It befalls, therefore, as I was told on most excellent authority, that when the editor of a live London daily finds the local grist to be dull and uninteresting reading he straightway cables to his American correspondent or his Paris correspondent—­these two being his main standbys for sensations—­asking, if his choice falls on the man in America, for a snappy dispatch, say, about an American train smash-up, or a Nature freak, or a scandal in high society with a rich man mixed up in it.  He wires for it, and in reply he gets it.  I have been in my time a country correspondent for city papers, and I know that what Mr. Editor wants Mr. Editor gets.

As a result America, to the provincial Englishman’s understanding, is a land where a hunter is always being nibbled to death by sheep; or a prospective mother is being so badly frightened by a chameleon that her child is born with a complexion changeable at will and an ungovernable appetite for flies; or a billionaire is giving a monkey dinner or poisoning his wife, or something.  Also, he gets the idea that a through train in this country is so called because it invariably runs through the train ahead of it; and that when a man in Connecticut is expecting a friend on the fast express from Boston, and wants something to remember him by, he goes down to the station at traintime with a bucket.  Under the headlining system of the English newspapers the derailment of a work-train in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed up, becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster!  But a head-on collision, attended by fatalities, in the suburbs of Liverpool or Manchester is a Distressing Suburban Iincident.  Yet the official Blue Book, issued by the British Board of Trade, showed that in the three months ending March 31, 1913, 284 persons were killed and 2,457 were injured on railway lines in the United Kingdom.

Just as an English gentleman is the most modest person imaginable, and the most backward about offering lip-service in praise of his own achievements or his country’s achievements, so, in the same superlative degree, some of his newspapers are the most blatant of boasters.  About the time we were leaving England the job of remodeling and beautifying the front elevation of Buckingham Palace reached its conclusion, and a dinner was given to the workingmen who for some months had been engaged on the contract.  It had been expected that the occasion would be graced by the presence of Their Majesties; but the king, as I recall, was pasting stamps in the new album the Czar of Russia sent him on his birthday, and the queen was looking through the files of Godey’s Lady’s Book for the year 1874, picking out suitable costumes for the ladies of her court to wear.  At any rate they could not attend.  Otherwise, though, the dinner must have been a success.  Reading the account of it as published next morning in a London paper, I learned that some of the guests, “with rare British pluck,” wore their caps and corduroys; that others, “with true British independence,” smoked their pipes after dinner; that there was “real British beef” and “genuine British plum pudding” on the menu; and that repeatedly those present uttered “hearty British cheers.”  From top to bottom the column was studded thick with British thises and British thats.