that I was for the time being completely thrown off my bearings.
The questions that I had every right to expect after many years of
American and Canadian interviews failed to appear.

I pass over the fact that being interviewed for five hours is a
fatiguing process. I lay no claim to exemption for that. But to
that no doubt was due the singular discrepancies as to my physical
appearance which I detected in the London papers.

The young man who interviewed me immediately after breakfast
described me as "a brisk, energetic man, still on the right side
of forty, with energy in every movement."

The lady who wrote me up at 11.30 reported that my hair was turning
grey, and that there was "a peculiar languor" in my manner.

And at the end the boy who took me over at a quarter to two said,
"The old gentleman sank wearily upon a chair in the hotel lounge.
His hair is almost white."

The trouble is that I had not understood that London reporters are
supposed to look at a man's personal appearance. In America we
never bother with that. We simply describe him as a "dynamo." For
some reason or other it always pleases everybody to be called a
"dynamo," and the readers, at least with us, like
to read about people who are "dynamos," and hardly care for anything
else.

In the case of very old men we sometimes call them "battle-horses"
or "extinct volcanoes," but beyond these three classes we hardly