cities, and the subtler nature of its influence seemed to magnify its pervasive force.] None the less do the people of the United States, compared with those of any one European country, seem to me to have their due share of variety and even of picturesqueness.  This latter quality is indeed denied to the United States not only by European visitors, but also by many Americans.  This denial, however, rests on a limited and traditional use of the word picturesque.  America has not the European picturesqueness of costume, of relics of the past, of the constant presence of the potential foeman at the gate.  But apart altogether from the almost theatrical romance of frontier life and the now obsolescent conflict with the aborigines, is there not some element of the picturesque in the processes of readjustment by which the emigrants of European stock have adapted themselves and are adapting themselves to the conditions of the New World?  In some ways the nineteenth century is the most romantic of all; and the United States embody and express it as no other country.  Is there not a picturesque side to the triumph of civilisation over barbarism?  Is there nothing of the picturesque in the long thin lines of gleaming steel, thrown across the countless miles of desert sand and alkali plain, and in the mighty mass of metal with its glare of cyclopean eye and its banner of fire-illumined smoke, that bears the conquerors of stubborn nature from side to side of the great continent?  Is there not an element of the picturesque in the struggles of the Western farmer?  Can anything be finer in its way than a night view of Pittsburg—­that “Hell with its lid off,” where the cold gleam of electricity vies with the lurid glare of the furnaces and smelting works?  I say nothing of the Californian Missions; of the sallow creoles of New Orleans with their gorgeous processions of Mardi-Gras; or of the almost equally fantastic fete of the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis; or of the lumberers of Michigan; or of the Mexicans of Arizona; or of the German beer-gardens of Chicago; or of the swinging lanterns and banners of Chinatown in San Francisco and Mott street in New York; or of the Italians of Mulberry Bend in the latter city; or of the alternating stretches on a long railway journey of forest and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert; or of many other classes and conditions which are by no means void of material for the artist in pen or brush.  All these lend hues that are anything but prosaic to my kaleidoscopic recollections of the United States; but more than all these, the characteristically picturesque feature of American life, stands out the omnipresent negro.  It was a thrill to have one’s boots blackened by a coloured “professor” in an alley-way of Boston, and to hear his richly intoned “as shoh’s you’re bawn.”  It was a delight to see the negro couples in the Public Garden, conducting themselves and their courting, as Mr. Howells has well remarked, with infinitely more restraint and refinement