India

  Ah, what avails the sceptred race, 
    Ah, what the form divine! 
  What every virtue, every grace! 
    Rose Aylmer, all were thine!

It was in San Francisco that I learned - and very quickly - that it is as necessary to visit America in order to know what Americans are like as it is to leave one's own country in order to know more about that. Americans when abroad are less hearty, less revealing. They are either suffering from a constraint or an over-assertiveness; and both moods may be due to not being at home. In neither case are they so natural as at home. I suppose that on soil not our own we all tend to be a little over-anxious to proclaim our nationality, to maintain the distinction.

America is a land of newspapers, and the newspapers are very largely the same. To a certain extent many of them are exactly the same, for the vastness of the country makes it possible to syndicalise various features, so that you find Walt Mason's sagacious and merry and punctual verse, printed to look like prose but never disappointing the ear, in one of the journals that you buy wherever you are, in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Chicago or New York; and Mr. Montagu's topical rhymes in another; and the daily adventures of Mutt and Jeff, who are national heroes, in a third.

I did not have to wait to reach India for that great and exciting moment when one is first called "Sahib." I was addressed as "Sahib," to my mingled pride and confusion, at Marseilles, by an attendant on the steamer which I joined there.

If I did not find Rose Aylmer's tomb, I found, in St. John's pleasant God's Acre, the comely mausoleum of Job Charnock, and this delighted me, because for how long has been ringing in my ears that line -

  "The tall pale widow is mine, Joe, the little brown 
      girl's for you."

San Francisco I shall chiefly recollect (apart from personal reasons) for the sparkling freshness and vigour of the air; for the extent and variety of Golden Gate Park, where I found a bust of Beethoven, but no sign of Bret Harte; for the vast reading-room in the library at Berkeley, a university which is so enchantingly situated, beneath such a sun, and in sight of such a bay, that I marvel that any work can be done there at all; and for the miles and miles of perfect tarmac roads fringed with burning eschscholtzias and gentle purple irises. That was in April.

I was fortunate in being in New York when the Metropolitan Museum celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its birth, for I was therefore able to enjoy not only its normal treasures but such others as had been borrowed for birthday presents, which means that I saw Mrs. H. E. Huntington's Vermeer, as well as the supreme Marquand example of that master; more than the regular wealth of Rembrandts, Manet's "Still Life," Gauguin's "Women by the River," El Greco's "View of Toledo," Franz Hals' big jovial Dutchman from Mr.

It is difficult for a stranger to India, especially when paying only a brief visit, to lose the impression that he is at an exhibition - in a section of a World's Fair. How long it takes for this delusion to wear off I cannot say. All I can say is that seven weeks are not enough. And never does one feel it more than in the bazaar, where movement is incessant and humanity is so packed and costumes are so diverse, and where the suggestion of the exhibition is of course heightened by the merchants and the stalls.

I arrived in Bombay on the last day of 1919 and embarked at Calcutta for Japan on the evening of February 17th, seven weeks later. But to embark at Calcutta is not to leave it, for we merely dropped down the river a short distance that night, and for the next day and a half we were in the Hooghli, sounding all the way.

Watching the young men and maidens crowding to a lecture in the Hearst Amphitheatre at Berkeley, under that glorious Californian sky, I was struck by the sensible, frank intimacy of them all, and envied them the advantages that must be theirs over the English methods of segregation at the same age, which, by creating shyness and destroying familiarity, tends to retard if not destroy the natural understanding which ought to subsist between them and if it did would often make life afterwards so much simpler.