It strikes me that Americans possess in a very high degree the gift of sight-seeing. They possess what at school was called _pace_. They travel over England in a fortnight, but at the end they seem to have seen all that is, and all who are, worth seeing. We wonder how they can enjoy anything. But they do enjoy what they see, and they carry away a great many photographs, not only in their albums but in their memory also. The fact is that they generally come well prepared, and know beforehand what they want to see; and, after all, there are limits to everything. If we have only a quarter of an hour to look at the Madonna di San Sisto, may not that short exposure give us an excellent negative in our memory, if only our brain is sensitive, and the lens of our eyes clear and strong? The Americans, knowing that their time is limited, make certainly an excellent use of it, and seem to carry away more than many travellers who stand for hours with open mouths before a Raphael, and in the end know no more of the picture than of the frame. It requires sharp eyes and a strong will to see much in a short time. Some portrait painters, for instance, catch a likeness in a few minutes; others sit and sit, and stare and stare, and alter and alter, and never perceive the real characteristic points in a face. It is the same with the American interviewer. I do not like him, and I think he ought at all events to tell us that we are being interviewed. Even ancient statues are protected now against snap-shots in the museums of antiquities. But with all that I cannot help admiring him. His skill, in the cases where I have been under his scalpel or before his brush, has certainly been extraordinary, and several of them seem to have seen in my house, in my garden, in my library, and in my face, what I myself had never detected there, and all that in about half an hour. I remember one visit, however, which was rather humiliating. An American gentleman (I did not know that he was interviewing me) had been sitting with me for a long time, asking all sorts of questions and making evidently a trigonometrical survey of myself and my surroundings. At last I had to tell him that I was sorry I had to go, as I had to deliver a lecture. As he seemed so interested in my work I naturally expected he would ask me to allow him to hear my lecture. Nothing of the kind! “I am sorry,” he said, “but you don’t mind my sitting here in your library till you come back?” And, true enough, there I found him when I came home after an hour, and he was delighted to see me again. Some months after I had my reward in a most charming account of an interview with Professor Max Müller, published in an American journal. This power of observation which these interviewers, and to a certain extent most American travellers, seem to possess, is highly valuable, and as most of us cannot hope to have more than a few hours to see such monuments as St.