In the eighteenth century in England, whenever people met together to eat, drink, and enjoy themselves, they sang. Song, alas, is now dying out of modern England, but it still lingers in the haunts of the young. Very few people now write drinking-songs, and this surely testifies to a lamentable decay in our morals. I shall always be thankful to this trip for having afforded me a better glimpse of the new world, which I obtained through the companionship of these fine sons of Australia and New Zealand, than I might have obtained by living for months in Wellington or Sydney, because on board a small ship one gets to know people far more intimately than one does anywhere else, and it is by getting to know people that you arrive at an understanding of a country. It is not through sight-seeing that you get to know a country; it is through getting to know its people well, and through getting to know the right sort of people. _San Francisco: October 3_ There is no subject in the world more hackneyed than American impressions. Nearly every month a writer of note discovers America over again. In spite of this, I am told, there is no stuff that is more eagerly read in the States, and outside of them, than impressions of America written by a foreigner. It doesn’t seem to matter whether such impressions are written by a writer of renown, such as H. G. Wells or Arnold Bennett, or by a totally unknown tourist; it does not matter whether they are well written or ill written, whether they are serious or flippant, amusing or dull; they are certain to be read. I think I can understand the reason of this. People in any country like to read about themselves. They like to look upon their own image as it is reflected in the mirror of foreign observers. It does not much matter what the mirror is like, so long as the image is there. There is no book of impressions of England, for instance, that I could not read with interest. Nevertheless, all this does not make the task of writing about America to an American public any easier. If one is writing exclusively for one’s own native public, the task is not so difficult. One can describe an American hotel, for instance, a train, a tram-car; one can tell how one is shaved and how one’s boots are blacked; but the American public knows that already. So the task resolves itself into this: one has to write about things which are intimately familiar to the public one is addressing, in such a manner as to make it possible for them to read what one writes without being tired to death and throwing the book at some one’s head.