It is possible to distinguish two sorts of hospitality, one which is given to a person because of his introductions, and the other which is given to the person who has no introductions, the one given on the strength of a man's importance, the other on the strength of the common love of mankind. America is rich in the one species, she is not so rich in the other.  
There is no country in the world where an introduction helps you more than in the United States. In this respect how vastly more hospitable the Americans are than the British! It is wonderful the extent to which an American will put himself to trouble in order to help a properly introduced visitor to see America. It is a real hospitality, and it springs from a great belief in America and in the American people, and a realisation of the fact that if nation and individuals are to co-operate to do things in the world, they must unbend and think of others beside themselves.
 
To me, in the literary and artistic clubs of New York, in the city institutions and schools, in the houses of the rich and cultured, and in the homes of the poor,[Pg 142] America breathed kindness. New York seemed to me more friendly and hospitable than any other great city I had lived in. There also, as in Russia, one person came out and took me by the hand, and was America to me.
 
But when I shed respectability and the cheap fame of having one's portrait and pages of "write-up" in the papers and put pack on back, and sallied forth merely as a man I found that the other and more precious kind of hospitality was not easily come by. Little is given anonymously in the United States.
 
Not that the country people despise the tramp, or hate him or set the dogs on him or even refuse him a breakfast now and then, but that they simply won't have him in their houses for the night, and are otherwise indifferent to his hardships. They do not look on the stranger as a fellow-man but as a loose wheel, a utility lying rusting in a field; or at best they look upon him as a man who will "make good," who will get a job later on and earn his living. No one is good enough for the American till he has "made good." But this is the same in all commercialised countries, commercialism kills the old Christian charity, the hospitality of house and mind and heart.
 
AN INDIANA FARM
AN INDIANA FARM: THE WIND-WELL BEHIND IT, THE WHEATFIELD IN FRONT.
 
In the old colonial days there was extraordinary hospitality in America, and this still survives in the West and North and South in places out of touch with the great industrial beehive of the East and Centre.[Pg 143] The feeling still survives in the spirit that prevents Americans printing prohibitions. You never see the notice "Trespassers will be Prosecuted," though I do not know what one is to make of the uncharitable poster that frequently met my gaze in Indiana and Illinois:
 
KEEP OUT!
THAT MEANS YOU.
 
That is brutal.
 
Tramping up to Williamsport from Scranton I encountered forty-eight hours' rain, and only with difficulty on the second night did I obtain shelter. After being refused three times the first rainy evening, I found an old covered well beside an empty, padlocked shed. In this I spent twenty hours, sleeping the night and waking to a day of down-pour.
 
It was an interesting little hermitage, the three walls were of stone but the roof and floor of wood. One side of the building was completely open to wind and weather. In a corner was a dark square of clear water—the well. Half-way up the stone wall was a narrow ledge, and there I slept. I covered the ledge with two sacks, for pillow I had a book, a duplicate pair of boots, and a silken scarf. I slept with my feet in a sack and a thick tweed coat spread over the rest of me,—slept well. By day I sat on a box and looked out at a deserted garden, and the rain pouring on the trees and rank grass. There were young pines and hemlocks[Pg 144] and maples, and a shaggy hickory tree. Beyond them an apple orchard climbed over a very green hill, and the branches were all crooked and gnarled and pointing. The blossoms had shed their petals, and there was much young fruit.
 
I gathered dry wood and made a fire on the threshold, and dried wet wood and boiled a kettle, the smoke blowing in to me all the while, and the raindrops hissing and dying as they fell into the embers.
 
About mid-day a Dutch farmer came and stood in front of the little house, and stared for some minutes and said nought.
 
I hailed him: "Good-day!"
 
He did not reply to this but inquired:
 
"Hev you not seen that notice on the wall—'Any one meddling with this house will be treated as he deserves'?"
 
I had not.
 
"Waal," said he, "it's there. So you'll put that fire out."
 
I complied.
 
"It's a wet day," said I.
 
"Yes, it's wet."
 
"I'd like to get put up for the night somewhere, and get a good meal. Do you know of any one who would do it?"
 
He was silent for some while, and stared at me as if irritated, and then he said:
 
[Pg 145]
 
"Guess about no one in this hollow'd take any one in. But you might try at the store at the top of the hill."
 
"Couldn't you take me in?"
 
"No; couldn't do it."
 
"Then, could you put me up a meal?"
 
"We have been out of food and are living on buckwheat cakes."
 
"I wouldn't mind some of them and some milk."
 
"No, no. No use. Wife wouldn't have any one in."
 
After some converse he learned that I was British, and he said, "There was one of yours here two-three years back."
 
"What did he think of this country?"
 
"He said it was the darndest country he ever saw."
 
There was no help for it. I had to abandon the well and go out through the never-ceasing down-pour and seek shelter and a decent meal. On my way to the store I met another farmer, and we had this interchange of talk:
 
"Can you put me up for the night?"
 
"No."
 
"Can you make me up a meal?"
 
"No."
 
"I'll pay you for it. You can have a quarter or so for a hot meal."
 
"We've just had our supper, and the women are[Pg 146] doing other things now. There is a place on top of the hill."
 
A mile farther on I came to a General Store. It was locked up, and as I stared into the window the owner eyed me from a house over the way.
 
He came out, looking at me apprehensively.
 
"Can you put me up for the night?" I asked.
 
"No; not to-night."
 
"Why not?"
 
"We don't take only our own people. There's a place two miles on."
 
"Two miles through the wet."
 
"You're right."
 
"I can pay you what you get from your own people, and a little extra perhaps."
 
The storekeeper shook his head and answered:
 
"My wife is a little unwell and does not want the trouble."
 
"I can tell you you wouldn't get turned away like this in my country," said I.
 
"Where are you from?"
 
"From England."
 
"Oh, wouldn't they?"
 
"There are plenty of places where they'd take you in without charging for it. There are places in Europe where they'd come out and ask you into their houses on such a night."
 
"I dessay, I dessay."
 
[Pg 147]
 
"Well, I think the people about here are very inhospitable."
 
"I reckon you're right."
 
"I think you are inhospitable."
 
"Um!"
 
"Well, you're a storekeeper, I want some bread and some butter, and anything else you've got that doesn't need to be cooked."
 
"Are you hungry?"
 
I told him I was, and he determined to be more charitable than I had given him the name for.
 
"Well," said he, "I can let you have a slice of bread and butter and a cup of cawfee I dessay."
 
"Thanks. I should like to buy a loaf of bread and a quarter pound of butter all the same," said I.
 
"We haven't any bread in the store. The baker leaves it three times a week, and we've only enough for ourselves; but I can let you have a slice, and that'll keep you going till you get to Unityville. It's only about two miles away. There's a hotel there. The folks have taken away the keeper's licence, and you won't be able to get anything to drink. But he'll take you in for a dollar. You'll get all you want. In half an hour you'll be there. There are two more big hills, and then you're there."
 
He brought the bread, and as I was ravenous I was tamed thereby, and I thanked him. The bread and butter and coffee were gratis. He was really a kindly[Pg 148] man. I shouldn't wonder if his wife had an acid temperament. The night's lodging, no doubt, depended more on her than on him.
 
I sat on rolls of wire-netting outside the store and finished the little meal. Then I went away. Over the hills in the dusk! It was real colonial weather; the light of kerosene lamps streamed through the downpour of rain, the dark woods on each side of the strange high road grew more mysterious and lonesome, silent except for the throbbing of the rain on the leaves and on the ground. I stopped at a house to ask the way, but when I knocked no one answered. I looked through the kitchen window at the glow of the fire and at the family round the well-spread table, and the farmer's wife directed me through the glass.
 
At last—in a flow of liquid mud, as if arrested in floating down-hill—a miserable town and a hotel.
 
When I asked the host to put me up he said his wife had gone to bed with a headache, and if I had not rated him soundly I should have been turned into the rain once again.
 
"Well," said he, "I cahnt give you any hot supper, you'll have to take what's on hand."
 
So saying, he opened a tin of Boston beans, emptied them on to a plate, and put before me a saucerful of those little salt biscuits called oysterettes. My supper!
 
In the bar, deprived of ale, sat half a dozen youths eating chocolate and birch beer, and talking excitedly[Pg 149] of a baseball match that was to be played on the morrow. Mine host was a portly American of the white-nigger type. The villagers, exercising their local option, had taken away his right to sell intoxicating liquor, and now on the wall he had an oleographic picture of an angel guiding a little girl over a footbridge, and saving her from the water. Somehow I think this was unintentional humour on the part of mine host. He was an obtuse fellow, who mixed the name Jesus Christ inextricably with his talk, and swore b'God. But he gave me a warm bed. And he had his dollar.
 
Another evening, about a month later, I sought a lodging in a town on Erie Shore. The weather was very hot, and I was tramping beside marshes over which clouds of mosquitoes were swarming. There was no good resting-place in the bosom of Nature, so I imagined in my heart, vainly, that I might find refuge with man.
 
I came to a town and went into the store and asked where I would be likely to find a night's lodging. The storekeeper mentioned a house in one of the bye-streets. But when I applied there the landlady said her husband was away, and she would be afraid to have a stranger in his absence. I went to another house: they hadn't any room. I went to a third: they told me a man there was on the point of death and must not be disturbed. I returned to the store,[Pg 150] and the storekeeper said it would be impossible to be put up for the night anywhere in the village. I told him I considered the harbouring of travellers a Christian duty.
 
"They don't feel it so about here," said he politely.
 
There was an empty park-seat at the end of the main street, I went and sat on it and made my supper. Whilst I sat there several folk came and gazed at me, and thought I might be plotting revenge. In America they are very much afraid of the refused tramp—he may set houses on fire.
 
But I was quite cheerful and patient. I had been sleeping out regularly for weeks, and shelter refused did not stir a spirit of revenge in me. In any case, I was out to see America as she is, not simply to be entertained. I was having my little lesson—"and very cheap at the price."
 
But I found hospitality that night. As I sat on the park-seat a tall labourer with two water-pails came across some fields to me, passed me, and went to the town pump and drew water. "Surely," said I to myself, "that is a Russian."
 
I hailed him as he came back.
 
"Zdrastvitye! Roosky?"
 
I had guessed aright; he replied in Russian.
 
"Are you working in a gang?" I inquired.
 
"No, only on the section of the railway; there are six of us. We have charge of this section. Where[Pg 151] are you going to............