AMERICA TO-DAY
actress. Two daughters, of about eighteen and twenty, respectively, are on the stage, acting in their father's company; but the master of the house is a bright little boy of seven or eight, known as "the Commodore." As it happened, the mother of the family was away for the day; yet in the hundred affectionate references made to her by the father and daughters, not to me, but to each other, I read her character and influence more clearly, perhaps, than if she had been present in the flesh. A more simple, natural, unaffectedly beautiful "interior" no novelist could conceive. If the family tie is seriously relaxed in America, it seems an odd coincidence that I should in a single month have chanced upon two households where it is seen in notable perfection, to say nothing of many others in which it is at least as binding as in the average English home.
Postscript.—The American university system is a very large subject, to which none but a specialist could do justice, and that in a volume, not a postscript. Nevertheless I should like slightly to supplement the above allusion to it. In the first place, let me quote from the Spectator (February 12, 1898) the following passage:
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