My mother’s family was Scotch¹, and it was judged fitting I should pay a visit on my way Paris-ward, to my Uncle Adam Loudon, a wealthy retired² grocer of Edinburgh. He was very stiff and very ironical³; he fed me well, lodged⁴ me sumptuously⁶, and seemed to take it out of me all the time, cent per cent, in secret entertainment which caused his spectacles to glitter and his mouth to twitch⁷. The ground of this ill-suppressed mirth (as well as I could make out) was simply the fact that I was an American. “Well,” he would say, drawing out the word to infinity⁸, “and I suppose now in your country, things will be so and so.” And the whole group of my cousins would titter joyously⁹. Repeated receptions of this sort must be at the root, I suppose, of what they call the Great American Jest; and I know I was myself goaded¹⁰ into saying that my friends went naked in the summer months, and that the Second Methodist Episcopal Church in Muskegon was decorated with scalps. I cannot say that these flights had any great success; they seemed to awaken¹¹ little more surprise than the fact that my father was a Republican or that I had been taught in school to spell COLOUR without the U. If I had told them (what was after all the truth) that my father had paid a considerable annual sum to have me brought up in a gambling¹² hell, the tittering and grinning of this dreadful family might perhaps have been excused.

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