner with God, and sometimes the senior partner; the commonest, poorest peasant is apt to say as he drenches his field with the accumulated compost: “Ich und Gott.”

Speaking of the farmer, the Herr Director admitted that in Germany as elsewhere there is a trend to the city; but the tide is held back by the pride of the German farmer, who glories in having his traditions, his folksongs, and, above all, this sense of partnership with God.

We scarcely have such a thing as a farmer class; we have merely merchandizers in dirt who sell not only the products of the soil, but unhesitatingly the soil itself.

The land which we see from the car window, which the pioneers won from this boundless space, these houses and sheltering groves, the homesteads in which a great race was cradled, are all for sale, now that the soil is robbed of its fertility and the robbers have moved on to repeat the process elsewhere. We are doing something, he admitted, to stem the tide to the cities; we are introducing agricultural training into our public schools and are making the raising of corn and wheat a science, but not as yet a sacrament.

We stayed over night in one of the half-asleep towns on the shores of the river, a town whose history is written upon the headstones in the cemetery, in the center of which the stately meeting-house stands. We met the descendants of those who sleep there, whose pride lies in the fact that their forefathers were the pioneers who fought the Indians, the fevers and each other. Their houses are full of old furniture shipped from England and Holland, and we ate their food and drank their tea from costly silver and exquisite china which they have inherited.

We looked upon the portraits of their ancestors and were told of their virtues and their fame; we saw fine memorials to the past in churches and town halls and rode in their automobiles, to see the farms bequeathed to them. One thing, alas! they have not and never will have—descendants.

On one of the farms we saw a swarthy Italian with a bright red rose behind his ear. His wife and children were working with him in the field, and they were doing this strange thing as they pulled weeds from the onion beds—they were singing. The Herr Director said significantly, “These are the heirs to all this,” and I think he was a true prophet.

It is a wonderful thing to invent agricultural machinery and to discover new methods by which two blades of grass can be made to grow where but one grew; yet if only some one could tune our dull American ears, so that our farmers might catch the melody of the singing land and sing with it; if our boys and girls would love wild roses well enough to wear them—if, and that is a very big if—some one could teach us Americans to be proud of having descendants, we might add a new note to the great American out-of-doors, and keep it American.

That night we sat upon a wide verandah, overlooking a valley through which the Hudson rolled majestically; we saw populous cities, picturesque villages and bounteous farms; we looked into the heart of the out-of-doors and I was proud of it and of its free people, who ought to be a grateful people. There was deep silence everywhere; no sound except that of the birds, and they did not sing jubilantly as birds ought to sing in so blessed a place and on so glorious an evening. No one sang except the same Italian who was coming home with his wife and numerous progeny. He still wore the rose behind his ear, although it had faded. Those who sat with us had every luxury and more money than they knew how to spend; but they could not sing, for they were old, children there were none, and if there had been, they would not have been singing—they would have had a victrola.

After the Italian had eaten his frugal but pungent fare he came to the big verandah to get his orders for the next day, and the Herr Director spoke Italian to him and he replied in that language which in itself is almost a song. His mistress asked him to bring his wife and children to sing for us. His wife did not come but the children came. They would not sing an Italian song, it is true—that was just for themselves, in the fields where only God heard. They sang some sentimental thing they had heard in the “movies”—chewing gum the while. I asked them to sing something their teacher taught them but they knew nothing except “My Country ’tis of Thee” and the “Star Spangled Banner,” both of which they sang joylessly and not understandingly. How and why should they understand when the Americans did not?

It was a day full of dismal failure in my attempt to impress upon my guests the American spirit, and the failure of it was “rubbed” in by the Herr Director, who, as he bade me good-night, quoted as a parting shot this bit of German verse:

The rub was in his inference that we have no song because we have no noble spirit.