I have been in my time a country correspondent for city
papers, and I know that what Mr. Editor wants Mr. Editor gets.
As a result America, to the provincial Englishman's understanding,
is a land where a hunter is always being nibbled to death by sheep;
or a prospective mother is being so badly frightened by a chameleon
that her child is born with a complexion changeable at will and
an ungovernable appetite for flies; or a billionaire is giving a
monkey dinner or poisoning his wife, or something. Also, he gets
the idea that a through train in this country is so called because
it invariably runs through the train ahead of it; and that when a
man in Connecticut is expecting a friend on the fast express from
Boston, and wants something to remember him by, he goes down to
the station at traintime with a bucket. Under the headlining
system of the English newspapers the derailment of a work-train
in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed up,
becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster! But a head-on
collision, attended by fatalities, in the suburbs of Liverpool or
Manchester is a Distressing Suburban Iincident. Yet the official
Blue Book, issued by the British Board of Trade, showed that in
the three months ending March 31, 1913, 284 persons were killed
and 2,457 were injured on railway lines in the United Kingdom.
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