Allusions on the part of the audience, when they shook hands with me afterwards, I allowed to paas because there was not time to put things right; merely smiling at the mention of “A Window in Thrums,” and looking modest at the adjectives heaped upon “The Raiders.” My cynical humour was greatly tickled with the chairman, who had been very cordial with me in private, and who was understood by the public to have been closely identified with my visit to his city, when he not only escaped from the stage after he had introduced me, but also immediately left the theatre and cheerfully betook himself to his office without hearing one word of the lecture. Perhaps he had discovered from some casual remark of mine that I was not Mr. Barrie, and was at a loss to make out who I could be. With mayors and other public functionaries who have to speak six times a day on six different subjects, and who get a little confused as to which meeting they are attending, I have the utmost sympathy, and never have been discomposed by any reference to the management of hospitals or the fallacy of bimetallism, even though the references were very indifferently connected with the lecturer and his subjects. The labour of shaking hands afterwards with a considerable proportion of your audience is not only lightened by their kindness, but also much cheered by their conversation. After a few evenings in the United States I arrived at the rooted conviction that the majority of the American people belonged to the Scots race, and that America was the real Scotland. It was not only that native-born Scots came forward to welcome a fellow-countryman with an accent which was beyond all dispute and could be heard six yards off, and with allusions to Auchterarder which warmed your heart, but that every person seemed to be connected with Scotland. One belonged to a family which had emigrated from Scotland in the seventeenth century, and was anxious to know whether I could give him any information on the family tree. Another had married a Scots wife, and believed he owed his prosperity to her; a third was an admirer of Sir Walter Scott, and looked forward to visiting Scotland as the ambition of his life. And one lady, full of despair as she heard the Scots claims of the people around her, came and confessed frankly: “I am not Scots, and I have no relative a Scot, and none of our family married a Scot, but my sister has a Scots nurse: will that do?” I assured her it would, and that I was glad at last to meet a genuine American, because I had come to see the American people.