The excitement of finding the “Canadian Line” cheered my companion. The face which in the morning had looked contrite and penitent as that of one just released from jail, lighted up with new mirth and facetious intent. He began to get steam. The slow train from Arkansas began to approach Kentucky, and the sign of steam was a return to political conversation. He began to chaff me mercilessly on the subject of the Empire and King George and the British lion. I chaffed him about “God’s own country.” The poet identified America with all that was best in America’s traditions and in the visions of her poets, the All I could never be, All men ignored in me, of his native country. I was critical, for I bore in my mind the growth of materialism, the corruption of the law, the lynchings of the Negroes, and the rest. He wanted me to dissociate America from the dollar, from the noisy business rampage, and from all that was unworthy, and instead identify America with the dreams of her idealists. “That is what I did with Russia,” said I. “If I tell England of the ideal America they’ll only call me a mystic. But you, Vachel,” I continued, “try and think of the Empire that way.” He found it difficult. He could think creatively about his own country, but where others were concerned he reverted to the normal critical mind. * * * * * IT is almost a recognised convention in literature. If you are writing about a foreign country you take the general average of what you observe and describe that. You can attack lustily without fear that the magazine will lose “advertising.” The writer on Russia was supposed to bring home a report that the police, and indeed every one else, took bribes, the Jews were persecuted, the prisoners in Siberia were chained together. Most American writers on Russia have done it. Kennan is a characteristic case, who obtained fame identifying Russia with prison horrors without recalling to the minds of his readers that there are dreadful prisons also in the United States, and that the silence of his own Georgia is sometimes desecrated by the melancholy clank-clank of the chain-gang. I was besought in 1917, by a leading magazine of America, to write an account of Rasputin, and although I had many interesting stories of that evil genius of Russia I refused to write what I considered would at that time be damaging to Russia. On the other hand, I wrote in 1919 a realistic vision of America in perhaps her saddest post-war moment, when Wilson was down and no one knew what America was going to do next, and offered it to the same journal. But the editor was quite hurt that I did not then see America in roseate hues. How characteristic of this sprightly world, which, as Latimer said, “was begotten of Envy and put out at Discord for nurse!”