The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin greeted all the good Lord's endeavor and mine, with an air of condescension as something due their station. From force of habit they worried and fussed about their baggage, although there was nothing to worry or fuss about, for it was safe on its way to the hotel. They were shot under the river and the busy streets of Manhattan and whirled up to the twenty-first story of their thirty-two-storied hotel without having taken more than a dozen steps to reach it. The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin refused to be impressed by the rooms assigned them, in which not a single comfort or luxury was missing, and complained because they were not as big as barns and the ceilings not as high as a cathedral. The Frau Directorin eyed the bath-room almost in silence; but she did wonder why they put out a whole month's supply of towels at once, instead of doing it in the provident European way of one towel every other day. The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, like all Europeans who can afford to travel, are exceedingly æsthetic, and at the same time fond of good food, and their first approving smile was won at the breakfast table, when they were each face to face with half a grapefruit of vast circumference, reposing upon a bed of crushed ice. Their smiles broadened when they had introduced their palates to an American breakfast food, a crispy bit of nut-flavored air bubble, floating upon thick, rich cream; and, although they had made up their minds that American coffee was vile and they must not taste it, they could not resist its aroma, and drank it with a relish. When the Herr Director said: _"Der Kaffee ist gut,_" I knew that my prayers were being answered, and that the good Lord still loves the United States of America. Most of us have shown off something--a baby, school-children, a schoolhouse, a town, an automobile, a cemetery. You know that feeling of pride which thrills you, that fear lest pride have a fall if it or they fail to "show up." But have you ever tried to show off a country--a country which you love with a lover's passion; a country whose virtues are so many, whose defects are so obvious; a country whose glory you have gloried in before the whole world, but whose halo has so many rust spots that you wish you might have had a chance to use Sapolio on it ere you let it shine before your visitors? A country of one hundred million inhabitants, of whom every fourth person smells of the steerage, when you wish that they all smelled of the Mayflower; a country where more people are ready to die for its freedom than anywhere, and more people ought to be in the penitentiary for abusing that freedom; a country of vast distances, bound together by huge railways and controlled by unsavory politicians; a country with more homely virtues, more virtuous homes, than anywhere else, yet where the divorce courts never cease their grinding and alimonies have no end?