Then as the train speeds scornfully through Newark, without stopping, he catches sight of a vast concrete building—­a warehouse of some kind, apparently.

“Look!” he cries.  “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“That building?”

“Not the building itself.  The thought that we don’t have to get off here and go through it.  Think what it would be like if we were on our travels!  There would be a lot of citizens in frock coats.  Probably the mayor would be there, too.  They would drive us to that building, and take us in, and then they would cry if we refused to go to the fourteenth floor, where they keep the dried prunes.”

The train slips across the Jersey meadows and darts into the tunnel.

“Now,” he remarks hopefully, “we are really going to get home—­if this tunnel doesn’t drop in on us.”

And when the train has emerged from the tunnel, and you have emerged from the train, he says:  “Now there’s no doubt that we are going to get home—­unless we are smashed up in a taxi, on the way.”

And when the taxi stops at your front door, and you bid him farewell before he continues on his way to his own front door, he says:  “Now you’re going to get home for sure—­unless the elevator drops.”

And when the elevator has not dropped, but has transported you in safety to the door of your apartment, and you have searched out the old key, and have unlocked the door, and entered, and found happiness within, then you wonder to yourself as I once heard a little boy wonder, when he had gone out of his own yard, and had found a number of large cans of paint, and had upset them on himself: 

“I have a very happy home,” he said, reflectively.  “I wonder why I don’t seem to stay around it more?”

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Charleston is the last stronghold of a unified American upper class; the last remaining American city in which Madeira and Port and noblesse oblige are fully and widely understood, and are employed according to the best traditions]

[Illustration:  “Railroad ticket!” said the baggageman with exaggerated patience.  I began to feel in various pockets]

[Illustration:  Can most travellers, I wonder, enjoy as I do a solitary walk, by night, through the mysterious streets of a strange city?]

[Illustration:  Coming out of my slumber with the curious and unpleasant sense of being stared at, I found his eyes fixed upon me]

[Illustration:  Mount Vernon Place is the centre of Baltimore.  Everything begins there, including Baedeker]

[Illustration:  If she is shopping for a dinner party, she may order the costly and aristocratic diamond-back terrapin, sacred in Baltimore as is the Sacred Cod in Boston]

[Illustration:  Doughoregan Manor—­The house was of buff-colored brick.  It was low and very long, with wings extending from its central structure like beautiful arms flung wide in welcome]