He was very stiff and very ironical; he fed
me well, lodged me sumptuously, and seemed to take it
out of me all the time, cent. per cent., in secret
entertainment which caused his spectacles to glitter
and his mouth to twitch. The ground of this ill-
suppressed mirth (as well as I could make out) was
simply the fact that I was an American. "Well," he
would say, drawing out the word to infinity "and I
suppose now in your country things will be so-and-so."
And the whole group of my cousins would titter
joyously. Repeated receptions of this sort must be at
the root, I suppose, of what they call the Great
American Jest; and I know I was myself goaded into
saying that my friends went naked in the summer months,
and that the Second Methodist Episcopal Church in
Muskegon was decorated with scalps. I cannot say that
these flights had any great success; they seemed to
awaken little more surprise than the fact that my
father was a Republican, or that I had been taught in
school to spell COLOUR without the U. If I had
told them (what was, after all, the truth) that my
father had paid a considerable annual sum to have me
brought up in a gambling-hell, the tittering and
grinning of this dreadful family might perhaps have
been excused.
Pages:
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52