And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.
I should like to be a periwinkle, said he, mysteriously, on the top of a valley, and sing too-ralloo-ralloo.
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.
Ive been around the world twelve times, said he. I know an Esqui-mau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw agoat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast-food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year round. Ive got slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I dont have to tell em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. Its a mighty little old world. Whats the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor-house in the dale, or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, or Pikes Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligans Flats or any place? Itll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.
You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite, I said admiringly. But it also seems that you would decry patriotism.
A relic of the stone age, declared Coglan warmly. We are all brothers——Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians, and the people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in ones city or state or section or country will be wiped out, and well all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be.
But while you are wandering in foreign lands, I persisted, do notyour thoughts revert to some spot——some dear and——
Nary a spot, interrupted E. R. Cogl an flippantly. The terrestrial, globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth, is my abode. Ive met a good many object-bound citi-zens of this country abroad. Ive seen men from Chicago sit in a gondolain Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal.
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——贝茨(英国短篇小说作家)