Roamin’ in the gloamin’ (1928)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN' 167 over there for more than twenty years now and although my work is harder, much more strenuous, across the water, I feel a new inspiration every time I land in New York or Montreal for still another tour. Yes, as I write these lines in Dunoon I find my mind wandering all over North America and I see rising before my eyes familiar forms and faces that I have come to love very much. This "America Calling" urge reminds me of the story about the Scottish minister who had accepted, in ecclesiastical language, "a call from God to another sphere of usefulness." His leading elder, discussing the vacancy thus created in the local church, remarked to the senior deacon that "it was a funny thing that God aye seemed to call his meenisters awa' to a bigger steepend !" My second trip lasted for fourteen weeks. On this occasion I played ten weeks in New York and a week each in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. I thought my previous experience of New York had taught me all there was to know about the States and its people. What a terrible mistake ! One only gets to know the soul of a nation when one begins to work outward from its great towns and cities. So you will realize how interested I was in visiting the four wonderful cities I have mentioned. The week I spent in each of them convinced me that my American education was only beginning. Chicago is as different from New York as London is from Edinburgh; Boston might be on another continent so far as its comparison with Pittsburg is concerned! While Philadelphia is again completely different from every other American city. It is more like a British city than any other place in the United States and that is probably the reason why many British visitors have told me they feel perfectly at home there. I always do — but then I have travelled America so thoroughly, and am a "freeman" of so many of its chief cities, that I am and feel quite at home in any place from coast to coast. It is not my