Only the other day we heard a wise man say that he did not care for Long Island, because one has to travel through a number of half-built suburbs before getting into real country.  We felt, when he said it, that it would be impossible for us to tell him how much some of those growing suburbs mean to us, for we have lived in them.  There is not one of those little frame dwellings that doesn’t give us a thrill as we buzz past them.  If you voyage from Brooklyn, as we do, you will have noticed two stations (near Jamaica) called Clarenceville and Morris Park.  Now we have never got off at those stations, though we intend to some day.  But in those rows of small houses and in sudden glimpses of modest tree-lined streets and corner drug stores we can see something that we are not subtle enough to express.  We see it again in the scrap of green park by the station at Queens, and in the brave little public library near the same station—­which we cannot see from the train, though we often try to; but we know it is there, and probably the same kindly lady librarian and the children borrowing books.  We see it again—­or we did the other day—­in a field at Mineola where a number of small boys were flying kites in the warm, clean, softly perfumed air of a July afternoon.  We see it in the vivid rows of colour in the florist’s meadow at Floral Park.  We don’t know just what it is, but over all that broad tract of hardworking suburbs there is a secret spirit of practical and persevering decency that we somehow associate with the soul of America.

We see it with the eye of a lover, and we know that it is good.

Having got as far as this, we took the trouble to count all the words up to this point.  The total is exactly 1100.

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SOME INNS

The other evening we went with Titania to a ramshackle country hotel which calls itself The Mansion House, looking forward to a fine robust meal.  It was a transparent, sunny, cool evening, and when we saw on the bill of fare half broiled chicken, we innocently supposed that the word half was an adjective modifying the compound noun, broiled-chicken.  Instead, to our sorrow and disappointment, it proved to be an adverb modifying broiled (we hope we parse the matter correctly).  At any rate, the wretched fowl was blue and pallid, a little smoked on the exterior, raw and sinewy within, and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping.  Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back at our fine mood of expectancy as we entered that hostelry, and its pitiable collapse when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, we fell to thinking about some of the inns we had known of old time where we had feasted not without good heart.