Yet the editorial writers of that very paper are given to frequent and sneering attacks on the alleged yellowness and the boasting proclivities of the jingo Yankee sheets; also, they are prone to spasmodic attacks on the laxity of our marriage laws.  Perhaps what they say of us is true; but for unadulterated nastiness I never saw anything in print to equal the front page of a so-called sporting weekly that circulates freely in London, and I know of nothing to compare with the brazen exhibition of a certain form of vice that is to be witnessed nightly in the balconies of two of London’s largest music halls.  It was upon the program of another London theater that I came across the advertisement of a lady styling herself “London’s Woman Detective” and stating, in so many words, that her specialties were “Divorce Shadowings” and “Secret Inquiries.”  Maybe it is a fact that in certain of our states marriage is not so much a contract as a ninety-day option, but the lady detective who does divorce shadowing and advertises her qualifications publicly has not opened up her shop among us.

In the campaign to give the stay-at-home Englishman a strange conception of his American kinsman the press is ably assisted by the stage.  In London I went to see a comedy written by a deservedly successful dramatist, and staged, I think, under his personal direction.  The English characters in the play were whimsical and, as nearly as I might judge, true to the classes they purported to represent.  There was an American character in this piece too—­a multimillionaire, of course, and a collector of pictures—­presumably a dramatically fair and realistic drawing of a wealthy, successful, art-loving American.  I have forgotten now whether he was supposed to be one of our meaty Chicago millionaires, or one of our oily Cleveland millionaires, or one of our steely Pittsburgh millionaires, or just a plain millionaire from the country at large; and I doubt whether the man who wrote the lines had any conception when he did write them of the fashion in which they were afterward read.  Be that as it may, the actor who essayed to play the American used an inflection, or an accent, or a dialect, or a jargon—­or whatever you might choose to call it—­which was partly of the oldtime drawly Wild Western school of expression and partly of the oldtime nasal Down East school.  I had thought—­and had hoped—­that both these actor-created lingoes were happily obsolete; but in their full flower of perfection I now heard them here in London.  Also, the actor who played the part interpreted the physical angles of the character in a manner to suggest a pleasing combination of Uncle Joshua Whitcomb, Mike the Bite, Jefferson Brick and Coal-Oil Johnny, with a suggestion of Jesse James interspersed here and there.  True, he spat not on the carpet loudly, and he refrained from saying I vum! and Great Snakes!—­quaint conceits that, I am told, every English actor who respected his art formally employed when wishful to type a stage American for an English audience; but he bragged loudly and emphatically of his money and of how he got it and of what he would do with it.  I do not perceive why it is the English, who themselves so dearly love the dollar after it is translated into terms of pounds, shillings and pence, should insist on regarding us as a nation of dollar-grabbers, when they only see us in the act of freely dispensing the aforesaid dollar.