Ameriea. I remember Hugh Walpole telling me that he could hardly
walk down Broadway without getting at least three dollars' worth
and on Fifth Avenue five dollars' worth; and I recollect that St.
John Ervine came up to my house in Montreal, drank a cup of tea,
borrowed some tobacco, and got away with sixty dollars' worth of
impressions of Canadian life and character.

For this kind of thing I have only a despairing admiration. I can get
an impression if I am given time and can think about it beforehand.
But it requires thought. This fact was all the more distressing to me
in as much as one of the leading editors of America had made me a
proposal, as honourable to him as it was Iucrative to me, that
immediately on my arrival in London;--or just before it,--I should
send him a thousand words on the genius of the English, and five
hundred words on the spirit of London, and two hundred words of
personal chat with Lord Northcliffe. This contract I was unable to
fulfil except the personal chat with Lord Northcliffe, which proved
an easy matter as he happened to be away in Australia.

But I have since pieced together my impressions as conscientiously
as I could and I present them here. If they seem to be a little
bit modelled on British impressions of America I admit at once that
the influence is there. We writers all act and react on one another;
and when I see a good thing in another man's book I react on it at
once.

London, the name of which is already known to millions of readers
of this book, is beautifully situated on the river Thames, which
here sweeps in a wide curve with much the same breadth and majesty
as the St. Jo River at South Bend, Indiana. London, like South Bend