And haven’t we Americans built enough railroads and factories, haven’t we made our cities large and dirty and noisy enough, haven’t we been giving ourselves to surface facts long enough? Let us away with the fact of existence, for the moment at least. You, the reader, are to imagine yourself sitting under a tree with me on a summer afternoon; or, better yet, lying with me in the sweet-smelling hay in an Ohio barn. We shall let our fancies loose, lie to ourselves if you please. Let us not question each other too closely. There is America, now. What is America? Whee! I say, now, don’t begin with such a gigantic question as that. Let’s think a little about what it isn’t. It isn’t English, for one thing, and--isn’t it odd?--the notion persists that it is. If we are ever to have a race of our own here--if the melting pot we are always talking about ever really melts up the mass--how English, how German, how Puritanic will it be? Not very much, I fancy. Too many Slavs, Poles, Wops, Chinese, Negroes, Mexicans, Hindoos, Jews, whatnot, for the old influences to hold in the end. But is it not odd how that old notion persists? A few English came and settled in that far-away frozen northeast corner--New England--and their sons did the book-writing and the school-teaching. They did not get themselves--physically--as breeders--very deeply into the new blood of the land, but they made their notion of what we are and of what we are to be stick pretty well. In time, however, the basic cultural feeling of the land must change too. Mind cannot persist without body. Blood will tell. And in my own time I was to see the grip of the old New England, the Puritanic culture, begin to loosen. The physical incoming of the Celts, Latins, Slavs, men of the Far East, the blood of the dreaming nations of the world gradually flowing thicker and thicker in the body of the American, and the shrewd shop-keeping money-saving blood of the northern men getting thinner and thinner. But I run far, far ahead of myself. Did my own fancy, even then, as a boy, lying in the hay in the barn, did it run ahead of my own day and my own time? Of that I cannot say, but of one thing I am quite certain--in all my life I have never for a moment subscribed to the philosophy of life as set forth by the _Saturday Evening Post_, the _Atlantic Monthly_, _Yale_, “Upward and Onward,” “The White Man’s Burden,” etc. There was always within me a notion of another aspect of life--at least faintly felt--a life that dreamed a little of more colorful and gaudy things--cruelty and tragedy creeping in the night, laughter, splashing sunlight, the pomp and splendor of the old tyrants, the simple devotion of old devotees.