ABSTRACT
The impressions of a lecturer who travels to a new place every day are necessarily very superficial, and I lay no stress on my own, which may have been all wrong. There are only two points on which I can speak from adequate experience: one, that the trains are amazingly punctual; the other, that people have a fondness for lectures which is, to an Englishman, quite unintelligible. In England, if people admire an author, they read his books; in America, they want to hear him lecture, but they do not dream of reading him. It is impossible to read in America, except in the train, because of the telephone. Everyone has a telephone, and it rings all day and most of the night. This makes conversation, thinking, and reading out of the question, and accordingly these activities are somewhat neglected.
