Another curious contrast to the practical, material, matter-of-fact side of the American is his intense interest in the supernatural, the spiritualistic, the superstitious.  Boston, of all places in the world, is, perhaps, the happiest hunting-ground for the spiritualist medium, the faith healer, and the mind curer.  You will find there the most advanced emancipation from theological superstition combined in the most extraordinary way with a more than half belief in the incoherences of a spiritualistic seance.  The Boston Christian Scientists have just erected a handsome stone church, with chime of bells, organ, and choir of the most approved ecclesiastical cut; and, greatest marvel of all, have actually had to return a surplus of $50,000 (L10,000) that was subscribed for its building.  There are two pulpits, one occupied by a man who expounds the Bible, while in the other a woman responds with the grandiloquent platitudes of Mrs. Eddy.  In other parts of the country this desire to pry into the Book of Fate assumes grosser forms.  Mr. Bryce tells us that Western newspapers devote a special column to the advertisements of astrologers and soothsayers, and assures us that this profession is as much recognised in the California of to-day as in the Greece of Homer.

It seems to me that I have met in America the nearest approaches to my ideals of a Bayard sans peur et sans reproche; and it is in this same America that I have met flagrant examples of the being wittily described as sans pere et sans proche—­utterly without the responsibility of background and entirely unacquainted with the obligation of noblesse.  The superficial observer in the United States might conceivably imagine the characteristic national trait to be self-sufficiency or vanity (this mistake has, I believe, been made), and his opinion might be strengthened should he find, as I did, in an arithmetic published at Richmond during the late Civil War, such a modest example as the following:  “If one Confederate soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many Confederate soldiers will it take to whip forty-nine Yankees?” America has been likened to a self-made man, hugging her conditions because she has made them, and considering them divine because they have grown up with the country.  Another observer might quite as easily come to the conclusion that diffidence and self-distrust are the true American characteristics.  Certainly Americans often show a saving consciousness of their faults, and lash themselves with biting satire.  There are even Americans whose very attitude is an apology—­wholly unnecessary—­for the Great Republic, and who seem to despise any native product until it has received the hall-mark of London or of Paris.  In the new world that has produced the new book, of the exquisite delicacy and insight of which Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells may be taken as typical exponents, it seems to me that there are more than the usual proportion of critics who prefer to it what Colonel