On the way back from the lovely _campanile_ to the hotel, I stumbled over a scattering of artificial hillocks surrounding two mud-puddles connected by a gutter. This monstrosity turned out to be a relief-map of Palestine. Little children, with uncultivated voices, shouted at each other as they lightly leaped from Jerusalem to Jericho; and waste-paper soaked itself to dingy brown in the insanitary Sea of Galilee.--Then I encountered a wooden edifice with castellated towers and machicolated battlements, which called itself (with a large label) the Men's Club; and from this I fled, with almost a sense of relief, to the hotel itself, now sprawling low and dark beneath its Boston-brown-bread cupola. Thus my first impression of Chautauqua was one of melancholy and resentment. But, in the subsequent few days, this emotion was altered to one of impressible satiric mirth; and, subsequently still, it was changed again to an emotion of wondering and humble admiration. I had been assured at the outset, by one who had already tried it, that, if I stayed long enough, I should end up by liking Chautauqua; and this is precisely what happened to me before a week was out. But meanwhile I laughed very hard for three days. The thing that made me laugh most was the unexpected experience of enduring the discomfiture of fame. Chautauqua is a constricted community; and any one who lectures there becomes, by that very fact, a famous person in this little backwater of the world, until he is supplanted (for fame is as fickle as a ballet-dancer) by the next new-comer to the platform. The Chautauqua Press publishes a daily paper, a weekly review, a monthly magazine and a quarterly; and these publications report your lectures, tell the story of your life, comment upon your views of this and that, advertise your books, and print your picture. Everybody knows you by sight, and stops you in the street to ask you questions. Thus, on your way to the Post Office, you are intercepted by some kindly soul who says: "I am Miss Terwilliger, from Montgomery, Alabama; and do you think that Bernard Shaw is really an immoral writer?" or, "I am Mrs. Winterbottom, of Muncie, Indiana; and where do you think I had better send my boy to school? He is rather a backward boy for his age--he was ten last April--but I really think that if, etc."