"Ladies—and genelmen," he said—he always added the gentleman as if they were an after-thought—"you are mos' fortunate, mos' locky. Tout Paris—all the folks—are still driving their 'orse an' carriage 'ere. One week more—the style will be all gone—what you say—vamoosed? Every mother's son! An' Cook's excursion party won't see nothin' but ole cabs goin' along!"

"Can't we get away from them?" asked the serious person. It was humorously intended—certainly a liberty, and the guide was down on it in an instant.

"Get away from them? Not if they know you're here!"

At which the serious man looked still more serious, and sympathy for him sprang up in every heart.

We passed Longchamps at a steady trot, and the guide's statement that the races there were always held on Sunday was received with a silence that evidently disappointed him. It was plain that he had a withering rejoinder ready for sabbatarians, and he waited anxiously, balanced on one foot, for an expression of shocked opinion. It was after we had passed Mont Valerien, frowning on the horizon, that the man in the pink cotton shirt began to grow restive under so much instruction. He told the serious person that his name was Hinkson of Iowa, and the serious person was induced to reply that his was Pabbley of Simcoe, Ontario. It was insubordination—the guide was talking about the shelling from Mont Valerien at the time, with the most patriotic dislocations in his grammar.

"You understan', you see?" he concluded. "Now those two genelmen, they don' understan', and they don' see. An' when they get back to the United States they won' be able to tell their wives an' sweethearts anythin' about Mont Valerien! All right, genelmen—please yourselves. Mais you please remember I am just like William Shekspeare—I give no repetition!"

It was then that the serious man demonstrated that Britons, even the North American kind, never, never would be slaves. Placing his black silk hat carefully a little further back on his head, he leaned forward.

"Now look here, mister," he said, "you're as personal as a Yankee newspaper. So far as I know, you're not the friend of my childhood, nor the companion of my later years, except for this trip only, and I'd just as soon you realised it. As far as I know, you're paid to point out objects of historical interest. Don't you trouble to entertain us any further than that. We'll excuse you!"

"Ladies—an' genelmen," continued the guide calmly, "in a lil' short while we shall be approached to the town of St. Cloud. At that town of St. Cloud will be one genelman will take the excellen' group—fotograff. To appear in that fotograff, you will please all keep together with me. Afterwards, you will look at the fountains, at the magnificent panorama de Paris, and we go on to Versailles. On the return journey, if you like that fotograff you can buy, if you don't like, you don' buy. An' if you got no wife an' no sweetheart all the same you keep your temper!"

But Mr. Pabbley had settled his hat in its normal position and did not intend to clear his brow for action again. All might have gone well, had it not been for the patriotic sensitiveness of Mr. Hinkson of Iowa.

"I think I heard you pass a remark about American newspapers, sir," said Mr Hinkson of Iowa. "Think you've got any better in Canada?"

Mr. Pabbley smiled. There may have been some fancied superiority in the smile.

"I guess they suit us better," he said.

"Got any circulation figures about you?"

"Not being an advertising agent, I don't carry them."

"I see!" Mr. Hinkson's manner of saying he saw clearly implied that there might have been other reasons why Mr. Pabbley declined to produce those figures. We were all listening now, and the guide had subsided upon the box seat. The Senator's face wore the judicial expression it always assumes when he has a difficulty in keeping himself out of the conversation. It became easier than ever to separate the Republican and the British elements on that coach.

"Well," said Mr. Hinkson, "don't you folks get pretty tired of paying Victoria taxes sometimes?"

The British contingent seemed to find this amusing. The Americans looked as if it were no laughing matter.

"I don't believe Her Majesty is much the richer for all she gets out of us," said Mr. Pabbley.

"Oh, I guess you send over a pretty good lump per annum, don't you?"

"Not a red cent, sir," said Mr. Pabbley decisively. "We run our own show."

"What about that aristocrat that rules the country up at Ottawa?"

"Oh, he hasn't got any say! We get him out and pay him a salary to save ourselves the trouble of electing a president. A presidential election's bad for business, bad for politics, bad for morals."

"You seem to know. Doesn't it ever make you tired to hear yourselves called subjects? Don't you ever want to be free and equal, like us? Trot out the truth now—the George Washington article!"

"Mister," said Mr. Pabbley, "I flatter myself that Canadians are a good deal like United States folks already, and I don't mind congratulating both our nations on the resemblance. But I'm bound to add that, while I would wish to imitate the American people in many ways still further, I wouldn't be like you personally, no, not under any circumstances nor in any respect."

At this moment it was necessary to dismount, and, as poppa and I both immediately became engaged in reconciling momma to the necessity of walking to the top of the plateau, I lost the rest of the conversation. Momma, when it was necessary to walk anywhere, always became pathetic and offered to stay behind alone. She declared on this occasion that she would be perfectly happy in the coach with the dear horses, and poppa had to resort to extreme measures. "Please yourself, Augusta," he said. "Your lightest whim is law to me, and you know it. But I'm going to hate standing up in that photograph all alone with my only child, like any widower."

"Alexander!" exclaimed momma at once. "What a dreadful idea! I think I might be able to manage it."

The photographer was there with his camera. The guide marshalled us up to him, falling back now and then to bark at the heels of the lagging ones, and, with the assistance of a bench and an acacia, we were rapidly arranged, the short ones standing up, the tall ones sitting down, everyone assuming his most pleasing expression, and the Misses Bingham standing alone, apart, on the brink, looking on under an umbrella that seemed to protect them from intimate association with the democracy in any form. We saw the guide approach them in gingerly inquiry, but, before simultaneous waves of their two black fans, he retired in disorder. The bride had slipped her hand upon her husband's shoulder, just to mark his identity; the fat gentleman had removed his hat and hurriedly put it on again, and the photographer had gone under his curtain for the third time, when Mr. Hinkson of Iowa, who sat in a conspicuous cross-legged position in the foreground, drew from his pocket a handkerchief and spread it carefully out over one knee. It was not an ordinary handkerchief, it was a pocket edition of the Stars and Stripes, all red, and blue, and white, and it attracted the instant attention of every eye. One of the eyes was Mr. Pabbley's, who appeared to clear the group at a bound in consequence.

"Ladies and gentlemen," exclaimed Mr. Pabbley with vehemence, "does anyone happen to have a Union Jack about him or her?"

They felt in their pockets, but they hadn't.

"Then," said Mr. Pabbley, who was evidently aroused, "unless the gentleman from Iowa will withdraw his handkerchief, I refuse to sit."

"I guess we aren't any of us annexationists," said a middle-aged woman from Toronto in a duster, and proceeded to follow Mr. Pabbley.

The rest of the Canadians looked at each other undecidedly for a moment and then slowly filed after the middle-aged woman. There remained the mere wreck of a group clustering round the national emblem on the leg of Mr. Hinkson. The guide was expostulating himself speechless, the photographer was in convulsions, the Senator saw it was time to interfere. Leaning over, he gently tapped the patriot from Iowa on the shoulder.

"Aren't you satisfied with the sixty million fellow-citizens you've got already," said poppa, "that you want to grab nine half-starved Canucks with a hand camera?"

"They're in the majority here," said Mr. Hinkson fiercely, "and I dare any one of 'em to touch that flag. Go along over there and join 'em if you like—they're goin' to be done by themselves—to send to Queen Victoria!"

But that was further than anybody would go, even in defence of cosmopolitanism. The Republic rallied round Mr. Hinkson's leg, while the Dominion with much dignity supported Mr. Pabbley. As momma said, human nature is perfectly extraordinary.

For the rest of the journey to Versailles there was hardly any international conversation. Mr. Hinkson tied his handkerchief round his neck, and the Canadians tried to look as if they had no objection. We passed through the villages of Montretout and Buze. I know we did because momma took down the names, but I fancy they couldn't have differed much from the general landscape, for I don't remember a thing about them. The Misses Bingham came and sat next us at luncheon, which flattered both momma and me immensely, though the Senator didn't seem able to see where the distinction came in, and during this meal they pointed out the fact that Mr. Hinkson was drinking lemonade with his roast mutton, and asked us how we could travel with such a combination. I remember poppa said that it was a combination that Mr. Hinkson and Mr. Hinkson only had to deal with, but momma and I felt the obloquy of it a good deal, though when we came to think of it we were no more responsible for Mr. Hinkson than the Misses Bingham were. After that, walking rapidly behind the guide, we covered centuries of French history, illustrated by chairs and tables and fire-irons and chandeliers and four-post beds. Momma told me afterwards that she was rather sorry she had taken me with the guide through Madame du Barry's fascinating Petit Trianon, the things he didn't say sounded so improper, but when I assured her that it was only contemporary scandal that had any effect on our morals, she said she supposed that was so, and somehow one never did expect people who wore curled wigs and knee-breeches to behave quite prettily. The rooms were dotted with groups of people who had come in fiacres or by tramway, which made it difficult for the guide to impart his information only to those who had paid for it. He generally surmounted this by saying, "Ladies and genelmen, I want you to stick closer than brothers. When you hear me a-talkin' don' you go turnin' over your Baedekers and lookin' out of the window. If I didn't know a great big sight more about Versailles than Baedeker does I wouldn't be here makin' a clown of myself; an' I'll show you the view out of the window all in good time. You see that lady an' two genelmen over there? They're listenin' all right enough because they don't belong to this party an' they want to get a little information cheap price. All right—I let 'em have it!" At which the lady and two gentlemen usually melted away looking annoyed.

We were fascinated with the coaches of state and much impressed with the cost of them. As momma said, it took so very little imagination to conjure up a Royal Philip inside bowing to the populace.

"What a pity we couldn't have had them over!" said poppa indiscreetly.

"Where you mean?" demanded the guide, "over to America? I know—for that ole Chicago show! You are the five hundred American who has said that to me this summer! Number five hundred! Nossir, we don't lend those carriage. We don't even drive them ourself."

"No more kings and queens nowadays," remarked Mr. Hinkson, "this century's got no use for them."

I think the guide was a Monarchist. "Nossir," he said, "you don't see no more kings an' queens of France, but you do see a good many people travellin' that's nothin' like so good for trade."

At which Mr. Pabbley's eye sought that of the guide, and expressed its appreciation in a marked and joyous wink.

In the Palace, especially in the picture rooms, there were generally benches along the walls. When momma observed this she arranged that she should go on ahead and sit down and get the impression, while poppa and I caught up from time to time with the guide and the information. The guide was quite agreeable about it, when it was explained to him.

He was either a very thoughtless or a very insincere person, however. Stopping before the portrait of an officer in uniform, he drew us all together. The Canadians, headed by Mr. Pabbley, were well to the fore, and it was to them in particular that he appeared to address himself when he said, "Take a good look at this picture, ladies and genelmen. There is a man wat lives in your 'istory an', if I may say, in your 'art—as he does in ours. There's a man, ladies and genelmen, that helped you on to liberty. Take a good look at 'im, you'll be glad to remember it afterward."

And it was General Lafayette!



CHAPTER VII.

It was after dinner and we were sitting in the little courtyard of the hotel in the dark without our hats—that is, momma and I; the Senator was seldom altogether without his hat. I think he would have felt it to be a little indecent. The courtyard was paved, and there were flowers on the stand in the middle of it, natural palms and artificial begonias mixed with the most annoying cleverness, and little tables for coffee cups or glasses were scattered about. Outside beyond the hotel vestibule one could see and hear Paris rolling by in the gaslight. It was the only place in the hotel that did not smell of furniture, so we frequented it. So did Mr. Malt and Mrs. Malt, and Emmeline Malt, and Miss Callis. That was chiefly how we made the acquaintance of the Malt party. You can't very well sit out in the dark in a foreign capital with a family from your own State and not get to know them. Besides poppa never could overcome his feeling of indebtedness to Mr. Malt. They were taking Emmeline abroad for her health. She was the popular thirteen-year-old only child of American families, and she certainly was thin. I remember being pleased, sometimes, considering her in her typical capacity, that I once had a little brother, though he died before I was born.

The two gentlemen were smoking; we could see nothing but the ends of their cigars glowing in their immediate vicinity. Momma was saying that the situation was very romantic, and Mr. Malt had assured her that it was nothing to what we would experience in Italy. "That's where you get romance," said Mr. Malt, and his cigar end dropped like a falling star as he removed the ash. "Italy's been romantic ever since B.C. All through the time the rest of the world was inventing Magna Chartas and Doomsday Books, and Parliaments, and printing presses, and steam engines, Italy's gone right on turning out romance. Result is, a better quality of that article to be had in Italy to-day than anywhere else. Further result, twenty million pounds spent there annually by tourists from all parts of the civilised world. Romance, like anything else, can be made to pay."

"Are we likely to find the beds——" began Mrs. Malt plaintively.

"Oh dear yes, Mrs. Malt!" interrupted momma, who thought everything entomological extremely indelicate. "Perfectly. You have only to go to the hotels the guide-books recommend, and everything will be quite propre."

"Well," said Emmeline, "they may be propre in Italy, but they're not propre in Paris. We had to speak to the housemaid yesterday morning, didn't we, mother? Don't you remember the back of my neck?"

"We all suffered!" declared Mrs. Malt.

"And I showed one to her, mother, and all she would say was, 'Jamais ici, mademoiselle, ici, jamais!' And there it was you know."

"Emmeline," said her father, "isn't it about time for you to want to go to bed?"

"Not by about three hours. I'm going to get up a little music first. Do you play, Mis' Wick?"

Momma said she didn't, and Miss Malt disappeared in search of other performers. "Don't you go asking strangers to play, Emmeline," her mother called after her. "They'll think it forward of you."

"When Emmeline leaves us," said her father, "I always have a kind of abandoned feeling, like a top that's got to the end of its spin."

There was silence for a moment, and then the Senator said he thought he could understand that.

"Well," continued Mr. Malt, "you've had three whole days now. I presume you're beginning to know your way around."

"I think we may say we've made pretty good use of our time," responded the Senator. "This morning we had a look in at the Luxembourg picture gallery, and the Madeleine, and Napoleon's Tomb, and the site of the Bastile. This afternoon we took a run down to Notre Dame Cathedral. That's a very fine building, sir."

"You saw the Morgue, of course, when you were in that direction," remarked Mr. Malt.

"Why no," poppa confessed, "we haven't taken much of liking for live Frenchmen, up to the present, and I don't suppose dead ones would be any more attractive."

"Oh, there's nothing unpleasant," said Mrs. Malt, "nothing that you can notice."

"Nothing at all," said Mr. Malt. "They refrigerate them, you know. We send our beef to England by the same process——"

"There are people," the Senator interrupted, "who never can see anything amusing in a corpse."

"They don't let you in as a matter of course," Mr. Malt went on. "You have to pretend that you're looking for a relation."

"We had to mention Uncle Sammy," said Mrs. Malt.

"An uncle of Mis' Malt's who went to California in '49 and was never heard of afterward," Mr. Malt explained. "First use he's ever been to his family. Well, there they were, seven of 'em, lying there looking at you yesterday. All in good condition. I was told they have a place downstairs for the older ones."

"Alexander," said momma faintly, "I think I should like a little brandy in my coffee. Were there—were there any ladies among them, Mr. Malt?"

"Three," Mr. Malt responded briskly, "and one of them had her hair——"

"Then please don't tell us about them," momma exclaimed, and the silence that ensued was one of slight indignation on the part of the Malt family.

"You been seeing the town at all, evenings?" Mr. Malt inquired of the Senator.

"I can't say I have. We've been seeing so much of it in the daytime, we haven't felt able to enjoy anything at night except our beds," poppa returned with his accustomed candour.

"Just so. All the same there's a good deal going on in Paris after supper."

"So I've always been told," said the Senator, lighting another cigar.

"They've got what you might call characteristic shows here. You see a lot of life."

"Can you take your ladies?" asked the Senator.

"Well of course you can, but I don't believe they would find it interesting."

"Too much life," said the Senator. "I guess that settles it for me too. I daresay I'm lacking in originality and enterprise, but I generally ask myself about an entertainment, 'Are Mrs. and Miss Wick likely to enjoy it?' If so, well and good. If not, I don't as a rule take it in."

"He's a great comfort that way," remarked momma to Mrs. Malt.

"Oh, I don't frequent them myself," said Mr. Malt defensively.

"Talking of improprieties," remarked Miss Callis, "have you seen the New Salon?"

There was something very unexpected about Miss Callis; momma complained of it. Her remarks were never polished by reflection. She called herself a child of nature, but she really resided in Brooklyn.

The Senator said we had not.

"Then don't you go, Mr. Wick. There's a picture there——"

"We never look at such pictures, Miss Callis," momma interrupted.

"It's so French," said Miss Callis.

Momma drew her shawl round her preparatory to withdrawing, but it was too late.

"Too French for words," continued Miss Callis. "The poet Lamartine, with a note-book and pencil in his hand, seated in a triumphal chariot, drawn through the clouds by beautiful Muses."

"Oh," said momma, in a relieved voice, "there's nothing so dreadfully French about that."

"You should have seen it," said Miss Callis. "It was simply immoral. Lamartine was in a frock coat!"

"There could have been nothing objectionable in that," momma repeated. "I suppose the Muses——"

"The Muses were not in frock coats. They were dressed in their traditions," replied Miss Callis, "but they couldn't save the situation, poor dears."

Momma looked as if she wished she had the courage to ask Miss Callis to explain.

"In picture galleries," remarked poppa, "we've seen only the Luxembourg and the Louvre. The Louvre, I acknowledge, is worthy of a second visit. But I don't believe we'll have time to get round again."

"We've got to get a hustle on ourselves in a day or two," said Mr. Malt, as we separated for the night. "There's all Italy and Switzerland waiting for us, and they're bound to be done, because we've got circular tickets. But there's something about this town that I hate to leave."

"He doesn't know whether it's the Arc de Triomphe on the Bois de Boulogne or the Opera Comique, or what," said Mrs. Malt in affectionate criticism. "But we've been here a week over our time now, and he doesn't seem able to tear himself away."

"I'll tell you what it is," exclaimed Mr. Malt, producing a newspaper, "it's this little old New York Herald. There's no use comparing it with any American newspaper, and it wouldn't be fair to do so; but I wonder these French rags, in a foreign tongue, aren't ashamed to be published in the same capital with it. It doesn't take above a quarter of an hour to read in the mornings, but it's a quarter of an hour of solid comfort that you don't expect somehow abroad. If the New York Herald were only published in Rome I wouldn't mind going there."

"There's something," said poppa, thoughtfully, as we ascended to the third floor, "in what Malt says."

Next day we spent an hour buying trunks for the accommodation of the unattainable elsewhere. Then poppa reminded us that we had an important satisfaction yet to experience. "Business before pleasure," he said, "certainly. But we've been improving our minds pretty hard for the last few days, and I feel the need of a little relaxation. D.V. and W.P., I propose this afternoon to make the ascent of the Eiffel Tower. Are you on?"

"I will accompany you, Alexander, if it is safe," said momma, "and, if it is unsafe, I couldn't possibly let you go without me."

Momma is naturally a person of some timidity, but when the Senator proposes to incur any danger, she always suggests that he shall do it over her dead body.

I forget where we were at the time, but I know that we had only to walk through the perpetual motion of Paris, across a bridge, and down a few steps on the other side, to find the little steamer that took us by the river to the Tower. We might have gone by omnibus or by fiacre, but if we had we should never have known what a street the Seine is, sliding through Paris, brown in the open sun, dark under the shadowing arches of the bridges, full of hastening comers and goers from landing-place to landing-place, up and down. It gave us quite a new familiarity with the river, which had been before only a part of the landscape, and one of the things that made Paris imposing. We saw that it was a highway of traffic, and that the little, brisk, business-like steamers were full of people, who went about in them because it was the cheapest and most convenient way, and not at all for the pleasure of a trip by water. We noticed, too, a difference in these river-going people. Some of them carried baskets, and some of them read the Petit Journal, and they all comfortably submitted to the good-natured bullying of the mariner in charge. There were elderly women in black, with a button or two off their tight bodices, and children with patched shoes carrying an assortment of vegetables, and middle-aged men in slouch hats, smoking tobacco that would have been forbidden by public statute anywhere else. They all treated us with a respect and consideration which we had not observed in the Avenue de l'Opera, and I noticed the Senator visibly expanding in it. There was also a man and a little boy, and a dog, all lunching out of the same basket. Afterward, on being requested to do so, the dog performed tricks—French ones—to the enjoyment and satisfaction of all three. There was a great deal of politeness and good feeling, and if they were not Capi and Remi and Vitalis in "Sans Famille," it was merely because their circumstances were different.

As we stood looking at the Eiffel Tower, poppa said he thought if he were in my place he wouldn't describe it. "It's old news," he said, "and there's nothing the general public dislike so much as that. Every hotel-porter in Chicago knows that it's three hundred metres high, and that you can see through it all the way up. There it is, and I feel as if I'd passed my boyhood in its shadow. That way I must say it's a disappointment. I was expecting it to be more unexpected, if you understand."

Momma and I quite agreed. It had the familiarity of a demonstration of Euclid, and to the non-engineering mind was about as interesting. The Senator felt so well acquainted with it that he hesitated about buying a descriptive pamphlet. "They want to sell a stranger too much information in this country," he said. "The meanest American intelligence is equal to stepping into an elevator and stepping out again." But he bought one nevertheless, and was particularly pleased with it, not only because it was the cheapest thing in Paris at five cents, but because, as he said himself, it contained an amount of enthusiasm not usually available at any price.

The Senator thought, as we entered the elevator at the first story, that the accommodation compared very well indeed with anything in his experience. He had only one criticism—there was no smoking-room. We had a slight difficulty with momma at the second story—she did not wish to change her elevator. Inside she said she felt perfectly secure, but the tower itself she knew must waggle at that height when once you stepped out. In the end, however, we persuaded her not to go down before she had made the ascent, and she rose to the top with her eyes shut. When we finally got out, however, the sight of numbers of young ladies selling Eiffel Tower mementoes steadied her nerves. She agreed with poppa that business premises would never let on anything but the most stable basis.

"It's exactly as Bramley said," remarked the Senator. "You're up so high that the scenery, so far as Paris is concerned, becomes perfectly ridiculous. It might as well be a map."

"Don't look over, Alexander," said momma. "It will fill you with a wild desire to throw yourself down. It is said always to have that effect."

"'The past ends in this plain at your feet,'" quoted poppa critically from the guide-book, "'the future will there be fulfilled.' I suppose they did feel a bit uppish when they'd got as high as this—but you'd think France was about the only republic at present doing business, wouldn't you?"

I pointed out the Pantheon down below and St. Etienne du Mont, and poppa was immediately filled with a poignant regret that we had spent so much time seeing public buildings on foot. "Whereas," said he, "from our present point of view we could have done them all in ten minutes. As it is, we shall be in a position to say we've seen everything there is to be seen in Paris. Bramley won't be able to tell us it's a pity we've missed anything. However," he continued, "we must be conscientious about it. I've no desire to play it low down on Bramley. Let us walk round and pick out the places of interest he's most likely to expect to catch us on, and look at them separately. I should hate to think I wasn't telling the truth about a thing like that."

We walked round and specifically observed the "Ecole des Beaux Arts," the "Palais d'Industrie," "Liberty Enlightening the World," and other objects, poppa carefully noting against each of them "seen from Eiffel Tower." As we made our way to the river side we noticed four other people, two ladies and two gentlemen, looking at the military balloon hanging over Meudon. They all had their backs to us, and there was to me something dissimilarly familiar about three of those backs. While I was trying to analyse it one of the gentlemen turned, and caught sight of poppa. In another instant the highest elevation yet made by engineering skill was the scene of three impetuous American handclasps, and four impulsive American voices were saying, "Why how do you do!" The gentleman was Mr. Richard Dod of Chicago, known to our family without interruption since he wore long clothes. Mr. Dod had come into his patrimony and simultaneously disappeared in the direction of Europe six months before, since when we had only heard vaguely that he had lost most of it, but was inalterably cheerful; and there was nobody, apparently, he expected so little or desired so much to see in Paris as the Senator, momma and me. Poppa called him "Dick, my boy," momma called him "my dear Dicky," I called him plain "Dick," and when this had been going on for, possibly, five minutes, the older and larger of the two ladies of the party swung round with a majesty I at once associated with my earlier London experiences, and regarded us through her pince nez. There was no mistaking her disapproval. I had seen it before. We were Americans and she was Mrs. Portheris of Half Moon-street, Piccadilly. I saw that she recognised me and was trying to make up her mind whether, in view of the complication of Mr. Dod, to bow or not. But the woman who hesitates is lost, even though she be a British matron of massive prejudices and a figure to match. In Mrs. Portheris's instant of vacillation, I stepped forward with such enthusiasm that she was compelled to take down her pince nez and hold out a superior hand. I took it warmly, and turned to my parents with a joy which was not in the least affected. "Momma," I exclaimed, "try to think of the very last person who would naturally cross your mind—our relation, Mrs. Portheris. Poppa, allow me to introduce you to your aunt—Mrs. Portheris. Your far distant nephew from Chicago, Mr. Joshua Peter Wick."

It was a moment to be remembered—we all said so afterwards. Everything hung upon Mrs. Portheris's attitude. But it was immediately evident that Mrs. Portheris considered parents of any kind excusable, even commendable! Her manner said as much—it also implied, however, that she could not possibly be held responsible for transatlantic connections by a former marriage. Momma was nervous, but collected. She bowed a distant Wastgaggle bow, an heirloom in the family, which gave Mrs. Portheris to understand that if any cordiality was to characterise the occasion, it would have to emanate from her. Besides, Mrs. Portheris was poppa's relation, and would naturally have to be guarded against. Poppa, on the other hand, was cordiality itself—he always is.

"Why, is that so?" said poppa, looking earnestly at Mrs. Portheris and firmly retaining her hand. "Is this my very own Aunt Caroline?"

"At one time," responded Mrs. Portheris with a difficult smile, "and, I fear, by marriage only."

"Ah, to be sure, to be sure! Poor Uncle Jimmy gave place to another. But we won't say anything more about that. Especially as you've been equally unfortunate with your second," said poppa sympathetically. "Well, I'm sure I'm pleased to meet you—glad to shake you by the hand." He gave that member one more pressure as he spoke and relinquished it.

"It is extremely unlooked for," replied his Aunt Caroline, and looked at Mr. Dod, who quailed, as if he were in some way responsible for it. "I confess I am not in the habit of meeting my connections promiscuously abroad." When we came to analyse the impropriety of this it was difficult, but we felt as a family very disreputable at the time. Mr. Dod radiated sympathy for us. Poppa looked concerned.

"The fact is," said he, "we ought to have called on you at your London residence, Aunt Caroline. And if we had been able to make a more protracted stay than just about long enough, as you might say, to see what time it was, we would have done so. But you see how it was."

"Pray don't mention it," said Mrs. Portheris. "It is very unlikely that I should have been at home."

"Then that's all right," poppa replied with relief.

"London has so many monuments," murmured Dicky Dod, regarding Mrs. Portheris's impressive back. "It is quite impossible to visit them all."

"The view from here," our relation remarked in a leave-taking tone, "is very beautiful, is it not?"

"It's very extensive," replied poppa, "but I notice the inhabitants round about seem to think it embraces the biggest part of civilisation. I admit it's a good-sized view, but that's what I call enlarging upon it."

"Come, Mr. Dod," commanded Mrs. Portheris, "we must rejoin the rest of our party. They are on the other side."

"Certainly," said Dicky. "But you must give me your address, Mrs. Wick. Thanks. And there now! I've been away from Illinois a good long time, but I'm not going to forget to congratulate Chicago on getting you once more into the United States Senate, Mr. Wick. I did what I could in my humble way, you know."

"I know you did, Richard," returned poppa warmly, "and if there's any little Consulship in foreign parts that it would amuse you to fill——"

Mrs. Portheris, in the act of exchanging unemotional farewells with mamma, turned round. "Do I understand that you are now a Senator?" she inquired. "I had no idea of it. It is certainly a distinction—an American distinction, of course—but you can't help that. It does you credit. I trust you will use your influence to put an end to the Mormons."

"As far as that goes," poppa returned with deprecation, "I believe my business does take me to the Capitol pretty regularly now. But I'd be sorry to think any more of myself on that account. Your nephew, Aunt Caroline, is just the same plain American he was before."

"I hope you will vote to exterminate them," continued Mrs. Portheris with decision. "Dear me! A Senator—I suppose you must have a great deal of influence in your own country! Ah, here are the truants! We might all go down in the lift together."

The truants appeared looking conscious. One of them, when he saw me, looked astonished as well, and I cannot say that I myself was perfectly unmoved when I realised that it was Mr. Mafferton! There was no reason why Mr. Mafferton should not have been at the top of the Eiffel Tower in the society of Mrs. Portheris, Mr. Dod, and another, that afternoon, but for the moment it seemed to me uniquely amazing. We shook hands, however—it was the only thing to do—and Mr. Mafferton said this was indeed a surprise as if it were the most ordinary thing possible. Mrs. Portheris looked on at our greeting with an air of objecting to things she had not been taught to expect, and remarked that she had no idea Mr. Mafferton was one of my London acquaintances. "But then," she continued in a tone of just reproach, "I saw so little of you during your season in town that you might have made the Queen's acquaintance and all the Royal Family, and I should have been none the wiser."

It was too much to expect of one's momma that she should let an opportunity like that slip, and mine took hold of it with both hands.

"I believe my daughter did make Victoria's acquaintance, Mrs. Portheris," said she, "and we were all very pleased about it. Your Queen has a very good reputation in our country. We think her a wise sovereign and a perfect lady. I suppose you often go to her Drawing Rooms."

Mrs. Portheris wore the expression of one passing through the Stone Age to a somewhat more mobile period. "I really think," she said, "I should have been made aware of that. To have had a young relative presented without one's knowledge seems too extraordinary. No," she continued, turning to poppa, "the only thing I heard of this young lady—it came to me in a very roundabout manner—was that she had gone home to be married. Was not that your intention?" asked Mrs. Portheris, turning to me.

"It was," I said. There was nothing else to say.

"Then may I inquire if you fulfilled it?"

"I didn't, Mrs. Portheris," said I. I was very red, but not so red as Mr. Mafferton. "Circumstances interfered." I was prepared for an inquiry as to what the circumstances were, and privately made up my mind that Mrs. Portheris was too distant a relation to be gratified with such information in the publicity of the Eiffel Tower. But she merely looked at me with suspicion, and said it was much better that young people should discover their unsuitability to one another before marriage than after. "I can conceive nothing more shocking than divorce," said Mrs. Portheris, and her tone indicated that I had probably narrowly escaped it.

We were rather a large party as we made our way to the elevator, and I found myself behind the others in conversation with Dicky Dod. It was a happiness to come thus unexpectedly upon Dicky Dod—he gave forth all that is most exhilarating in our democratic civilisation, and he was in excellent spirits. As the young lady of Mrs. Portheris's party joined us I thought I found a barometric reading in Mr. Dod's countenance that explained the situation. "I remember you," she said shyly, and there was something in this innocent audacity and the blush which accompanied it that helped me to remember her too. "You came to see mamma in Half Moon-street once. I am Isabel."

"Dear me!" I replied, "so you are. I remember—you had to go upstairs, hadn't you. Please don't mind," I went on hastily as Isabel looked distressed, "you couldn't help it. I was very unexpected, and I might have been dangerous. How—how you've grown!" I really couldn't think of anything else to say.

Isabel blushed again, Dicky observing with absorbed adoration. It was lovely colour. "You know I haven't really," she said, "it's all one's long frocks and doing up one's hair, you know."

"Miss Portheris only came out two months ago," remarked Mr. Dod, with the effect of announcing that Venus had just arisen from the foam.

"Come, young people," Mrs. Portheris exclaimed from the lift; "we are waiting for you." Poppa and momma and Mr. Mafferton were already inside. Mrs. Portheris stood in the door. As Isabel entered, I saw that Mr. Dod was making the wildest efforts to communicate something to me with his left eye.

"Come, young people," repeated Mrs. Portheris.

"Do you think it's safe for so many?" asked Dicky doubtfully. "Suppose anything should give, you know!"

Mrs. Portheris looked undecided. Momma, from the interior, immediately proposed to get out.

"Safe as a church," remarked the Senator.

"What do you mean, Dod?" demanded Mr. Mafferton.

"Well, it's like this," said Dicky; "Miss Wick is rather nervous about overcrowding, and I think it's better to run no risks myself. You all go down, and we'll follow you next trip. See?"

"I suppose you will hardly allow that, Mrs. Wick," said our relation, with ominous portent.

"Est ce que vous voulez a descendre, monsieur?" inquired the official attached to the elevator, with some impatience.

"I don't see what there is to object to—I suppose it would be safer," momma replied anxiously, and the official again demanded if we were going down.

"Not this trip, thank you," said Dicky, and turned away. Mrs. Portheris, who had taken her seat, rose with dignity. "In that case," said she, "I also will remain at the top;" but her determination arrived too late. With a ferocious gesture the little official shut the door and gave the signal, and Mrs. Portheris sank earthwards, a vision of outraged propriety. I felt sorry for momma.

"And now," I inquired of Mr. Dod, "why was the elevator not safe?"

"I'll tell you," said Dicky. "Do you know Mrs. Portheris well?"

"Very slightly indeed," I replied.

"Not well enough to—sort of chum up with our party, I suppose."

"Not for worlds," said I.

Dicky looked so disconsolate that I was touched.

"Still," I said, "you'd better trot out the circumstances, Dicky. We haven't forgotten what you did in your humble way, you know, at election time. I can promise for the family that we'll do anything we can. You mustn't ask us to poison her, but we might lead her into the influenza."

"It's this way," said Mr. Dod. "How remarkably contracted the Place de la Concorde looks down there, doesn't it! It's like looking through the wrong end of an opera glass."

"I've observed that," I said. "It won't be fair to keep them waiting very long down there on the earth, you know, Dicky."

"Certainly not! Well, as I was saying, your poppa's Aunt Caroline is a perfect fiend of a chaperone. By Jove, Mamie, let's be silhouetted!"

"Poppa was silhouetted," I said, "and the artist turned him out the image of Senator Frye. Now he doesn't resemble Senator Frye in the least degree. The elevator is ascending, Richard."

Richard blushed and looked intently at the horizon beyond Montmartre.

"You see, between Miss Portheris and me, it's this way," he began recklessly, but with the vision before my eyes of momma on the steps below wanting her tea, I cut him short.

"So far as you are concerned, Dicky, I see the way it is," I interposed sympathetically. "The question is——"

"Exactly. So it is. About Isabel. But I can't find out. It seems to be so difficult with an English girl. Doesn't seem to think such a thing as a—a proposal exists. Now an American girl is just as ready——"

"Richard," I interrupted severely, "the circumstances do not require international comparisons. By the way, how do you happen to be travelling with—with Mr. Mafferton?"

"That's exactly where it comes in," Mr. Dod exclaimed luminously. "You'd think, the way Mafferton purrs round the old lady, he'd been a friend of the family from the beginning of time! Fact is, he met them two days before they left London. I had known them a good month, and the venerable one seemed to take to me considerably. There wasn't a cab she wouldn't let me call, nor a box at the theatre she wouldn't occupy, nor a supper she wouldn't try to enjoy. Used to ask me to tea. Inquired whether I was High or Low. That was awful, because I had to chance it, being Congregational, but I hit it right—she's Low, too, strong. Isabel always made the tea out of a canister the old lady kept locked. Singular habit that, locking tea up in a canister."

"You are wandering, Dicky," I said. "And Isabel used to ask you whether you would have muffins or brown bread and butter—I know. Go on."

"Girls have intuition," remarked Mr. Dod with a glance of admiration which I discounted with contempt. "Well, then old Mafferton turned up here a week ago. Since then I haven't been waltzing in as I did before. Old lady seems to think there's a chance of keeping the family pure English—seems to think she'd like it better—see? At least, I take it that way; he's cousin to a lord," Dick added dejectedly, "and you know financially I've been coming through a cold season."

"It's awkward," I admitted, "but old ladies of no family are like that over here. I know Mrs. Portheris is an old lady of no family, because she's a connection of ours, you see. What about Isabel? Can't you tell the least bit?"

"How can a fellow? She blushes just as much when he speaks to her as when I do."

"But are you quite sure," I asked delicately, "whether Mr. Mafferton is—interested?"

"There's the worst kind of danger of it," Dicky replied impressively. "I don't know whether I ought to tell you, but the fact is Mafferton's just got the sack—I beg your pardon—just been congeed himself. They say she was an American and it was a bad case; she behaved most unfeelingly."

"You shouldn't believe all you hear," I said, "but I don't see what that has to do with it."

"Why, he's just in the mood to console himself. What fellow would think twice of being thrown over, if Miss Portheris were the alternative!"

"It depends, Dicky," I observed. "You are jumping at conclusions."

"What I hoped," he went on regretfully as we took our places in the elevator, "was that we might travel together a bit and that you wouldn't mind just now and then taking old Mafferton off our hands, you know."

"Dicky," I said, as we swiftly descended, "here is our itinerary. Genoa, you see, then Pisa, Rome, Naples, Rome again, Florence, Venice, Verona, up through the lakes to Switzerland, and so on. We leave to-morrow. If we should meet again, I don't promise to undertake it personally, but I'll see what momma can do."



CHAPTER VIII.

Poppa said as we steamed out of Paris that night that the Presidency itself would not induce him to reside there, and I think he meant it. I don't know whether the omnibus numeros and the correspondances where you change, or the men sitting staring on the side walks drinking things for hours at a time, or getting no vegetables to speak of with his joint, annoyed him most, but he was very decided in his views. Momma and I were not quite so certain; we had a guilty sense of ingratitude when we thought of the creations in the van; but the cobblestones biassed momma a good deal, who hoped she should get some sleep in Italy. I had breakfasted that morning in the most amusing way with Dicky Dod at a cafe in the Champs Elysees—poppa and momma had an engagement with Mr. and Mrs. Malt and couldn't come—and in the leniency of the recollection I said something favourable about the Arc de Triomphe at sunset; but I gathered from the Senator's remarks that, while the sunset was fine enough, he didn't see the propriety in using it that way as a background for Napoleon Bonaparte, so to speak.

"Result is," said the Senator, "the intelligent foreigner's got pretty nearly to go out of the town to see a sunset without having to think about Aboukir and Alexandria. But that's Paris all over. There isn't a street, or a public building, or a statue, or a fountain, or a thing that doesn't shout at you, 'Look at me! Think about me! Your admiration or your life!' Those Frenchmen don't mind it because it only repeats what they're always saying themselves, but if you're a foreigner it gets on your nerves. That city is too uniformly fine to be of much use to me—it keeps me all the time wondering why I'm not in one eternal good humour to match. There's good old London now—always looks, I should think, just as you feel. Looks like history, too, and change, and contrast, and the different varieties of the human lot."

"I see what you mean, poppa," I said. "There's too much equality in Paris, isn't there—to be interesting," but the Senator was too deeply engaged in getting out momma's smelling salts to corroborate this interpretation.

It is a very long way to Genoa if you don't stop at Aix-les-Bains or anywhere—twenty-four hours—but Mont Cenis occurs in the night, which is suitable in a tunnel. There came a chill through the darkness that struck to one's very marrow, and we all rose with one accord and groped about for more rugs. When broad daylight came it was Savoy, and we realised what we had been through. The Senator was inclined to deplore missing the realisation of the Mont Cenis, and it was only when momma said it was a pity he hadn't taken a train that would have brought us through in the daytime and enabled him to examine it, that he ceased to express regret. My parents are often vehicles of philosophy for each other.

Besides, in the course of the morning the Senator acknowledged that he got more tunnels than he had any idea he had paid for. They came with a precipitancy that interfered immensely with any connected idea of the scenery, though momma, in my interest, did her best to form one. "Note, my love," she said, as we began to penetrate the frontier country, "that majestic blue summit on the horizon to the left"—obliteration, and another tunnel! "Don't miss that jagged line of snows just beyond the back of poppa's head, dear one. Quick! they are melting away!"—but the next tunnel was quicker. "Put down that the dazzling purity of these lovely peaks must be realised, for it cannot be"—darkness, and the blight of another tunnel. It was very hard on momma's imagination, and she finally accepted the Senator's warning that it would be thrown completely out of gear if she went on, and abandoned the attempt to form complete sentences between tunnels. It was much simpler to exclaim "Splendid!" or "Glorious!" which one could generally do without being interrupted.

We were not prepared to enjoy anything when we arrived at Genoa, but there was Christopher Columbus in bronze, just outside the station in a little place by himself, and we felt bound to give him our attention before we went any further. He was patting America on the head, both of them life size, and carrying on that historical argument with his sailors in bas-relief below; and he looked a very fine character. As poppa said, he was just the man you would pick out to discover America. The Senator also remarked that you could see from the position of the statue, right there in full view of the travelling public, that the Genoese thought a lot of Columbus; relied upon him, in fact, as their biggest attraction. Momma examined him from the carriage. She said it was most gratifying to see him there in his own home, so to speak; but her enthusiasm did not induce her to get out. Momma's patriotism has always to be considered in connection with the state of her nerves.

The state of all our nerves was healed in a quarter of an hour. The Senator showed his coupons somewhat truculently, but they were received as things of price with disarming bows and real gladness. We were led through rambling passages into lofty white chambers, with marble floors and iron bedsteads, full of simplicity and cleanliness, where we removed all recollections of Paris without being obliged to consider a stuffy carpet or satin-covered furniture. Italy, in the persons of the portier and the chambermaid, laid hold of us with intelligible smiles, and we were charmed. Inside, the place was full of long free lines and cool polished surfaces, and pleasant curves. Outside, a thick-fronded palm swayed in the evening wind against a climbing hill of many-tinted, many-windowed houses, in all the soft colours we knew of before. When the portier addressed momma as "Signora" her cup of bliss ran over, and she made up her mind that she felt able, after all, to go down to dinner.

Remembering their sentiments, we bowed as slightly as possible when we saw the Miss Binghams across the table, and the Senator threw that into his voice, as he inquired how they liked la belle Italie so far, and whether they had had any trouble with their trunks coming in, which might have given them to understand that his politeness was very perfunctory. If they perceived it, they allowed it to influence them the other way, however. They asked, almost as cordially as if we were middle-class English people, whether we had actually survived that trip to Versailles, and forbore to comment when we said we had enjoyed it, beyond saying that if there was one enviable thing it was the American capacity for pleasure. Yet one could see quite plainly that the vacuum caused by the absence of the American capacity for pleasure was filled in their case by something very superior to it.

"This city new to you?" asked the Senator as the meal progressed.

"In a sense, yes," replied Miss Nancy Bingham.

"We've never studied it before," said Miss Cora.

"I suppose it has a fascination all its own," remarked momma.

"Oh, rather!" exclaimed Miss Nancy Bingham, and I reflected that when she was in England she must have seen a great deal of school-boy society. I decided at once, noting its effect upon the lips of a middle-aged maiden lady, that momma must not be allowed to pick up the expression.

"It's simply full of associations of old families—the Dorias, the Pallavicinis, the Durazzos," remarked Miss Cora. "Do you gloat on the medieval?"

"We're perfectly prepared to," said the Senator. "I believe we've got both Murray and Baedeker for this place. Now do you commit your facts to memory before going to bed the night previous, or do you learn them up as you go along?"

"Oh," said Miss Nancy Bingham, "we are of the opinion that one should always visit these places with a mind prepared. Though I myself have no objection to carrying a guide-book, provided it is covered with brown paper."

"Then you acquire it all beforehand," commented the Senator. "That, I must say, is commendable of you. And it's certainly the only business-like way of proceeding. The amount of time a person loses fooling over Baedeker on the spot——"

"One of us does," acknowledged Miss Nancy. "We take it in turns. And I must say it is generally my sister." And she turned to Miss Cora, who blushed and said, "How can you, Nancy!"

"And you use her, for that particular public building or historic scene, as a sort of portable, self-acting reference library," remarked poppa. "That's an idea that commends itself to me, daughter, in connection with you."

I was about to reply in terms of deprecation, when a confusion of sound drifted in from the street, of arriving cabs and expostulating voices. The Miss Binghams looked at each other in consternation and said with one accord, "It was the Fulda!"

"Was it?" inquired poppa. "Do you refer to the German Lloyd steamship of that name?"

"We do," said Miss Nancy. "About an hour ago we were sure we saw her steaming into the harbour."

"She comes from New York, I suppose," momma remarked.

"She does indeed," said Miss Nancy, "and she's been lying at the docks unloading Americans ever since she arrived. And here they are. Cora, have you finished?"

Cora said she had, and without further parley the ladies rose and rustled away. Their invading fellow-countrymen gratefully took their places, and the Senator sent a glance of scorn after them strong enough to make them turn round. After dinner, we saw a collection of cabin trunks and valises standing in the entrance hall labelled BINGHAM, and knew that Miss Nancy and Miss Cora were again in flight before the Nemesis of the American Eagle. I will not repeat poppa's sentiments.

On the hotel doorstep next morning waited Alessandro Bebbini. He waited for us—an hour and a half, because momma had some re-packing to do and we were going on next day. Nobody had asked him to wait, but he had a carriage ready and the look of having been ordered three months previously. He presented his card to the Senator, who glanced at him and said, "Do I look as if I wanted a shave?"

Alessandro Bebbini smiled—an olive flash of pity and amusement. "I make not the shava, Signore," he said, "I am the courier—for your kind dispositione I am here."

"You should never judge foreigners by their appearance, Alexander," rebuked momma.

"Well, Mr. Bebbini," said the Senator, "I guess I've got to apologise to you. You see they told me inside there that I should probably find a—a tonsorial artist out here on the steps"—poppa never minds telling a story to save people's feelings. "But you haven't convinced me," he continued, "that I've got any use for a courier."

"You wish see Genoa—is it not?"

"Well, yes," replied the Senator, "it is."

"Then with me you come alonga. I will translate you the city—shoppia, pallass—w'at you like. Also I am not dear man neither. In the season yes. Then I am very dear. But now is nobody."

"What does your time cost to buy?" demanded poppa.

"Very cheap price. Two francs one hour. Ten francs one day. But if with you I travel, make arrangimento, you und'stan', look for traina—'otel, biglietto, bagaglia—then I am so little you laugh. Two 'undred franc the month!" and Alessandro indicated with every muscle of his body the amazement he expected us to feel.

The Senator turned to the ladies of his family. "Now that I think of it," he said, "travels in Italy are never written without a courier. People wouldn't believe they were authentic. And Bramley said if you really wanted to enjoy yourself it was folly not to engage one."

"I suppose there's more choice in the season," said momma, glancing disapprovingly at Alessandro's swarthy collar. "And I confess I should have expected them to be garbed more picturesquely."

"Look at his language," I remarked. "You can't have everything."

The Senator said that was so. "I believe you can come along, Mr. Bebbini," he said; "we're strangers here and we'll get you to help us to enjoy ourselves for a month on the terms you name. You can begin right away."

Alessandro bowed and waved us to the carriage. It was only the ordinary commercial bow of Italy, but I could see that it made a difference to momma. He saw us seated and was climbing on the box when poppa interfered. "There's no use trying to work it that way," he said; "we can't ask you to twist your head off every time you emit a piece of information. Besides, there's no sense in your riding on the box when there's an extra seat. You won't crowd us any, Mr. Bebbini, and I guess we can refrain from discussing family matters for one hour."

So we started, with Mr. Bebbini at short range.

"I think," said he, "you lika first off the 'ouse of Cristoforo Colombo."

"I don't see how you knew," said poppa, "but you are perfectly correct. Cristoforo was one of the most distinguished Americans on the roll of history, and we, also, are Americans. At once, at once to the habitation of Cristoforo."

Alessandro leaned forward impressively.

"Who informa you Cristoforo Colombo was Americano? Better you don't believe these other guide—ignoranta fella. Cristoforo was Genoa man, born here, you und'stan'? Italiano. Only live in America a lill' w'ile—to discover, you und'stan'?"

"Mr. Bebbini," said poppa, "if you go around contradicting Americans on the subject of Christopher Columbus your business will decrease. As a matter of fact, Christopher wasn't born, he was made, and America made him. He has every right to claim to be considered an American, and it was a little careless of him not to have founded a family there. We make excuses for him—it's quite true he had very little time at his disposal—but we feel it, the whole nation of us, to this day."

The Via Balbi was cheerfully crooked and crowded, it had the modern note of the street car, and the mediaeval one of old women, arms akimbo, in the nooks and recesses, selling big black cherries and bursting figs. Even the old women though, as momma complained, wore postilion basques and bell skirts, certainly in an advanced stage of usefulness, but of unmistakable genesis—just what had been popular in Chicago a year or two before.

"Really, my love," said momma, "I don't know what we shall do for description in Genoa, the people seem to wear no clothes worth mentioning whatever." We concluded that all the city's characteristically Italian garments were in the wash; they depended in novel cut and colour from every window that did not belong to a bank or a university; and sometimes, when the side street was narrow and the houses high, the effect was quite imposing. Poppa asked Alessandro Bebbini whether they were expecting royalty or anything, or whether it was like this every washing day, and we gathered that there was nothing unusual about it. But poppa said I had better mention it so that people might be prepared. Personally, I rather liked the display, it gave such unexpected colour and incident to those high-shouldering, narrow by-ways we looked down into from the upper level of the Via Balbi, where only here and there the sun strove through, and all the rest was a rich toned mystery; but there may be others like momma, who prefer the clothes line of the Occident and the privacy of the back yard.

The two sides of the Via Poverina almost touched foreheads. "Yes," said Alessandro Bebbini apologetically, "it is a ver' tight street."

Poppa was extremely pleased with the appearance of the house of Christopher Columbus, which Alessandro pointed out in the Via Assorotti. It was a comfortable looking edifice, with stone giants supporting the arch of the doorway, in every respect suitable as the residence of a retired navigator of distinction. Poppa said it was very gratifying to find that Cristoforo had been able, in his declining years, when he was our only European representative, to keep his end up with credit to America.

You so often found the former abodes of glorious names with a modern rental out of all proportion with their historic interest. This house, poppa calculated, would let to-day at a figure discreditable neither to Cristoforo himself, nor to the United States of America. Mr. Bebbini, unfortunately, could not tell him what that figure was.

On the steps of San Lorenzo Cathedral momma paused and cast a searching glance into all the corners.

"Where are the beggars?" she inquired, not without injury. "I have always been given to understand that church entrances in Italy were disgracefully thronged with beggars of the lowest type. I have never seen a picture of a sacred building without them!"

"So that was why you wanted so much small change, Augusta," said the Senator. "Mr. Bebbini says there's a law against them nowadays. Now that you mention it, I'm disappointed there too. Municipal progress in Italy is something you've not prepared for somehow. I daresay if we only knew it, they're thinking of lighting this town with electricity, and the Board of Aldermen are considering contracts for cable cars."

"Do not inquire, Alexander," begged momma, but the Senator had fallen behind with Mr. Bebbini in earnest conversation, and we gathered that its import was entirely modern.

It was our first Italian church and it was impressive, for a President of the French Republic had just fallen to the knife of an Italian assassin, and from the altar to the door San Lorenzo was in mourning and in penance. Masses for his soul's repose had that day been said and sung; near the door hung a request for the prayers of all good Christians to this end. Many of the grave-eyed people that came and went were doubtless about this business, but one, I know, was there on a private errand. He prayed at a chapel aside, kneeling on the floor beside the railings, his cap in his hands, grasping it just as the peasant in The Angelus grasps his. Inside the altar hung a picture of a pitying woman, and there were candles and foolish flowers of tinsel, but beside these, many tokens of hearts, gold and silver, thick below the altar, crowding the partition walls. The hearts were grateful ones—Alessandro explained in an undertone—brought and left by many who had been preserved from violent death by the saint there, and he who knelt was a workman just from hospital, who had fallen, with his son, from a building. The boy had been killed, the father only badly hurt. His heart token was the last—a little common thing—and tied with no rejoiceful ribbon but with a scrap of crape. I hoped Heaven would see the crape as well as the tribute. When we went away he was still kneeling in his patched blue cotton clothes, and as the saint had very beautiful kind eyes, and all the tinsel flowers were standing in the glowing light of stained glass, and the voice of the Church had begun to speak too, through the organ, I daresay he went away comforted.

Momma says there is only one thing she recollects clearly about San Lorenzo, and that is the Chapel of St. John the Baptist. This does not remain in her memory because of the Cinquecento screen or the altar-canopy's porphyry pillars which we know we must have seen because the guide-book says they are there, but because of the fact that Pope Innocent the Eighth had it closed to our sex for a long time, except on one day of the year, on account of Herodias. Momma considered this extremely invidious of Innocent the Eighth, and said it was a thing no man except a Pope would have thought of doing. What annoyed poppa was that she seemed to hold Alessandro Bebbini responsible, and covered him with reproaches, in the guise of argument, which he neither deserved nor understood. And when poppa suggested that she was probably as much to blame for Herodias's conduct as Mr. Bebbini was for the Pope's, she said that had nothing whatever to do with it, and she thanked Heaven she was born a Protestant anyway, distinctly implying that Herodias was a Roman Catholic. And if poppa didn't wish her back to give out altogether, would he please return to the carriage.

We wandered through a palace or two and thought how interesting it must have been to be rich in the days of "Sir Horatio Palavasene, who robbed the Pope to pay the Queen." Wealth had its individuality in those days, and expressed itself with truth and splendour in sculpture, and picture, and tapestry, and precious things, with the picturesqueness of contrast and homage. As the Senator said, a banquet hall did not then suggest a Fifth Avenue hairdresser's saloon. But now the Genoese merchant-princes would find that their state had lost its identity in machine made imitations, and that it would be more distinguished to be poor, since poverty is never counterfeited. But poppa declined to go as far as that.

Alessandro, as we drove round and up the winding roads that take one to the top of Genoa—the hotels and the palaces and the churches are mostly at the bottom—was full of joyous and rapid information. Especially did he continue to be communicative on the subject of Christopher Columbus, and if we are not now assured of the school that discoverer attended in his youth, and the altar rails before which he took the first communion of his early manhood, and the occupation of his wife's parents, and many other matters concerning him, it is the fault of history and not that of Alessandro Bebbini. After a cathedral and a palace and a long drive, this was bound to have its effect, and I very soon saw resentment in the demeanour of both my parents. So much so, that when we passed the family group in memory of Mazzini, and Alessandro explained dramatically that "the daughter he sitta down and cryo because his father is a-dead," poppa said, "Is that so?" without the faintest show of excitement, and momma declined even to look round.

It was not until the evening, however, when we were talking to some Milwaukee people, that we remembered, with the assistance of Baedeker and the Milwaukee people, a number of facts about Columbus that deprived Alessandro's information of its commercial value, while leaving his ingenuity, so to speak, at par. The Senator was so much annoyed, as he had made a special note of the state of preservation in which he had found the dwelling of our discoverer, that he had recourse to the most unscrupulous means of relieving us of Alessandro—who was to present himself next morning at eleven. He wrote an impulsive letter to "A. Bebbini, Esq.," which ran:

"SIR: I find that we are too credulous a family to travel in safety with a courier. When you arrive at the hotel to-morrow, therefore, you will discover that we have fled by an earlier train. We take it from no personal objection to your society, but from a rooted and unconquerable objection to brass facts. I enclose your month's salary and a warning that any attempt to follow me will be fruitless and expensive."

"Yours truly," "J.P. WICK."

The Senator assured me afterwards that this was absolutely necessary—that A. Bebbini, if we introduced him in any quantity, would ruin the sale of our work, and if he accompanied us it would be impossible to keep him out. He said we ought to apologize for having even mentioned him in a book of travels which we hope to see taken seriously. And we do.



CHAPTER IX.

Momma wishes me to state that the word Italy, in any language, will for ever be associated in her mind with the journey from Genoa to Pisa. We had our own lunch basket, so no baneful anticipation of cutlets fried in olive oil marred the perfect satisfaction with which we looked out of the windows. One window, almost the whole way, opened on a low embankment which seemed a garden wall. Olives and lemon trees grew beyond it and dropped over, and it was always dipping in the sunlight to show us the roses and the shady walks of the villas inside, white and remote; now and then we saw the pillared end of a verandah or a plaster Neptune ruling a restricted fountain area. Out of the other window stretched the blue Gulf of Genoa all becalmed and smiling, with freakish little points and headlines, and here and there the white blossom of a sail. The Senator counted eighty tunnels—he wants that fact mentioned too—some of them so short that it was like shutting one's eyes for an instant on the olives and the sea. Nevertheless it was an idyllic journey, and at four o'clock in the afternoon we saw the Leaning Tower from afar, describing the precise angle that it does in the illustrated geographies. Momma was charmed to recognise it, she blew it a kiss of adulation and acclaim, while we yet wound about among the environs, and hailed it "Pisa!" It was as if she bowed to a celebrity, with the homage due.

What the Senator called our attention to as we drove to the hotel was the conspicuous part in municipal politics played by that little old brown river Arno. In most places the riparian feature of the landscape is not insisted on—you have usually to go to the suburbs to find it, but in Pisa it is a sort of main street, with the town sitting comfortably and equally on each side of it looking on. Momma and I both liked the idea of a river in town scenery, and thought it might be copied with advantage in America, it afforded such a good excuse for bridges. Pisa's three arched stone ones made a reason for settling there in themselves in our opinion. The Senator, however, was against it on conservancy grounds, and asked us what we thought of the population of Pisa. And we had to admit that for the size of the houses there weren't very many people about. The Lungarno was almost empty except for desolate cabmen, and they were just as eager and hospitable to us and our trunks as they had been in Genoa.

In the Piazza del Duomo we expected the Cathedral, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistry, and the Campo Santo. We did not expect Mrs. Portheris; at least, neither of my parents did—I knew enough about Dicky Dod not to be surprised at any combination he might effect. There they all were in the middle of the square bit of meadow, apparently waiting for us, but really, I have no doubt, getting an impression of the architecture as a whole. I could tell from Mrs. Portheris's attitude that she had acknowledged herself to be gratified. Strange to relate, her gratification did not disappear when she saw that these mediaeval circumstances would inconsistently compel her to recognise very modern American connections. She approached us quite blandly, and I saw at once that Dicky Dod had been telling her that poppa's chances for the Presidency were considered certain, that the Spanish Infanta had stayed with us while she was in Chicago at the Exhibition, and that we fed her from gold plate. It was all in Mrs. Portheris's manner.

"Another unexpected meeting!" she exclaimed. "My dear Mrs. Wick, you are looking worn out! Try my sal volatile—I insist!" and in the general greeting momma was seen to back violently away from a long silver bottle in every direction. Poppa had to interfere. "If it's all the same to you, Aunt Caroline," he said, "Mrs. Wick is quite as usual, though I think the Middle Agedness of this country is a little trying for her at this time of year. She's just a little upset this morning by seeing the cook plucking a rooster down in the backyard before he'd killed it. The rooster was in great affliction, you see, and the way he crowed got on momma's nerves. She's been telling us about it ever since. But we hope it will pass off."

Mrs. Portheris expanded into that inevitable British story of the officer who reported of certain tribes that they had no manners and their customs were abominable, and I, at a mute invitation from Dicky, stepped aside to get the angle of the Tower from a better point of view.

Mr. Dod was depressed, so much so that he came to the point at once. "I hope you had a good time in Genoa," he said. "We should have been there now, only I knew we should never catch up to you if we didn't skip something. So I heard of a case of cholera there, and didn't mention that it was last year. Quite enough for Her Ex. I say, though—it's no use."

"Isn't it?" said I. "Are you sure?"

"Pretty confoundedly certain. The British lion's getting there, in great shape—the brute. All the widow's arranging. With the widow it's 'Mr. Dod, you will take care of me, won't you?' or 'Come now, Mr. Dod, and tell me all about buffalo shooting on your native prairies'—and Mr. Dod is a rattled jay. There's something about the mandate of a middle-aged British female."

"I should think there was!" I said.

"Then Maffy, you see, walks in. They don't seem to have much conversation—she regularly brightens up when I come along and say something cheerful—but he's gradually making up his mind that the best isn't any too good for him."

"Perhaps we don't begin so well in America," I interrupted thoughtfully. "But then, we don't develop into Mrs. P.'s either."

Dicky seemed unable to follow my line of thought. "I must say," he went on resentfully, "I like—well, just a smell of constancy about a man. A fellow that's thrown over ought to be in about the same shape as a widower. But not much Maffy. I tried to work up his feelings over the American girl the other night—he was as calm!"

"Dicky," said I, "there are subjects a man must keep sacred. You must not speak to Mr. Mafferton of his first—attachment again. They never do it in England, except for purposes of fiction."

"Well, I worked that racket all I knew. I even told him that American girls as often as not changed their minds."

"Richard! He will think I—what will he think of American girls! It was excessively wrong of you to say that—I might almost call it criminal!"

Dicky looked at me in pained surprise. "Look here, Mamie," he said, "a fellow in my fix, you know! Don't get excited. How am I going to confide in you unless you keep your hair on!"

"What, may I ask, did Mr. Mafferton say when you told him that?" I asked sternly.

"He said—now you'll be madder than ever. I won't tell you."

"Mr. Dod—Dicky, haven't we been friends from infancy!"

"Played with the same rattle. Cut our teeth together."

"Well then——"

"Well then," he said, "do you mind putting your parasol straight? I like to see the person I'm talking to, and besides the sun is on the other side. He said he didn't think it was a privilege that should be extended to all cases."

"He did, did he?" I rejoined calmly. "That's like the British—isn't it?"

"It would have made such a complication if I'd kicked him," confessed Mr. Dod.

The Senator, momma, and Mrs. Portheris stood in the cathedral door. Isabel and Mr. Mafferton occupied the middle distance. Mr. Mafferton stooped to add a poppy to a slender handful of wild flowers he held out to her. Isabel was looking back.

"It will be pleasant inside the Duomo," I said. "Let us go on. I feel warm. I agree with you that the situation is serious, Dicky. Look at those poppies! When an Englishman does that you may make up your mind to the worst. But I don't think anybody need have the slightest respect for the affections of Mr. Mafferton."

Inside the Duomo it was pleasant, and cool, and there was a dim religious light that gave one an opportunity for reflection. I was so much engaged in reflection that I failed to notice the shape of the Duomo, but I have since learned that it was a basilica, in the form of a Latin cross, and was simply full of things which should have claimed my attention. Momma took copious notes from which I see that the Madonna and Child holy water basin was perfectly sweet, and the episcopal throne by Uervellesi in 1536 was the finest piece of tarsia work in the world, and the large bronze hanging lamp by Vincenzo Possento was the object which assisted Galileo to invent the oscillations of the pendulum. The Senator was much taken with the inlaid wooden stalls in the choir, the subjects were so lively. He and his Aunt Caroline nearly came to words over a monkey regarding its reflection in a looking glass, done with a realism which Mrs. Portheris considered little short of profane, but which poppa found quite an excusable filip to devotions which must have been such an all day business in the sixteenth century. Outside, however, poppa found it difficult to approve the facade. To throw four galleries over the street door, he said, with no visible means of getting into them or possible object for sitting there, was about the most ridiculous waste of building space he had yet observed.

"But then," said Dicky Dod, who kept his disconsolate place by my side, "they didn't seem to know how to waste enough in those pre-elevator days. Look at the pictures and the bronzes and the marble columns inside there—ten times as much as they had any use for. They just heaped it up."

"That's so, Dicky, my boy," replied poppa; "we could cover more ground with the money in our century. But you've got to remember that they hadn't any other way worth mentioning of spending the taxes. Religion, so to speak, was the boss contractor's only line."

Dicky remarked that it had to be admitted he worked it on the square, and momma said that no doubt people built as well as they knew how at that time, but nothing should induce her to add her weight to the top of the Leaning Tower.

"It is very remarkable and impressive," said momma, "the idea of its hanging over that way all these centuries, just on the drop and never dropping, but who knows that it may not come down this very day!"

"My dear niece, if I may call you so," remarked Mrs. Portheris urbanely, "it was thus that the builders designed this great monument to stand; in its inclination lies the triumph of their art."

"I can't say I agree with you there, Aunt Caroline," said poppa; "that tower was never meant to stand crooked. It's a very serious defect, and if it happened nowadays, it would justify any Municipal Board in repudiating the contract. Even those fellows, you see, were too sick to go on with it, in every case. Begun by Bonanus 1174. Bonanus saw what was going to happen and gave it up at the third storey. Then Benenato had his show, got it up to four, and quit, 1203. The next architect was—let me see—William of Innsbruck. He put on a couple more, and by that time it began to look dangerous. But nothing happened from 1260 to 1350, and it struck Tomaso Pisano that nothing would happen. He risked it anyhow, ran up another storey, put the roof on, and came in for the credit of the whole miracle. I expect Tomaso is at the bottom of that idea of yours, Aunt Caroline. He would naturally give the reporters that view."

Mrs. Portheris listened with a tolerance as badly put on as any garment she was wearing. "I do not usually make assertions," she said when poppa had finished, "without being convinced of the facts," and I became aware for the first time that her upper lip wore a slight moustache.

"Well, you'll excuse me, Aunt Caroline——"

"All my life I have heard of the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a feat of architecture," replied his Aunt Caroline firmly. "I do not propose to have that view disturbed now."

"Perhaps it was so, my dear love," put in momma deprecatingly, and Mr. Dod, with a frenzied wink at poppa, called his attention to the ridiculous Pisan habit of putting immovable fringed carriage-tops on cabs.

"It undoubtedly was," said Mrs. Portheris, with an embattled front.

"But—Great Scott, aunt!" exclaimed poppa, recklessly, "think what this place was like—all marsh, with the sea right alongside; not four miles off as it is now. Why, you couldn't base so much as a calculation on it!"

"I must say," said Mrs. Portheris in severe surprise, "I knew that America had made great advances in the world of invention, but I did not expect to find what looks much like jealousy of the achievements of an older civilisation."

The Senator looked at his aunt, then he put his hat further back on his head and cleared his throat. I prepared for the worst, and the worst would undoubtedly have come if Dicky Dod had not suddenly remembered having seen a man with a foreign telegram looking for somebody in the Cathedral.

"It's a feat!" reiterated Mrs. Portheris as the Senator left us in pursuit of the man with the telegram.

"It's fourteen feet," cried the Senator from a safe distance, "out of the perpendicular!" and left us to take the consequences.



CHAPTER X.

When momma reported to me Mrs. Portheris's proposition that we should make the rest of our Continental trip as one undivided party, I found it difficult to understand.

"These sudden changes of temperature," I remarked, "are trying to the constitution. Why this desire for the society of three unabashed Americanisms like ourselves?"

"That's just what I wondered," said momma. "For you can see that she is full of insular prejudice against our great country. She makes no attempt to disguise it."

"She never did," I assented.

"She said it seemed so extraordinary—quite providential—meeting relatives abroad in this way," momma continued, "and she thought we ought to follow it up."

"Are we going to?" I inquired.

"My goodness gracious no, love! There are some things my nerves cannot stand the strain of, and one of them is your poppa's Aunt Caroline. The Senator smoothed it over. He said he was sure we were very much obliged, but our time was limited, and he thought we could get around faster alone."

"Well," I said, "I do not understand it, unless Dicky has persuaded her that poppa is to be our next ambassador to St. James's."

"She was too silly about Dicky," said momma. "She said she really was afraid, before you appeared, that young Mr. Dod was conceiving an attachment for her Isabel, whose affections lay quite in another direction; but now her mind was entirely at rest. I don't remember her words, she uses so many, but she was trying to hint that poor Dicky was an admirer of yours, dearest."

"I fancy she succeeded—as far as that goes," I remarked.

"Well, yes, she made me understand her. So I felt obliged to tell her that, though Dicky was a lovely fellow and we were all very fond of him, anything of that kind was out of the question."

"And what," I asked, "was her reply to that?"

"She seemed to think I was prevaricating. She said she knew what a mother's hopes and fears were. They seem to take a very low view," added momma austerely, "of friendship between a young man and a young woman in England!"

"I should think so!" said I absent-mindedly. "Dicky hasn't made love to me for three years."

"What!"

"Nothing, momma, dear," I replied kindly. "Only I wouldn't contradict Mrs. Portheris again upon that point, if I were you. She will think it so improper if Dicky isn't my admirer, don't you see?"

But Mrs. Portheris's desire to join our party stood revealed. Her constant chaperonage of Dicky was getting a little trying, and she wanted me to relieve her. I felt so deeply for them both, reflecting upon the situation, that I experienced quite a glow of virtue at the thought of my promise to Dicky to stay in Rome till his party arrived. They were going to Siena—why, Mr. Dod could not undertake to explain—he had never heard of anything cheerful in connection with Siena.

"My idea is," said the Senator, "that in Rome"—we were on our way there—"we'll find our work cut out for us. Think of the objects of interest involved from Romulus and Remus down to the present Pope!"

"I should like my salts before I begin," said momma, pathetically.

"Over two thousand years," continued the Senator impressively, "and every year you may be sure has left its architectural imprint."

"Does Baedeker say that, Senator?" I asked, with a certain severity.

"No, the expression is entirely my own; you may take it down and use it freely. Two thousand years of remains is what we've got before us in Rome, and pretty well scattered too—nothing like the convenience of Pisa. I expect we shall have to allow at least four days for it. That Piazza del Duomo," continued poppa, thoughtfully, "seems to have been laid out with a view to the American tourist of the future. But I don't suppose that kind of forethought is common."

"How exquisite it was, that cluster of white marble relics of the past on the bosom of dusky Pisa. It reminded me," said momma, poetically, "of an old maid's pearls."

"I should suggest," said the Senator to me, "that you make a note of that. A little sentiment won't do us any harm—just a little. And they are like an old maid's pearls in connection with that middle-aged, one-horse little city. Or I should say a widow's—Pisa was once a bride of the sea. A grass widow's," improved the Senator. "It's all meadow-land round there—did you notice?"

"I did not," I said coldly; "but, of course, if I'm to call Pisa a grass widow, it will have to be. Although I warn you, poppa, that in case of any critic being able to arise and indicate that it is laid out in oyster beds, I shall make it plain that the responsibility is yours."

We were speeding through Tuscany, and the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards clasped hands and danced along with us. The sky would have told us we were in Italy if we had come on a magic carpet without a compass or a time-table. Poppa says we are not, under any circumstances, to mention it more than once, but that we might as well explode the fallacy that there is anything like it in America. There isn't. Our cerulean is very beautifully blue, but in Italy one discovers by contrast that it is an intellectual blue, filled with light, high, provocative. The sky that bends over Tuscany is the very soul of blue, deep, soft, intense, impenetrable—the sky that one sees in those little casual bits of landscape behind the shoulders of pre-Raphaelite Saints and Madonnas; and here and there a lake, giving it back with delight, and now and then the long slope of a hill, with an old yellow-walled town creeping up, castle crowned, and raggedly trimmed with olives; and so many ruins that the Senator, summoned by momma to look at the last in view, regarded it with disparagement, which he did not attempt to conceal. He wondered, he said, that the Italian Government wasn't ashamed of having such a lot of them. They might be picturesque, but they weren't creditable; they gave you the impression that the country was on the down grade. "You needn't call my attention to any more of them, Augusta," he added; "but if you see any building that looks like progress, now, anything that gives you the idea of modern improvements inside, I shouldn't like to miss it." And he returned to the thirty-second page of the Sunday New York World.

"I sometimes wish," said momma, "that I were not the only person in this family with the artistic temperament."

Sometimes we stopped at the little yellow towns and saw quite closely their queer old defences and belfrys and clock towers, and guessed at the pomegranates and oleanders behind their high courtyard walls. They had musical names, even in the mouths of the railway guards, who sang every one of them with a high note and a full octave on the syllable of stress—"Rosignano!" "Carmiglia!" The Senator was fascinated with the spectacle of a railway guard who could express himself intelligibly, to say nothing of the charm; he spoke of introducing the system in the United States, but we tried it on "New York," "Washington," "Kansas City," and it didn't seem the same.

It was at Orbatello, I think, that we made the travelling acquaintance of the enterprising little gentleman to whom momma still mysteriously alludes as "il capitano." He bowed ceremoniously as he entered the carriage and stowed the inevitable enormous valise in the rack, and his eye brightened intelligently as he saw we were a family of American tourists. He wore a rather seamy black uniform and a soft felt hat with cocks' feathers drooping over it, and a sword and a ridiculously amiable expression for a man. I don't think he was five feet high, but his moustache and his feathers and his sword were out of all proportion. There was a gentle trustful exuberance about him which suggested that, although it was possibly twenty-five years since he was born, his age was much less than that. He twirled his moustache in voluble silence for ten minutes while we all furtively scrutinised him with the curiosity inspired by a foreigner of any size, and then with a smile of conscious sweetness he asked the Senator if he might take the liberty to give the trouble to see the English newspaper for a few seconds only. "I should be too thankful," he added.

"Why certainly," said poppa, much gratified. "I see you spikkum English," he added encouragingly.

"I speak—um, si. I have learned some—a few of them. But O very baddili I speak them!"

"I guess that's just your modesty," said poppa kindly. "But that's not an English paper, you know—it's published in New York."

"Ah!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "That will be much much the more pleasurable for me." His eyes shone with feeling. "In Italy," he added with an impulsive gesture, "we love the American peoples beyond the Londonian. We always remember that it was an Italian, Cristoforo Col——"

"I know," said poppa. "Very nice of you. But what's your reason now, for preferring Americans as a nation?"

We saw our first Italian shrug. It is more prolonged, more sentimental than French ones. In this case it expressed the direct responsibility of Fate.

"I think," he said, "that they are more simpatica—sympatheticated to us." He seemed to be unaware of me, but his eye rested upon momma at this point, and took her into his confidence.

"We also," said she reciprocally, "are always charmed to see Italians in our country."

I wondered privately whether she was thinking of hand organ men or members of the Mafia society, but it was no opportunity to inquire. My impression is that about this time, in spite of Tuscany outside, I went to sleep, because my next recollection is of the little Captain pouring Chianti out of a large black bottle into momma's jointed silver travelling cup. I remember thinking when I saw that, that they must have made progress. Scraps of conversation floated through my waking moments when the train stopped—I heard momma ask him if his parents were both living and where his home was. I also understood her to inquire whether the Italians were domestic in their tastes or whether they were like the French, who, she believed, had no home life at all. I saw the Senator put a card in his pocket-book and restore it to his breast, and heard him inquire whether his new Italian acquaintance wore his uniform every day as a matter of choice or because he had to. An hour went by, and when I finally awoke it was to see momma sitting by with folded hands and an expression of much gratification while poppa gave a graphic account of the rise and progress of the American baking-powder interest. "I don't expect," said he, "you've ever heard of Wick's Electric Corn-flour?"

"It is my misfortune."

"We sent thousands of cans to Southern Europe last year, sir. Or Wick's Sublimated Soda?"

"I am stupidissimo."

"No, not at all. But I daresay your momma knows it, if she ever has waffles on her breakfast table. Well, it's been a kind of kitchen revolution. We began by making a hundred pounds a week—and couldn't always get rid of it. Now—why the day before I sailed we sent six thousand cans to the Queen of Madagascar. I hope she'll read the instructions!"

"It takes the breath. What splendid revenue must be from that!"

The Senator merely smiled, and played with his watch chain. "I should hate to brag," he said, but anyone could see from the absence of a diamond ring on his little finger that he was a person of weight in his community.

"Oh!" said momma, "my daughter is awake at last! Mamie, let me introduce Count Filgiatti. Count, my daughter. What a pity you went to sleep, love. The Count has been giving us such a delightful afternoon."

The carriage swayed a good deal as the Count stood up to bow, but that had no effect either upon the dignity or the gratification he expressed. His pleasure was quite ingratiating, or would have been if he had been a little taller. As it was, it was amusing, and I recognised an opportunity for the study of Italian character. I don't mean that I made up my mind to avail myself of it, but I saw that the opportunity was there.

"So you've been reading the New York World," I said kindly.

"I have read, yes, two avertissimi. Not more, I fear. But they are also amusing, the avertissimi." His voice was certainly agreeably deferential, with a note of gratitude.

"Now, if you wouldn't mind taking the corner opposite my daughter, Count Filgiatti," put in poppa, "you and she could talk more comfortably, and Mrs. Wick could put her feet up and get a little nap."

"I am too happy if I shall not be a trouble to Mees," the Count responded, beaming. And I said, "Dear me, no; how could he?" at which he very obligingly changed his seat.

I hardly know how we drifted into abstract topics. The Count's English was so bad that my sense of humour should have confined him to the weather and the scenery; but it is nevertheless true that about an hour later, while the landscape turned itself into a soft, warm chromo in the fading sunset, and both my parents soundly slept, we were discussing the barrier of religion to marriage between Protestants and Roman Catholics. I did not hesitate to express the most liberal sentiments.

"Since there are to be no marriages in heaven," I said, "what difference can it make, in married life, how people get there?"

"The signor and signora think also so?"

"Oh, I daresay poppa and momma have got their own opinions," I said, "but that is mine."

"You do not think as they!" he exclaimed.

"I don't know what they think," I explained. "I haven't asked them. But I've got my own thinker, you know." I searched for simple expressions, and I seemed to make him understand.

"So! Then this prejudice is dead for you, Senorita—mees?"

"I like 'Senorita' best," I said. "I believe it is." At that moment I divined that he was a Roman Catholic. How, I don't know. So I added, "But I've never had the slightest reason to give it a thought."

"That must be," he said softly, "because you never met, Senorita—may I say this?—one single gentleman w'at is Catholic."

"That's rather clever of you," I said. "Perhaps that is why."

The Italian character struck me as having interesting phases, but I did not allow this impression to appear. I looked indifferently out of the window. Italian sunsets are very becoming.

"The signora, your mother, has told me that you have no brothers or sisters, Mees Wick. She made me the confidence—it was most kind."

"There never has been any secret about it, Count."

"Then you have not even one?" Count Filgiatti's eyes were full of melancholy sympathy.

"I think," I said with coldness, "that in a matter of that kind, momma's word should hardly need corroboration."

"Ah, it is sad! With me what difference! Can you believe of eleven? And the father with the saints! And I of course am the eldest of all."

"Dear me," I said, "what a responsibility!"

"Ah, you recognise! you understand the—the necessities, yes?"

At that moment the train stopped at Civita Vecchia, and the Senator awoke and put his hat on. "The Eternal City," he remarked when he descried that the name of the station was not Rome, "appears to have an eternal railway to match. There seems to be a feeding counter here though—we might have another try at those slices of veal boiled in tomatoes and smothered with macaroni that they give the pilgrim stranger in these parts. You may lead the world in romance, Count, but you don't put any of it in your railway refreshments."

As we passed out into the smooth-toned talkative darkness, Count Filgiatti said in my ear, "Mistra and Madame Wick have kindly consented to receive my visit at the hotel to-morrow. Is it agreeable to you also that I come?"

And I said, "Why, certainly!"



CHAPTER XI.

We descended next morning to realise how original we were in being in the plains of Italy in July. The Fulda people and the Miss Binghams and Mrs. Portheris had prevented our noticing it before, but in the Hotel Mascigni, Via del Tritone, we seemed to have arrived at a point of arid solitude, which gave poppa a new and convincing sense of all he was going through in pursuit of Continental culture. We sat in one corner of the "Sala di mangiari" at a small square table, and in all the length and breadth and sumptuousness of that magnificent apartment—Italian hotel dining-rooms are always florid and palatial—there was only one other little square table with a cloth on it and an appearance of expectancy. The rest were heaped with chairs, bottom side up, with their legs in the air; the chandeliers were tied up in brown holland, and through a depressed and exhausted atmosphere, suggestive of magnificent occasions temporarily in eclipse, moved, with a casual languid air, a very tall waiter and a very short one. At mysterious exits to the rear occasionally appeared the form of the chef exchanging plates. It was borne in upon one that in the season the chef would be remanded to the most inviolable seclusion.

"Do you suppose Pompeii will be any worse than this?" inquired the Senator.

"Talk about Americans pervading the Continent," he continued, casting his eye over the surrounding desolation. "Where are they? I should be glad to see them. Great Scott! if it comes to that, I should be glad to see a blooming Englishman!"

It wasn't an answer to prayer, for there had been no opportunity for devotion, but at that moment the door opened and admitted Mr., Mrs., and Miss Emmeline Malt, and Miss Callis. The reunion was as rapt as the Senator and Emmeline could make it, and cordial in every other respect. Mr. Malt explained that they had come straight through from Paris, as time was beginning to press.