* * * * *

It is remarkable that a citizen who cheerfully and negligently submits to so many various inconveniences outside his home should insist on having the most comfortable home in the world, as the American citizen unquestionably has!  Once, when in response to an interviewer I had become rather lyrical in praise of I forget what phenomenon in the United States, a Philadelphia evening newspaper published an editorial article in criticism of my views.  This article was entitled “Offensive Flattery.”  Were I to say freely all that I thought of the American private house, large or small, I might expose myself again to the same accusation.

[Illustration:  THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY ASSORTED.]

When I began to make the acquaintance of the American private house, I felt like one who, son of an exiled mother, had been born abroad and had at length entered his real country.  That is to say, I felt at home.  I felt that all this practical comfort and myself had been specially destined for each other since the beginning of time, and that fate was at last being fulfilled.  Freely I admit that until I reached America I had not understood what real domestic comfort, generously conceived, could be.  Certainly I had always in this particular quarreled with my own country, whose average notion of comfort still is to leave the drawing-room (temperature 70 deg.—­near the fire) at midnight, pass by a windswept hall and staircase (temperature 55 deg.) to a bedroom full of fine fresh air (temperature 50 deg. to 40 deg.), and in that chamber, having removed piece by piece every bit of warm clothing, to slip, imperfectly protected, between icy sheets and wait for sleep.  Certainly I had always contested the joyfulness of that particular process; but my imagination had fallen short of the delicious innumerable realities of comfort in an American home.

Now, having regained the “barbaric seats” whence I came, I read with a peculiar expression the advertisements of fashionable country and town residences to rent or for sale in England.  Such as:  “Choice residence.  Five reception-rooms.  Sixteen bedrooms.  Bathroom—­” Or:  “Thoroughly up-to-date mansion.  Six reception-rooms.  Splendid hall.  Billiard-room.  Twenty-four bedrooms.  Two bath-rooms—­” I read this literature (to be discovered textually every week in the best illustrated weeklies), and I smile.  Also I wonder, faintly blushing, what Americans truly do think of the residential aspects of European house-property when they first see it.  And I wonder, without blushing, to what miraculous degree of perfected comfort Americans would raise all their urban traffic if only they cared enough to keep the professional politician out of their streets as strictly as they keep him out of their houses.

* * * * *