including a slap on the shoulder, "Well, brother, did you
receive your delayed luggage correctly?" (In this instance my
studies of the North-American idiom lead me to believe that my
friend was intentionally truthful in regard to the
principalities, but mistaken in his observation of detail.) He
declared the recent willingness of the English to take some
interest in the United-Statesians to be a mistake; for their
were noisy, without real confidence in themselves; they were
restless and merely imitative instead of inventive. He told me
that he was not exceptional; all Englishmen had thought
similarly for fifty or sixty years; therefore, naturally, his
opinion carried great weight with me. And myself, to my
astonishment, I had often seen parties of these republicans
become all ears and whispers when somebody called a prince or a
countess passed by. Their reverence for age itself, in anything
but a horse, had often surprised me by its artlessness, and of
all strange things in the world, I have heard them admire old
customs and old families. It was strange to me to listen, when I
had believed that their land was the only one where happily no
person need worry to remember who had been his great-
grandfather.

The greatest of my own had not saved me from the decoration of
the past week, yet he was as much mine as he was Antonio
Caravacioli's; and Antonio, though impoverished, had his motor-
car and dined well, since I happened to see, in my perusal of
the journal, that he had been to dinner the evening before at
the English Embassy with a great company. "Bravo, Antonio! Find
a rich foreign wife if you can, since you cannot do well for
yourself at home!" And I could say so honestly, without spite,