THE ABOUNDING AMERICAN BY T. W. H. CROSLAND Author of “Lovely Woman” and “The Unspeakable Scot” London: A. F. THOMPSON & CO. 92 Fleet Street, E.C. 1907 CONTENTS. PAGE THE PROPOSITION 7 MILLIONAIRES 19 HUMOURISTS 29 THE AMERICAN WOMAN 37 LITERATURE 45 THE PRESIDENT 55 ADVERTISEMENT 61 THE PEA-NUT MIND 71 THE DRAMA 81 SPORT 91 HOGS 101 VERDICT 109 [Illustration] COPYRIGHT 1907 BY A. F. THOMPSON IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND All Rights Reserved CHAPTER I THE PROPOSITION “And what, prithee, hath overtaken Guy?” “Guy—why Guy diced and drabbed and ruffled away his inheritance, and to save his neck took shipping for the tobacco plantations where, they say, he married a daughter of Lo, the poor Indian, and none hath since heard of him.” This is the kind of talk that one could hear in the clubs of London a matter of, say, two hundred and fifty years ago. In plain terms, Guy, poor devil, being a wastrel,—and a broken wastrel at that—had betaken himself to America, there probably to found one of the “fine old Virginia families” of which American writers, and particularly American fictional writers, are so prone to babble. America, of course, was really started not by the Indians or Columbus, but by the Pilgrim Fathers, assisted and backed up by several cargoes of blue-brained and cleverblooded spirits from the British Isles, whose minds were full of theology and whose souls were full of tea. I shall be told that it is unkind of me to make such remarks.