I told how I had gone to America, where, finding all other talents unmarketable, I had become first a professional runner, and later a college trainer. To this occupation, in which I had been something of a success, I had given many years until a small invention had made me independent, and a man of leisure in a modest way. I saw he was a bit disappointed when I told him I had been forced to "turn pro." in order to obtain my bread and butter. I knew exactly how he felt, and well did I remember my sorrow when I dropped the "Mr." from my name. It is not a particularly high-sounding title, but to appreciate it at its true value a man need only to lose it and become plain "Smith," "Jones," or "Robinson." That nothing could raise the "pale spectre of the salt" between Frank Patterson and myself, not even going outside the pale of the "gentleman amateur," I was very certain. But when I told him a little later that I had become a full-fledged citizen of the United States, he could not conceal his surprise, although he said but little at first. We talked of other things for a while, and then my friend came back to what I knew he had been thinking about all the time, and he asked me bluntly how it was I had come to give up the nation of my birth. "It seemed only fair," I answered, "that I should become a citizen of the country in which I obtained my living, whose laws protected me, in which most of my friends were resident, and where I expected sometime to be buried." At this the Colonel was silent for a little while, and then he remarked rather doubtfully: "I cannot make up my mind just what the Americans are like. Are they what Kipling declared them in the 'Pioneer Mail' some ten years ago, when he cursed them root and branch, or what the same man said of them a few years later, when he affirmed just as strongly, 'I love them' and 'They'll be the biggest, finest, and best people on the surface of the globe'? Such contradictory statements are confusing to a plain soldier with nothing more than the average amount of intelligence. What is the use, too, of calling them Anglo-Saxon? They are, in fact, a mixture of Celt, Teuton, Gaul, Slav, with a modicum of Saxon blood, and I know not what else." I could not help smiling a little at the Colonel's earnestness. I tried to tell him that the American was essentially Anglo-Saxon in spite of all the mixture; that his traditions, aims, and sentiments were very much like his own; that he had the same language, law, and literature; that the boys read "Tom Brown at Rugby," and the old men Shakespeare, Browning, and Kipling. I told him that the boys played English games with but slight changes, and that they boxed like English boys, and their fathers fought like English men.