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Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb · English · Gutenberg #4551 · 534,883 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Europe Revised

Author: Irvin S. Cobb


        
Release date: October 1, 2003 [eBook #4551]
                Most recently updated: October 21, 2015

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUROPE REVISED ***




Produced by Kirk Pearson with help from the Volunteers at
The Distributed Proofreaders









EUROPE REVISED

By Irvin S. Cobb


To My Small Daughter

Who bade me shed a tear at the tomb of Napoleon, which I was very glad
to do, because when I got there my feet certainly were hurting me.




NOTE

The picture on page 81 purporting to show the undersigned leaping head
first into a German feather-bed does the undersigned a cruel injustice.
He has a prettier figure than that--oh, oh, much prettier!

The reader is earnestly entreated not to look at the picture on page 81.
It is the only blot on the McCutcheon of this book.

Respectfully,

The Author.




Chapter I



We Are Going Away From Here

Foreword.--It has always seemed to me that the principal drawback
about the average guidebook is that it is over-freighted with facts.
Guidebooks heretofore have made a specialty of facts--have abounded in
them; facts to be found on every page and in every paragraph. Reading
such a work, you imagine that the besotted author said to himself, "I
will just naturally fill this thing chock-full of facts"--and then went
and did so to the extent of a prolonged debauch.

Now personally I would be the last one in the world to decry facts as
such. In the abstract I have the highest opinion of them. But facts,
as someone has said, are stubborn things; and stubborn things, like
stubborn people, are frequently tiresome. So it occurred to me that
possibly there might be room for a guidebook on foreign travel which
would not have a single indubitable fact concealed anywhere about its
person. I have even dared to hope there might be an actual demand on
the part of the general public for such a guidebook. I shall endeavor to
meet that desire--if it exists.

While we are on the subject I wish to say there is probably not
a statement made by me here or hereafter which cannot readily be
controverted. Communications from parties desiring to controvert this or
that assertion will be considered in the order received. The line
forms on the left and parties will kindly avoid crowding. Triflers and
professional controverters save stamps.

With these few introductory remarks we now proceed to the first subject,
which is The Sea: Its Habits and Peculiarities, and the Quaint Creatures
Found upon Its Bosom.

From the very start of this expedition to Europe I labored under a
misapprehension. Everybody told me that as soon as I had got my sea
legs I would begin to love the sea with a vast and passionate love. As a
matter of fact I experienced no trouble whatever in getting my sea legs.
They were my regular legs, the same ones I use on land. It was my sea
stomach that caused all the bother. First I was afraid I should not
get it, and that worried me no little. Then I got it and was regretful.
However, that detail will come up later in a more suitable place. I am
concerned now with the departure.

Somewhere forward a bugle blares; somewhere rearward a bell jangles. On
the deck overhead is a scurry of feet. In the mysterious bowels of the
ship a mighty mechanism opens its metal mouth and speaks out briskly.
Later it will talk on steadily, with a measured and a regular voice;
but now it is heard frequently, yet intermittently, like the click of
a blind man's cane. Beneath your feet the ship, which has seemed until
this moment as solid as a rock, stirs the least little bit, as though it
had waked up. And now a shiver runs all through it and you are reminded
of that passage from Pygmalion and Galatea where Pygmalion says with
such feeling:

She starts; she moves; she seems to feel the thrill of life along her
keel.

You are under way. You are finally committed to the great adventure. The
necessary good-bys have already been said. Those who in the goodness of
their hearts came to see you off have departed for shore, leaving sundry
suitable and unsuitable gifts behind. You have examined your stateroom,
with its hot and cold decorations, its running stewardess, its all-night
throb service, and its windows overlooking the Hudson--a stateroom
that seemed so large and commodious until you put one small submissive
steamer trunk and two scared valises in it. You are tired, and yon white
bed, with the high mudguards on it, looks mighty good to you; but you
feel that you must go on deck to wave a fond farewell to the land you
love and the friends you are leaving behind.

You fight your way to the open through companionways full of frenzied
persons who are apparently trying to travel in every direction at once.
On the deck the illusion persists that it is the dock that is moving and
the ship that is standing still. All about you your fellow passengers
crowd the rails, waving and shouting messages to the people on the dock;
the people on the dock wave back and shout answers. About every other
person is begging somebody to tell auntie to be sure to write. You
gather that auntie will be expected to write weekly, if not oftener.

As the slice of dark water between boat and dock widens, those who are
left behind begin running toward the pierhead in such numbers that each
wide, bright-lit door-opening in turn suggests a flittering section of
a moving-picture film. The only perfectly calm person in sight is a
gorgeous, gold-laced creature standing on the outermost gunwale of the
dock, wearing the kind of uniform that a rear admiral of the Swiss navy
would wear--if the Swiss had any navy--and holding a speaking trumpet
in his hand. This person is not excited, for he sends
thirty-odd-thousand-ton ships off to Europe at frequent intervals, and
so he is impressively and importantly blase about it; but everybody else
is excited. You find yourself rather that way. You wave at persons you
know and then at persons you do not know.

You continue to wave until the man alongside you, who has spent years
of his life learning to imitate a siren whistle with his face, suddenly
twines his hands about his mouth and lets go a terrific blast right in
your ear. Something seems to warn you that you are not going to care for
this man.

The pier, ceasing to be a long, outstretched finger, seems to fold back
into itself, knuckle-fashion, and presently is but a part of the oddly
foreshortened shoreline, distinguishable only by the black dot of
watchers clustered under a battery of lights, like a swarm of hiving
bees. Out in midstream the tugs, which have been convoying the ship, let
go of her and scuttle off, one in this direction and one in that, like a
brace of teal ducks getting out of a walrus' way.

Almost imperceptibly her nose straightens down the river and soon on
the starboard quarter--how quickly one picks up these nautical
terms!--looming through the harbor mists, you behold the statue of Miss
Liberty, in her popular specialty of enlightening the world. So you go
below and turn in. Anyway, that is what I did; for certain of the larger
ships of the Cunard line sail at midnight or even later, and this was
such a ship.

For some hours I lay awake, while above me and below me and all about me
the boat settled down to her ordained ship's job, and began drawing the
long, soothing snores that for five days and nights she was to continue
drawing without cessation. There were so many things to think over.
I tried to remember all the authoritative and conflicting advice that
had been offered to me by traveled friends and well-wishers.

Let's see, now: On shipboard I was to wear only light clothes, because
nobody ever caught cold at sea. I was to wear the heaviest clothes I
had, because the landlubber always caught cold at sea. I was to tip only
those who served me. I was to tip all hands in moderation, whether they
served me or not. If I felt squeamish I was to do the following things:
Eat something. Quit eating. Drink something. Quit drinking. Stay on
deck. Go below and lie perfectly flat. Seek company. Avoid same. Give it
up. Keep it down.

There was but one point on which all of them were agreed. On no account
should I miss Naples; I must see Naples if I did not see another
solitary thing in Europe. Well, I did both--I saw Naples; and now I
should not miss Naples if I never saw it again, and I do not think I
shall. As regards the other suggestions these friends of mine gave me, I
learned in time that all of them were right and all of them were wrong.

For example, there was the matter of a correct traveling costume.
Between seasons on the Atlantic one wears what best pleases one. One
sees at the same time women in furs and summer boys in white ducks.
Tweed-enshrouded Englishmen and linen-clad American girls promenade
together, giving to the decks that pleasing air of variety and
individuality of apparel only to be found in southern California during
the winter, and in those orthodox pictures in the book of Robinson
Crusoe, where Robinson is depicted as completely wrapped up in
goatskins, while Man Friday is pirouetting round as nude as a raw
oyster and both of them are perfectly comfortable. I used to wonder
how Robinson and Friday did it. Since taking an ocean trip I understand
perfectly. I could do it myself now.

There certainly were a lot of things to think over. I do not recall now
exactly the moment when I ceased thinking them over. A blank that was
measurable by hours ensued. I woke from a dream about a scrambled egg,
in which I was the egg, to find that morning had arrived and the ship
was behaving naughtily.

Here was a ship almost as long as Main Street is back home, and six
stories high, with an English basement; with restaurants and elevators
and retail stores in her; and she was as broad as a courthouse; and
while lying at the dock she had appeared to be about the most solid and
dependable thing in creation--and yet in just a few hours' time she had
altered her whole nature, and was rolling and sliding and charging and
snorting like a warhorse. It was astonishing in the extreme, and you
would not have expected it of her.

Even as I focused my mind on this phenomenon the doorway was stealthily
entered by a small man in a uniform that made him look something like an
Eton schoolboy and something like a waiter in a dairy lunch. I was about
to have the first illuminating experience with an English manservant.
This was my bedroom steward, by name Lubly--William Lubly. My hat is off
to William Lubly--to him and to all his kind. He was always on duty;
he never seemed to sleep; he was always in a good humor, and he always
thought of the very thing you wanted just a moment or two before you
thought of it yourself, and came a-running and fetched it to you. Now
he was softly stealing in to close my port. As he screwed the round,
brass-faced window fast he glanced my way and caught my apprehensive
eye.

"Good morning, sir," he said, and said it in such a way as to convey a
subtle compliment.

"Is it getting rough outside?" I said--I knew about the inside. "Thank
you," he said; "the sea 'as got up a bit, sir--thank you, sir."

I was gratified--nay more, I was flattered. And it was so delicately
done too. I really did not have the heart to tell him that I was not
solely responsible--that I had, so to speak, collaborators; but Lubly
stood ready always to accord me a proper amount of recognition for
everything that happened on that ship. Only the next day, I think it
was, I asked him where we were. This occurred on deck. He had just
answered a lady who wanted to know whether we should have good weather
on the day we landed at Fishguard and whether we should get in on time.
Without a moment's hesitation he told her; and then he turned to me with
the air of giving credit where credit is due, and said:

"Thank you, sir--we are just off the Banks, thank you."

Lubly ran true to form. The British serving classes are ever like that,
whether met with at sea or on their native soil. They are a great and
a noble institution. Give an English servant a kind word and he thanks
you. Give him a harsh word and he still thanks you. Ask a question of a
London policeman--he tells you fully and then he thanks you. Go into an
English shop and buy something--the clerk who serves you thanks you with
enthusiasm. Go in and fail to buy something--he still thanks you, but
without the enthusiasm.

One kind of Englishman says Thank you, sir; and one kind--the Cockney
who has been educated--says Thenks; but the majority brief it into a
short but expressive expletive and merely say: Kew. Kew is the commonest
word in the British Isles. Stroidinary runs it a close second, but Kew
comes first. You hear it everywhere. Hence Kew Gardens; they are named
for it.

All the types that travel on a big English-owned ship were on ours. I
take it that there is a requirement in the maritime regulations to the
effect that the set must be complete before a ship may put to sea. To
begin with, there was a member of a British legation from somewhere
going home on leave, for a holiday, or a funeral. At least I heard it
was a holiday, but I should have said he was going home for the other
occasion. He wore an Honorable attached to the front of his name and
carried several extra initials behind in the rumble; and he was filled
up with that true British reserve which a certain sort of Britisher
always develops while traveling in foreign lands. He was upward of seven
feet tall, as the crow flies, and very thin and rigid.

Viewing him, you got the impression that his framework all ran straight
up and down, like the wires in a bird cage, with barely enough perches
extending across from side to side to keep him from caving in and
crushing the canaries to death. On second thought I judge I had better
make this comparison in the singular number--there would not have been
room in him for more than one canary.

Every morning for an hour, and again every afternoon for an hour, he
marched solemnly round and round the promenade deck, always alone
and always with his mournful gaze fixed on the far horizon. As I said
before, however, he stood very high in the air, and it may have been he
feared, if he ever did look down at his feet, he should turn dizzy and
be seized with an uncontrollable desire to leap off and end all; so I am
not blaming him for that.

He would walk his hour out to the sixtieth second of the sixtieth minute
and then he would sit in his steamer chair, as silent as a glacier and
as inaccessible as one. If it were afternoon he would have his tea at
five o'clock and then, with his soul still full of cracked ice, he would
go below and dress for dinner; but he never spoke to anyone. His steamer
chair was right-hand chair to mine and often we practically touched
elbows; but he did not see me once.

I had a terrible thought. Suppose now, I said to myself--just suppose
that this ship were to sink and only we two were saved; and suppose we
were cast away on a desert island and spent years and years there, never
knowing each other's name and never mingling together socially until the
rescue ship came along--and not even then unless there was some mutual
acquaintance aboard her to introduce us properly! It was indeed a
frightful thought! It made me shudder.

Among our company was a younger son going home after a tour of the
Colonies--Canada and Australia, and all that sort of bally rot. I
believe there is always at least one younger son on every well-conducted
English boat; the family keeps him on a remittance and seems to feel
easier in its mind when he is traveling. The British statesman who
said the sun never sets on British possessions spoke the truth, but
the reporters in committing his memorable utterance to paper spelt the
keyword wrong--undoubtedly he meant the other kind--the younger kind.

This particular example of the species was in every way up to grade and
sample. A happy combination of open air, open pores and open casegoods
gave to his face the exact color of a slice of rare roast beef; it also
had the expression of one. With a dab of English mustard in the lobe of
one ear and a savory bit of watercress stuck in his hair for a garnish,
he could have passed anywhere for a slice of cold roast beef.

He was reasonably exclusive too. Not until the day we landed did he and
the Honorable member of the legation learn--quite by chance--that they
were third cousins--or something of that sort--to one another. And
so, after the relationship had been thoroughly established through
the kindly offices of a third party, they fraternized to the extent
of riding up to London on the same boat-train, merely using different
compartments of different carriages. The English aristocrat is a
tolerably social animal when traveling; but, at the same time, he does
not carry his sociability to an excess. He shows restraint.

Also, we had with us the elderly gentleman of impaired disposition, who
had crossed thirty times before and was now completing his thirty-first
trip, and getting madder and madder about it every minute. I saw him
only with his clothes on; but I should say, speaking offhand, that he
had at least fourteen rattles and a button. His poison sacs hung 'way
down. Others may have taken them for dewlaps, but I knew better; they
were poison sacs.

It was quite apparent that he abhorred the very idea of having to cross
to Europe on the same ocean with the rest of us, let alone on the
same ship. And for persons who were taking their first trip abroad his
contempt was absolutely unutterable; he choked at the bare mention of
such a criminal's name and offense. You would hear him communing with
himself and a Scotch and soda.

"Bah!" he would say bitterly, addressing the soda-bottle. "These idiots
who've never been anywhere talking about this being rough weather! Rough
weather, mind you! Bah! People shouldn't be allowed to go to sea until
they know something about it. Bah!"

By the fourth day out his gums were as blue as indigo, and he was so
swelled up with his own venom he looked dropsical. I judged his bite
would have caused death in from twelve to fourteen minutes, preceded by
coma and convulsive rigors. We called him old Colonel Gila Monster or
Judge Stinging Lizard, for short.

There was the spry and conversational gentleman who looked like an
Englishman, but was of the type commonly denominated in our own land as
breezy. So he could not have been an Englishman. Once in a while there
comes along an Englishman who is windy, and frequently you meet one who
is drafty; but there was never a breezy Englishman yet.

With that interest in other people's business which the close communion
of a ship so promptly breeds in most of us, we fell to wondering who
and what he might be; but the minute the suspect came into the salon for
dinner the first night out I read his secret at a glance. He belonged to
a refined song-and-dance team doing sketches in vaudeville. He could not
have been anything else--he had jet buttons on his evening clothes.

There was the young woman--she had elocutionary talents, it turned
out afterward, and had graduated with honors from a school of
expression--who assisted in getting up the ship's concert and then took
part in it, both of those acts being mistakes on her part, as it proved.

And there was the official he-beauty of the ship. He was without a
wrinkle in his clothes--or his mind either; and he managed to maneuver
so that when he sat in the smoking room he always faced a mirror. That
was company enough for him. He never grew lonely or bored then. Only one
night he discovered something wrong about one of his eyebrows. He gave
a pained start; and then, oblivious of those of us who hovered about
enjoying the spectacle, he spent a long time working with the blemish.
The eyebrow was stubborn, though, and he just couldn't make it behave;
so he grew petulant and fretful, and finally went away to bed in a huff.
Had it not been for fear of stopping his watch, I am sure he would have
slapped himself on the wrist.

This fair youth was one of the delights of the voyage. One felt that if
he had merely a pair of tweezers and a mustache comb and a hand glass
he would never, never be at a loss for a solution of the problem that
worries so many writers for the farm journals--a way to spend the long
winter evenings pleasantly.




Chapter II



My Bonny Lies over the Ocean--Lies and Lies and Lies

Of course, we had a bridal couple and a troupe of professional deep-sea
fishermen aboard. We just naturally had to have them. Without them, I
doubt whether the ship could have sailed. The bridal couple were
from somewhere in the central part of Ohio and they were taking their
honeymoon tour; but, if I were a bridal couple from the central part
of Ohio and had never been to sea before, as was the case in this
particular instance, I should take my honeymoon ashore and keep it
there. I most certainly should! This couple of ours came aboard billing
and cooing to beat the lovebirds. They made it plain to all that they
had just been married and were proud of it. Their baggage was brand-new,
and the groom's shoes were shiny with that pristine shininess
which, once destroyed, can never be restored; and the bride wore her
going-and-giving-away outfit.

Just prior to sailing and on the morning after they were all over the
ship. Everywhere you went you seemed to meet them and they were always
wrestling. You entered a quiet side passage--there they were, exchanging
a kiss--one of the long-drawn, deep-siphoned, sirupy kind. You stepped
into the writing room thinking to find it deserted, and at sight of you
they broke grips and sprang apart, eyeing you like a pair of startled
fawns surprised by the cruel huntsman in a forest glade. At all other
times, though, they had eyes but for each other.

A day came, however--and it was the second day out--when they were among
the missing. For two days and two nights, while the good ship floundered
on the tempestuous bosom of the overwrought ocean, they were gone from
human ken. On the afternoon of the third day, the sea being calmer now,
but still sufficiently rough to satisfy the most exacting, a few hardy
and convalescent souls sat in a shawl-wrapped row on the lee side of the
ship.

There came two stewards, bearing with them pillows and blankets and
rugs. These articles were disposed to advantage in two steamer chairs.
Then the stewards hurried away; but presently they reappeared, dragging
the limp and dangling forms of the bridal couple from the central part
of Ohio. But oh, my countrymen, what a spectacle! And what a change from
what had been!

The going-away gown was wrinkled, as though worn for a period of time
by one suddenly and sorely stricken in the midst of health. The bride's
once well-coifed hair hung in lank disarray about a face that was the
color of prime old sage cheese--yellow, with a fleck of green here and
there--and in her wan and rolling eye was the hunted look of one who
hears something unpleasant stirring a long way off and fears it is
coming this way.

Side by side the stewards stretched them prone on their chairs and
tucked them in. Her face was turned from him. For some time both of
them lay there without visible signs of life--just two muffled,
misery-stricken heaps. Then, slowly and languidly, the youth stretched
forth an arm from his wrappings and fingered the swaddling folds that
enveloped the form of his beloved.

It may have been he thought it was about time to begin picking the
coverlid, or it may have been the promptings of reawakened romance, once
more feebly astir within his bosom. At any rate, gently and softly, his
hand fell on the rug about where her shoulder ought to be. She still had
life enough left in her to shake it off--and she did. Hurt, he waited
a moment, then caressed her again. "Stop that!" she cried in a low but
venomous tone. "Don't you dare touch me!"

So he touched her no more, but only lay there mute and motionless;
and from his look one might plumb the sorrows of his soul and know how
shocked he was, and how grieved and heartstricken! Love's young dream
was o'er! He had thought she loved him, but now he knew better. Their
marriage had been a terrible mistake and he would give her back her
freedom; he would give it back to her as soon as he was able to sit up.
Thus one interpreted his expression.

On the day we landed, however, they were seen again. We were nosing
northward through a dimpled duckpond of a sea, with the Welsh coast on
one side and Ireland just over the way. People who had not been seen
during the voyage came up to breathe, wearing the air of persons who had
just returned from the valley of the shadow and were mighty glad to be
back; and with those others came our bridal couple.

I inadvertently stumbled on them in an obscure companionway. Their
cheeks again wore the bloom of youth and health, and they were in a
tight clinch; it was indeed a pretty sight. Love had returned on roseate
pinions and the honeymoon had been resumed at the point where postponed
on account of bad weather.

They had not been seasick, though. I heard them say so. They had been
indisposed, possibly from something they had eaten; but they had not
been seasick. Well, I had my own periods of indisposition going over;
and if it had been seasickness I should not hesitate a moment about
coming right out and saying so. In these matters I believe in being
absolutely frank and aboveboard. For the life of me I cannot understand
why people will dissemble and lie about this thing of being seasick. To
me their attitude is a source of constant wonderment.

On land the average person is reasonably proud of having been
sick--after he begins to get better. It gives him something to talk
about. The pale and interesting invalid invariably commands respect
ashore. In my own list of acquaintances I number several persons--mainly
widowed ladies with satisfactory incomes--who never feel well unless
they are ill. In the old days they would have had resort to patent
medicines and the family lot at Laurel Grove Cemetery; but now they
go in for rest cures and sea voyages, and the baths at Carlsbad and
specialists, these same being main contributing causes to the present
high cost of living, and also helping to explain what becomes of some
of those large life-insurance policies you read about. Possibly you know
the type I am describing--the lady who, when planning where she will
spend the summer, sends for catalogues from all the leading sanatoriums.
We had one such person with us.

She had been surgically remodeled so many times that she dated
everything from her last operation. At least six times in her life she
had been down with something that was absolutely incurable, and she was
now going to Homburg to have one of the newest and most fatal German
diseases in its native haunts, where it would be at its best. She
herself said that she was but a mere shell; and for the first few meals
she ate like one--like a large, empty shell with plenty of curves inside
it.

However, when, after a subsequent period of seclusion, she emerged from
her stateroom wearing the same disheveled look that Jonah must have worn
when he and the whale parted company, do you think she would confess
she had been seasick? Not by any means! She said she had had a raging
headache. But she could not fool me. She had the stateroom next to mine
and I had heard what I had heard. She was from near Boston and she had
the near-Boston accent; and she was the only person I ever met who was
seasick with the broad A.

Personally I abhor those evasions, which deceive no one. If I had been
seasick I should not deny it here or elsewhere. For a time I thought
I was seasick. I know now I was wrong--but I thought so. There was
something about the sardels served at lunch--their look or their smell
or something--which seemed to make them distasteful to me; and I excused
myself from the company at the table and went up and out into the
open air. But the deck was unpleasantly congested with great burly
brutes--beefy, carnivorous, overfed creatures, gorged with victuals and
smoking disgustingly strong black cigars, and grinning in an annoying
and meaning sort of way every time they passed a body who preferred to
lie quiet.

The rail was also moving up and down in a manner that was annoying and
wearisome for the eye to watch--first tipping up and up and up until
half the sky was hidden, then dipping down and down and down until the
gray and heaving sea seemed ready to leap over the side and engulf us.
So I decided to go below and jot down a few notes. On arriving at my
quarters I changed my mind again. I decided to let the notes wait a
while and turn in.

It is my usual custom when turning in to remove the left shoe as well as
the right one and to put on my pajamas; but the pajamas were hanging
on a hook away over on the opposite side of the stateroom, which had
suddenly grown large and wide and full of great distances; and besides,
I thought it was just as well to have the left shoe where I could put
my hand on it when I needed it again. So I retired practically just as
I was and endeavored, as per the admonitions of certain friends, to lie
perfectly flat. No doubt this thing of lying flat is all very well for
some people--but suppose a fellow has not that kind of a figure?

Nevertheless, I tried. I lay as flat as I could, but the indisposition
persisted; in fact, it increased materially. The manner in which my
pajamas, limp and pendent from that hook, swayed and swung back and
forth became extremely distasteful to me; and if by mental treatment I
could have removed them from there I should assuredly have done so. But
that was impossible.

Along toward evening I began to think of food. I thought of it not from
its gastronomic aspect, but rather in the capacity of ballast. I did
not so much desire the taste of it as the feel of it. So I summoned
Lubly--he, at least, did not smile at me in that patronizing,
significant way--and ordered a dinner that included nearly everything
on the dinner card except Lubly's thumb. The dinner was brought to me in
relays and I ate it--ate it all! This step I know now was ill-advised.
It is true that for a short time I felt as I imagine a python in a zoo
feels when he is full of guinea-pigs--sort of gorged, you know, and
sluggish, and only tolerably uncomfortable.

Then ensued the frightful denouement. It ensued almost without warning.
At the time I felt absolutely positive that I was seasick. I would have
sworn to it. If somebody had put a Bible on my chest and held it there
I would cheerfully have laid my right hand on it and taken a solemn
oath that I was seasick. Indeed, I believed I was so seasick that I
feared--hoped, rather--I might never recover from it. All I desired at
the moment was to get it over with as quickly and as neatly as possible.

As in the case of drowning persons, there passed in review before my
eyes several of the more recent events of my past life--meals mostly.
I shall, however, pass hastily over these distressing details, merely
stating in parentheses, so to speak, that I did not remember those
string-beans at all. I was positive then, and am yet, that I had not
eaten string-beans for nearly a week. But enough of this!

I was sure I was seasick; and I am convinced any inexperienced
bystander, had there been one there, would have been misled by my
demeanor into regarding me as a seasick person--but it was a wrong
diagnosis. The steward told me so himself when he called the next
morning. He came and found me stretched prone on the bed of affliction;
and he asked me how I felt, to which I replied with a low and hollow
groan--tolerably low and exceedingly hollow. It could not have been any
hollower if I had been a megaphone.

So he looked me over and told me that I had climate fever. We were
passing through the Gulf Stream, where the water was warmer than
elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and I had a touch of climate fever. It
was a very common complaint in that latitude; many persons suffered
from it. The symptoms were akin to seasickness, it was true; yet the two
maladies were in no way to be confused. As soon as we passed out of the
Gulf Stream he felt sure I would be perfectly well. Meantime he would
recommend that I get Lubly to take the rest of my things off and then
remain perfectly quiet. He was right about it too.

Regardless of what one may think oneself, one is bound to accept the
statement of an authority on this subject; and if a steward on a big
liner, who has traveled back and forth across the ocean for years, is
not an authority on climate fever, who is? I looked at it in that light.
And sure enough, when we had passed out of the Gulf Stream and the sea
had smoothed itself out, I made a speedy and satisfactory recovery; but
if it had been seasickness I should have confessed it in a minute. I
have no patience with those who quibble and equivocate in regard to
their having been seasick.

I had one relapse--a short one, but painful. In an incautious moment,
when I wist not wot I wotted, I accepted an invitation from the chief
engineer to go below. We went below--miles and miles, I think--to where,
standing on metal runways that were hot to the foot, overalled Scots
ministered to the heart and the lungs and the bowels of that ship.
Electricity spat cracklingly in our faces, and at our sides steel shafts
as big as the pillars of a temple spun in coatings of spumy grease; and
through the double skin of her we could hear, over our heads, a mighty
Niagaralike churning as the slew-footed screws kicked us forward
twenty-odd knots an hour. Someone raised the cover of a vat, and peering
down into the opening we saw a small, vicious engine hard at work,
entirely enveloped in twisty, coily, stewy depths of black oil, like a
devil-fish writhing in sea-ooze and cuttle-juice.

So then we descended another mile or two to an inferno, full of naked,
sooty devils forever feeding sulphurous pitfires in the nethermost
parlors of the damned; but they said this was the stokehole; and I was
in no condition to argue with them, for I had suddenly begun to realize
that I was far from being a well person. As one peering through a glass
darkly, I saw one of the attendant demons sluice his blistered bare
breast with cold water, so that the sweat and grime ran from him in
streams like ink; and peering in at a furnace door I saw a great angry
sore of coals all scabbed and crusted over. Then another demon, wielding
a nine-foot bar daintily as a surgeon wields a scalpel, reached in and
stabbed it in the center, so that the fire burst through and gushed up
red and rich, like blood from a wound newly lanced.

I had seen enough and to spare; but my guide brought me back by way of
the steerage, in order that I might know how the other half lives.
There was nothing here, either of smell or sight, to upset the human
stomach--third class is better fed and better quartered now on those big
ships than first class was in those good old early days--but I had
held in as long as I could and now I relapsed. I relapsed in a vigorous
manner--a whole-souled, boisterous manner. People halfway up the
deck heard me relapsing, and I will warrant some of them were fooled
too--they thought I was seasick.

It was due to my attack of climate fever that I missed the most exciting
thing which happened on the voyage. I refer to the incident of the
professional gamblers and the youth from Jersey City. From the very
first there was one passenger who had been picked out by all the knowing
passengers as a professional gambler; for he was the very spit-and-image
of a professional gambler as we have learned to know him in story books.
Did he not dress in plain black, without any jewelry? He certainly did.
Did he not have those long, slender, flexible fingers? Such was,
indeed, the correct description of those fingers. Was not his eye a keen
steely-blue eye that seemed to have the power of looking right through
you? Steely-blue was the right word, all right. Well, then, what more
could you ask?

Behind his back sinister yet fascinating rumors circulated. He was the
brilliant but unscrupulous scion of a haughty house in England. He had
taken a first degree at Oxford, over there, and the third one at police
headquarters, over here. Women simply could not resist him. Let him make
up his mind to win a woman and she was a gone gosling. His picture
was to be found in rogues' galleries and ladies' lockets. And sh-h-h!
Listen! Everybody knew he was the identical crook who, disguised in
woman's clothes, escaped in the last lifeboat that left the sinking
Titanic. Who said so? Why--er--everybody said so!

It came as a grievous disappointment to all when we found out the truth,
which was that he was the booking agent for a lyceum bureau, going
abroad to sign up some foreign talent for next season's Chautauquas;
and the only gambling he had ever done was on the chance of whether
the Tyrolian Yodelers would draw better than our esteemed secretary of
state--or vice versa.

Meantime the real professionals had established themselves cozily and
comfortably aboard, had rigged the trap and cheese-baited it, and were
waiting for the coming of one of the class that is born so numerously in
this country. If you should be traveling this year on one of the
large trans-Atlantic ships, and there should come aboard two young
well-dressed men and shortly afterward a middle-aged well-dressed man
with a flat nose, who was apparently a stranger to the first two; and if
on the second night out in the smoking room, while the pool on the next
day's run was being auctioned, one of the younger men, whom we will call
Mr. Y, should appear to be slightly under the influence of malt, vinous
or spirituous liquors--or all three of them at once--and should, without
seeming provocation, insist on picking a quarrel with the middle-aged
stranger, whom we will call Mr. Z; and if further along in the voyage
Mr. Z should introduce himself to you and suggest a little game of
auction bridge for small stakes in order to while away the tedium of
travel; and if it should so fall out that Mr. Y and his friend Mr.
X chanced to be the only available candidates for a foursome at this
fascinating pursuit; and if Mr. Z, being still hostile toward the
sobered and repentant Mr. Y, should decline to take on either Mr. Y or
his friend X as a partner, but chose you instead; and if on the second
or third deal you picked up your cards and found you had an apparently
unbeatable hand and should bid accordingly; and Mr. X should double you;
and Mr. Z, sitting across from you should come gallantly right back and
redouble it; and Mr. Y, catching the spirit of the moment, should double
again--and so on and so forth until each point, instead of being worth
only a paltry cent or two, had accumulated a value of a good many
cents--if all these things or most of them should befall in the order
enumerated--why, then, if I were you, gentle reader, I would have a
care. And I should leave that game and go somewhere else to have it
too--lest a worse thing befall you as it befell the guileless young
Jerseyman on our ship. After he had paid out a considerable sum on being
beaten--by just one card--upon the playing of his seemingly unbeatable
hand and after the haunting and elusive odor of eau de rodent had become
plainly perceptible all over the ship, he began, as the saying goes, to
smell a rat himself, and straightway declined to make good his remaining
losses, amounting to quite a tidy amount. Following this there were high
words, meaning by that low ones, and accusations and recriminations, and
at eventide when the sunset was a welter of purple and gold, there was
a sudden smashing of glassware in the smoking room and a flurry of arms
and legs in a far corner, and a couple of pained stewards scurrying
about saying, "Ow, now, don't do that, sir, if you please, sir, thank
you, sir!" And one of the belligerents came forth from the melee wearing
a lavender eye with saffron trimmings, as though to match the sunset,
and the other with a set of skinned knuckles, emblematic of the skinning
operations previously undertaken. And through all the ship ran the
hissing tongues of scandal and gossip.

Out of wild rumor and cross-rumor, certain salient facts were eventually
precipitated like sediment from a clouded solution. It seemed that the
engaging Messrs. X, Y and Z had been induced, practically under false
pretenses to book passage, they having read in the public prints that
the prodigal and card-foolish son of a cheese-paring millionaire father
meant to take the ship too; but he had grievously disappointed them
by not coming aboard at all. Then, when in an effort to make their
traveling expenses back, they uncorked their newest trick and device
for inspiring confidence in gudgeons, the particular gudgeon of their
choosing had refused to pay up. Naturally they were fretful and peevish
in the extreme. It spoiled the whole trip for them.

Except for this one small affair it was, on the whole, a pleasant
voyage. We had only one storm and one ship's concert, and at the finish
most of us were strong enough to have stood another storm. And the trip
had been worth a lot to us--at least it had been worth a lot to me,
for I had crossed the ocean on one of the biggest hotels afloat. I had
amassed quite a lot of nautical terms that would come in very handy for
stunning the folks at home when I got back. I had had my first thrill at
the sight of foreign shores. And just by casual contact with members
of the British aristocracy, I had acquired such a heavy load of true
British hauteur that in parting on the landing dock I merely bowed
distantly toward those of my fellow Americans to whom I had not been
introduced; and they, having contracted the same disease, bowed back in
the same haughty and distant manner.

When some of us met again, however, in Vienna, the insulation had been
entirely rubbed off and we rushed madly into one another's arms and
exchanged names and addresses; and, babbling feverishly the while, we
told one another what our favorite flower was, and our birthstone and
our grandmother's maiden name, and what we thought of a race of
people who regarded a cup of ostensible coffee and a dab of honey
as constituting a man's-size breakfast. And, being pretty tolerably
homesick by that time, we leaned in toward a common center and gave
three loud, vehement cheers for the land of the country sausage and the
home of the buckwheat cake--and, as giants refreshed, went on our ways
rejoicing.

That, though, was to come later. At present we are concerned with the
trip over and what we had severally learned from it. I personally had
learned, among other things, that the Atlantic Ocean, considered as
such, is a considerably overrated body. Having been across it, even on
so big and fine and well-ordered a ship as this ship was, the ocean, it
seemed to me, was not at all what it had been cracked up to be.

During the first day out it is a novelty and after that a
monotony--except when it is rough; and then it is a doggoned nuisance.
Poets without end have written of the sea, but I take it they stayed at
home to do their writing. They were not on the bounding billow when they
praised it; if they had been they might have decorated the billow, but
they would never have praised it.

As the old song so happily put it: My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean! And a
lot of others have lied over it too; but I will not--at least not just
yet. Perhaps later on I may feel moved to do so; but at this moment I
am but newly landed from it and my heart is full of rankling resentment
toward the ocean and all its works.

I speak but a sober conviction when I say that the chief advantage to
be derived from taking an ocean voyage is not that you took it, but that
you have it to talk about afterward. And, to my mind, the most
inspiring sight to be witnessed on a trip across the Atlantic is the
Battery--viewed from the ocean side, coming back.

Do I hear any seconds to that motion?




Chapter III



Bathing Oneself on the Other Side

My first experience with the bathing habits of the native Aryan stocks
of Europe came to pass on the morning after the night of our arrival in
London.

London disappointed me in one regard--when I opened my eyes that morning
there was no fog. There was not the slightest sign of a fog. I had
expected that my room would be full of fog of about the consistency of
Scotch stage dialect--soupy, you know, and thick and bewildering. I
had expected that servants with lighted tapers in their hands would be
groping their way through corridors like caves, and that from the
street without, would come the hoarse-voiced cries of cabmen lost in the
enshrouding gray. You remember Dickens always had them hoarse-voiced.

This was what I confidently expected. Such, however, was not to be. I
woke to a consciousness that the place was flooded with indubitable and
undoubted sunshine. To be sure, it was not the sharp, hard sunshine we
have in America, which scours and bleaches all it touches, until
the whole world has the look of having just been clear-starched and
hot-ironed. It was a softened, smoke-edged, pastel-shaded sunshine;
nevertheless it was plainly recognizable as the genuine article.

Nor was your London shadow the sharply outlined companion in black who
accompanies you when the weather is fine in America. Your shadow in
London was rather a dim and wavery gentleman who caught up with you as
you turned out of the shaded by-street; who went with you a distance
and then shyly vanished, but was good company while he stayed, being
restful, as your well-bred Englishman nearly always is, and not overly
aggressive.

There was no fog that first morning, or the next morning, or any morning
of the twenty-odd we spent in England. Often the weather was cloudy,
and occasionally it was rainy; and then London would be drenched in that
wonderful gray color which makes it, scenically speaking, one of the
most fascinating spots on earth; but it was never downright foggy and
never downright cold. English friends used to speak to me about it. They
apologized for good weather at that season of the year, just as natives
of a Florida winter resort will apologize for bad.

"You know, old dear," they would say, "this is most unusual--most
stroidinary, in fact. It ought to be raw and nasty and foggy at this
time of the year, and here the cursed weather is perfectly fine--blast
it!" You could tell they were grieved about it, and disappointed too.
Anything that is not regular upsets Englishmen frightfully. Maybe that
is why they enforce their laws so rigidly and obey them so beautifully.

Anyway I woke to find the fog absent, and I rose and prepared to take
my customary cold bath. I am much given to taking a cold bath in the
morning and speaking of it afterward. People who take a cold bath every
day always like to brag about it, whether they take it or not.

The bathroom adjoined the bedroom, but did not directly connect with it,
being reached by means of a small semi-private hallway. It was a
fine, noble bathroom, white tiled and spotless; and one side of it
was occupied by the longest, narrowest bathtub I ever saw. Apparently
English bathtubs are constructed on the principle that every Englishman
who bathes is nine feet long and about eighteen inches wide, whereas the
approximate contrary is frequently the case. Draped over a chair was the
biggest, widest, softest bathtowel ever made. Shem, Ham and Japhet could
have dried themselves on that bathtowel, and there would still have been
enough dry territory left for some of the animals--not the large, woolly
animals like the Siberian yak, but the small, slick, porous animals such
as the armadillo and the Mexican hairless dog.

So I wedged myself into the tub and had a snug-fitting but most
luxurious bath; and when I got back to my room the maid had arrived with
the shaving water. There was a knock at the door, and when I opened
it there stood a maid with a lukewarm pint of water in a long-waisted,
thin-lipped pewter pitcher. There was plenty of hot water to be had in
the bathroom, with faucets and sinks all handy and convenient, and a
person might shave himself there in absolute comfort; but long before
the days of pipes and taps an Englishman got his shaving water in a
pewter ewer, and he still gets it so. It is one of the things guaranteed
him under Magna Charta and he demands it as a right; but I, being but a
benighted foreigner, left mine in the pitcher, and that evening the maid
checked me up.

"You didn't use the shaving water I brought you to-day, sir!" she said.
"It was still in the jug when I came in to tidy up, sir."

Her tone was grieved; so, after that, to spare her feelings, I used to
pour it down the sink. But if I were doing the trip over again I would
drink it for breakfast instead of the coffee the waiter brought me--the
shaving water being warmish and containing, so far as I could tell, no
deleterious substances. And if the bathroom were occupied at the time
I would shave myself with the coffee. I judge it might work up into
a thick and durable lather. It is certainly not adapted for drinking
purposes.

The English, as a race, excel at making tea and at drinking it after it
is made; but among them coffee is still a mysterious and murky compound
full of strange by-products. By first weakening it and wearing it down
with warm milk one may imbibe it; but it is not to be reckoned among the
pleasures of life. It is a solemn and a painful duty.

On the second morning I was splashing in my tub, gratifying that
amphibious instinct which has come down to us from the dim evolutionary
time when we were paleozoic polliwogs, when I made the discovery that
there were no towels in the bathroom. I glanced about keenly, seeking
for help and guidance in such an emergency. Set in the wall directly
above the rim of the tub was a brass plate containing two pushbuttons.
One button, the uppermost one, was labeled Waiter--the other was labeled
Maid.

This was disconcerting. Even in so short a stay under the roof of
an English hotel I had learned that at this hour the waiter would
be hastening from room to room, ministering to Englishmen engaged in
gumming their vital organs into an impenetrable mass with the national
dish of marmalade; and that the maid would also be busy carrying shaving
water to people who did not need it. Besides, of all the classes I
distinctly do not require when I am bathing, one is waiters and the
other is maids. For some minutes I considered the situation, without
making any headway toward a suitable solution of it; meantime I was
getting chilled. So I dried myself--sketchily--with a toothbrush and the
edge of the window-shade; then I dressed, and in a still somewhat moist
state I went down to interview the management about it. I first visited
the information desk and told the youth in charge there I wished to
converse with some one in authority on the subject of towels. After
gazing at me a spell in a puzzled manner he directed me to go across
the lobby to the cashier's department. Here I found a gentleman of truly
regal aspect. His tie was a perfect dream of a tie, and he wore a frock
coat so slim and long and black it made him look as though he were
climbing out of a smokestack. Presenting the case as though it were a
supposititious one purely, I said to him:

"Presuming now that one of your guests is in a bathtub and finds he has
forgotten to lay in any towels beforehand--such a thing might possibly
occur, you know--how does he go about summoning the man-servant or the
valet with a view to getting some?"

"Oh, sir," he replied, "that's very simple. You noticed two pushbuttons
in your bathroom, didn't you?"

"I did," I said, "and that's just the difficulty. One of them is for the
maid and the other is for the waiter."

"Quite so, sir," he said, "quite so. Very well, then, sir: You ring for
the waiter or the maid--or, if you should charnce to be in a hurry, for
both of them; because, you see, one of them might charnce to be en--"

"One moment," I said. "Let me make my position clear in this matter:
This Lady Susanna--I do not know her last name, but you will doubtless
recall the person I mean, because I saw several pictures of her
yesterday in your national art gallery--this Lady Susanna may have
enjoyed taking a bath with a lot of snoopy old elders lurking round in
the background; but I am not so constituted. I was raised differently
from that. With me, bathing has ever been a solitary pleasure. This may
denote selfishness on my part; but such is my nature and I cannot alter
it. All my folks feel about it as I do. We are a very peculiar family
that way. When bathing we do not invite an audience. Nor do I want one.
A crowd would only embarrass me. I merely desire a little privacy and,
here and there, a towel."

"Ah, yes! Quite so, sir," he said; "but you do not understand me. As I
said before, you ring for the waiter or the maid. When one of them comes
you tell them to send you the manservant on your floor; and when he
comes you tell him you require towels, and he goes to the linen cupboard
and gets them and fetches them to you, sir. It's very simple, sir."

"But why," I persisted, "why do this thing by a relay system? I
don't want any famishing gentleman in this place to go practically
unmarmaladed at breakfast because I am using the waiter to conduct
preliminary negotiations with a third party in regard to a bathtowel."

"But it is so very simple, sir," he repeated patiently. "You ring for
the waiter or the ma--"

I checked him with a gesture. I felt that I knew what he meant to say; I
also felt that if any word of mine might serve to put this establishment
on an easy-running basis they could have it and welcome.

"Listen!" I said. "You will kindly pardon the ignorance of a poor, red,
partly damp American who has shed his eagle feathers but still has his
native curiosity with him! Why not put a third button in that bathroom
labeled Manservant or Valet or Towel Boy, or something of that general
nature? And then when a sufferer wanted towels, and wanted 'em quick, he
could get them without blocking the wheels of progress and industry.
We may still be shooting Mohawk Indians and the American bison in
the streets of Buffalo, New York; and we may still be saying: 'By
Geehosaphat, I swan to calculate!--anyway, I note that we still say
that in all your leading comic papers; but when a man in my land
goes a-toweling, he goes a-toweling--and that is all there is to it,
positively! In our secret lodges it may happen that the worshipful
master calls the august swordbearer to him and bids him communicate
with the grand outer guardian and see whether the candidate is suitably
attired for admission; but in ordinary life we cut out the middleman
wherever possible. Do you get my drift?"

"Oh, yes, sir," he said; "but I fear you do not understand me. As I
told you, it's very simple--so very simple, sir. We've never found it
necessary to make a change. You ring for the waiter or for the maid, and
you tell them to tell the manservant--"

"All right," I said, breaking in. I could see that his arguments were of
the circular variety that always came back to the starting point. "But,
as a favor to me, would you kindly ask the proprietor to request the
head cook to communicate with the carriage starter and have him inform
the waiter that when in future I ring the bathroom bell in a given
manner--to wit: one long, determined ring followed by three short,
passionate rings--it may be regarded as a signal for towels?"

So saying, I turned on my heel and went away, for I could tell he was
getting ready to begin all over again. Later on I found out for myself
that, in this particular hotel, when you ring for the waiter or the
maid the bell sounds in the service room, where those functionaries are
supposed to be stationed; but when you ring for the manservant a small
arm-shaped device like a semaphore drops down over your outer door.
But what has the manservant done that he should be thus discriminated
against? Why should he not have a bell of his own? So far as I might
judge, the poor fellow has few enough pleasures in life as it is. Why
should he battle with the intricacies of a block-signal system when
everybody else round the place has a separate bell? And why all this
mystery and mummery over so simple and elemental a thing as a towel?

To my mind, it merely helps to prove that among the English the art of
bathing is still in its infancy. The English claim to have discovered
the human bath and they resent mildly the assumption that any other
nation should become addicted to it; whereas I argue that the burden of
the proof shows we do more bathing to the square inch of surface than
the English ever did. At least, we have superior accommodations for it.

The day is gone in this country when Saturday night was the big night
for indoor aquatic sports and pastimes; and no gentleman as was a
gentleman would call on his ladylove and break up her plans for the
great weekly ceremony. There may have been a time in certain rural
districts when the bathing season for males practically ended on
September fifteenth, owing to the water in the horsepond becoming
chilled; but that time has passed. Along with every modern house that
is built to-day, in country or town, we expect bathrooms and plenty of
them. With us the presence of a few bathtubs more or less creates no
great amount of excitement--nor does the mere sight of open plumbing
particularly stir our people; whereas in England a hotelkeeper who has
bathrooms on the premises advertises the fact on his stationery.

If in addition to a few bathrooms a Continental hotelkeeper has a
decrepit elevator he makes more noise over it than we do over a Pompeian
palmroom or an Etruscan roofgarden; he hangs a sign above his front door
testifying to his magnificent enterprise in this regard. The Continental
may be a born hotelkeeper, as has been frequently claimed for him; but
the trouble is he usually has no hotel to keep. It is as though you set
an interior decorator to run a livery stable and expected him to make
it attractive. He may have the talents, but he is lacking in the raw
material.

It was in a London apartment house, out Maida Vale way, that I first
beheld the official bathtub of an English family establishment. It was
one of those bathtubs that flourished in our own land at about the time
of the Green-back craze--a coffin-shaped, boxed-in affair lined with
zinc; and the zinc was suffering from tetter or other serious skin
trouble and was peeling badly. There was a current superstition about
the place to the effect that the bathroom and the water supply might on
occasion be heated with a device known in the vernacular as a geezer.

The geezer was a sheet-iron contraption in the shape of a pocket
inkstand, and it stood on a perch in the corner, like a Russian icon,
with a small blue flame flickering beneath it. It looked as though its
sire might have been a snare-drum and its dam a dark lantern, and
that it got its looks from its father and its heating powers from the
mother's side of the family. And the plumbing fixtures were of the type
that passed out of general use on the American side of the water with
the Rutherford B. Hayes administration. I was given to understand
that this was a fair sample of the average residential London
bathroom--though the newer apartment houses that are going up have
better ones, they told me.

In English country houses the dearth of bathing appliances must be even
more dearthful. I ran through the columns of the leading English fashion
journal and read the descriptions of the large country places that were
there offered for sale or lease. In many instances the advertisements
were accompanied by photographic reproductions in half tone showing
magnificent old places, with Queen Anne fronts and Tudor towers and
Elizabethan entails and Georgian mortgages, and what not.

Seeing these views I could conjure up visions of rooks cawing in the
elms; of young curates in flat hats imbibing tea on green lawns; of
housekeepers named Meadows or Fleming, in rustling black silk; of old
Giles--fifty years, man and boy, on the place--wearing a smock frock
and leaning on a pitchfork, with a wisp of hay caught in the tines,
lamenting that the 'All 'asn't been the same, zur, since the young
marster was killed ridin' to 'ounds; and then pensively wiping his eyes
on a stray strand of the hay.

With no great stretch of the imagination I could picture a gouty, morose
old lord with a secret sorrow and a brandy breath; I could picture a
profligate heir going deeper and deeper in debt, but refusing to the
bitter end to put the ax to the roots of the ancestral oaks. I could
imagine these parties readily, because I had frequently read about both
of them in the standard English novels; and I had seen them depicted in
all the orthodox English dramas I ever patronized. But I did not
notice in the appended descriptions any extended notice of heating
arrangements; most of the advertisements seemed to slur over that point
altogether.

And, as regards bathing facilities in their relation to the capacities
of these country places, I quote at random from the figures given:
Eighteen rooms and one bath; sixteen rooms and two baths; fourteen rooms
and one bath; twenty-one rooms and two baths; eleven rooms and one bath;
thirty-four rooms and two baths. Remember that by rooms bedrooms were
meant; the reception rooms and parlors and dining halls and offices, and
the like, were listed separately.

I asked a well-informed Englishman how he could reconcile this
discrepancy between bedrooms and bathrooms with the current belief that
the English had a practical monopoly of the habit of bathing. After
considering the proposition at some length he said I should understand
there was a difference in England between taking a bath and taking a
tub--that, though an Englishman might not be particularly addicted to
a bath, he must have his tub every morning. But I submit that the facts
prove this explanation to have been but a feeble subterfuge.

Let us, for an especially conspicuous example, take the house that has
thirty-four sleeping chambers and only two baths. Let us imagine the
house to be full of guests, with every bedroom occupied; and, if it is
possible to do so without blushing, let us further imagine a couple
of pink-and-white English gentlemen in the two baths. If preferable,
members of the opposite sex may imagine two ladies. Very well, then;
this leaves the occupants of thirty-two bedrooms all to be provided
with large tin tubs at approximately the same hour of the morning. Where
would any household muster the crews to man all those portable tin tubs?
And where would the proprietor keep his battery of thirty-two tubs when
they were not in use? Not in the family picture gallery, surely!

From my readings of works of fiction describing the daily life of the
English upper classes I know full well that the picture gallery is lined
with family portraits; that each canvased countenance there shows the
haughtily aquiline but slightly catarrhal nose, which is a heritage
of this house; that each pair of dark and brooding eyes hide in their
depths the shadow of that dread Nemesis which, through all the fateful
centuries, has dogged this brave but ill-starred race until now, alas!
the place must be let, furnished, to some beastly creature in trade,
such as an American millionaire.

Here at this end we have the founder of the line, dubbed a knight on the
gory field of Hastings; and there at that end we have the present heir,
a knighted dub. We know they cannot put the tubs in the family picture
gallery; there is no room. They need an armory for that outfit, and no
armory is specified in the advertisement.

So I, for one, must decline to be misled or deceived by specious
generalities. If you are asking me my opinion I shall simply say that
the bathing habit of Merrie England is a venerable myth, and likewise
so is the fresh-air fetish. The error an Englishman makes is that he
mistakes cold air for fresh air.

In cold weather an Englishman arranges a few splintered jackstraws,
kindling fashion, in an open grate somewhat resembling in size and
shape a wallpocket for bedroom slippers. On this substructure he gently
deposits one or more carboniferous nodules the size of a pigeon egg, and
touches a match to the whole. In the more fortunate instances the result
is a small, reddish ember smoking intermittently. He stands by and
feeds the glow with a dessert-spoonful of fuel administered at half-hour
intervals, and imagines he really has a fire and that he is really being
warmed.

Why the English insist on speaking of coal in the plural when they use
it only in the singular is more than I can understand. Conceded that
we overheat our houses and our railroad trains and our hotel lobbies
in America, nevertheless we do heat them. In winter their interiors are
warmer and less damp than the outer air--which is more than can be said
for the lands across the sea, where you have to go outdoors to thaw.

If there are any outdoor sleeping porches in England I missed them when
I was there; but as regards the ventilation of an English hotel I may
speak with authority, having patronized one. To begin with, the windows
have heavy shades. Back of these in turn are folding blinds; then long,
close curtains of muslin; then, finally, thick, manifolding, shrouding
draperies of some airproof woolen stuff. At nighttime the maid enters
your room, seals the windows, pulls down the shades, locks the shutters,
closes the curtains, draws the draperies--and then, I think, calks all
the cracks with oakum. When the occupant of that chamber retires to rest
he is as hermetic as old Rameses the First, safe in his tomb, ever dared
to hope to be. That reddish aspect of the face noted in connection with
the average Englishman is not due to fresh air, as has been popularly
supposed; it is due to the lack of it. It is caused by congestion. For
years he has been going along, trying to breathe without having the
necessary ingredients at hand.

At that, England excels the rest of Europe in fresh air, just as it
excels it in the matter of bathing facilities. There is some fresh air
left in England--an abundant supply in warm weather, and a stray bit
here and there in cold. On the Continent there is none to speak of.




Chapter IV



Jacques, the Forsaken

In Germany the last fresh air was used during the Thirty Years' War,
and there has since been no demand for any. Austria has no fresh air at
all--never did have any, and therefore has never felt the need of having
any. Italy--the northern part of it anyhow--is also reasonably shy of
this commodity.

In the German-speaking countries all street cars and all railway trains
sail with battened hatches. In their palmiest days the Jimmy Hope gang
could not have opened a window in a German sleeping car--not without
blasting; and trying to open a window in the ordinary first or second
class carriage provides healthful exercise for an American tourist,
while affording a cheap and simple form of amusement for his fellow
passengers. If, by superhuman efforts and at the cost of a fingernail
or two, he should get one open, somebody else in the compartment as
a matter of principle, immediately objects; and the retired
brigadier-general, who is always in charge of a German train, comes
and seals it up again, for that is the rule and the law; and then the
natives are satisfied and sit in sweet content together, breathing a
line of second-handed air that would choke a salamander.

Once, a good many years ago--in the century before the last I think it
was--a member of the Teutonic racial stock was accidentally caught out
in the fresh air and some of it got into his lungs. And, being a strange
and a foreign influence to which the lungs were unused, it sickened
him; in fact I am not sure but that it killed him on the spot. So the
emperors of Germany and Austria got together and issued a joint ukase on
the subject and, so far as the traveling public was concerned, forever
abolished those dangerous experiments. Over there they think a draft is
deadly, and I presume it is if you have never tampered with one. They
have a saying: A little window is a dangerous thing.

As with fresh air on the Continent, so also with baths--except perhaps
more so. In deference to the strange and unaccountable desires of
their English-speaking guests the larger hotels in Paris are abundantly
equipped with bathrooms now, but the Parisian boulevardiers continue to
look with darkling suspicion on a party who will deliberately immerse
his person in cold water; their beings seem to recoil in horror from the
bare prospect of such a thing. It is plainly to be seen they think his
intelligence has been attainted by cold water externally applied; they
fear that through a complete undermining of his reason he may next be
committing these acts of violence on innocent bystanders rather than on
himself, as in the present distressing stages of his mania. Especially,
I would say, is this the attitude of the habitue of Montmartre.

I can offer no visual proof to back my word; but by other testimony I
venture the assertion that when a boulevardier feels the need of a bath
he hangs a musk bag round his neck--and then, as the saying is, the
warmer the sweeter. His companion of the gentler sex apparently has the
same idea of performing daily ablutions that a tabby cat has. You recall
the tabby-cat system, do you not?--two swipes over the brow with the
moistened paw, one forward swipe over each ear, a kind of circular
rubbing effect across the face--and call it a day! Drowning must be the
most frightful death that a Parisian sidewalk favorite can die. It is
not so much the death itself--it is the attendant circumstances.

Across the river, in the older quarters of Paris, there is excitement
when anybody on the block takes a bath--not so much excitement as for a
fire, perhaps, but more than for a funeral. On the eve of the fatal day
the news spreads through the district that to-morrow poor Jacques is
going to take a bath! A further reprieve has been denied him. He cannot
put it off for another month, or even for another two weeks. His doom is
nigh at hand; there is no hope--none!

Kindly old Angeline, the midwife, shakes her head sadly as she goes
about her simple duties.

On the morrow the condemned man rises early and sees his spiritual
adviser. He eats a hearty breakfast, takes an affectionate leave of his
family and says he is prepared for the worst. At the appointed hour the
tumbrel enters the street, driven by the paid executioner--a descendant
of the original Sanson--and bearing the dread instrument of punishment,
a large oblong tin tub.

The rumble of the heavy wheels over the cobbles seems to wake an
agonized chord in every bosom. To-day this dread visitation descends on
Jacques; but who can tell--so the neighbors say to themselves--when the
same fate may strike some other household now happily unconscious! All
along the narrow way sorrow-drooped heads protrude in rows; from every
casement dangle whiskers, lank and stringy with sympathy--for in this
section every true Frenchman has whiskers, and if by chance he has not
his wife has; so that there are whiskers for all.

From the window of the doomed wretch's apartments a derrick protrudes--a
crossarm with a pulley and a rope attached. It bears a grimly
significant resemblance to a gallows tree. Under the direction of the
presiding functionary the tub is made fast to the tackle and hoisted
upward as pianos and safes are hoisted in American cities. It halts at
the open casement. It vanishes within. The whole place resounds with low
murmurs of horror and commiseration.

Ah, the poor Jacques--how he must suffer! Hark to that low, sickening
thud! 'Tis the accursed soap dropping from his nerveless grasp. Hist to
that sound--like unto a death rattle! It is the water gurgling in the
tub. And what means that low, poignant, smothered gasp? It is the last
convulsive cry of Jacques descending into the depths. All is over! Let
us pray!

The tub, emptied but stained, is lowered to the waiting cart. The
executioner kisses the citizen who has held his horse for him during his
absence and departs; the whole district still hums with ill-suppressed
excitement. Questions fly from tongue to tongue. Was the victim brave
at the last? Was he resigned when the dread moment came? And how is the
family bearing up? It is hours before the place settles down again to
that calm which will endure for another month, until somebody else takes
a bath on a physician's prescription.

Even in the sanctity of a Paris hotel a bath is more or less a public
function unless you lock your door. All sorts of domestic servitors
drift in, filled with a morbid curiosity to see how a foreigner deports
himself when engaged in this strange, barbaric rite. On the occasion of
my first bath on French soil, after several of the hired help had
thus called on me informally, causing me to cower low in my porcelain
retreat, I took advantage of a moment of comparative quiet to rise
drippingly and draw the latch. I judged the proprietor would be along
next, and I was not dressed for him. The Lady Susanna of whom mention
has previously been made must have stopped at a French hotel at some
time of her life. This helps us to understand why she remained so calm
when the elders happened in.

Even as now practiced, bathing still remains a comparative novelty
in the best French circles, I imagine. I base this presumption on
observations made during a visit to Versailles. I went to Versailles;
I trod with reverent step those historic precincts adorned with art
treasures uncountable, with curios magnificent, with relics invaluable.
I visited the little palace and the big; I ventured deep into that
splendid forest where, in the company of ladies regarding whom there has
been a good deal of talk subsequently, France's Grandest and Merriest
Monarch disported himself. And I found out what made the Merriest
Monarch merry--so far as I could see, there was not a bathroom on the
place. He was a true Frenchman--was Louis the Fourteenth.

In Berlin, at the Imperial Palace, our experience was somewhat similar.
Led by a guide we walked through acres of state drawing rooms and state
dining rooms and state reception rooms and state picture rooms; and
we were told that most of them--or, at least, many of them--were the
handiwork of the late Andreas Schluter. The deceased Schluter was an
architect, a painter, a sculptor, a woodcarver, a decorator, all rolled
into one. He was the George M. Cohan of his time; and I think he also
played the clarinet, being a German.

We traversed miles of these Schluter masterpieces. Eventually we heard
sounds of martial music without, and we went to a window overlooking a
paved courtyard; and from that point we presently beheld a fine sight.
For the moment the courtyard was empty, except that in the center stood
a great mass of bronze--by Schluter, I think--a heroic equestrian statue
of Saint George in the act of destroying the first adulterated German
sausage. But in a minute the garrison turned out; and then in through
an arched gateway filed the relief guard headed by a splendid band,
with bell-hung standards jingling at the head of the column and young
officers stalking along as stiff as ramrods, and soldiers marching with
the goosestep.

In the German army the private who raises his knee the highest and
sticks his shank out ahead of him the straightest, and slams his foot
down the hardest and jars his brain the painfulest, is promoted to be
a corporal and given a much heavier pair of shoes, so that he may make
more noise and in time utterly destroy his reason. The goosestep would
be a great thing for destroying grasshoppers or cutworms in a plague
year in a Kansas wheatfield.

At the Kaiser's palace we witnessed all these sights, but we did not run
across any bathrooms or any bathtubs. However, we were in the public end
of the establishment and I regard it as probable that in the other wing,
where the Kaiser lives when at home, there are plenty of bathrooms. I
did not investigate personally. The Kaiser was out at Potsdam and I did
not care to call in his absence.

Bathrooms are plentiful at the hotel where we stopped at Berlin. I had
rather hoped to find the bedroom equipped with an old-fashioned German
feather bed. I had heard that one scaled the side of a German bed on
a stepladder and then fell headlong into its smothering folds like
a gallant fireman invading a burning rag warehouse; but this hotel
happened to be the best hotel that I ever saw outside the United States.
It had been built and it was managed on American lines, plus German
domestic service--which made an incomparable combination--and it was
furnished with modern beds and provided with modern bathrooms.

Probably as a delicate compliment to the Kaiser, the bathtowels were
starched until the fringes at the ends bristled up stiffly a-curl,
like the ends of His Imperial Majesty's equally imperial mustache. Just
once--and once only--I made the mistake of rubbing myself with one
of those towels just as it was. I should have softened it first by a
hackling process, as we used to hackle the hemp in Kentucky; but I did
not. For two days I felt like an etching. I looked something like one
too.

In Vienna we could not get a bedroom with a bathroom attached--they did
not seem to have any--but we were told there was a bathroom just across
the hall which we might use with the utmost freedom. This bathroom was
a large, long, loftly, marble-walled vault. It was as cold as a tomb
and as gloomy as one, and very smelly. Indeed it greatly resembled the
pictures I have seen of the sepulcher of an Egyptian king--only I would
have said that this particular king had been skimpily embalmed by the
royal undertakers in the first place, and then imperfectly packed. The
bathtub was long and marked with scars, and it looked exactly like
a rifled mummy case with the lid missing, which added greatly to the
prevalent illusion.

We used this bathroom ad lib.: but when I went to pay the bill I found
an official had been keeping tabs on us, and that all baths taken had
been charged up at the rate of sixty cents apiece. I had provided my own
soap too! For that matter the traveler provides his own soap everywhere
in Europe, outside of England. In some parts soap is regarded as an
edible and in some as a vice common to foreigners; but everywhere except
in the northern countries it is a curio.

So in Vienna they made us furnish our own soap and then charged us more
for a bath than they did for a meal. Still, by their standards, I dare
say they were right. A meal is a necessity, but a bath is an exotic
luxury; and, since they have no extensive tariff laws in Austria, it is
but fair that the foreigner should pay the tax. I know I paid mine, one
way or another.

Speaking of bathing reminds me of washing; and speaking of washing
reminds me of an adventure I had in Vienna in connection with a white
waistcoat--or, as we would call it down where I was raised, a dress
vest. This vest had become soiled through travel and wear across
Europe. At Vienna I intrusted it to the laundry along with certain other
garments. When the bundle came back my vest was among the missing.

The maid did not seem to be able to comprehend the brand of German I use
in casual conversation; so, through an interpreter, I explained to her
that I was shy one white vest. For two days she brought all sorts of
vests and submitted them to me on approval--thin ones and thick ones;
old ones and new ones; slick ones and woolly ones; fringed ones and
frayed ones. I think the woman had a private vest mine somewhere, and
went and tapped a fresh vein on my account every few minutes; but it
never was the right vest she brought me.

Finally I told her in my best German, meantime accompanying myself with
appropriate yet graceful gestures, that she need not concern herself
further with the affair; she could just let the matter drop and I would
interview the manager and put in a claim for the value of the lost
garment. She looked at me dazedly a moment while I repeated the
injunction more painstakingly than before; and, at that, understanding
seemed to break down the barriers of her reason and she said, "Ja! Ja!"
Then she nodded emphatically several times, smiled and hurried away and
in twenty minutes was back, bringing with her a begging friar of some
monastic order or other.

I would take it as a personal favor if some student of the various
Teutonic tongues and jargons would inform me whether there is any word
in Viennese for white vest that sounds like Catholic priest! However, we
prayed together--that brown brother and I. I do not know what he prayed
for, but I prayed for my vest.

I never got it though. I doubt whether my prayer ever reached heaven--it
had such a long way to go. It is farther from Vienna to heaven than from
any other place in the world, I guess--unless it is Paris. That vest is
still wandering about the damp-filled corridors of that hotel, mooing in
a plaintive manner for its mate--which is myself. It will never find
a suitable adopted parent. It was especially coopered to my form by an
expert clothing contractor, and it will not fit anyone else. No; it will
wander on and on, the starchy bulge of its bosom dimly phosphorescent in
the gloaming, its white pearl buttons glimmering spectrally; and after a
while the hotel will get the reputation of being haunted by the ghost
of a flour barrel, and will have a bad name and lose custom. I hope so
anyway. It looks to be my one chance of getting even with the owner for
penalizing me in the matter of baths.

From Vienna we went southward into the Tyrolese Alps. It was a wonderful
ride--that ride through the Semmering and on down to Northern Italy. Our
absurdly short little locomotive, drawing our absurdly long train, went
boring in and out of a wrinkly shoulder-seam of the Tyrols like a stubby
needle going through a tuck. I think in thirty miles we threaded thirty
tunnels; after that I was practically asphyxiated and lost count.

If I ever take that journey again I shall wear a smoke helmet and be
comfortable. But always between tunnels there were views to be seen
that would have revived one of the Seven Sleepers. Now, on the
great-granddaddy-longlegs of all the spidery trestles that ever were
built, we would go roaring across a mighty gorge, its sides clothed
with perpendicular gardens and vineyards, and with little gray towns
clustering under the ledges on its sheer walls like mud-daubers' nests
beneath an eave. Now, perched on a ridgy outcrop of rock like a single
tooth in a snaggled reptilian jaw, would be a deserted tower, making a
fellow think of the good old feudal days when the robber barons robbed
the traveler instead of as at present, when the job is so completely
attended to by the pirates who weigh and register baggage in these
parts.

Then--whish, roar, eclipse, darkness and sulphureted hydrogen!--we
would dive into another tunnel and out again--gasping--on a breathtaking
panorama of mountains. Some of them would be standing up against the sky
like the jagged top of a half-finished cutout puzzle, and some would
be buried so deeply in clouds that only their peaked blue noses showed
sharp above the featherbed mattresses of mist in which they were
snuggled, as befitted mountains of Teutonic extraction. And nearly every
eminence was crowned with a ruined castle or a hotel. It was easy to
tell a hotel from a ruin--it had a sign over the door.

At one of those hotels I met up with a homesick American. He was
marooned there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he could
do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy from
the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had become an
obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs
about the place. He said a bathtub in those altitudes was as rare as a
chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct; so I might make my own
calculations. But he said he could show me something that was even a
greater curiosity than a bathtub, and he led me to where a moonfaced
barometer hung alongside the front entrance of the hotel.

He said he had been there a week now and had about lost hope; but every
time he threatened to move on, the proprietor would take him out there
and prove that they were bound to have clearing weather within a few
hours, because the barometer registered fair. At that moment streams of
chilly rain-water were coursing down across the dial of the barometer,
but it registered fair even then. He said--the American did--that it
was the most stationary barometer he had ever seen, and the most
reliable--not vacillating and given to moods, like most barometers, but
fixed and unchangeable in its habits.

I matched it, though, with a thermometer I saw in the early spring of
1913 at a coast resort in southern California. An Eastern tourist would
venture out on the windswept and drippy veranda, of a morning after
breakfast. He would think he was cold. He would have many of the outward
indications of being cold. His teeth would be chattering like a Morse
sounder, and inside his white-duck pants his knees would be knocking
together with a low, muffled sound. He would be so prickled with
gooseflesh that he felt like Saint Sebastian; but he would take a look
at the thermometer--sixty-one in the shade! And such was the power of
mercury and mind combined over matter that he would immediately chirk up
and feel warm.

Not a hundred yards away, at a drug store, was one of those
fickle-minded, variable thermometers, showing a temperature that ranged
from fifty-five on downward to forty; but the hotel thermometer stood
firm at sixty-one, no matter what happened. In a season of trying
climatic conditions it was a great comfort--a boon really--not only to
its owner but to his guests. Speaking personally, however, I have no
need to consult the barometer's face to see what the weather is going to
do, or the thermometer's tube to see what it has done. No person needs
to do so who is favored naturally as I am. I have one of the most
dependable soft corns in the business.

Rome is full of baths--vast ruined ones erected by various emperors and
still bearing their names--such as Caracalla's Baths and Titus' Baths,
and so on. Evidently the ancient Romans were very fond of taking baths.

Other striking dissimilarities between the ancient Romans and the modern
Romans are perceptible at a glance.




Chapter V



When the Seven A.M. Tut-tut leaves for Anywhere

Being desirous of tendering sundry hints and observations to such of my
fellow countrymen as may contemplate trips abroad I shall, with their
kindly permission, devote this chapter to setting forth briefly the
following principles, which apply generally to railroad travel in the
Old World.

First--On the Continent all trains leave at or about seven A.M. and
reach their destination at or about eleven P.M. You may be going a long
distance or a short one--it makes no difference; you leave at seven
and you arrive at eleven. The few exceptions to this rule are of no
consequence and do not count.

Second--A trunk is the most costly luxury known to European travel. If I
could sell my small, shrinking and flat-chested steamer trunk--original
value in New York eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents--for what it
cost me over on the other side in registration fees, excess charges,
mental wear and tear, freightage, forwarding and warehousing bills,
tips, bribes, indulgences, and acts of barratry and piracy, I should
be able to laugh in the income tax's face. In this connection I would
suggest to the tourist who is traveling with a trunk that he begin his
land itinerary in Southern Italy and work northward; thereby, through
the gradual shrinkage in weight, he will save much money on his trunk,
owing to the pleasing custom among the Italian trainhands of prying it
open and making a judicious selection from its contents for personal use
and for gifts to friends and relatives.

Third--For the sake of the experience, travel second class once; after
that travel first class--and try to forget the experience. With the
exception of two or three special-fare, so-called de-luxe trains, first
class over there is about what the service was on an accommodation,
mixed-freight-and-passenger train in Arkansas immediately following the
close of the Civil War.

Fourth--When buying a ticket for anywhere you will receive a cunning
little booklet full of detachable leaves, the whole constituting a
volume about the size and thickness of one of those portfolios of
views that came into popularity with us at the time of the Philadelphia
Centennial. Surrender a sheet out of your book on demand of the
uniformed official who will come through the train at from five to seven
minute intervals. However, he will collect only a sheet every other
trip; on the alternate trips he will merely examine your ticket with the
air of never having seen it before, and will fold it over, and perforate
it with his punching machine and return it to you. By the time you reach
your destination nothing will be left but the cover; but do not cast
this carelessly aside; retain it until you are filing out of the
terminal, when it will be taken up by a haughty voluptuary with
whiskers. If you have not got it you cannot escape. You will have to
go back and live on the train, which is, indeed, a frightful fate to
contemplate.

Fifth--Reach the station half an hour before the train starts and claim
your seat; then tip the guard liberally to keep other passengers out of
your compartment. He has no intention of doing so, but it is customary
for Americans to go through this pleasing formality--and it is expected
of them.

Sixth--Tip everybody on the train who wears a uniform. Be not afraid of
hurting some one's feelings by offering a tip to the wrong person.
There will not be any wrong person. A tip is the one form of insult that
anybody in Europe will take.

Seventh--Before entering the train inhale deeply several times. This
will be your last chance of getting any fresh air until you reach your
destination. For self-defense against the germ life prevailing in the
atmosphere of the unventilated compartments, smoke a German cigar. A
German cigar keeps off any disease except the cholera; it gives you the
cholera.

Eighth--Do not linger on the platform, waiting for the locomotive
whistle to blow, or the bell to ring, or somebody to yell "All aboard!"
If you do this you will probably keep on lingering until the following
morning at seven. As a starting signal the presiding functionary renders
a brief solo on a tiny tin trumpet. One puny warning blast from this
instrument sets the whole train in motion. It makes you think of Gabriel
bringing on the Day of Judgment by tootling on a penny whistle.
Another interesting point: The engine does not say Choo-choo as in our
country--it says Tut-tut.

Ninth--In England, for convenience in claiming your baggage, change your
name to Xenophon or Zymology--there are always about the baggage
such crowds of persons who have the commoner initials, such as T for
Thompson, J for Jones, and S for Smith. When next I go to England my
name will be Zoroaster--Quintus P. Zoroaster.

Tenth--If possible avoid patronizing the so-called refreshment wagons
or dining cars, which are expensive and uniformly bad. Live off the
country. Remember, the country is living off you.




Chapter VI



La Belle France Being the First Stop

Except eighty or ninety other things the British Channel was the most
disappointing thing we encountered in our travels. All my reading on
this subject had led me to expect that the Channel would be very choppy
and that we should all be very seasick. Nothing of the sort befell. The
channel may have been suetty but it was not choppy. The steamer that
ferried us over ran as steadily as a clock and everybody felt as fine as
a fiddle.

A friend of mine whom I met six weeks later in Florence had better luck.
He crossed on an occasion when a test was being made of a device for
preventing seasickness. A Frenchman was the inventor and also the
experimenter. This Frenchman had spent valuable years of his life
perfecting his invention. It resembled a hammock swung between uprights.
The supports were to be bolted to the deck of the ship, and when the
Channel began to misbehave the squeamish passenger would climb into the
hammock and fasten himself in; and then, by a system of reciprocating
oscillations, the hammock would counteract the motion of the ship
and the occupant would rest in perfect comfort no matter how high she
pitched or how deep she rolled. At least such was the theory of the
inventor; and to prove it he offered himself as the subject for the
first actual demonstration.

The result was unexpected. The sea was only moderately rough; but that
patent hammock bucked like a kicking bronco. The poor Frenchman was the
only seasick person aboard--but he was sick enough for the whole crowd.
He was seasick with a Gallic abandon; he was seasick both ways from the
jack, and other ways too. He was strapped down so he could not get out,
which added no little to the pleasure of the occasion for everybody
except himself. When the steamer landed the captain of the boat told
the distressed owner that, in his opinion, the device was not suited for
steamer use. He advised him to rent it to a riding academy.

In crossing from Dover to Calais we had thought we should be going
merely from one country to another; we found we had gone from one world
to another. That narrow strip of uneasy water does not separate two
countries--it separates two planets.

Gone were the incredible stiffness and the incurable honesty of the
race that belonged over yonder on those white chalk cliffs dimly visible
along the horizon. Gone were the phlegm and stolidity of those people
who manifest emotion only on the occasions when they stand up to sing
their national anthem:

                        God save the King!
                     The Queen is doing well!

Gone were the green fields of Sussex, which looked as though they had
been taken in every night and brushed and dry-cleaned and then put down
again in the morning. Gone were the trees that Maxfield Parrish might
have painted, so vivid were they in their burnished green-and-yellow
coloring, so spectacular in their grouping. Gone was the five-franc note
which I had intrusted to a sandwich vender on the railroad platform
in the vain hope that he would come back with the change. After that
clincher there was no doubt about it--we were in La Belle France all
right, all right!

Everything testified to the change. From the pier where we landed, a
small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was fishing;
he hooked a little fingerling. At the first tentative tug on his line he
set up a shrill clamor. At that there came running a fat, kindly looking
old priest in a long gown and a shovel hat; and a market woman came,
who had arms like a wrestler and skirts that stuck out like a ballet
dancer's; and a soldier in baggy red pants came; and thirty or forty
others of all ages and sizes came--and they gathered about that small
boy and gave him advice at the top of their voices. And when he yanked
out the shining little silver fish there could not have been more
animation and enthusiasm and excitement if he had landed a full-grown
Presbyterian.

They were still congratulating him when we pulled out and went tearing
along on our way to Paris, scooting through quaint, stone-walled cities,
each one dominated by its crumbly old cathedral; sliding through open
country where the fields were all diked and ditched with small canals
and bordered with poplars trimmed so that each tree looked like a set of
undertaker's whiskers pointing the wrong way.

And in these fields were peasants in sabots at work, looking as
though they had just stepped out of one of Millet's pictures. Even the
haystacks and the scarecrows were different. In England the haystacks
had been geometrically correct in their dimensions--so square and firm
and exact that sections might be sliced off them like cheese, and doors
and windows might be carved in them; but these French haystacks were
devil-may-care haystacks wearing tufts on their polls like headdresses.
The windmills had a rakish air; and the scarecrows in the truck gardens
were debonair and cocky, tilting themselves back on their pins the
better to enjoy the view and fluttering their ragged vestments in a most
jaunty fashion. The land though looked poor--it had a driven, overworked
look to it.

Presently, above the clacking voice of our train, we heard a whining
roar without; and peering forth we beheld almost over our heads a big
monoplane racing with us. It seemed a mighty, winged Thunder Lizard that
had come back to link the Age of Stone with the Age of Air. On second
thought I am inclined to believe the Thunder Lizard did not flourish in
the Stone Age; but if you like the simile as much as I like it we will
just let it stand.

Three times on that trip we saw from the windows of our train aviators
out enjoying the cool of the evening in their airships; and each time
the natives among the passengers jammed into the passageway that flanked
the compartments and speculated regarding the identity of the aviators
and the make of their machines, and argued and shrugged their shoulders
and quarreled and gesticulated. The whole thing was as Frenchy as tripe
in a casserole.

I was wrong, though, a minute ago when I said there remained nothing to
remind us of the right little, tight little island we had just quit; for
we had two Englishmen in our compartment--fit and proper representatives
of a certain breed of Englishman. They were tall and lean, and had the
languid eyes and the long, weary faces and the yellow buck teeth of
weary cart-horses, and they each wore a fixed expression of intense
gloom. You felt sure it was a fixed expression because any person with
such an expression would change it if he could do so by anything short
of a surgical operation. And it was quite evident they had come mentally
prepared to disapprove of all things and all people in a foreign clime.

Silently, but none the less forcibly, they resented the circumstance
that others should be sharing the same compartment with them--or sharing
the same train, either, for that matter. The compartment was full, too,
which made the situation all the more intolerable: an elderly English
lady with a placid face under a mid-Victorian bonnet; a young, pretty
woman who was either English or American; the two members of my party,
and these two Englishmen.

And when, just as the train was drawing out of Calais, they discovered
that the best two seats, which they had promptly preempted, belonged
to others, and that the seats for which they held reservations
faced rearward, so that they must ride with their backs to the
locomotive--why, that irked them sore and more. I imagine they wrote a
letter to the London Times about it afterward.

As is the pleasing habit of traveling Englishmen, they had brought with
them everything portable they owned. Each one had four or five large
handbags, and a carryall, and a hat box, and his tea-caddy, and his
plaid blanket done up in a shawlstrap, and his framed picture of the
Death of Nelson--and all the rest of it; and they piled those things in
the luggage racks until both the racks were chock-full; so the rest of
us had to hold our baggage in our laps or sit on it. One of them was
facing me not more than five or six feet distant. He never saw me
though. He just gazed steadily through me, studying the pattern of the
upholstery on the seat behind me; and I could tell by his look that he
did not care for the upholstering--as very naturally he would not, it
being French.

We had traveled together thus for some hours when one of them began to
cloud up for a sneeze. He tried to sidetrack it, but it would not be
sidetracked. The rest of us, looking on, seemed to hear that sneeze
coming from a long way off. It reminded me of a musical-sketch team
giving an imitation of a brass band marching down Main Street playing
the Turkish Patrol--dim and faint at first, you know, and then growing
louder and stronger, and gathering volume until it bursts right in your
face.

Fascinated, we watched his struggles. Would he master it or would it
master him? But he lost, and it was probably a good thing he did. If he
had swallowed that sneeze it would have drowned him. His nose jibed and
went about; his head tilted back farther and farther; his countenance
expressed deep agony, and then the log jam at the bend in his nose went
out with a roar and he let loose the moistest, loudest kerswoosh! that
ever was, I reckon.

He sneezed eight times. The first sneeze unbuttoned his waistcoat, the
second unparted his hair, and the third one almost pulled his shoes off;
and after that they grew really violent, until the last sneeze shifted
his cargo and left him with a list to port and his lee scuppers awash.
It made a ruin of him--the Prophet Isaiah could not have remained
dignified wrestling with a sneezing bee of those dimensions--but oh, how
it did gladden the rest of us to behold him at the mercy of the elements
and to note what a sodden, waterlogged wreck they made of him!

It was not long after that before we had another streak of luck.
The train jolted over something and a hat fell down from the topmost
pinnacle of the mountain of luggage above and hit his friend on the
nose. We should have felt better satisfied if it had been a coal
scuttle; but it was a reasonably hard and heavy hat and it hit him brim
first on the tenderest part of his nose and made his eyes water, and we
were grateful enough for small blessings. One should not expect too much
of an already overworked Providence.

The rest of us were still warm and happy in our souls when, without any
whistle-tooting or bell-clanging or station-calling, we slid silently,
almost surreptitiously, into the Gare du Nord, at Paris. Neither in
England nor on the mainland does anyone feel called on to notify you
that you have reached your destination.

It is like the old formula for determining the sex of a pigeon--you give
the suspected bird some corn, and if he eats it he is a he; but if she
eats it she is a she. In Europe if it is your destination you get off,
and if it is not your destination you stay on. On this occasion we
stayed on, feeling rather forlorn and helpless, until we saw that
everyone else had piled off. We gathered up our belongings and piled off
too.

By that time all the available porters had been engaged; so we took up
our luggage and walked. We walked the length of the trainshed--and then
we stepped right into the recreation hall of the State Hospital for the
Criminal Insane, at Matteawan, New York. I knew the place instantly,
though the decorations had been changed since I was there last. It was
a joy to come on a home institution so far from home--joysome, but a
trifle disconcerting too, because all the keepers had died or gone on
strike or something; and the lunatics, some of them being in uniform
and some in civilian dress, were leaping from crag to crag, uttering
maniacal shrieks.

Divers lunatics, who had been away and were just getting back, and
sundry lunatics who were fixing to go away and apparently did not expect
ever to get back, were dashing headlong into the arms of still other
lunatics, kissing and hugging them, and exchanging farewells and
sacre-bleuing with them in the maddest fashion imaginable. From time to
time I laid violent hands on a flying, flitting maniac and detained him
against his will, and asked him for some directions; but the persons to
whom I spoke could not understand me, and when they answered I could not
understand them; so we did not make much headway by that. I could not
get out of that asylum until I had surrendered the covers of our ticket
books and claimed our baggage and put it through the customs office. I
knew that; the trouble was I could not find the place for attending to
these details. On a chance I tried a door, but it was distinctly the
wrong place; and an elderly female on duty there got me out by employing
the universal language known of all peoples. She shook her skirts at me
and said Shoo! So I got out, still toting five or six bags and bundles
of assorted sizes and shapes, and tried all the other doors in sight.

Finally, by a process of elimination and deduction, I arrived at the
right one. To make it harder for me they had put it around a corner
in an elbow-shaped wing of the building and had taken the sign off the
door. This place was full of porters and loud cries. To be on the safe
side I tendered retaining fees to three of the porters; and thus by
the time I had satisfied the customs officials that I had no imported
spirits or playing cards or tobacco or soap, or other contraband goods,
and had cleared our baggage and started for the cabstand, we amounted
to quite a stately procession and attracted no little attention as we
passed along. But the tips I had to hand out before the taxi started
would stagger the human imagination if I told you the sum total.

There are few finer things than to go into Paris for the first time on a
warm, bright Saturday night. At this moment I can think of but one finer
thing--and that is when, wearied of being short-changed and bilked and
double-charged, and held up for tips or tribute at every step, you are
leaving Paris on a Saturday night--or, in fact, any night.

Those first impressions of the life on the boulevards are going to stay
in my memory a long, long time--the people, paired off at the tables
of the sidewalk cafes, drinking drinks of all colors; a little shopgirl
wearing her new, cheap, fetching hat in such a way as to center public
attention on her head and divert it from her feet, which were shabby;
two small errand boys in white aprons, standing right in the middle of
the whirling, swirling traffic, in imminent peril of their lives, while
one lighted his cigarette butt from the cigarette butt of his friend; a
handful of roistering soldiers, singing as they swept six abreast
along the wide, rutty sidewalk; the kiosks for advertising, all thickly
plastered over with posters, half of which should have been in an art
gallery and the other half in a garbage barrel; a well-dressed pair,
kissing in the full glare of a street light; an imitation art student,
got up to look like an Apache, and--no doubt--plenty of real Apaches
got up to look like human beings; a silk-hatted gentleman, stopping
with perfect courtesy to help a bloused workman lift a baby-laden
baby carriage over an awkward spot in the curbing, and the workingman
returning thanks with the same perfect courtesy; our own driver,
careening along in a manner suggestive of what certain East Side friends
of mine would call the Chariot Race from Ben Hirsch; and a stout lady of
the middle class sitting under a cafe awning caressing her pet mole.

To the Belgian belongs the credit of domesticating the formerly
ferocious Belgian hare, and the East Indian fakir makes a friend and
companion of the king cobra; but it remained for those ingenious people,
the Parisians, to tame the mole, which other races have always regarded
as unbeautiful and unornamental, and make a cunning little companion of
it and spend hours stroking its fleece. This particular mole belonging
to the stout middle-aged lady in question was one of the largest moles
and one of the curliest I ever saw. It was on the side of her nose.

You see a good deal of mole culture going on here. Later, with the
reader's permission, we shall return to Paris and look its inhabitants
over at more length; but for the time being I think it well for us to be
on our travels. In passing I would merely state that on leaving a Paris
hotel you will tip everybody on the premises.

Oh, yes--but you will!

Let us move southward. Let us go to Sunny Italy, which is called Sunny
Italy for the same reason that the laughing hyena is called the laughing
hyena--not because he laughs so frequently, but because he laughs so
seldom. Let us go to Rome, the Eternal City, sitting on her Seven Hills,
remembering as we go along that the currency has changed and we no
longer compute sums of money in the franc but in the lira. I regret the
latter word is not pronounced as spelled--it would give me a chance to
say that the common coin of Italy is a lira, and that nearly everybody
in Rome is one also.




Chapter VII



Thence On and On to Verbotenland

Ah, Rome--the Roma of the Ancients--the Mistress of the Olden World--the
Sacred City! Ah, Rome, if only your stones could speak! It is customary
for the tourist, taking his cue from the guidebooks, to carry on like
this, forgetting in his enthusiasm that, even if they did speak, they
would doubtless speak Italian, which would leave him practically where
he was before. And so, having said it myself according to formula, I
shall proceed to state the actual facts:

If, coming forth from a huge and dirty terminal, you emerge on a
splendid plaza, miserably paved, and see a priest, a soldier and a
beggar; a beautiful child wearing nothing at all to speak of, and a
hideous old woman with the eyes of a Madonna looking out of a tragic
mask of a face; a magnificent fountain, and nobody using the water, and
a great, overpowering smell--yes, you can see a Roman smell; a cart
mule with ten dollars' worth of trappings on him, and a driver with ten
cents' worth on him; a palace like a dream of stone, entirely surrounded
by nightmare hovels; a new, shiny, modern apartment house, and
shouldering up against it a cankered rubbish heap that was once the
playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted
laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church
that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold
and gems and porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue
starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another
festering stew of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely
hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the
center there stands a statue which is worth its weight in minted silver
and which carries more than its weight in dirt--if in addition everybody
in sight is smiling and good-natured and happy, and is trying to sell
you something or wheedle you out of something, or pick your pocket of
something--you need not, for confirmatory evidence, seek the vast dome
of St. Peter's rising yonder in the distance, or the green tops of the
cedars and the dusky clumps of olive groves on the hillsides beyond--you
know you are in Rome.

To get the correct likeness of Naples we merely reduce the priests by
one-half and increase the beggars by two-thirds; we richen the color
masses, thicken the dirt, raise the smells to the Nth degree, and set
half the populace to singing. We establish in every second doorway a
mother with her offspring tucked between her knees and forcibly held
there while the mother searches the child's head for a flea; anyhow, it
is more charitable to say it is a flea; and we add a special touch of
gorgeousness to the street pictures.

For here a cart is a glory of red tires and blue shafts, and green hubs
and pink body and purple tailgate, with a canopy on it that would have
suited Sheba's Queen; and the mule that draws the cart is caparisoned in
brass and plumage like a circus pony; and the driver wears a broad red
sash, part of a shirt, and half of a pair of pants--usually the front
half. With an outfit such as that, you feel he should be peddling aurora
borealises, or, at the very least, rainbows. It is a distinct shock to
find he has only chianti or cheeses or garbage in stock.

In Naples, also, there is, even in the most prosaic thing, a sight to
gladden your eye if you but hold your nose while you look on it. On the
stalls of the truckvenders the cauliflowers and the cabbages are racked
up with an artistic effect we could scarcely equal if we had roses and
orchids to work with; the fishmonger's cart is a study in still life,
and the tripe is what artists call a harmonious interior.

Nearly all the hotels in Italy are converted palaces. They may have
been successes as palaces, but, with their marble floors and their
high ceilings, and their dank, dark corridors, they distinctly fail to
qualify as hotels. I should have preferred them remaining unsaved and
sinful. I likewise observed a peculiarity common to hotelkeepers in
Italy--they all look like cats. The proprietor of the converted palace
where we stopped in Naples was the very image of a tomcat we used to
own, named Plutarch's Lives, which was half Maltese and half Mormon.
He was a cat that had a fine carrying voice--though better adapted for
concert work than parlor singing--and a sweetheart in every port. This
hotelkeeper might have been the cat's own brother with clothes on--he
had Plute's roving eye and his bristling whiskers and his sharp white
teeth, and Plute's silent, stealthy tread, and his way of purring softly
until he had won your confidence and then sticking his claw into you.
The only difference was, he stuck you with a bill instead of a claw.

Another interesting idiosyncrasy of the Italian hotelkeeper is that he
invariably swears to you his town is the only honest town in Italy, but
begs you to beware of the next town which, he assures you with his hand
on the place where his heart would be if he had a heart, is full of
thieves and liars and counterfeit money and pickpockets. Half of what he
tells you is true--the latter half.

The tourist agencies issue pamphlets telling how you may send money or
jewelry by registered mail in Italy, and then append a footnote warning
you against sending money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy.
Likewise you are constantly being advised against carrying articles
of value in your trunk, unless it is most carefully locked, bolted and
strapped. It is good advice too.

An American I met on the boat coming home told me he failed to take such
precautions while traveling in Italy; and he said that when he reached
the Swiss border his trunk was so light he had to sit on it to keep it
from blowing off the bus on the way from the station to the hotel, and
so empty that when he opened it at both ends the draft whistling through
it gave him a bad cold. However, he may have exaggerated slightly.

If you can forget that you are paying first-class prices for fourth-rate
accommodations--forget the dirt in the carriages and the smells in the
compartments--a railroad journey through the Italian Peninsula is a
wonderful experience. I know it was a wonderful experience for me.

I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously on
the sloping withers of razorbacked mountains--towns that were old when
the Saviour was born; or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all pocked and
pecked with age, looping their arches across the land for miles on
miles; or the fields, scored and scarified by three thousand years of
unremitting, relentless, everlasting agriculture; or the wide-horned
Italian cattle that browsed in those fields; or yet the woman who darted
to the door of every signal-house we passed and came to attention, with
a long cudgel held flat against her shoulder like a sentry's musket.

I do not know why a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick when
an Italian train passes a flag station, any more than I know why, when a
squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine house for exercise, they
should carry carbines and knapsacks. I only know that these things are
done.

In Tuscany the vineyards make a fine show, for the vines are trained
to grow up from the ground and then are bound into streamers and draped
from one fruit tree or one shade tree to another, until a whole hillside
becomes one long, confusing vista of leafy festoons. The thrifty owner
gets the benefit of his grapes and of his trees, and of the earth below,
too, for there he raises vegetables and grains, and the like. Like
everything else in this land, the system is an old one. I judge it was
old enough to be hackneyed when Horace wrote of it:

            Now each man, basking on his slopes,
             Weds to his widowed tree the vine;
             Then, as he gayly quaffs his wine,
             Salutes thee god of all his hopes.

Classical quotations interspersed here and there are wonderful helps to
a guide book, don't you think?

In rural Italy there are two other scenic details that strike the
American as being most curious--one is the amazing prevalence of family
washing, and the other is the amazing scarcity of birdlife. To himself
the traveler says:

"What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family
apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in this
country? Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever wears it
after it is washed. And what has become of all the birds?"

For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the answer
to the other when he passes a meat-dealer's shop in the town and sees
spread on the stalls heaps of pitiably small starlings and sparrows and
finches exposed for sale. An Italian will cook and eat anything he can
kill that has wings on it, from a cassowary to a katydid.

Thinking this barbarity over, I started to get indignant; but just
in time I remembered what we ourselves have done to decimate the
canvas-back duck and the wild pigeon and the ricebird and the
red-worsted pulse-warmer, and other pleasing wild creatures of the
earlier days in America, now practically or wholly extinct. And I felt
that before I could attend to the tomtits in my Italian brother's eye I
must needs pluck a few buffaloes out of my own; so I decided, in view of
those things, to collect myself and endeavor to remain perfectly calm.

We came into Venice at the customary hour--to wit, eleven P.M.--and had
a real treat as our train left the mainland and went gliding far out,
seemingly right through the placid Adriatic, to where the beaded
lights of Venice showed like a necklace about the withered throat of a
long-abandoned bride, waiting in the rags of her moldered wedding finery
for a bridegroom who comes not.

Better even than this was the journey by gondola from the terminal
through narrow canals and under stone bridges where the water lapped
with little mouthing tongues at the walls, and the tall, gloomy
buildings almost met overhead, so that only a tiny strip of
star-buttoned sky showed between. And from dark windows high up came the
tinkle of guitars and the sound of song pouring from throats of silver.
And so we came to our hotel, which was another converted palace; but
baptism is not regarded as essential to salvation in these parts.

On the whole, Venice did not impress me as it has impressed certain
other travelers. You see, I was born and raised in one of those Ohio
Valley towns where the river gets emotional and temperamental every year
or two. In my youth I had passed through several of these visitations,
when the family would take the family plate and the family cow, and
other treasures, and retire to the attic floor to wait for the spring
rise to abate; and when really the most annoying phase of the situation
for a housekeeper, sitting on the top landing of his staircase watching
the yellow wavelets lap inch by inch over the keys of the piano, and
inch by inch climb up the new dining-room wallpaper, was to hear a
knocking at a front window upstairs and go to answer it and find that
Moscoe Burnett had come in a john-boat to collect the water tax.

The Grand Canal did not stir me as it has stirred some--so far back as
'84 I could remember when Jefferson Street at home looked almost exactly
like that.

Going through the Austrian Tyrol, between Vienna and Venice, I met two
old and dear friends in their native haunts--the plush hat and the hot
dog. When such a thing as this happens away over on the other side of
the globe it helps us to realize how small a place this world is after
all, and how closely all peoples are knitted together in common bonds of
love and affection. The hot dog, as found here, is just as we know
him throughout the length and breadth of our own land--a dropsical
Wienerwurst entombed in the depths of a rye-bread sandwich, with a dab
of horse-radish above him to mark his grave; price, creation over, five
cents the copy.

The woolly plush hat shows no change either, except that if anything
it is slightly woollier in the Alps than among us. As transplanted,
the dinky little bow at the back is an affectation purely--but in these
parts it is logical and serves a practical and a utilitarian purpose,
because the mountain byways twist and turn and double, and the local
beverages are potent brews; and the weary mountaineer, homeward-bound
afoot at the close of a market day, may by the simple expedient of
reaching up and fingering his bow tell instantly whether he is going or
coming.

This is also a great country for churches. Every group of chalets that
calls itself a village has at least one long-spired gray church in its
midst, and frequently more than one. In one sweep of hillside view from
our car window I counted seven church steeples. I do not think it was a
particularly good day for churches either; I wished I might have passed
through on a Sunday, when they would naturally be thicker.

Along this stretch of railroad the mountaineers come to the stations
wearing the distinctive costume of their own craggy and slabsided
hills--the curling pheasant feather in the hatbrim; the tight-fitting
knee-breeches; the gaudy stockings; and the broad-suspendered belt with
rows of huge brass buttons spangling it up and down and crosswise. Such
is your pleasure at finding these quaint habiliments still in use
amid settings so picturesque that you buy freely of the fancy-dressed
individual's wares--for he always has something to sell.

And then as your train pulls out, if by main force and awkwardness you
jam a window open, as I did, and cast your eyes rearward for a farewell
peek, as I did, you will behold him, as I did, pulling off his parade
clothes and climbing into the blue overalls and the jean jumpers of
prosaic civilization, to wait until the next carload lot of foreign
tourists rolls in. The European peasant is indeed a simple, guileless
creature--if you are careless about how you talk.

In this district and on beyond, the sight of women doing the bulk of
the hard and dirty farmwork becomes common. You see women plowing; women
hoeing; women carrying incredibly huge bundles of fagots and fodder
on their heads; women hauling heavy carts, sometimes with a straining,
panting dog for a teammate, sometimes unaccompanied except by a stalwart
father or husband, or brother or son, who, puffing a china-bowled pipe,
walks alongside to see that the poor human draft-animals do not shirk or
balk, or shy over the traces.

To one coming from a land where no decent man raises his hand against
a woman--except, of course, in self-defense--this is indeed a startling
sight to see; but worse is in store for him when he reaches Bohemia,
on the upper edge of the Austrian Empire. In Bohemia, if there is a
particularly nasty and laborious job to be done, such as spading up
manure in the rain or grubbing sugar-beets out of the half-frozen earth,
they wish it on the dear old grandmother. She always seemed to me to be
a grandmother--or old enough for one anyway. Perhaps, though, it is the
life they lead, and not the years, that bends the backs of these women
and thickens their waists and mats their hair and turns their feet into
clods and their hands into swollen, red monstrosities.

Surely the Walrus, in Alice in Wonderland, had Germany in mind when he
said the time had come to speak of cabbages and kings--because Germany
certainly does lead the known world in those two commodities. Everywhere
in Germany you see them--the cabbages by the millions and the billions,
growing rank and purple in the fields and giving promise of the time
when they will change from vegetable to vine and become the fragrant and
luscious trailing sauerkraut; but the kings, in stone or bronze, stand
up in the marketplace or the public square, or on the bridge abutment,
or just back of the brewery, in every German city and town along the
route.

By these surface indications alone the most inexperienced traveler would
know he had reached Germany, even without the halt at the custom house
on the border; or the crossing watchman in trim uniform jumping to
attention at every road-crossing; or the beautifully upholstered,
handswept state forests; or the hedges of willow trees along the
brooks, sticking up their stubby, twiggy heads like so many disreputable
hearth-brooms; or the young grain stretching in straight rows
crosswise of the weedless fields and looking, at a distance, like
fair green-printed lines evenly spaced on a wide brown page. Also, one
observes everywhere surviving traces that are unmistakable of the
reign of that most ingenious and wideawake of all the earlier rulers of
Germany, King Verboten the Great.

In connection with the life and works of this distinguished ruler is
told an interesting legend well worthy of being repeated here. It would
seem that King Verboten was the first crowned head of Europe to learn
the value of keeping his name constantly before the reading public.
Rameses the Third of Egypt--that enterprising old constant advertiser
who swiped the pyramids of all his predecessors and had his own name
engraved thereon--had been dead for many centuries and was forgotten
when Verboten mounted the throne, and our own Teddy Roosevelt would not
be born for many centuries yet to come; so the idea must have occurred
to King Verboten spontaneously, as it were. Therefore he took counsel
with himself, saying:

"I shall now erect statues to myself. Dynasties change and wars rage,
and folks grow fickle and tear down statues. None of that for your Uncle
Dudley K. Verboten! No; this is what I shall do: On every available site
in the length and breadth of this my realm I shall stick up my name;
and, wherever possible, near to it I shall engrave or paint the names
of my two favorite sons, Ausgang and Eingang--to the end that, come what
may, we shall never be forgotten in the land of our birth."

And then he went and did it; and it was a thorough job--so thorough a
job that, to this good year of our Lord you may still see the name of
that wise king everywhere displayed in Germany--on railroad stations and
in railroad trains; on castle walls and dead walls and brewery walls,
and the back fence of the Young Ladies' High School. And nearly always,
too, you will find hard by, over doors and passageways, the names of
his two sons, each accompanied or underscored by the heraldic emblem of
their house--a barbed and feathered arrow pointing horizontally.

And so it was that King Verboten lived happily ever after and in the
fullness of time died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by his wives,
his children and his courtiers; and all of them sorrowed greatly and
wept, but the royal signpainter sorrowed most of all.

I know that certain persons will contest the authenticity of this
passage of history; they will claim Verboten means in our tongue
Forbidden, and that Ausgang means Outgoing, and Eingang means
Incoming--or, in other words, Exit and Entrance; but surely this could
not be so. If so many things were forbidden, a man in Germany would be
privileged only to die--and probably not that, unless he died according
to a given formula; and certainly no human being with the possible
exception of the comedian who used to work the revolving-door trick
in Hanlon's Fantasma, could go out of and come into a place so often
without getting dizzy in the head. No--the legend stands as stated.

Even as it is, there are rules enough in Germany, rules to regulate all
things and all persons. At first, to the stranger, this seems an
irksome arrangement--this posting of rules and orders and directions and
warnings everywhere--but he finds that everyone, be he high or low, must
obey or go to jail; there are no exceptions and no evasions; so that
what is a duty on all is a burden on none.

Take the trains, for example. Pretty much all over the Continent the
railroads are state-owned and state-run, but only in Germany are they
properly run. True, there are so many uniformed officials aboard
a German train that frequently there is barely room for the paying
travelers to squeeze in; but the cars are sanitary and the schedule
is accurately maintained, and the attendants are honest and polite and
cleanly of person--wherein lies another point of dissimilarity between
them and those scurvy, musty, fusty brigands who are found managing and
operating trains in certain nearby countries.

I remember a cup of coffee I had while going from Paris to Berlin. It
was made expressly for me by an invalided commander-in-chief of the
artillery corps of the imperial army--so I judged him to be by his
costume, air and general deportment--who was in charge of our carriage
and also of the small kitchen at the far end of it.

He came into our compartment and bowed and clicked his heels together
and saluted, and wanted to know whether I would take coffee. Recklessly
I said I would. He filled in several blanks of a printed form, and went
and cooked the coffee and brought it back, pausing at intervals as he
came along to fill in other blanks. Would I take cream in my coffee? I
would; so he filled in a couple of blanks. Would I take sugar? I said I
would take two lumps. He put in two lumps and filled in another blank.

I really prefer my coffee with three lumps in it; but I noticed that
his printed form was now completely filled in, and I hated to call for
a third lump and put him to the trouble of starting his literary labors
all over again. Besides, by that time the coffee would be cold. So I
took it as it was--with two lumps only--and it was pretty fair coffee
for European coffee. It tasted slightly of the red tape and the chicory,
but it was neatly prepared and promptly served.

And so, over historic streams no larger than creeks would be in America,
and by castles and cabbages and kings and cows, we came to Berlin;
and after some of the other Continental cities Berlin seemed a mighty
restful spot to be in, and a good one to tarry in awhile. It has few
historical associations, has Berlin, but we were loaded to the gills
with historical associations by now. It does not excel greatly in
Old Masters, but we had already gazed with a languid eye upon several
million Old Masters of all ages, including many very young ones. It has
no ancient monuments and tombs either, which is a blessing. Most of the
statuary in Berlin is new and shiny and provided with all the modern
conveniences--the present kaiser attended competently to that detail.
Wherever, in his capital, there was space for a statue he has stuck up
one in memory of a member of his own dynasty, beginning with a statue
apiece for such earlier rulers as Otho the Oboe-Player, and Joachim,
surnamed the Half-a-Ton--let some one correct me if I have the names
wrong--and finishing up with forty or fifty for himself. That is, there
were forty or fifty of him when I was there. There are probably more
now.

In its essentials Berlin suggests a progressive American city, with
Teutonic trimmings. Conceive a bit of New York, a good deal of Chicago,
a scrap of Denver, a slice of Hoboken, and a whole lot of Milwaukee;
conceive this combination as being scoured every day until it shines;
conceive it as beautifully though somewhat profusely governed, and
laid out with magnificent drives, and dotted with big, handsome public
buildings, and full of reasonably honest and more than reasonably kindly
people--and you have Berlin.

It was in Berlin that I picked up the most unique art treasure I found
anywhere on my travels--a picture of the composer Verdi that looked
exactly like Uncle Joe Cannon, without the cigar; whereas Uncle Joe
Cannon does not look a thing in the world like Verdi, and probably
wouldn't if he could.

I have always regretted that our route through the German Empire took
us across the land of the Hessians after dark, for I wanted to see those
people. You will recollect that when George the Third, of England, first
put into actual use the doctrine of Hands Across the Sea he used the
Hessians.

They were hired hands.




Chapter VIII



A Tale of a String-bean

It was at a small dinner party in a home out in Passy--which is to Paris
what Flatbush is to Brooklyn--that the event hereinafter set forth
came to pass. Our host was an American who had lived abroad a good many
years; and his wife, our hostess, was a French woman as charming as she
was pretty and as pretty as she could be.

The dinner was going along famously. We had hors-d'oeuvres, the soup
and the hare--all very tasty to look on and very soothing to the palate.
Then came the fowl, roasted, of course--the roast fowl is the national
bird of France--and along with the fowl something exceedingly appetizing
in the way of hearts of lettuce garnished with breasts of hothouse
tomatoes cut on the bias.

When we were through with this the servants removed the debris and
brought us hot plates. Then, with the air of one conferring a real treat
on us, the butler bore around a tureen arrangement full of smoking-hot
string-beans. When it came my turn I helped myself--copiously--and
waited for what was to go with the beans. A pause ensued--to my
imagination an embarrassed pause. Seeking a cue I glanced down the
table and back again. There did not appear to be anything to go with the
beans. The butler was standing at ease behind his master's chair--ease
for a butler, I mean--and the other guests, it seemed to me, were
waiting and watching. To myself I said:

"Well, sir, that butler certainly has made a J. Henry Fox Pass of
himself this trip! Here, just when this dinner was getting to be one of
the notable successes of the present century, he has to go and derange
the whole running schedule by serving the salad when he should have
served the beans, and the beans when he should have served the salad.
It's a sickening situation; but if I can save it I'll do it. I'll be
well bred if it takes a leg!"

So, wearing the manner of one who has been accustomed all his life
to finishing off his dinner with a mess of string-beans, I used my
putting-iron; and from the edge of the fair green I holed out in three.
My last stroke was a dandy, if I do say it myself. The others were
game too--I could see that. They were eating beans as though beans were
particularly what they had come for. Out of the tail of my eye I glanced
at our hostess, sitting next to me on the left. She was placid, calm,
perfectly easy. Again addressing myself mentally I said:

"There's a thoroughbred for you! You take a woman who got prosperous
suddenly and is still acutely suffering from nervous culture, and if
such a shipwreck had occurred at her dinner table she'd be utterly
prostrated by now--she'd be down and out--and we'd all be standing back
to give her air; but when they're born in the purple it shows in
these big emergencies. Look at this woman now--not a ripple on the
surface--balmy as a summer evening! But in about one hour from now,
Central European time, I can see her accepting that fool butler's
resignation before he's had time to offer it!"

After the beans had been cleared off the right-of-way we had the dessert
and the cheese and the coffee and the rest of it. And, as we used to say
in the society column down home when the wife of the largest advertiser
was entertaining, "at a suitable hour those present dispersed to their
homes, one and all voting the affair to have been one of the most
enjoyable occasions among like events of the season." We all knew our
manners--we had proved that.

Personally I was very proud of myself for having carried the thing off
so well but after I had survived a few tables d'hote in France and a
few more in Austria and a great many in Italy, where they do not have
anything at the hotels except tables d'hote, I did not feel quite
so proud. For at this writing in those parts the slender, sylphlike
string-bean is not playing a minor part, as with us. He has the best
spot on the evening bill--he is a headliner. So is the cauliflower; so
is the Brussels sprout; so is any vegetable whose function among our own
people is largely scenic.

Therefore I treasured the memory of this incident and brought it back
with me; and I tell it here at some length of detail because I know how
grateful my countrywomen will be to get hold of it--I know how grateful
they always are when they learn about a new gastronomical wrinkle. Mind
you, I am not saying that the notion is an absolute novelty here. For
all I know to the contrary, prominent hostesses along the Gold Coast
of the United States--Bar Harbor to Palm Beach inclusive--may have been
serving one lone vegetable as a separate course for years and years; but
I feel sure that throughout the interior the disclosure will come as a
pleasant surprise.

The directions for executing this coup are simple and all the deadlier
because they are so simple. The main thing is to invite your chief
opponent as a smart entertainer; you know the one I mean--the woman who
scored such a distinct social triumph in the season of 1912-13 by being
the first woman in town to serve tomato bisque with whipped cream on it.
Have her there by all means. Go ahead with your dinner as though naught
sensational and revolutionary were about to happen. Give them in proper
turn the oysters, the fish, the entree, the bird, the salad. And then,
all by itself, alone and unafraid, bring on a dab of string-beans.

Wait until you see the whites of their eyes, and aim and fire at
will. Settle back then, until the first hushed shock has somewhat
abated--until your dazed and suffering rival is glaring about in a
well-bred but flustered manner, looking for something to go with the
beans. Hold her eye while you smile a smile that is compounded of equal
parts--superior wisdom, and gentle contempt for her ignorance--and then
slowly, deliberately, dip a fork into the beans on your plate and go to
it.

Believe me, it cannot lose. Before breakfast time the next morning every
woman who was at that dinner will either be sending out invitations for
a dinner of her own and ordering beans, or she will be calling up her
nearest and best friend on the telephone to spread the tidings. I figure
that the intense social excitement occasioned in this country a few
years ago by the introduction of Russian salad dressing will be as
nothing in comparison.

This stunt of serving the vegetable as a separate course was one of the
things I learned about food during our flittings across Europe, but it
was not the only thing I learned--by a long shot it was not. For example
I learned this--and I do not care what anybody else may say to the
contrary either--that here in America we have better food and more
different kinds of food, and food better cooked and better served than
the effete monarchies of the Old World ever dreamed of. And, quality
and variety considered, it costs less here, bite for bite, than it costs
there.

Food in Germany is cheaper than anywhere else almost, I reckon; and,
selected with care and discrimination, a German dinner is an excellently
good dinner. Certain dishes in England--and they are very certain, for
you get them at every meal--are good, too, and not overly expensive.
There are some distinctive Austrian dishes that are not without their
attractions either. Speaking by and large, however, I venture the
assertion that, taking any first-rate restaurant in any of the larger
American cities and balancing it off against any establishment of like
standing in Europe, the American restaurant wins on cuisine, service,
price, flavor and attractiveness.

Centuries of careful and constant press-agenting have given French
cookery much of its present fame. The same crafty processes of
publicity, continued through a period of eight or nine hundred
years, have endowed the European scenic effects with a glamour and an
impressiveness that really are not there, if you can but forget the
advertising and consider the proposition on its merits.

Take their rivers now--their historic rivers, if you please. You are
traveling--heaven help you--on a Continental train. Between spells of
having your ticket punched or torn apart, or otherwise mutilated; and
getting out at the border to see your trunks ceremoniously and solemnly
unloaded and unlocked, and then as ceremoniously relocked and reloaded
after you have conferred largess on everybody connected with the
train, the customs regulations being mainly devised for the purpose of
collecting not tariff but tips--between these periods, which constitute
so important a feature of Continental travel--you come, let us say, to a
stream.

It is a puny stream, as we are accustomed to measure streams, boxed
in by stone walls and regulated by stone dams, and frequently it is
mud-colored and, more frequently still, runs between muddy banks. In the
West it would probably not even be dignified with a regular name, and in
the East it would be of so little importance that the local congressman
would not ask an annual appropriation of more than half a million
dollars for the purposes of dredging, deepening and diking it. But even
as you cross it you learn that it is the Tiber or the Arno, the Elbe or
the Po; and, such is the force of precept and example, you immediately
get all excited and worked up over it.

English rivers are beautiful enough in a restrained, well-managed,
landscape-gardened sort of way; but Americans do not enthuse over an
English river because of what it is in itself, but because it happens
to be the Thames or the Avon--because of the distinguished characters in
history whose names are associated with it.

Hades gets much of its reputation the same way.

I think of one experience I had while touring through what we had
learned to call the Dachshund District. Our route led us alongside a
most inconsequential-looking little river. Its contents seemed a trifle
too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank
was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in
midstream, making poor headway against the semi-gelid current, was
a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and
kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheelbuckets in a manner to
remind you of a very warm small lady fanning herself with a very large
gauze fan, and only getting hotter at the job.

In America that stream would have been known as Mink Creek or Cassidy's
Run, or by some equally poetic title; but when I found out it was
the Danube--no less--I had a distinct thrill. On closer examination I
discovered it to be a counterfeit thrill; but nevertheless, I had it.

What applies in the main to the scenery applies in the main to the food.
France has the reputation of breeding the best cooks in the world--and
maybe she does; but when you are calling in France you find most of them
out. They have emigrated to America, where a French chef gets more money
in one year for exercising his art--and gets it easier--than he could
get in ten years at home--and is given better ingredients to cook with
than he ever had at home.

The hotel in Paris at which we stopped served good enough meals, all of
them centering, of course, round the inevitable poulet roti; but it took
the staff an everlastingly long time to bring the food to you. If you
grew reckless and ordered anything that was not on the bill it upset the
entire establishment; and before they calmed down and relayed it in to
you it was time for the next meal. Still, I must say we did not mind
the waiting; near at hand a fascinating spectacle was invariably on
exhibition.

At the next table sat an Italian countess. Anyhow they told me she was
an Italian countess, and she wore jewelry enough for a dozen countesses.
Every time I beheld her, with a big emerald earring gleaming at either
side of her head, I thought of a Lenox Avenue local in the New York
Subway. However, it was not so much her jewelry that proved such
a fascinating sight as it was her pleasing habit of fetching out a
gold-mounted toothpick and exploring the most remote and intricate
dental recesses of herself in full view of the entire dining room,
meanwhile making a noise like somebody sicking a dog on.

The Europeans have developed public toothpicking beyond anything we
know. They make an outdoor pastime and function of it, whereas we pursue
this sport more or less privately. Over there, a toothpick is a family
heirloom and is handed down from one generation to another, and is
operated in company ostentatiously. In its use some Europeans
are absolutely gifted. But then we beat the world at open-air
gum-chewing--so I reckon the honors are about even.

This particular hotel, in common with all other first-class hotels in
Paris, was forgetful about setting forth on its menu the prices of
its best dishes and its special dishes. I take it this arrangement was
devised for the benefit of currency-quilted Americans. A Frenchman asks
the waiter the price of an unpriced dish and then orders something
else; but the American, as a rule, is either too proud or too foolish to
inquire into these details. At home he is beset by a hideous fear that
some waiter will think he is of a mercenary nature; and when he is
abroad this trait in him is accentuated. So, in his carefree American
way, he orders a portion of a dish of an unspecified value; whereupon
the head waiter slips out to the office and ascertains by private
inquiry how large a letter of credit the American is carrying with him,
and comes back and charges him all the traffic will bear.

As for the keeper of a fashionable cafe on a boulevard or in the Rue de
la Paix--well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant proprietor
on Broadway is a kindly, Christian soul who is in business for his
health--and not feeling very healthy at that. When you dine at one of
the swagger boulevard places the head waiter always comes, just before
you have finished, and places a display of fresh fruit before you, with
a winning smile and a bow and a gesture, which, taken together, would
seem to indicate that he is extending the compliments of the season and
that the fruit will be on the house; but never did one of the intriguing
scoundrels deceive me. Somewhere, years before, I had read statistics on
the cost of fresh fruit in a Paris restaurant, and so I had a care. The
sight of a bunch of hothouse grapes alone was sufficient to throw me
into a cold perspiration right there at the table; and as for South
African peaches, I carefully walked around them, getting farther away
all the time. A peach was just the same as a pesthouse to me, in Paris.

Alas though! no one had warned me about French oysters, and once--just
once--I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part, one financial and
the other gustatory. They were not particularly flavorous oysters as we
know oysters on this side of the ocean. The French oyster is a small,
copper-tinted proposition, and he tastes something like an indisposed
mussel and something like a touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently
costly for all purposes. The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly
that he refuses to vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the
same menu. A person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious
display of his affluence, on finding a pearl in an oyster, would swallow
the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirtfront. That would stamp him as
a person of wealth.

However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant
in price or of excessively low grade. We had one of the surprises of our
lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we went to a
little obscure cafe that was off the tourist route and therefore--as
yet--unspoiled and uncommercialized. This place was up a back street
near one of the markets; a small and smellsome place it was, decorated
most atrociously. In the front window, in close juxtaposition, were a
platter of French snails and a platter of sticky confections full
of dark spots. There was no mistaking the snails for anything except
snails; but the other articles were either currant buns or plain buns
that had been made in an unscreened kitchen.

Within were marble-topped tables of the Louie-Quince period and stuffy
wall-seats of faded, dusty red velvet; and a waiter in his shirtsleeves
was wandering about with a sheaf of those long French loaves tucked
under his arm like golf sticks, distributing his loaves among the
diners. But somewhere in its mysterious and odorous depths that little
bourgeois cafe harbored an honest-to-goodness cook. He knew a few things
about grilling a pig's knuckle--that worthy person. He could make the
knuckle of a pig taste like the wing of an angel; and what he could do
with a skillet, a pinch of herbs and a calf's sweetbread passed human
understanding.

Certain animals in Europe do have the most delicious diseases
anyway--notably the calf and the goose, particularly the goose of
Strasburg, where the pate de foie gras comes from. The engorged liver
of a Strasburg goose must be a source of joy to all--except its original
owner!

Several times we went back to the little restaurant round the corner
from the market, and each time we had something good. The food we ate
there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment awaiting
us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn, to get some of
that wonderful provincial cookery that through all our reading days we
had been hearing about. You will doubtless recall the description, as
so frequently and graphically dished up by the inspired writers of
travelogue stuff--the picturesque, tumbledown place, where on a cloth of
coarse linen--white like snow--old Marie, her wrinkled face abeam with
hospitality and kindness, places the delicious omelet she has just
made, and brings also the marvelous salad and the perfect fowl, and the
steaming hot coffee fragrant as breezes from Araby the Blest, and the
vin ordinaire that is even as honey and gold to the thirsty throat. You
must know that passage?

We went to see for ourselves. At a distance of half a day's automobile
run from Paris we found an establishment answering to the plans and
specifications. It was shoved jam-up against the road, as is the French
custom; and it was surrounded by a high, broken wall, on which all
manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little
towers hung, like Texas ticks on the ears of a quarantined steer. Within
the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together
any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other way, and some
facing all ways at once; so that, for the housefly, so numerously
encountered on these premises, it was but a short trip and a merry one
from the stable to the dining room and back again.

Sure enough, old Marie was on the job. Not desiring to be unkind or
unduly critical I shall merely state that as a cook old Marie was what
we who have been in France and speak the language fluently would call la
limite! The omelet she turned out for us was a thing that was very firm
and durable, containing, I think, leather findings, with a sprinkling
of chopped henbane on the top. The coffee was as feeble a counterfeit
as chicory usually is when it is masquerading as coffee, and the vin
ordinaire had less of the vin to it and more of the ordinaire than any
we sampled elsewhere.

Right here let me say this for the much-vaunted vin ordinaire of Europe:
In the end it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder--not like
the ordinary Egyptian adder, but like a patent adder in the office of
a loan shark, which is the worst stinger of the whole adder family. If
consumed with any degree of freedom it puts a downy coat on your tongue
next morning that causes you to think you inadvertently swallowed the
pillow in your sleep. Good domestic wine costs as much in Europe as good
domestic wine costs in America--possibly more than as much.

The souffle potatoes of old Marie were not bad to look on, but I did not
test them otherwise. Even in my own country I do not care to partake of
souffle potatoes unless I know personally the person who blew them
up. So at the conclusion of the repast we nibbled tentatively at
the dessert, which was a pancake with jelly, done in the image of a
medicated bandage but not so tasty as one. And then I paid the check,
which was of august proportions, and we came sadly away, realizing
that another happy dream of youth had been shattered to bits. Only
the tablecloth had been as advertised. It was coarse, but white like
snow--like snow three days old in Pittsburgh.

Yet I was given to understand that was a typical rural French inn
and fully up to the standards of such places; but if the manager of a
roadhouse within half a day's ride of New York or Boston or Philadelphia
served such food to his patrons, at such prices, the sheriff would have
him inside of two months; and everybody would be glad of it too--except
the sheriff. Also, no humane man in this country would ask a
self-respecting cow to camp overnight in such outbuildings as abutted on
the kitchen of this particular inn.

I am not denying that we have in America some pretty bad country hotels,
where good food is most barbarously mistreated and good beds are rare
to find, but we admit our shortcomings in this regard and we deplore
them--we do not shellac them over with a glamour of bogus romance, with
intent to deceive the foreign visitor to our shores. We warn him in
advance of what he may expect and urge him to carry his rations with
him.

It is almost unnecessary to add that old Marie gave us veal and poulet
roti. According to the French version of the story of the Flood only
two animals emerged from the Ark when the waters receded--one was an
immature hen and the other was an adolescent calf. At every meal except
breakfast--when they do not give you anything at all--the French give
you veal and poulet roti. If at lunch you had the poulet roti first and
afterward the veal, why, then at dinner they provide a pleasing variety
by bringing on the veal first and the poulet roti afterward.

The veal is invariably stringy and coated over with weird sauces, and
the poulet never appears at the table in her recognizable members--such
as wings and drumsticks--but is chopped up with a cleaver into cross
sections, and strange-looking chunks of the wreckage are sent to you.
Moreover they cook the chicken in such a way as to destroy its original
taste, and the veal in such a way as to preserve its original taste,
both being inexcusable errors.

Nowhere in the larger Italian cities, except by the exercise of a most
tremendous determination, can you get any real Italian cooking or
any real Italian dishes. At the hotels they feed you on a pale, sad
table-d'hote imitation of French cooking, invariably buttressed with the
everlasting veal and the eternal poulet roti. At the finish of a meal
the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small withered apples and a
bunch of fly-specked sour grapes; and, on another plate, the mortal
remains of some excessively deceased cheese wearing a tinfoil shroud and
appropriately laid out in a small, white, coffin-shaped box.

After this had happened to me several times I told the waiter with
gentle irony that he might as well screw the lid back on the casket and
proceed with the obsequies. I told him I was not one of those morbid
people who love to look on the faces of the strange dead. The funeral
could not get under way too soon to suit me. It seemed to me that this
funeral was already several days overdue. That was what I told him.

In my travels the best place I ever found to get Italian dishes was
a basement restaurant under an old brownstone house on Forty-seventh
Street, in New York. There you might find the typical dishes of Italy--I
defy you to find them in Italy without a search-warrant. However, while
in Italy the tourist may derive much entertainment and instruction from
a careful study of table manners.

In our own land we produce some reasonably boisterous trenchermen, and
some tolerably careless ones too. Several among us have yet to learn
how to eat corn on the ear and at the same time avoid corn in the ear.
A dish of asparagus has been known to develop fine acoustic properties,
and in certain quarters there is a crying need for a sound-proof soup;
but even so, and admitting these things as facts, we are but mere
beginners in this line when compared with our European brethren.

In the caskets of memory I shall ever cherish the picture of a
particularly hairy gentleman, apparently of Russian extraction, who
patronized our hotel in Venice one evening. He was what you might call
a human hazard--a golf-player would probably have thought of him in that
connection. He was eating flour dumplings, using his knife for a niblick
all the way round; and he lost every other shot in a concealed bunker
on the edge of the rough; and he could make more noise sucking his teeth
than some people could make playing on a fife.

There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats his
spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches round the
tines of his fork and then lifting it inboard, an ell at a time. This is
not correct. The true Neapolitan does not eat his spaghetti at all--he
inhales it. He gathers up a loose strand and starts it down his throat.
He then respires from the diaphragm, and like a troupe of trained
angleworms that entire mass of spaghetti uncoils itself, gets up off the
plate and disappears inside him--en masse, as it were--and making him
look like a man who is chinning himself over a set of bead portieres.
I fear we in America will never learn to siphon our spaghetti into us
thus. It takes a nation that has practiced deep breathing for centuries.




Chapter IX



The Deadly Poulet Routine

Under the head of European disillusionments I would rate, along with
the vin ordinaire of the French vineyard and inkworks, the barmaid of
Britain. From what you have heard on this subject you confidently expect
the British barmaid to be buxom, blond, blooming, billowy, buoyant--but
especially blond. On the contrary she is generally brunette, frequently
middle-aged, in appearance often fair-to-middling homely, and in manner
nearly always abounding with a stiffness and hauteur that would do
credit to a belted earl, if the belting had just taken place and the
earl was still groggy from the effects of it. Also, she has the notion
of personal adornment that is common in more than one social stratum of
women in England. If she has a large, firm, solid mound of false hair
overhanging her brow like an impending landslide, and at least three
jingly bracelets on each wrist, she considers herself well dressed, no
matter what else she may or may not be wearing.

Often this lady is found presiding over an American bar, which is an
institution now commonly met with in all parts of London. The American
bar of London differs from the ordinary English bar of London in two
respects, namely--there is an American flag draped over the mirror, and
it is a place where they sell all the English drinks and are just out of
all the American ones. If you ask for a Bronx the barmaid tells you
they do not carry seafood in stock and advises you to apply at the
fishmongers'--second turning to the right, sir, and then over the way,
sir--just before you come to the bottom of the road, sir. If you ask for
a Mamie Taylor she gets it confused in her mind with a Sally Lunn and
sends out for yeastcake and a cookbook; and while you are waiting she
will give you a genuine Yankee drink, such as a brandy and soda--or she
will suggest that you smoke something and take a look at the evening
paper.

If you do smoke something, beware--oh, beware!--of the native English
cigar. When rolled between the fingers it gives off a dry, rustling
sound similar to a shuck mattress. For smoking purposes it is also open
to the same criticisms that a shuck mattress is. The flames smolder in
the walls and then burst through in unexpected places, and the smoke
sucks up the airshaft and mushrooms on your top floor; then the deadly
back draft comes and the fatal firedamp, and when the firemen arrive you
are a ruined tenement. Except the German, the French, the Belgian, the
Austrian and the Italian cigar, the English cigar is the worst cigar I
ever saw. I did not go to Spain; they tell me, though, the Spanish cigar
has the high qualifications of badness. Spanish cigars are not really
cigars at all, I hear; they fall into the classification of defective
flues.

Likewise beware of the alleged American cocktail occasionally dispensed,
with an air of pride and accomplished triumph, by the British barmaid
of an American bar. If for purposes of experiment and research you feel
that you must take one, order with it, instead of the customary olive or
cherry, a nice boiled vegetable marrow. The advantage to be derived from
this is that the vegetable marrow takes away the taste of anything else
and does not have any taste of its own.

In the eating line the Englishman depends on the staples. He sticks to
the old standbys. What was good enough for his fathers is good enough
for him--in some cases almost too good. Monotony of victuals does
not distress him. He likes his food to be humdrum; the humdrummer the
better.

Speaking with regard to the whole country, I am sure we have better
beef uniformly in America than in England; but there is at least one
restaurant on the Strand where the roast beef is just a little
bit superior to any other roast beef on earth. English mutton is
incomparable, too, and English breakfast bacon is a joy forever. But it
never seems to occur to an Englishman to vary his diet. I submit samples
of the daily menu:

                 LUNCHEON            DINNER
                 Roast Beef          Boiled Mutton
                 Boiled Mutton       Roast Beef
                 Potatoes, Boiled    Cabbage, Boiled
                 Cabbage, Boiled     Potatoes, Boiled
                 Jam Tart            Custard
                 Custard             Jam Tart
                 Cheese              Coffee
                 Coffee              Cheese
                             TEA!

I know now why an Englishman dresses for dinner--it enables him to
distinguish dinner from lunch.

His regular desserts are worthy of a line. The jam tart is a death-mask
that went wrong and in consequence became morose and heavy of spirit,
and the custard is a soft-boiled egg which started out in life to be a
soft-boiled egg and at the last moment--when it was too late--changed
its mind and tried to be something else.

In the City, where lunching places abound, the steamer works overtime
and the stewpan never rests. There is one place, well advertised
to American visitors, where they make a specialty of their
beefsteak-and-kidney pudding. This is a gummy concoction containing
steak, kidney, mushroom, oyster, lark--and sometimes W and Y. Doctor
Johnson is said to have been very fond of it; this, if true, accounts
for the doctor's disposition. A helping of it weighs two pounds before
you eat it and ten pounds afterward. The kidney is its predominating
influence. The favorite flower of the English is not the primrose. It
is the kidney. Wherever you go, among the restaurants, there is always
somebody operating on a steamed flour dumpling for kidney trouble.

The lower orders are much addicted to a dish known--if I remember the
name aright--by the euphonious title of Toad in the Hole. Toad in the
Hole consists of a full-grown and fragrant sheep's kidney entombed in an
excavated retreat at the heart of a large and powerful onion, and then
cooked in a slow and painful manner, so that the onion and the kidney
may swap perfumes and flavors. These people do not use this combination
for a weapon or for a disinfectant, or for anything else for which it
is naturally purposed; they actually go so far as to eat it. You pass
a cabmen's lunchroom and get a whiff of a freshly opened Toad in the
Hole--and you imagine it is the German invasion starting and wonder why
they are not removing the women and children to a place of safety. All
England smells like something boiling, just as all France smells like
something that needs boiling.

Seemingly the only Londoners who enjoy any extensive variety in their
provender are the slum-dwellers. Out Whitechapel-way the establishment
of a tripe dresser and draper is a sight wondrous to behold, and will
almost instantly eradicate the strongest appetite; but it is not to be
compared with an East End meatshop, where there are skinned sheep faces
on slabs, and various vital organs of various animals disposed about in
clumps and clusters. I was reminded of one of those Fourteenth Street
museums of anatomy--tickets ten cents each; boys under fourteen not
admitted. The East End butcher is not only a thrifty but an inquiring
soul. Until I viewed his shop I had no idea that a sheep could be so
untidy inside; and as for a cow--he finds things in a cow she didn't
know she had.

Breakfast is the meal at which the Englishman rather excels; in fact
England is the only country in Europe where the natives have the
faintest conception of what a regular breakfast is, or should be.
Moreover, it is now possible in certain London hotels for an American to
get hot bread and ice-water at breakfast, though the English round about
look on with undisguised horror as he consumes them, and the manager
only hopes that he will have the good taste not to die on the premises.

It is true that, in lieu of the fresh fruit an American prefers, the
waiter brings at least three kinds of particularly sticky marmalade and,
in accordance with a custom that dates back to the time of the Druids,
spangles the breakfast cloth over with a large number of empty saucers
and plates, which fulfill no earthly purpose except to keep getting in
the way. The English breakfast bacon, however, is a most worthy article,
and the broiled kipper is juicy and plump, and does not resemble a dried
autumn leaf, as our kipper often does. And the fried sole, on which the
Englishman banks his breakfast hopes, invariably repays one for one's
undivided attention. The English boast of their fish; but, excusing
the kipper, they have but three of note--the turbot, the plaice and
the sole. And the turbot tastes like turbot, and the plaice tastes like
fish; but the sole, when fried, is most appetizing.

I have been present when the English gooseberry and the English
strawberry were very highly spoken of, too, but with me this is merely
hearsay evidence; we reached England too late for berries. Happily,
though, we came in good season for the green filbert, which is gathered
in the fall of the year, being known then as the Kentish cobnut. The
Kentish cob beats any nut we have except the paper-shell pecan. The
English postage stamp is also much tastier than ours. The space for
licking is no larger, if as large--but the flavor lasts.

As I said before, the Englishman has no great variety of things to
eat, but he is always eating them; and when he is not eating them he is
swigging tea. Yet in these regards the German excels him. The Englishman
gains a lap at breakfast; but after that first hour the German leaves
him, hopelessly distanced, far in the rear. It is due to his talents in
this respect that the average Berliner has a double chin running all the
way round, and four rolls of fat on the back of his neck, all closely
clipped and shaved, so as to bring out their full beauty and symmetry,
and a figure that makes him look as though an earthquake had shaken
loose everything on the top floor and it all fell through into his
dining room.

Your true Berliner eats his regular daily meals--four in number and all
large ones; and in between times he now and then gathers a bite. For
instance, about ten o'clock in the morning he knocks off for an hour and
has a few cups of hard-boiled coffee and some sweet, sticky pastry with
whipped cream on it. Then about four in the afternoon he browses a
bit, just to keep up his appetite for dinner. This, though, is but a
snack--say, a school of Bismarck herring and a kraut pie, some more
coffee and more cake, and one thing and another--merely a preliminary
to the real food, which will be coming along a little later on. Between
acts at the theater he excuses himself and goes out and prepares his
stomach for supper, which will follow at eleven, by drinking two or
three steins of thick Munich beer, and nibbling on such small tidbits
as a rosary of German sausage or the upper half of a raw Westphalia ham.
There are forty-seven distinct and separate varieties of German sausage
and three of them are edible; but the Westphalia ham, in my judgment, is
greatly overrated. It is pronounced Westfailure with the accent on the
last part, where it belongs.

In Germany, however, there is a pheasant agreeably smothered in young
cabbage which is delicious and in season plentiful. The only drawback
to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the grasping and avaricious
German restaurant keeper has the confounded nerve to charge you, in our
money, forty cents for a whole pheasant and half a peck of cabbage--say,
enough to furnish a full meal for two tolerably hungry adults and a
growing child.

The Germans like to eat and they love a hearty eater. There should
never be any trouble about getting a suitable person to serve us at the
Kaiser's court if the Administration at Washington will but harken to
the voice of experience. To the Germans the late Doctor Tanner would
have been a distinct disappointment in an ambassadorial capacity; but
there was a man who used to live in my congressional district who could
qualify in a holy minute if he were still alive. He was one of Nature's
noblemen, untutored but naturally gifted, and his name was John Wesley
Bass. He was the champion eater of the world, specializing particularly
in eggs on the shell, and cove oysters out of the can, with pepper sauce
on them, and soda crackers on the side.

I regret to be compelled to state, however, that John Wesley is no
more. At one of our McCracken County annual fairs, a few years back, he
succumbed to overambition coupled with a mistake in judgment. After he
had established a new world's record by eating at one sitting five dozen
raw eggs he rashly rode on the steam merry-go-round. At the end of the
first quarter of an hour he fainted and fell off a spotted wooden horse
and never spoke again, but passed away soon after being removed to his
home in an unconscious condition. I have forgotten what the verdict of
the coroner's jury was--the attending physician gave it some fancy Latin
name--but among laymen the general judgment was that our fellow townsman
had just naturally been scrambled to death. It was a pity, too--the
German people would have cared for John Wesley as an ambassador. He
would have eaten his way right into their affections.

We have the word of history for it that Vienna was originally settled by
the Celts, but you would hardly notice it now. On first impressions
you would say that about Vienna there was a noticeable suggestion--a
perceptible trace--of the Teutonic; and this applies to the Austrian
food in the main. I remember a kind of Wiener-schnitzel, breaded, that I
had in Vienna; in fact for the moment I do not seem to recall much else
about Vienna. Life there was just one Wiener-schnitzel after another.

In order to spread sweetness and light, and to the end, furthermore,
that the ignorant people across the salted seas might know something
of a land of real food and much food, and plenty of it and plenty of
variety to it, I would that I might bring an expedition of Europeans to
America and personally conduct it up and down our continent and back and
forth crosswise of it.

And if I had the money of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller I would do it,
too, for it would be a greater act of charity than building public
libraries or endowing public baths. I would include in my party a few
delegates from England, where every day is All Soles' Day; and a few
sausage-surfeited Teutons; and some Gauls, wearied and worn by
the deadly poulet routine of their daily life, and a scattering
representation from all the other countries over there.

In especial I would direct the Englishman's attention to the broiled
pompano of New Orleans; the kingfish filet of New York; the sanddab
of Los Angeles; the Boston scrod of the Massachusetts coast; and that
noblest of all pan fish--the fried crappie of Southern Indiana. To these
and to many another delectable fishling, would I introduce the poor
fellow; and to him and his fellows I fain would offer a dozen apiece of
Smith Island oysters on the half shell.

And I would take all of them to New England for baked beans and brown
bread and codfish balls; but on the way we would visit the shores of
Long Island for a kind of soft clam which first is steamed and then is
esteemed. At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they should each have a broiled
lobster measuring thirty inches from tip to tip, fresh caught out of the
Piscataqua River.

Vermont should come to them in hospitality and in pity, offering
buckwheat cakes and maple sirup. But Rhode Island would bring a genuine
Yankee blueberry pie and directions for the proper consumption of it,
namely--discarding knife and fork, to raise a crusty, dripping wedge
of blueberry pie in your hand to your mouth, and to take a first
bite, which instantly changes the ground-floor plan of that pie from a
triangle to a crescent; and then to take a second bite, and then to lick
your fingers--and then there isn't any more pie.

Down in Kentucky I should engage Mandy Berry, colored, to fry for them
some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real cornbread. In
Creole Louisiana they should sample crawfish gumbo; and in Georgia
they should have 'possum baked with sweet potatoes; and in Tidewater
Maryland, terrapin and canvasback; and in Illinois, young gray squirrels
on toast; and in South Carolina, boiled rice with black-eyed peas;
and in Colorado, cantaloupes; and in Kansas, young sweet corn; and in
Virginia, country hams, not cured with chemicals but with hickory smoke
and loving hands; and in Tennessee, jowl and greens.

And elsewhere they should have their whacking fill of prairie hen and
suckling pig and barbecued shote, and sure-enough beefsteak, and
goobers hot from the parching box; and scrapple, and yams roasted in hot
wood-ashes; and hotbiscuit and waffles and Parker house rolls--and
the thousand and one other good things that may be found in this our
country, and which are distinctively and uniquely of this country.

Finally I would bring them back by way of Richmond, and there I would
give them each an eggnog compounded with fresh cream and made according
to a recipe older than the Revolution. If I had my way about it no
living creature should be denied the right to bury his face in a
brimming tumbler of that eggnog--except a man with a drooping red
mustache.

By the time those gorged and converted pilgrims touched the Eastern
seaboard again any one of them, if he caught fire, would burn for about
four days with a clear blue flame, and many valuable packing-house
by-products could be gleaned from his ruins. It would bind us all,
foreigner and native alike, in closer ties of love and confidence,
and it would turn the tide of travel westward from Europe, instead of
eastward from America.

Let's do it sometime--and appoint me conductor of the expedition!




Chapter X



Modes of the Moment; a Fashion Article

Among the furbearing races the adult male of the French species easily
excels. Some fine peltries are to be seen in Italy, and there is a type
of farming Englishman who wears a stiff set of burnishers projecting
out round his face in a circular effect suggestive of a halo that has
slipped down. In connection with whiskers I have heard the Russians
highly commended. They tell me that, from a distance, it is very hard
to distinguish a muzhik from a bosky dell, whereas a grand duke nearly
always reminds one of something tasty and luxuriant in the line of
ornamental arborwork. The German military man specializes in mustaches,
preference being given to the Texas longhorn mustache, and the walrus
and kitty-cat styles. A dehorned German officer is rarely found and a
muley one is practically unknown. But the French lead all the world in
whiskers--both the wildwood variety and the domesticated kind trained
on a trellis. I mention this here at the outset because no Frenchman
is properly dressed unless he is whiskered also; such details properly
appertain to a chapter on European dress.

Probably every freeborn American citizen has at some time in his life
cherished the dream of going to England and buying himself an outfit of
English clothes--just as every woman has had hopes of visiting Paris and
stocking up with Parisian gowns on the spot where they were created, and
where--so she assumes--they will naturally be cheaper than elsewhere.
Those among us who no longer harbor these fancies are the men and women
who have tried these experiments.

After she has paid the tariff on them a woman is pained to note that her
Paris gowns have cost her as much as they would cost her in the United
States--so I have been told by women who have invested extensively in
that direction. And though a man, by the passion of the moment, may
be carried away to the extent of buying English clothes, he usually
discovers on returning to his native land that they are not adapted to
withstand the trying climatic conditions and the critical comments of
press and public in this country. What was contemplated as a triumphal
reentrance becomes a footrace to the nearest ready-made clothing store.

English clothes are not meant for Americans, but for Englishmen to wear:
that is a great cardinal truth which Americans would do well to ponder.
Possibly you have heard that an Englishman's clothes fit him with an
air. They do so; they fit him with a lot of air around the collar and a
great deal of air adjacent to the waistband and through the slack of the
trousers; frequently they fit him with such an air that he is entirely
surrounded by space, as in the case of a vacuum bottle. Once there was
a Briton whose overcoat collar hugged the back of his neck; so they knew
by that he was no true Briton, but an impostor--and they put him out
of the union. In brief, the kind of English clothes best suited for an
American to wear is the kind Americans make.

I knew these things in advance--or, anyway, I should have known them;
nevertheless I felt our trip abroad would not be complete unless I
brought back some London clothes. I took a look at the shop-windows and
decided to pass up the ready-made things. The coat shirt; the shaped
sock; the collar that will fit the neckband of a shirt, and other common
American commodities, seemed to be practically unknown in London.

The English dress shirt has such a dinky little bosom on it that by
rights you cannot refer to it as a bosom at all; it comes nearer to
being what women used to call a guimpe. Every show-window where I
halted was jammed to the gunwales with thick, fuzzy, woolen articles
and inflammatory plaid waistcoats, and articles in crash for tropical
wear--even through the glass you could note each individual crash
with distinctness. The London shopkeeper adheres steadfastly to this
arrangement. Into his window he puts everything he has in his shop
except the customer. The customer is in the rear, with all avenues of
escape expertly fenced off from him by the proprietor and the clerks;
but the stock itself is in the show-window.

There are just two department stores in London where, according to the
American viewpoint, the windows are attractively dressed. One of these
stores is owned by an American, and the other, I believe, is managed
by an American. In Paris there are many shops that are veritable
jewel-boxes for beauty and taste; but these are the small specialty
shops, very expensive and highly perfumed.

The Paris department stores are worse jumbles even than the English
department stores. When there is a special sale under way the bargain
counters are rigged up on the sidewalks. There, in the open air, buyer
and seller will chaffer and bicker, and wrangle and quarrel, and kiss
and make up again--for all the world to see. One of the free sights
of Paris is a frugal Frenchman, with his face extensively haired over,
pawing like a Skye terrier through a heap of marked-down lingerie;
picking out things for the female members of his household to wear--now
testing some material with his tongue; now holding a most personal
article up in the sunlight to examine the fabric--while the wife stands
humbly, dumbly by, waiting for him to complete his selections. So far
as London was concerned, I decided to deny myself any extensive orgy in
haberdashery. From similar motives I did not invest in the lounge suit
to which an Englishman is addicted. I doubted whether it would fit the
lounge we have at home--though, with stretching, it might, at that. My
choice finally fell on an English raincoat and a pair of those baggy
knee breeches such as an Englishman wears when he goes to Scotland for
the moor shooting, or to the National Gallery, or any other damp, misty,
rheumatic place.

I got the raincoat first. It was built to my measure; at least that was
the understanding; but you give an English tailor an inch and he takes
an ell. This particular tailor seemed to labor under the impression that
I was going to use my raincoat for holding large public assemblies or
social gatherings in--nothing that I could say convinced him that I
desired it for individual use; so he modeled it on a generous spreading
design, big at the bottom and sloping up toward the top like a pagoda.
Equipped with guy ropes and a centerpole it would make a first-rate
marquee for a garden party--in case of bad weather the refreshments
could be served under it; but as a raincoat I did not particularly fancy
it. When I put it on I sort of reminded myself of a covered wagon.

Nothing daunted by this I looked up the address of a sporting tailor
in a side street off Regent Street, whose genius was reputed to find an
artistic outlet in knee breeches. Before visiting his shop I disclosed
my purpose to my traveling companion, an individual in whose judgment
and good taste I have ordinarily every confidence, and who has a way of
coming directly to the meat of a subject.

"What do you want with a pair of knee breeches?" inquired this person
crisply.

"Why--er--for general sporting occasions," I replied.

"For instance, what occasions?"

"For golfing," I said, "and for riding, you know. And if I should go
West next year they would come in very handy for the shooting."

"To begin with," said my companion, "you do not golf. The only extensive
riding I have ever heard of your doing was on railway trains. And if
these knee breeches you contemplate buying are anything like the knee
breeches I have seen here in London, and if you should wear them out
West among the impulsive Western people, there would undoubtedly be
a good deal of shooting; but I doubt whether you would enjoy it--they
might hit you!"

"Look here!" I said. "Every man in America who wears duck pants doesn't
run a poultry farm. And the presence of a sailor hat in the summertime
does not necessarily imply that the man under it owns a yacht. I
cannot go back home to New York and face other and older members of the
When-I-Was-in-London Club without some sartorial credentials to show
for my trip. I am firmly committed to this undertaking. Do not seek to
dissuade me, I beg of you. My mind is set on knee breeches and I shan't
be happy until I get them."

So saying I betook myself to the establishment of this sporting
tailor in the side street off Regent Street; and there, without much
difficulty, I formed the acquaintance of a salesman of suave and urbane
manners. With his assistance I picked out a distinctive, not to say
striking, pattern in an effect of plaids. The goods, he said, were made
of the wool of a Scotch sheep in the natural colors. They must have some
pretty fancy-looking sheep in Scotland!

This done, the salesman turned me over to a cutter, who took me to a
small room where incompleted garments were hanging all about like the
quartered carcasses of animals in a butcher shop. The cutter was a
person who dropped his H's and then, catching himself, gathered them
all up again and put them back in his speech--in the wrong places. He
surveyed me extensively with a square and a measuring line, meantime
taking many notes, and told me to come back on the next day but one.

On the day named and at the hour appointed I was back. He had the
garments ready for me. As, with an air of pride, he elevated them for my
inspection, they seemed commodious--indeed, voluminous. I had told him,
when making them, to take all the latitude he needed; but it looked
now as though he had got it confused in his mind with longitude. Those
breeches appeared to be constructed for cargo rather than speed.

With some internal misgivings I lowered my person into them while he
held them in position, and when I had descended as far as I could go
without entirely immuring myself, he buttoned the dewdabs at the knees;
then he went round behind me and cinched them in abruptly, so that of
a sudden they became quite snug at the waistline; the only trouble was
that the waistline had moved close up under my armpits, practically
eliminating about a foot and a half of me that I had always theretofore
regarded as indispensable to the general effect. Right in the middle of
my back, up between my shoulder blades there was a stiff, hard clump of
something that bored into my spine uncomfortably. I could feel it quite
plainly--lumpy and rough.

"Ow's that, sir?" he cheerily asked me, over my shoulder; but it seemed
to me there was a strained, nervous note in his voice. "A bit of all
right--eh, sir?"

"Well," I said, standing on tiptoe in an effort to see over the top,
"you've certainly behaved very generously toward me--I'll say that much.
Midships there appears to be about four or five yards of material I do
not actually need in my business, being, as it happens, neither a harem
favorite nor a professional sackracer. And they come up so high I'm
afraid people will think the gallant coast-guards have got me in a
lifebuoy and are bringing me ashore through the surf."

"You'll be wanting them a bit loose, sir, you know," he interjected,
still snuggling close behind me. "All our gentlemen like them loose."

"Oh, very well," I said; "perhaps these things are mere details.
However, I would be under deep obligations to you if you'd change 'em
from barkentine to schooner rig, and lower away this gaff-topsail which
now sticks up under my chin, so that I can luff and come up in the
wind without capsizing. And say, what is that hard lump between my
shoulders?"

"Nothing at all, sir," he said hastily; and now I knew he was flurried.
"I can fix that, sir--in a jiffy, sir."

"Anyhow, please come round here in front where I can converse more
freely with you on the subject," I said. I was becoming suspicious that
all was not well with me back there where he was lingering. He came
reluctantly, still half-embracing me with one arm.

Petulantly I wrestled my form free, and instantly those breeches seemed
to leap outward in all directions away from me. I grabbed for them, and
barely in time I got a grip on the yawning top hem. Peering down the
cavelike orifice that now confronted me I beheld two spectral white
columns, and recognized them as my own legs. In the same instant, also,
I realized what that hard clump against my spine was, because when he
took his hand away the clump was gone. He had been standing back there
with some eight or nine inches of superfluous waistband bunched up in
his fist.

The situation was embarrassing, and it would have been still more
embarrassing had I elected to go forth wearing my breeches in their
then state, because, to avoid talk, he would have had to go along too,
walking immediately behind me and holding up the slack. And such a
spectacle, with me filling the tonneau and he back behind on the rumble,
would have caused comment undoubtedly.

That pantsmaker was up a stump! He looked reproachfully at me, chidingly
at the breeches and sternly at the tapemeasure--which he wore draped
round his neck like a pet snake--as though he felt convinced one of us
was at fault, but could not be sure which one.

"I'm afraid, sir," he said, "that your figure is changing."

"I guess you're right," I replied with a soft sigh. "As well as I can
judge I'm not as tall as I was day before yesterday by at least eighteen
inches. And I've mislaid my diaphragm somewhere, haven't I?"

"'Ave them off, please, sir," he said resignedly. "I'll 'ave to alter
them to conform, sir. Come back to-morrow."

I had them off and he altered them to conform, and I went back on the
morrow; in fact I went back so often that after a while I became really
quite attached to the place. I felt almost like a member of the firm.
Between calls from me the cutter worked on those breeches. He cut them
up and he cut them down; he sheared the back away and shingled the
front, and shifted the buttons to and fro.

Still, even after all this, they were not what I should term an
unqualified success. When I sat down in them they seemed to climb up on
me so high, fore and aft, that I felt as short-waisted as a crush hat
in a state of repose. And the only way I could get my hands into the
hip pockets of those breeches was to take the breeches off first. As ear
muffs they were fair but as hip pockets they were failures. Finally
I told him to send my breeches, just as they were, to my hotel
address--and I paid the bill.

I brought them home with me. On the day after my arrival I took them to
my regular tailor and laid the case before him. I tried them on for him
and asked him to tell me, as man to man, whether anything could be done
to make those garments habitable. He called his cutter into consultation
and they went over me carefully, meantime uttering those commiserating
clucking sounds one tailor always utters when examining another tailor's
handiwork. After this my tailor took a lump of chalk and charted out a
kind of Queen Rosamond's maze of crossmarks on my breeches and said I
might leave them, and that if surgery could save them he would operate.
At any rate he guaranteed to cut them away sufficiently to admit of my
breast bone coming out into the open once more.

In a week--about--he called me on the telephone and broke the sad news
to me. My English riding pants would never ride me again. In using the
shears he had made a fatal slip and had irreparably damaged them in an
essential location. However, he said I need not worry, because it
might have been worse; from what he had already cut out of them he had
garnered enough material to make me a neat outing coat, and by scrimping
he thought he might get a waistcoat to match.

I have my English raincoat; it is still in a virgin state so far as
wearing it is concerned. I may yet wear it and I may not. If I wear
it and you meet me on the street--and we are strangers--you should
experience no great difficulty in recognizing me. Just start in at
almost any spot on the outer orbit and walk round and round as though
you were circling a sideshow tent looking for a chance to crawl under
the canvas and see the curiosities for nothing; and after a while, if
you keep on walking as directed, you will come to a person with a plain
but substantial face, and that will be me in my new English raincoat.
Then again I may wear it to a fancy-dress ball sometime. In that case
I shall stencil Pike's Peak or Bust! on the sidebreadth and go as a
prairie schooner. If I can succeed in training a Missouri hound-dog to
trail along immediately behind me the illusion will be perfect.

After these two experiences with the English tailor I gave up. Instead
of trying to wear the apparel of the foreigner I set myself to the
study of it. I would avoid falling into the habit of making comparisons
between European institutions and American institutions that are forever
favorable to the American side of the argument. To my way of thinking
there is only one class of tourist-Americans to be encountered abroad
worse than the class who go into hysterical rapture over everything they
see merely because it is European, and that is the class who condemn
offhand everything they see and find fault with everything merely
because it is not American. But I must say that in the matter of outer
habiliments the American man wins the decision on points nearly every
whack.

In his evening garb, which generally fits him, but which generally is
not pressed as to trouserlegs and coatsleeves, the Englishman makes
an exceedingly good appearance. The swallow-tailed coat was created for
the Englishman and he for it; but on all other occasions the well-dressed
American leads him--leads the world, for that matter. When a Frenchman
attires himself in his fanciest regalia he merely succeeds in looking
effeminate; whereas a German, under similar circumstances, bears a
wadded-in, bulged-out, stuffed-up appearance. I never saw a German
in Germany whose hat was not too small for him--just as I never saw a
Japanese in Occidental garb whose hat was not too large for him--if it
was a derby hat. If a German has on a pair of trousers that flare out
at the bottom and a coat with angel sleeves--I think that is the correct
technical term--and if the front of his coat is spangled over with
the largest-sized horn buttons obtainable he regards himself as being
dressed to the minute.

As for the women, I believe even the super-critical mantuamakers of
Paris have begun to concede that, as a nation, the American women
are the best-dressed women on earth. The French women have a way of
arranging their hair and of wearing their hats and of draping their furs
about their throats that is artistic beyond comparison. There may be a
word in some folks' dictionaries fitly to describe it--there is no such
word in mine; but when you have said that much you have said all there
is to say. A French woman's feet are not shod well. French shoes, like
all European shoes, are clumsy and awkward looking.

English children are well dressed because they are simply dressed;
and the children themselves, in contrast to the overdressed, overly
aggressive youngsters so frequently encountered in America, are mannerly
and self-effacing, and have sane, simple, childish tastes. Young English
girls are fresh and natural, but frequently frumpy; and the English
married woman is generally dressed in poor taste and appears to have
a most limited wardrobe. Apparently the husband buys all he wants, and
then, if there is any money left over, the wife gets it to spend on
herself.

Venturing one morning into a London chapel I saw a dowdy little woman of
this type kneeling in a pew, chanting the responses to the service. Her
blouse gaped open all the way down her back and she was saying with much
fervor, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done."
She had too, but she didn't know it, as she knelt there unconsciously
supplying a personal illustration for the spoken line.

The typical highborn English woman has pale blue eyes, a fine complexion
and a clear-cut, rather expressionless face with a profile suggestive
of the portraits seen on English postage stamps of the early Victorian
period; but in the arranging of her hair any French shopgirl could give
her lessons, and any smart American woman could teach her a lot about
the knack of wearing clothes with distinction.

In England, that land of caste which is rigid enough to be cast iron,
all men, with the exception of petty tradespeople, dress to match the
vocations they follow. In America no man stays put--he either goes
forward to a circle above the one into which he was born or he slips
back into a lower one; and so he dresses to suit himself or his wife or
his tailor. But in England the professional man advertises his calling
by his clothes. Extreme stage types are ordinary types in London.
No Southern silver-tongued orator of the old-time, string-tied,
slouch-hatted, long-haired variety ever clung more closely to his
official makeup than the English barrister clings to his spats, his
shad-bellied coat and his eye-glass dangling on a cord. At a glance one
knows the medical man or the journalist, the military man in undress or
the gentleman farmer; also, by the same easy method, one may know the
workingman and the penny postman. The workingman has a cap on his
head and a neckerchief about his throat, and the legs of his corduroy
trousers are tied up below the knees with strings--else he is no
workingman.

When we were in London the postmen were threatening to go on strike.
From the papers I gathered that the points in dispute had to do with
better hours and better pay; but if they had been striking against
having to wear the kind of cap the British Government makes a postman
wear, their cause would have had the cordial support and intense
sympathy of every American in town.

It remains for the English clerk to be the only Englishman who seeks, by
the clothes he wears in his hours of ease, to appear as something more
than what he really is. Off duty he fair1y dotes on the high hat of
commerce. Frequently he sports it in connection with an exceedingly
short and bobby sackcoat, and trousers that are four or five inches
too short in the legs for him. The Parisian shopman harbors similar
ambitions--only he expresses them with more attention to detail. The
noon hour arriving, the French shophand doffs his apron and his air of
deference. He puts on a high hat and a frock coat that have been on a
peg behind the door all the morning, gathers up his cane and his gloves;
and, becoming on the instant a swagger and a swaggering boulevardier, he
saunters to his favorite sidewalk cafe for a cordial glassful of a pink
or green or purple drink. When his little hour of glory is over and done
with he returns to his counter, sheds his grandeur and is once 

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