"My friends and I" I answered, "are, of course, illiterate. Our better people say Americans. You avoided Amuricans at the Mermaid. And then you met some of them in a movie." I laughed.

"In a cinema," he corrected. "And whenever you have seen enough of this horrid picture (My God, you send us beastly pictures!)—when you have seen enough let's go over to my hotel and have a drink!"

We assented.

"Your cinemas" he persisted, "make us trouble in the Orient. They teach the natives unnecessarily what cheats and liars we are you are, that is, but the natives mix us up. They used to look on the English as persons superior to themselves, persons whose orders must be obeyed; but the pictures tell them that we are swine, and little by little they are coming to believe it. I am serious. The American cinema is bad enough at Rye, but here it only bores you and you may stay away. In the Orient it creates unrest and puts the English rule in jeopardy."

"Revolution in India." I laughed. "The police are seeking Baby Peggy. A bit silly, isn't it?"

"In far-off towns" he continued, "there may be but a handful of white persons living among ten thousand natives-yellow, black or brown. And these few persons are just as safe as a lion-tamer in his cage. The lions would like to eat him, but they do not dare. There is something of authority in his eye, and a sharp stick in his hand. And the British women! Sex unrestraint is as usual in much of the Orient as it was in the days when the Arabian Nights was written. And the

colored race seeks the white. The protection of white women rests on the belief that British women are sacred, that a native who violates one of them must die for it. Whether it is by her consent is no matter. This tradition has been built up through a century or so. Without it, no white woman would be safe in many of the outlying stations of the Empire. And then a cinema from Hollywood comes to town. God! Mack Sennet's Bathing Beauties! So these are the sacred women of the west-these girls who caper naked and are pawed and mauled. It's a dirty business and white women pay for its profits."

We walked through the silent streets of Rye, snarling pleasantly at one another. He did not like the French. No honesty! They would not pay their debts, would not even try to pay them. England, by God, he said, would pay hers. If America would make a stand against Germany, Italy and France, she would do better than pecking at England. And yet, despite his brusqueness, I liked him. Bill was less tolerant. He kept nudging at me to land him one.

A local law forbade the Englishman's hotel from serving liquor to those who were not staying in the house, so we were given ginger beer while our hosts took Scotch. They accepted it with but a slight murmur of regret and with a lack of resourcefulness toward a remedy that seemed apparent. And then all five of us went to the Mermaid, which seemed in happy ignorance of the law.

For an hour we sat in the oak-timbered back parlor and told one another of our national defects and per

versities. He accused us of a flat and open A, and of an R that was burred like a file. So we asked him why he pronounced raspberries as if it were spelled rawsbriz, with a sustenuto on the raw. He told us that we spoke an E as if it were a U. Library, we retorted, not labri. He charged us with excessive slang, but failed to catch us. He insisted that we were now speaking guardedly against a slip. And of the general instances that he gave, many of them are used in America only in the gutter. It would be as unjust, we urged, to charge an English gentleman with a cockney H. Cheerio, we hurled back, old thing!

"Why do you wear straw hats and horn-rimmed glasses?" he asked.

"Because we prefer them to monocles and spats," we answered.

He countered this by calling us a nation of wartime profiteers, a people who bought its culture from abroad.

At times it was almost a stormy evening, and once or twice negotiations nearly cracked. But all of us felt the better to air our spleen. And, although some of the truths were unpalatable, the drink was excellent.

He was rather an engaging fellow and we sat until the hour was late. He gave us his card and asked us to look him up in London. Nor did the bookkeeper complain, although we had kept her up till one o'clock to lock the door.

FO

of Rye. Grass grows in the cobbles, but this is

said by bustling rival towns to be planted to stress an accent on the town's unworldliness. We climbed the Traders' Lane where certainly artists live at the high windows that look upon the sea. A door or so is painted blue and there are open skylights for the escape of bursting passion. There is, moreover, a delightful, rickety aspect of disorder-an outside stairway like a flying buttress across a lower roof, landings where genius can get its breath, areas where talent sweats in a basement for a penny-a touch of something that is foreign and smacks of Italy.

We rambled along the moldy fronts of Watchbell Street and I retain the memory of one house older than its fellows that sets up a claim it was once part of a convent building. Three steps lead downward to a hollow sill that is worn by sandaled feet, for the centuries have laid a thick coating on the street. Each wind drops a tiny burden until the deposit lifts the level of an ancient town. For Time is of Christian ritual, and it buries our human generations in its dust.

We poked up a narrow lane on a hint that John Fletcher had been born in a house somewhere at the top.

"And where is Beaumont?" asked Bill. "I always thought that he was Fletcher's twin."

But of him no mention. The building showed at the rear a decayed Tudor front, as it were; but the lane was too cramped for a view of it. Below the leaded windows there was a wretched little yard where a yellow dog nosed among the ash cans. We stood for a minute with heads thrown back at a painful paralytic angle, then checked the house as something seen.

We lounged about the church square, which is as snug a spot of quiet retirement as one could find in England. This, I fancy, is the abode of authors; and books, no doubt, of a dreamy sort are here still written with a quill. They say that once a pawnbroker hung his triple symbol at one of these doors. Did he think to catch a profit in the poverty arising from a rejected manuscript, or from a watch hung up until the day of royalty? Had the fellow no feeling of his business that he pushed his way among his victims? But the harsh