My American Diary - Clare Sheridan

DEDICATION

To those I have met in this country
who have not misunderstood me.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Clare Sheridan]	Frontispiece
[George Gray Barnard, describing his cloisters to Clare Sheridan]	72
[Lady Randolph Churchill]	154
[Margaret, who is being brought up in England, like a conventionally proper little girl]	226
[Dick sailing his battleship in the turbulent Mexican river]	272
[The “Russian Castle” in the “Land of Make-Believe”]	302
[“Charlie” in his dressing-gown on his Moorish sunbathed veranda]	340
[“Charlie” tells Dick the story of the wrecked ship on the beach]	348

INTRODUCTION

The publication of an American diary requires neither apology nor explanation, especially when it is more a record than a criticism. Besides, the “best people” seem to do it. I have upon my desk an old volume entitled: “Travels in the United States, etc., during 1849 and 1850,” by the Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortly. It is dedicated with some pomp “to the Countess of Chesterfield by her most affectionate cousin the authoress.” By a strange coincidence we seem to have trodden the same paths, and ofttimes our impressions are the same. Her experiences in 1850 traveling with her little girl are in many ways not dissimilar to mine in 1921 traveling with my little son. She describes her visits to New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc., and then she goes to Vera Cruz, Mexico City, Puebla, and many other places. She has the unconscious arrogance of a genteel aristocrat; she describes the people she meets and writes of them as “Ladies and Gentlemen” instead of as “men and women.” For her there is no Bohemianism and she has no perplexities about world movements. Nevertheless she expresses a deep interest in Russia and some of her comments are not without value even in this day.