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THE MEETING
61

"Oh—mine's Graves—Tom Graves!"

Now, for the excuse of the young Westerner, be it said that all his life, though he had met plenty of Englishmen, in the Inland Empire, he had been familiar only with the two types who abound there: the English worker, and the English wastrel.

The former are the men, men of all classes, who come either direct to the Northwest or via Canada and who, in spite of the fact that they are less ready to take out their citizenship papers than the Continental Europeans, mix with the native life, business and social, as oil mixes with oil, thus accounting for the fact, never yet sufficiently dwelt upon, that though in the United States there are German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and what-not, there is no organized, or unorganized, English-American party, or vote, or even consciousness. The Englishman, he of the worker type, blends with the civic and national life, and his son is altogether an American.

Tom had also met and drunk with and ridden with his share of the second type of English, the wastrels, mostly remittance men who had left their country for their country's good and who received a quarterly stipend from home as long as they remained abroad. There was a vague rumor that some of them were the sons of noblemen, earls and viscounts and so forth, all called "dooks" for short by the gentry of the range, and they were not bad fellows. At least they were plucky.

But this man, Vyvyan, was decidedly not an English worker, and just as decidedly not an English wastrel—and: he was a lord; and Tom, out of the ingenuousness of his heart, blurted out a great, loud, tactless;