As a mere visitor, I have been back in Europe on several occasions since 1898, but I have never regretted my stubborn decision in that year to return to my country and make it my abiding place. In retrospect, it occurs to me, first of all, that the general experience in Europe, on account of its prolongation, lost for me that personal touch with young men of my own age who were making their way ahead in America, and which accounts for so much in getting into the swim of things, making those friends that avail so much in business or in the professions--in a word, in growing in your own community with your own people. I stayed too long in Europe for my own good. In 1898, in spite of the mysterious and uncontrollable desire to get back to America, I was for months after my arrival in New York the most Europe-homesick person imaginable. Whom did I find that knew me? Only a few friends settled there who had been at my mother's home in Berlin, or that I had met during my travels. I did not know one of them in any business capacity here, and not one of them had been acquainted with me in any of my American homes. I had got acquainted with them in Europe, "on the march," so to speak. I think it unfortunate that a boy or young man should linger so long in lands far removed from his own, when, in the end, he usually must try to amount to something. It is again that question of camping, which I referred to in an earlier part of my story, which is preëminently noticeable in all such American colony life abroad as I have observed. The colonies are for the most part nothing but camps, the colonists being only too obviously mere birds of passage. I do not believe it is a good thing for a young man, whose life is afterwards to be taken up again in his native land, to spend so much time out of it as I did. I lost touch with my home generation; I spent the most formative years of my life in countries where, as it proved, I was not to live and make my way; I got into lackadaisical ways of looking at things, and I fell to thinking that living in bachelor quarters on five hundred dollars a year would be an enviable achievement. Yet Europe, and particularly Germany, also did me a certain good for which I must always be grateful. I have already hinted at some of the benefits which I think I appreciated at the time of their bestowal, and have learned never to forget. I must certainly thank Europe for a quieting effect on my fiery unwillingness to see inexorable truths as they must be seen sooner or later. I must also thank Europe for some most delightful friends and acquaintances. But where are they now? The great majority are scattered no doubt all over the world, only a few remaining in my own country for me to enjoy. This is the pathos of the whole business as I have been through it. CHAPTER XXII NEW YORK AGAIN