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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Chapter VI



La Belle France Being the First Stop

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

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

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

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

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

God save the King! The Queen is doing well!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, yes—but you will!

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



Chapter VII



Thence On and On to Verbotenland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were hired hands.



Chapter VIII



A Tale of a String-bean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hades gets much of its reputation the same way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Chapter IX



The Deadly Poulet Routine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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