第57章

If he says `FISH,' all the beasts in the universe stalk through your memory, but not one finny, sealy, swimming thing! Well, that is the effect of `For instance?' on my faculties. So I stumbled a bit, and succeeded in recalling, as objects which do not improve with age, mushrooms, women, and chickens, and he was obliged to agree with me, which nearly killed him. Then I said that although America is so fresh and blooming that people persist in calling it young, it is much older than it appears to the superficial eye. There is no real propriety in dating us as a nation from the Declaration of Independence in 1776, I said, nor even from the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620; nor, for that matter, from Columbus's discovery in 1492. It's my opinion, I asserted, that some of us had been there thousands of years before, but nobody had had the sense to discover us. We couldn't discover ourselves,--though if we could have foreseen how the sere and yellow nations of the earth would taunt us with youth and inexperience, we should have had to do something desperate!"

"That theory must have been very convincing to the philosophic Scots mind," I interjected.

"It was; even Mr. Macdonald thought it ingenious. `And so,' I went on, `we were alive and awake and beginning to make history when you Scots were only bare-legged savages roaming over the hills and stealing cattle. It was a very bad habit of yours, that cattle- stealing, and one which you kept up too long.'

"'No worse a sin than your stealing land from the Indians,' he said.

"'Oh yes,' I answered, `because it was a smaller one! Yours was a vice, and ours a sin; or I mean it would have been a sin had we done it; but in reality we didn't steal land; we just TOOK it, reserving plenty for the Indians to play about on; and for every hunting- ground we took away we gave them in exchange a serviceable plough, or a school, or a nice Indian agent, or something. That was land- grabbing, if you like, but it is a habit you Britishers have still, while we gave it up when we reached years of discretion.'"

"This is very illuminating," I interrupted, now thoroughly wide awake, "but it isn't my idea of a literary discussion."

"I am coming to that," she responded. "It was just at this point that, goaded into secret fury by my innocent speech about cattle- stealing, he began to belittle American literature, the poetry especially. Of course he waxed eloquent about the royal line of poet-kings that had made his country famous, and said the people who could claim Shakespeare had reason to be the proudest nation on earth. `Doubtless,' I said. `But do you mean to say that Scotland has any nearer claim upon Shakespeare than we have? I do not now allude to the fact that in the large sense he is the common property of the English-speaking world' (Salemina told me to say that), `but Shakespeare died in 1616, and the union of Scotland with England didn't come about till 1707, nearly a century afterwards. You really haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't leave England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four years. We took very good care not to come away too soon.

Chaucer and Spenser were dead too, and we had nothing to stay for!'"

I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of merriment at Francesca's absurdities.