ACADEMY OP SC.ENCES] ABROAD 163 



But like an Afrikander visiting the home country after a life in the open veldt, Gilbert 

 was not pleased with certain English restrictions; he did not like the high walls around — 



all small private enclosures. A town street is a box-canon with occasional doorways through the walls. . . . 

 The habit of barring out the wayfarer is a mere survival of lawless times many centuries ago, and our conserva- 

 tive cousins are simply slow to discover that they have become civilised. The mere neglect of the 10-foot walls 

 will not destroy them in a generation for like everything else they are built for eternity. 



A WEEK-END AT A COUNTRY SEAT 



Gilbert wrote the following account of his week-end at "Rushmore." 



It is the house of the country gentleman of whom we have all read in English novels — the owner of all 

 the surrounding landscape. . . . Rushmore proper, the country place in a single enclosure with gates and 

 porter's lodges at its various exits, is perhaps a square mile in area, but the entire estate . . . includes 35,000 

 acres. The stone house is but two stories high and not very imposing but it covers much ground and I think 

 thirty guests must have lodged here night before last. The place is full of the choicest things. Modern and 

 ancestral paintings, armor, vases, busts, elegant furniture and quaint furniture. The grounds are a park with 

 forest and copse as well as lawn. In them roam not only cattle of various choice breeds but fallow and Japanese 

 deer and llamas. In smaller enclosures are pheasants, parrots, kangaroos, marmots. The table bears at dinner 

 time such a display of gold plate as I have never seen before and the meats are served on silver. The order 

 of meals is breakfast 9-10 (a singularly informal meal), tea at 2, and dinner at 7.45. . . . General Pitt Rivers 

 is an archeologist and antiquarian of the scientific type. He has dug over the site of an ancient village near by 

 and recovered everything that could be found to trace its history, finding it to be a British village occupied during 

 the Roman occupation. He has also explored at great expense and monographed a pre-Roman fortified camp. 

 And he has spent the day showing these places to his guests. The vases, implements, ornaments and skeletons 

 from these places form the nucleus of a museum devoted to ethnography and most thoroughly arranged and 

 labelled. He has raised a local storm by throwing it open on Sundays. We have also seen today a park of a 

 few acres tastefully arranged and practically dedicated to the laboring people. One of its features is a music 

 stand where an orchestra of about fifteen pieces play every Sunday from 3 to 5 — to the disgust of the clergy. 

 The members of the orchestra are all laborers from Rushmore, but they made very fair music. . . . Am I 

 not a fortunate Yankee to have this glimpse of high life dropped into my path. ... I am sure that I am 

 enriched by the experience. 



A few days later he naively wrote: 



Already I feel very distinctly the broadening effect always wrought by foreign travel. 



IMPRESSIONS OF A LONDON CLUB 



On reaching London, Gilbert found among his letters "an invitation to the Athenaeum 

 Club, an honorary membership for 30 days," and the amusing account of an evening that he 

 spent there is quoted below; but the account needs two comments. In the first place, the 

 equation intimated in his opening line between the severely exclusive Athenaeum Club of 

 London and the genial meet-you-more-than-halfway Cosmos Club of Washington is not likely 

 to satisfy a London reader who happens to know something of the American capital, and still 

 less a Washington reader who has wished to know something of the British capital; and next, 

 the desertlike silence which Gilbert encountered in the Athenaeum, when he went there un- 

 announced, alone, and unknown, ought to have set over against it the enthusiastic greeting 

 accorded to John Fiske by the Cosmopolitan Club after he, 10 years earlier, had made himself 

 most acceptably known in London by his lectures on America, for on that occasion a London 

 club actually thawed. Nevertheless; the desolating silence of one occasion is as true to life 

 as the rare enthusiasm of the other; for even Punch has pictured the cold and repellant stare 

 with which London club men know how to intimate to a guest that he is something of a tres- 

 passer. Gilbert's account follows. 



As the Athenaeum is the Cosmos of London I was glad of an opportunity to see it and determined to do so 

 that very evening, though I had no reason to expect to meet my friend there at that time. So I arrayed my- 

 self in my coat of ceremony, called a cab, and went "to dine at the club." As the Athenaeum has 1200 members, 

 all distinguished, I was prepared to find a larger house than that of the Cosmos but I was not prepared for the 

 actual magnificence. Spacious rooms, high studded, stuccoed, fretted, frescoed, gilded, decorated with statues 

 and paintings. In the dining room a row of small tables all about the sides, each for one person. Twenty or 

 thirty gentlemen were eating while I ate, all deliberate, calm, dignified and self-sufficient. In only a single 



