The Bishop had picked out an unusually bright Chinese lad to have educated in the United States and then become his curate. When he returned to China, after having attended both a college and a theological seminary, he was assisting the Bishop. Evidently he had not thoroughly mastered the ritual of the church; for this Oriental, who had “separated himself from the ethnic root,” moved close to the Bishop, poked his elbow into the ecclesiastical ribs of his superior and asked: “Say, Bishop, where do I butt in?”
Our host wanted to know whether I was sure that he did not say: “Bish”; I thought to reach the point of being able to express himself so briefly and directly the Oriental would need at least another geologic period.
One of the staff asked whether that anecdote was not my invention; to which I took the liberty of replying that if I could invent such good stories he might offer me an editorship. How imperfectly, after all, the Oriental may absorb the spirit of our language, I told in the story which is supposed to have its origin at the University of Michigan; although like all such stories it may be claimed by innumerable birthplaces.
A Hindoo student, who had not quite finished his academic career and had to return home on account of illness in his family, wrote back to his faculty adviser, notifying him of the death of his mother-in-law, in this characteristic, brief, Occidental way: “Alas! the hand which rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.”
The Herr Director thought this anecdote funny enough, but it proved the opposite from that for which I was contending. “Who but an Oriental could invent such highly picturesque figures of speech?”
The conversation drifted into soberer channels when our host took up the question as to what constitutes the American, who after all is hybrid and frequently so mixed that he does not know just how he is ethnically constituted.
“For instance,” he said, “I am part German, part revolutionary Yankee stock” (it seemed to me that he put the emphasis upon the revolutionary), “part French, part Scandinavian, part Irish.”
I have forgotten just how many racial strains he said were running in his veins, but a variety large enough to be exceedingly useful to him in claiming kinship with all sorts of folk, and in making political speeches. That the ancestors of the average American belong to the great fighting stocks of humanity may explain if not excuse his love for physical combat. Each guest around the table followed the editor’s example and accounted for his ancestry, showing that all but two of the Americans were mixtures, ranging from three to eight more or less greatly differentiated races, using that term in its broadest sense.
One of these unmixed Americans gave the outlines of his family tree, all of it growing out of the rugged New England soil; but every one of his daughters had married a man of foreign birth, or of foreign parentage. His sons-in-law are German, Polish, French and Jewish. He added: “My German and French sons-in-law are great chums.”
The other pure American was myself, although of course my ancestors did not come over in the Mayflower, and I have never been in New England long enough for my family tree to take root in its historic soil.