_The_ BLOWER _of_ BUBBLES BY ARTHUR BEVERLEY BAXTER D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY MOTHER PREFACE It was one of Dumas' characters, I believe, who said: "I do not apologize--I explain." The purpose of this brief preface is to explain the many imperfections which of necessity appear in this volume. It was at a dance after Armistice, given by American officers in the Palace Hotel, London, that I met a young lady who had landed from New York two days previously. "My goodness!" she said, "they don't have any furnaces in their houses here; and I've been trying all day to buy some rubbers, and no one knew what I meant. My goodness! but they're backward over here." I looked at her face and recognized the joyful mania of the explorer. She was "discovering" England. Before the war, England was "discovered" fairly often--but during the war it became the passion of hundreds of thousands, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, South Africans--we all brought our particular national viewpoint and centered it on the "tight little Island," nor were we backward about telling the English of their faults. Each one of us stated (or implied) that his own country was the special acreage of God, and that the Kaiser ought to be made to live in foggy London as a punishment. And for more than four years the Old Country listened patiently as the throngs of adventurers poured in from the world's outskirts. The stately homes of England were opened in their stately, hospitable way; English taxicab drivers insulted and robbed us just as cheerfully as they did their own countrymen; English girls proved the best of comrades; and the Englishman proper continued to be the world's greatest enigma. So, in claiming admittance to that vast throng that has already discovered England, I do so with a certain humility but a hope that, when my words are sifted, some little ore of truth may be discovered at the bottom. In three of the five stories of this collection, I have usurped the power of the Wizard of Oz, and have looked through three pairs of glasses. In "The Blower of Bubbles" an Englishman subjects his own country to analysis; in "Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist," the glasses used are American and the medium is a New Yorker; in "The Airy Prince" (the last and favorite child) a girl of sixteen from Picardy is transplanted by aeroplane for one full day in wartime London. In the remaining two stories I have endeavored to paint something of city life in Canada in the one, and in the other to do some little justice to that least understood type--the French Canadian.