 Section I of Europe Revised—This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Dedication—To my small daughter, who bad me shed a tear at the tomb of Napoleon, which I was very glad to do, because when I got there my feet certainly were hurting me. Note. The picture on page 81, purporting to show the undersigned, leaping head-first into a German feather-bed, does the undersigned a cruel injustice. He has a prettier figure than that—oh, oh, much prettier. The reader is earnestly entreated not to look at the picture on page 81. It is the only blot on the macretion of this book. Respectfully, the author. Chapter I. We are going away from here. Part I. Forward. It has always seemed to me that the principal drawback about the average guidebook is that it is overfrated with facts. Guidebooks here to four have made a specialty of facts, have abounded in them, facts to be found on every page and in every paragraph. Reading such a work, you can imagine that the besotted author said to himself, I will just naturally fill this thing chock-full of facts, and then went and did so to the extent of a prolonged debauch. Now, personally, I would be the last one in the world to decry facts as such. In the abstract I have the highest opinion of them. But facts, as someone has said, are stubborn things, and stubborn things like stubborn people are frequently tiresome. So it occurred to me that possibly there might be room for a guidebook on foreign travel which would not have a single indubitable fact concealed anywhere about its person. I have even dared to hope there might be an actual demand on the part of the general public for such a guidebook. I shall endeavor to meet that desire if it exists. While we are on the subject, I wish to say there is probably not a statement made by me here or hereafter which cannot readily be controverted. Communications from parties desiring to controvert this or that assertion will be considered in the order received. The line forms on the left, and parties will kindly avoid crowding. Triflors and professional controvertors save stamps. With these few introductory remarks, we now proceed to the first subject, which is the sea, its habits and peculiarities, and the quaint features found upon its bosom. From the very start of this expedition to Europe, I labored under a misapprehension. Everybody told me that as soon as I had got my sea legs, I would begin to love the sea with a vast and passionate love. As a matter of fact, I experienced no trouble whatever in getting my sea legs. They were my regular legs, the same ones I use on land. It was my sea stomach that caused all the bother. First I was afraid I should not get it, and that worried me no little. Then I got it and was regretful. However, that detail will come up later in a more suitable place. I am concerned just now with a departure. Somewhere forward a bugle blares. Somewhere, rearward a bell jangles. On the deck overhead is a scurry of feet. In the mysterious bowels of the ship, a mighty mechanism opens its metal mouth and speaks out briskly. Later it will talk on steadily with a measured and irregular voice, but now it is heard frequently, yet intermittently, like the click of a blind man's cane. Beneath your feet the ship, which has seemed until this moment as solid as a rock, stirs the least little bit as though it had waked up. And a shiver runs all through it, and you are reminded of that passage from Pygmalion and Galatia where Pygmalion sails with such feeling. She starts, she moves, she seems to fill the thrill of life along her keel. You are under way. You are finally committed to the great adventure. The necessary good-byes have already been said. Those who, in the goodness of their hearts, came to see you off have departed for sure, leaving sundries suitable and unsuitable gifts behind. You have examined your stateroom with its hot and cold decorations, its running stewardess, its all-night throb service, and its windows overlooking the Hudson, a stateroom that seemed so large and commodious until you put one small submissive steamer trunk and two scarred valises in it. You are tired, and yawn white bed, with the high mud-guards on it, looks mighty good to you, but you feel that you must go on deck to wave a fond farewell to the land you love and the friends you are leaving behind. You fight your way to the open through companion ways full of frenzied persons who are apparently trying to travel in every direction at once. On the deck the illusion persists that it is the dock that is moving in the ship that is standing still. All about you, your fellow passengers crowd the rails, waving and shouting messages to the people on the dock, the people on the dock wave back and shout answers. About every other person is begging somebody to tell Auntie to be sure to write. You gather that Auntie will expect it to write weekly, if not oftener. As the slice of dark water between boat and dock widens, those who are left behind begin running toward the pier head in such numbers that each wide, bright lit door opening in turn suggests a flittering section of a moving picture film. The only perfectly calm person in sight is a gorgeous, gold-laced creature standing on the outermost gunwale of the dock, wearing the kind of uniform that a rear admiral of the Swiss Navy would wear if the Swiss had any Navy and holding a speaking trumpet in his hand. This person is not excited, for he sends thirty odd thousand-ton ships off to Europe at frequent intervals, and so he is impressively and importantly blasé about it, but everybody else is excited. You find yourself rather that way. You wave at persons you know and then at persons you do not know. You continue to wave until the man alongside you, who has spent years of his life learning to imitate a siren whistle with his face, suddenly twines his hands about his mouth and lets go a terrific blast right in your ear. Something seems to warn you that you are not going to care for this man. The pier, ceasing to be a long outstretched finger, seems to fold back into itself, knuckle fashion, and presently is but a part of the oddly foreshortened shoreline, distinguishable only by the black dot of watchers clustered under a battery of lights like a swarm of hiving bees. Out in midstream the tugs, which have been convoying the ship, let go of her and scuttle off, one in this direction and one in that, like a brace of teal ducks getting out of a walrus's way. Almost imperceptibly her nose straightens down the river and soon, on the starboard quarter, how quickly one picks up these nautical terms, looming through the harbour-mists, you behold the Statue of Miss Liberty, in her popular specialty of enlightening the world. So you go below and turn in. Anyway, that is what I did, for certain of the larger ships of the Cunard Line sail at midnight or even later, and this was such a ship. For some hours I lay awake, while above me and below me and all about me the bolt settled down to her ordained ship's job, and began drawing the long, soothing snores that for five days and nights she was to continue drawing without cessation. There were so many things to think over. I tried to remember all the authoritative and conflicting advice that had been offered to me by traveled friends and well-wishers. Let's see now. On shipboard I was to wear only light clothes because nobody ever caught cold at sea. I was to wear the heaviest clothes I had because the landlubber always caught cold at sea. I was to tip only those who served me. I was to tip all hands in moderation whether they served me or not. If I felt squeamish I was to do the following things. Eat something, quit eating, drink something, quit drinking, stay on deck, go below and lie perfectly flat, seek company, avoid same, give it up, keep it down. There was but one point on which all of them were agreed. On no account should I miss Naples. I must see Naples if I did not see another solitary thing in Europe. Well I did both, I saw Naples, and now I should not miss Naples if I had never saw it again, and I do not think I shall. As regards the other suggestions these friends of mine gave me, I learned in time that all of them were right and all of them were wrong. For example, there was the matter of a correct traveling costume. Between seasons on the Atlantic one wears what best pleases one. One sees at the same time women in furs and summer boys in white ducks. Tweed and shrouded Englishmen and linen-clad American girls promenade together, giving to the decks that pleasing air of variety and individuality of apparel, only to be found in Southern California during the winter, and in those orthodox pictures in the book of Robinson Crusoe, where Robinson is depicted as completely wrapped up in goatskins, while Man Friday is pure wedding round as nude as a raw oyster, and both of them are perfectly comfortable. I used to wonder how Robinson and Friday did it. Since taking an ocean trip I understand perfectly. I could do it myself now. There certainly were a lot of things to think over. I do not recall now exactly the moment when I ceased thinking them over. A blank that was measurable by hours ensued. I woke from a dream about a scrambled egg, in which I was the egg, to find that morning had arrived and the ship was behaving nautily. Here was a ship almost as long as Main Street is back home, and six stories high with an English basement, with restaurants and elevators and retail stores in her, and she was as broad as a courthouse, and while lying at the dock she had appeared to be about the most solid and dependable thing in creation, and yet in just a few hours' time she had altered her whole nature and was rolling and sliding and charging and snorting like a warhorse. It was astonishing in the extreme, and you would not have expected it of her. End of Section 1 Section 2 of Europe Revised This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Chapter 1 We are going away from here. Part 2 Even as I focused my mind on this phenomenon, the doorway was stealthily entered by a small man in a uniform that made him look something like an eaten schoolboy and something like a waiter in a dairy-lunch. I was about to have the first illuminating experience with an English man-servant. This was my bedroom steward by name Lovely, William Lovely. My hat is off to William Lovely, to him and to all his kind. He was always on duty, he never seemed to sleep. He was always in a good humor, and he always thought of the very thing you wanted just a moment or two before you thought of it yourself, and came a-running and fetched it to you. Now he was softly stealing in to close my port. As he screwed the round, brass-faced window fast, he glanced my way and caught my apprehensive eye. Good morning, sir, he said, and he said it in such a way as to convey a subtle compliment. Is it getting rough outside? I said. I knew about the inside. Thank you, he said. The sea-as got up a bit, sir. Thank you, sir. I was gratified. Nay more I was flattered. And it was so delicately done, too. I really did not have the heart to tell him that I was not solely responsible, that I had, so to speak, collaborators, but Lovely stood ready always to accord me a proper amount of recognition for everything that happened on that ship. Only the next day I think it was, I asked him where we were. This occurred on deck. He had just answered a lady who wanted to know whether we should have good weather on the day we landed at Fishguard, and whether we should get in on time. Without a moment's hesitation, he told her, and then he turned to me with the air of giving credit where credit is due, and said, Thank you, sir. We are just off the banks. Thank you, sir. Lovely ran true to form. The British serving classes are ever like that. Whether met with at sea or on their native soil. They are a great and noble institution. Give an English servant a kind word, and he thanks you. Give him a harsh word, and he still thanks you. Ask a question of a London policeman. He tells you fully, and then he thanks you. Go into an English shop and buy something. The clerk who serves you thanks you with enthusiasm. Go in and fail to buy something. He still thanks you, but without the enthusiasm. One kind of Englishman says thank you, sir, and one kind, the cockney who has been educated, says thanks. But the majority brief it into a short, but expressive, expletive, and merely say cue. Cue is the commonest word in the British Isles. Extraordinary runs it to a close second, but cue comes first. You hear it everywhere. Hence cue gardens. They are named for it. All the types that travel on a big English-owned ship were on ours. I take it that there is a requirement in the maritime regulations to the effect that the set must be complete before a ship may put to sea. To begin with, there was a member of a British legation going home on leave for a holiday or a funeral. At least I heard it was a holiday, but I should have said he was going home for the other occasion. He wore an honorable attach to the front of his name and carried several extra initials behind in the rumble, and he was filled up with that true British reserve, which a certain sort of Britisher always develops while traveling in foreign lands. He was upward of seven feet tall as the crow flies and very thin and rigid. Viewing him, you got the impression that his framework all ran straight up and down, like the wires in a birdcage, with barely enough perches extending across from side to side to keep him from caving in and crushing the canaries to death. On second thought, I judge I had better make this comparison in the singular number. There would not have been room in him for more than one canary. Every morning for an hour, and again every afternoon for an hour, he marched solemnly round and round the promenade deck, always alone and always with his mournful gaze fixed on the far horizon. As I said before, however, he stood very high in the air, and it may have been he feared if he ever did look down at his feet he should turn dizzy and be seized with an uncontrollable desire to leap off and end all. So I am not blaming him for that. He would walk his hour out to the sixtieth second of the sixtieth minute, and then he would sit in his steamer chair, as silent as a glacier and as inaccessible as one. If it were afternoon he would have his tea at five o'clock, and then, with his soul still full of cracked dice, he would go below and dress for dinner. But he never spoke to anyone. His steamer chair was right hand-chair to mine, and often we practically touched elbows. But he did not see me once. I had a terrible thought. Suppose now, I said to myself, just suppose that this ship were to sink, and only we two were saved, and suppose we were cast away on a desert island and spent years and years there, never knowing each other's names and never mingling together socially until the rescue ship came along, and not even then unless there was some mutual acquaintance on board her to introduce us properly. It was indeed a frightful thought. It made me shudder. Among our company was a younger son going home after a tour of the colonies, Canada and Australia and all that sort of valley-rot. I believe there is always at least one younger son on every well-conducted English boat. The family keeps him on a remittance and seems to feel easier in its mind when he is traveling. A British statesman who said the son never sets on British possession spoke the truth, but the reporters in committing his memorable utterance to paper spelt the key word wrong, undoubtedly he meant the other kind, the younger kind. This particular example of the species was in every way up to grade and sample. A happy combination of open air, open pours, and open case goods gave to his face the exact color of a slice of rare roast beef. It also had the expression of one. With a dab of English mustard in the lobe of one ear and a savory bit of watercress stuck in his hair for garnish, he might have passed anywhere for a slice of cold roast beef. He was reasonably exclusive, too. Not until the day we landed did he and the honorable member of the delegation learn quite by chance that they were third cousins or something of that sort to one another, and so after the relationship had been thoroughly established by the kindly offices of a third party, they fraternized to the extent of riding up to London on the same boat train, merely using different compartments of different carriages. The English aristocrat is a tolerably social animal when traveling, but at the same time he does not carry a sociability to an excess. He shows restraint. Also we had with us the elderly gentleman of impaired disposition, who had crossed thirty times before his thirty-first trip, and getting madder and madder about it every minute. I saw him only with his clothes on, but I should say, speaking offhand, that he had at least fourteen rattles and a button. His poison sacks hung way down. Others may have taken them for doolaps, but I knew better they were poison sacks. It was quite apparent that he abhorred the very idea of having to cross to Europe on the same motion with the rest of us, let alone on the same ship. And for persons who were taking their first trip abroad, his contempt was absolutely unutterable. He choked at the bare mention of such a criminal's name and offence. You would hear him communing with himself and a scotch and soda. Bah! he would say bitterly, addressing the soda bottle. These idiots who've never been anywhere talking about this being rough weather. Rough weather, mind you. Bah! People shouldn't be allowed to go to sea until they know something about it. Bah! By the fourth day out his gums were as blue as indigo, and he was so swelled up with his own venom he looked dropsicle. I judged his bite would have caused death in from twelve to fourteen minutes, preceded by coma and convulsive rigors. We called him Old Colonel Heela Monster or Judge Stinging Lizard for short. There was the spry and conversational gentleman who looked like an Englishman, but was of the type commonly denominated in our own land as breezy. So he could not have been an Englishman. Once in a while there comes along an Englishman who is windy, and frequently you meet one who is draughty, but there never was a breezy Englishman yet. With that interest in other people's business, which the close communication of a ship so promptly breeds in most of us, we fell to wondering who and what he might be. But the minute the suspect came into the salon for dinner, the first night out I read his secret at a glance. He belonged to a refined song and dance team doing sketches in Vaudeville. He could not have been anything else. He had jet buttons on his evening clothes. There was the young woman, she had elocutionary talents it turned out afterward, and had graduated with honors from a school of expression, who assisted in getting up the ship's concert and then took part in it, both of these acts being mistakes on her part as it proved. And there was the official he-beauty of the ship. He was without a wrinkle in his clothes or his mind either, and he managed to maneuver so that when he sat in the smoking-room he always faced a mirror. That was company enough for him. He never grew lonely or bored then. Only one night he discovered something wrong about one of his eyebrows. He gave a pained start and then, oblivious to those of us who hovered about enjoying the spectacle, he spent a long time working with the blemish. The eyebrow was stubborn, though, and he just couldn't make it behave, so he grew petulant and fretful, and finally went away to bed in a huff. Had it not been for fear of stopping his watch, I am sure he would have slept himself on the wrist. This fair youth was one of the delights of the voyage. One felt that if he had merely a pair of tweezers and a moustache comb and a hand-glass, he would never, never be at a loss for a solution of the problem that worries so many writers for the farm journals, a way to spend the long winter evenings pleasantly. CHAPTER II Of course, we had a bridal couple and a troop of professional deep-sea fishermen aboard. We just naturally had to have them. Without them I doubt whether the ship could have sailed. The bridal couple were from somewhere in the central part of Ohio, and they were taking their honeymoon tour. But if I were a bridal couple from the central part of Ohio and had never been to sea before, as was the case in this particular instance, I should take my honeymoon ashore and keep it there. I most certainly should. A couple of hours came aboard billing and cooing to beat the lovebirds. They made it plain to all that they had just been married and were proud of it. Their baggage was brand new and the groom's shoes were shiny with that pristine shininess which, once destroyed, can never be restored, and the bride wore her going and giving away outfit. Just prior to sailing and on the morning after, they were all over the ship. Everywhere you went you seemed to meet them as if it was wrestling. You entered a quiet side passage. There they were, exchanging a kiss, one of the long-drawn, deep-siphoned, syrupy kind. You stepped into the riding-room thinking to find it deserted, and at sight of you they broke grips and sprang apart, eyeing you like a pair of startled fawns surprised by the cruel huntsman in a forest-glade. At all other times, though, they had eyes but for each other. They were, for a second day out, when they were among the missing. For two days and two nights, while the good ship floundered on the tempestuous bosom of the overwrought ocean, they were gone from human ken. On the afternoon of the third day, the sea being calmer now, but still sufficiently rough to satisfy the most exacting, a few hearty and convalescent souls sat in a shawl-wrapped row on the lee side of the ship. There came two stewards and two crickets and rugs. These articles were disposed to advantage in two steamer-chairs. Then the stewards hurried away, but presently they reappeared, dragging the limp and dangling forms of the bridal couple from the central part of Ohio. But, oh, my countrymen, what a spectacle! And what a change from what had been! The going-away gown was wrinkled, as though worn for a period of time by one suddenly and sorely stricken in the midst of health. The brides once well-coifed hair hung in a lanked duceré about a face that was the color of prime old sage cheese, yellow with a fleck of green here and there, and in her wand and rolling eye was the hunted look of one who hears something unpleasant stirring a long way off, and fears it is coming this way. Side by side the stewards stretched them prone on their chairs and tucked them in. Her face was turned from him. For some time both of them lay there without visible signs of life, just two muffled, misery-stricken heaps. Then, slowly and languidly, the youth stretched forth an arm from his wrappings and fingered the swaddling folds that enveloped the form of his beloved. It may have been he thought it was about time to begin picking the cover lid, or it may have been the promptings of reawakened romance, once more feebly astir within his bosom. At any rate, gently and softly, his hand fell on the rug about where her shoulder ought to be. She still had life enough in her to shake it off, and she did. Hurt he waited a moment, then caressed her again. Stop that! she cried in a low but venomous tone. Don't you dare touch me. So he touched her no more, but only lay there, mute and motionless, and from his look one might plumb the sorrows of his soul and know how grieved and heart-stricken. Love's young dream was o'er. He had thought she loved him, but now he knew better. Their marriage had been a terrible mistake, and he would give her back her freedom. He would give it back to her as soon as she was able to sit up. Thus one interpreted his expression. On the day we landed, however, they were seen again. We were nosing northward through a dimpled duck pond of a sea, with the Welsh coast on one side and Ireland just over the way. People who had not been seen during the voyage came up to breathe, wearing the air of persons who had just returned from the valley of the shadow and were mightily glad to be back, and with those others came our bridal couple. I inadvertently stumbled on them in an obscure companion-way. Their cheeks again wore the bloom of youth and health, and they were in a tight clinch. It was indeed a pretty sight. They returned on roseate pinions and the honeymoon had been resumed at the point where postponed on account of bad weather. They had not been seasick, though. I heard them say so. They had been indisposed, possibly from something they had eaten, but they had not been seasick. Well, I had my own periods of indisposition going over, and if it had been seasickness I should not hesitate a moment in coming right out and saying so. I am absolutely frank and above-board. For the life of me I cannot understand why people will disassemble and lie about this thing of being seasick. To me their attitude is a source of constant wonderment. On land the average person is reasonably proud of having been sick after he begins to get better. It gives him something to talk about. The pale and interesting invalid invariably commands respect to shore. In my own list of acquaintances I number several persons, mainly widowed ladies with satisfactory incomes, who never feel well unless they are ill. In the old days they would have had to resort to patent medicines in the family lot at Laurel Grove Cemetery, but now they go in for rest cures and sea voyages, and the bath set Carl's bad and specialists, these same being main contributing causes to the present high cost of living, and also helping to explain what becomes the largest large life insurance policy you read about. Possibly you know the type I am describing. The lady who, when planning where she will spend the summer, sends for catalogs from all the leading sanatoriums. We had one such person with us. She had been surgically remodeled so many times that she dated everything from her last operation. At least six times in her life she had been down with something that was absolutely incurable, to have one of the newest and most fatal German diseases in its native haunts, where it would be at its best. She herself said that she was but a mere shell, and for the first few meals she ate like one like a large empty shell with plenty of curves inside it. However, when, after a subsequent period of seclusion, she emerged from her state room wearing the same disheveled look that Jonah must have worn when he and the whale parted company, do you think she would confess she had been seasick? Not by any means. She said she had had a raging headache. But she could not fool me. She had the state room next to mind and I had heard what I heard. She was from near Boston and she had the near Boston accent, and she was the only person I ever met who was seasick with the broad A. Personally, I abhor these evasions which deceive no one. If I had been seasick I should not deny it here or elsewhere. For a time I thought I was seasick. I know now I was wrong, but I thought so. There was something about the sardells served at lunch, their look or their smell or something, which seemed to make them distasteful to me. And I excused myself from the company at the table and went up and out into the open air. But the deck was unpleasantly congested with great burly brutes, beefy, carnivorous, overfed creatures, gorged with victuals and smoking disgustingly strong black cigars, and grinning in an annoying and meaning sort of way every time they passed a body who preferred to lie quiet. The rail was also moving up and down in a manner that was annoying and wearysome for the eye to watch, first tipping up and up and up until half the sky was hidden, then dipping down and down and down until the gray and heaving seas seemed ready to leap over the side and engulf us. Then I went down below and jot down a few notes. On arriving at my quarters I changed my mind again. I decided to let the notes wait a while and turn in. It is my usual custom when turning in to remove the left shoe as well as the right one and to put on my pajamas, but the pajamas were hanging on a hook away over on the opposite side of the state room, which had suddenly grown large and wide and full of great distances. And besides, I thought it was just new where I could put my hand on it when I needed it again. So I retired practically just as I was and endeavored, as per the admonitions of certain friends, to lie perfectly flat. No doubt this thing of lying flat is all very well for some people, but suppose a fellow has not that kind of figure. Nevertheless I tried. I lay as flat as I could, but the indisposition persisted. In fact it increased materially. The manner in which my pajamas limp and pendant from that hook swayed and swung back and forth became extremely distasteful to me, and if by mental treatment I could have removed them from there I should assuredly have done so. But that was impossible. Along toward evening I began to think of food. I thought of it not from its gastronomic aspect, but rather in the capacity of ballast. I did not so much desire the taste of it as the feel of it. So I summoned lovely. He, at least, did not smile at me in that patronizing, significant way, and ordered a dinner that included nearly everything on the dinner-card except lovely's thumb. The dinner was brought to me in relays, and I ate it. Ate it all. This step, I know now, was ill-advised. It is true that for a short time I felt as I imagine a python in his zoo-fields when he is full of guinea-pigs—sort of gorge, you know, and sluggish, and only tolerably uncomfortable. Then ensued the frightful denouement. It ensued almost without warning. At the time I felt absolutely positive that I was seasick. I would have sworn to it. If somebody had put a Bible on my chest and held it there I would cheerfully have laid my right hand on it and taken a solemn oath that I was seasick. Indeed, I believed I was so seasick that I feared, hoped, rather, I might never recover from it. All I desired at the moment was to get it as quickly and as neatly as possible. As in the case of drowning persons, they are passed in review before my eyes several of the more recent events of my past life—meals mostly. I shall, however, past hastily over these distressing details, merely stating in parentheses, so to speak, that I did not remember those string beans at all. I was positive then and am yet that I had not eaten string beans for nearly a week. But enough of this. CHAPTER II I was sure I was seasick, and I am convinced any inexperienced bystander, had there been one there, would have been misled by my demeanor into regarding me as a seasick person. But it was a wrong diagnosis. The steward told me so himself when he called the next morning. He came and found me stretched prone on the bed of affliction, and he asked me how I felt, to which I replied with a low and hollow groan—tolerably low and exceedingly hollow. It could not have been any more if I had been a megaphone. So he looked me over and told me that I had climate fever. We were passing through the Gulf Stream, where the water was warmer than elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and I had a touch of climate fever. It was a very common complaint in that latitude. Many persons suffered from it. The symptoms were akin to seasickness, it was true, yet the two maladies were in no way to be confused. As soon as I was in the Gulf Stream, he felt sure I would be perfectly well. Meantime he would recommend that I get lovely to take the rest of my things off and then remain perfectly quiet. He was right about it, too. Regardless of what one may think oneself, one is bound to accept the statement of an authority on the subject, and if a steward on a big liner who has traveled back and forth across the ocean for years is not light. And sure enough, when we had passed out of the Gulf Stream and the sea had smoothed itself out, I made a speedy and satisfactory recovery. But if it had been seasickness I should have confessed it in a minute. I have no patience with those who quibble and equivocate in regard to their having been seasick. I had one relapse, a short one, but painful. In an incautious moment, when I whisked not what I wanted, I went below. We went below, miles and miles, I think, to where, standing on metal runways that were hot to the foot, over all the scots ministered to the heart and the lungs and the bowels of that ship. Electricity spat cracklingly in our faces, and at our sides steel shafts as big as the pillars of a temple spun in coatings of spoomy grease, and through the double skin of her we could churning as the slew-footed screws kicked us forward twenty odd knots an hour. Someone raised the cover of a vat, and peering down into the opening we saw a small, vicious engine hard at work, entirely enveloped in twisty, coily, stewy depths of black oil, like a devilfish writhing in sea-ews and cuddle-juice. So then we descended another mile or two into an inferno, full of naked, sooty devils treating sulfurous pitfires in the nethermost parlors of the damned. But they said this was the stoke-hole, and I was in no condition to argue with them, for I had suddenly begun to realize that I was far from being a well person. As one peering through a glass darkly, I saw one of the attendant demons slew his blistered bare wrist with cold water, so that the sweat and grime ran from him in streams like ink, and peering in at a furnace-door I saw a great angry door of coals all scabbed and crusted over. Then another demon, wielding a nine-foot bar daintily as a surgeon wields a scalpel, reached in and stabbed it in the center, so that the fire burst through and gushed up red and rich, like blood from a wound newly lanced. I had seen enough and to spare, but my guide brought me back by way of the steerage, in order that I might know how the other half lives. There was nothing here, either of smell or sight, to upset the human stomach. Third class is better fed and better quartered now on those big ships than first class was in those good old early days. But I had held in as long as I could, and now I relapsed. I relapsed in a vigorous manner, a whole-sold, boisterous manner. People half way up the deck heard me relapsing, and I will warrant some of them were fooled, too. They thought I was seasick. It was due to my attack of climate fever that I missed the most exciting thing which happened on the voyage. I refer to the incident of the professional gamblers and the youth from Jersey City. From the very first there was one passenger who had been picked out by all the knowing passengers as a professional gambler, for he was the very spit an image of a professional gambler as we have learned to know him in the story-books. Did he not dress in plain black without any jewelry? He certainly did. Did he not have those long, slender, flexible fingers? Such was indeed the correct description of those fingers. Was not his eye a keen, steely blue that seemed to have the power of looking right through you? Steely blue was the right word all right. Well, then, what more could you ask? Behind his back, sinister yet fascinating rumors circulated. He was the brilliant but unscrupulous sign of a haughty house in England. He had taken a first degree at Oxford, over there, and the third one at police headquarters over here. Women simply could not resist him. Let him make of his mind to win a woman and she was a gone gosseling. His picture was to be found in robes as galleries and ladies' lockets, and shh, listen, everybody knew he was the identical crook who, disguised in some woman's clothes, escaped in the last lifeboat that left the sinking Titanic. Who said so? Why, uh, everybody said so. It came as a grievous disappointment to all when we found out the truth, which was that he was the booking agent for a Lyceum Bureau going abroad to sign up some foreign talent for next season's chatakwas, and the only gambling he had ever done was on the chance of whether the Tyrolean neodlers would draw better than our esteemed Secretary of State or vice versa. Meantime the real professionals had established themselves cosily and comfortably aboard. Had rigged the trap and cheese-baited it and were waiting for the coming of one of the class that is born so numerously in this country. If you should be travelling this year on one of the large transatlantic ships and there should come aboard two young well-dressed men, and shortly afterward a middle-aged well-dressed man with a flat nose, who was apparently a stranger to the first two, and if, on the snuck at night out in the smoking room, while the pool in the next day's run was being auctioned, one of the younger men, whom we will call Mr. Y, should appear to be slightly under the influence of malt, vineas, or spiritus liquors, or of all three of them at once, and should, without seeming provocation, insist on picking a quarrel with the middle-aged stranger whom we shall call Mr. Z. And if further along in the voyage Mr. Z should introduce himself to you and suggest a little game of auction bridge for small stakes in order to wile away the tedium of travel, and if it should so fall out that Mr. Y and his friend Mr. X chanced to be the only available candidates for a foursome at this fascinating pursuit, and if Mr. Z, being still hostile toward the sobered and repentant Mr. Y, should decline to take on either Mr. Y or his friend X as a partner, but choose you instead, and if, on the second or third deal, you picked up your cards and found you had an apparently unbeatable hand, and should bid accordingly, and Mr. X should double you, and Mr. Z sitting across from you should come gallantly right back and redouble it, and Mr. Y, catching the spirit of the moment, should double again, and so on and so forth until each point, instead of being worth only a paltry cent or two, had accumulated a value of a good many cents, and if all these things, or most of them, should be fall in the order enumerated, why then, if I were you, gentle reader, I would have a care, and I should leave that game and go somewhere else to have it, too, lest a worse thing befall you as it befell the guileless young Jerseyman on our ship. After he had paid out a considerable sum on being beaten, by just one card upon the playing of his seemingly unbeatable hand, and after the haunting and elusive odor of ode de rodent had become plainly perceptible all over the ship, he began as the saying goes to smell a rat himself, and straightway declined to make good his remaining losses, amounting to quite a tidy amount. Following this there were high words, meaning by that low ones, and accusations and recriminations, and it even tied when the sunset was a welter of purple and gold, there was a sudden smashing of glassware in the smoking-room, and a flurry of arms and legs in a far corner, and a couple of pain-stewards scurrying about saying, ah, now don't do that, sir, if you please, sir, thank you, sir, and one of the belligerents came forth from the melee wearing a lavender eye with saffron trimmings as though to match the sunset, and the other with a set of skin knuckles emblematic of the skinning operations previously undertaken, and through all the ship ran the hissing tongues of scandal and gossip. Out of wild rumor and cross-rumor, certain salient facts were eventually precipitated like sediment from a clouded solution. It seemed that the engaging Missures X, when induced, practically under false pretenses, to book passage, they having read in the public Prince that the prodigal and card-foolish son of a cheese-pairing millionaire father meant to take the ship, too. But he had grievously disappointed them by not coming aboard at all. Then, when in an effort to make their traveling expenses back, they uncorked their newest trick and devise for inspiring confidence in gudgins, the particular gudgeon of their choosing had refused to pay up. Naturally they were fretful and peevish in the extreme. It spoiled the whole trip for them. Except for this one small affair it was on the whole a pleasant voyage. We had only one storm and one ship's concert, and, at the finish, most of us were strong enough to have stood another storm. And the trip had been worth a lot to us—at least it had been worth a lot to me, for I had crossed the ocean on one of the biggest hotels afloat. I had amassed quite a lot of rooms that would come in very handy for stunning the folks at home when I got back. I had had my first thrill at the side of foreign shores. And, by just casual contact with members of the British aristocracy, I had acquired such a heavy load of true British hauteur that imparting on the landing-dock I merely bowed distantly toward those of my fellow Americans to whom I had not been introduced, and they, having contracted the same disease, bowed back in the same haughty and distant manner. When some of us met again, however, in Vienna, the insulation had been entirely rubbed off, and we rushed madly into one another's arms, and exchanged names and addresses, and babbling feverishly the while we told one another what our favorite flower was, and our birthstone, and our grandmother's maiden name, and what we thought of a race of people who regarded the cup of ostensible coffee and a dab of honey as constituting a bollow-scent, and, being pretty tolerably homesick by that time, we leaned in toward a common center and gave three loud vehement cheers for the land of the country sausage and the home of the buckwheat cake, and as giants refreshed went on our ways rejoicing. That, though, was to come later. At present we are concerned with the trip over and what we had severally learned from it. I personally had learned, among other things, that the Atlantic is a considerably overrated body. Having been across it, even on so big and fine and well ordered a ship as this ship was, the ocean, it seemed to me, was not at all what it had been cracked up to be. During the first day out it is a novelty, and after that a monotony, except when it is rough, and then it is a dog-on nuisance. Poets without end have written of the sea, but I take it they stayed home to do their writing. They were not on the bounding side of it. If they had been they might have decorated the billow, but they would never have praised it. As the old song so happily put it, my body lies over the ocean and a lot of others have lied over it too, but I will not, at least not just yet. Perhaps later on I may feel moved to do so, but at this moment I am but newly landed from it and my heart is full of rankling resentment toward the ocean and all its works. I speak but a sober conviction I say that the chief advantage to be derived from taking an ocean voyage is not that you took it, but that you have it to talk about afterward, and to my mind the most inspiring sight to be witnessed on a trip across the Atlantic is the battery, viewed from the ocean side coming back. Do I hear any seconds to that motion? End of section four. Section five of Europe provides. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Europe revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Chapter three. Bathing oneself on the other side. Part one. My first experience with the bathing habits of the native Aryan stocks of Europe came to pass on the morning after the night of our arrival in London. London disappointed me in one regard. When I opened my eyes that morning there was no fog. There was not the slightest sign of a fog. I had expected that my room would be full of fog about the consistency of Scotch stage dialect, soupy, you know, and thick and bewildering. I had expected that servants with lighted tapers in their hands would be groping their way through corridors like caves and that from the street without there would come the horse-voiced eyes of cab men lost in the enshrouding gray. You remember Dickens always had them horse-voiced. This was what I confidently expected. Such, however, was not to be. I worked to a consciousness that the place was flooded with indubitable and undoubted sunshine. To be sure it was not the sharp hard sunshine we have in America which scours and bleaches all it touches until the whole world has the look just been clear-starched and hot-ironed. It was a softened, smoke-edged pastel-shaded sunshine. Nevertheless it was plainly recognizable as the genuine article. Nor was your London shadow the sharply outlined companion in black who accompanies you when the weather is fine in America. Your shadow in London was rather a dim and wavery gentleman who caught up with you as you turned out of the shaded by-street, who went with you a distance and shyly vanished, but was good company while he stayed, being restful as your well-bred Englishman nearly always is and not overly aggressive. There was no fog that first morning or the next morning or any morning of the twenty-odd we spent in England. Often the weather was cloudy and occasionally it was rainy and then London would be drenched in that wonderful gray color which makes it, scenically speaking, one of the most fascinating spots on earth. But it was never downright foggy and never downright cold. English friends used to speak to me about it. They apologized for good weather at that season of the year. Just as natives of a Florida winter resort will apologize for bad. You know, old dear, they would say, this is most unusual, most extraordinary in fact. It ought to be raw and nasty and foggy at this time of the year, and here the cursed weather is perfectly fine in fact. You could tell they were grieved about it and disappointed, too. Anything that is not regular upsets Englishmen frightfully. Maybe that is why they enforced their laws so rigidly and obeyed them so beautifully. Anyway, I woke to find the fog absent and I rose and prepared to take my customary cold bath. I am much given to taking a cold bath in the morning and speaking of it afterward. People who take a cold bath every day always like whether they take it or not. The bathroom rejoined the bedroom, but it did not directly connect with it, being reached by means of a small, semi-private hallway. It was a fine, noble bathroom, white-tiled and spotless, and one side of it was occupied by the longest, narrowest bathtub I ever saw. Apparently English bathtubs are constructed on the principle that every Englishman who bathes is nine feet long and about eighteen inches wide, whereas the approximate contrary is frequently the case. Draped over a chair was the biggest, widest, softest bathtub ever made. Shem, Ham, and Jeppette could have dried themselves on that bathtub, and there would still have been enough dry territory left for some of the animals—not the large woolly animals like the Siberian yak, but the small, slick, porous animals such as the armadillo and the Mexican hairless dog. So I wedged myself into the tub with a snug fitting but almost luxurious bath, and when I got back to my room the maid had arrived with the shaving water. There was a knock at the door, and when I opened it there stood a maid with a lukewarm pint of water in a long-waisted, thin-lipped pewter pitcher. There was plenty of hot water to be had in the bathroom, with faucets and sinks all handy and convenient, and a person might shave himself there in absolute comfort. But long before the days of pipes and taps an Englishman got his computer ewer, and he still gets it so. It is one of the things guaranteed him under magna charter, and he demands it as a right. But I, being but a benighted foreigner, left mine in the pitcher, and that evening the maid checked me up. You didn't use the shaving water I brought you today, sir, she said. It was still in the jug when I came into tidy up, sir. Her tone was grieved, so after that to spare her feelings I used to pour it down the sink. But if I were doing the trip over again I would drink it for breakfast instead of the coffee the waiter brought me, the shaving water being warmish and containing, so far as I could tell, no deletorious substances. And if the bathroom were occupied at the time I would shave myself with the coffee. I judge it might work up into a thick and durable lather. It is certainly not adapted for drinking purposes. The English, as a race, excel at making tea and at drinking it after it is made, but coffee is still a mysterious and murky compound full of strange byproducts. By first weakening it and wearing it down with warm milk one may imbibe it, but it is not to be reckoned among the pleasures of life. It is a solemn and a painful duty. On the second morning I was splashing in my tub, gratifying that amphibious instinct which has come down to us from the dim evolutionary time when we were paleozoic polywags, when I made the discovery that there were no towels in the bathroom. I glanced about keenly seeking for help and guidance in such an emergency. Set in the wall directly above the rim of the tub was a brass plate containing two push-buttons. One button, the uppermost one, was labeled waiter. The other was labeled maid. This was disconcerting. Even in so short a stay under the roof of an English hotel I had learned that at this hour the waiter would be hastening from room to room, ministering to Englishmen engaged in gumming their vital organs into an impenetrable mass with the national dish of marmalade, and that the maid would also be busy carrying shaving water to people who did not need it. Besides, of all the classes I distinctly do not require when I am bathing, one is waiters and the other is maids. For some minutes I considered the situation without making any headway toward a suitable solution of it. Meantime I was getting chilled. So I tried myself, sketchily, with a toothbrush on the edge of the window shade. Then I dressed and in a still somewhat moist state I went down to interview the management about it. I first visited the information desk and told the youth in charge there that I wished to converse with someone in authority on the subject of towels. After gazing at me a spell in a puzzled manner he directed me to go across the lobby to the cashiers department. Here I found a gentleman of truly regal subject. His tie was a perfect dream of a tie. And he wore a fraught coat so slim and long and black it made him look as though he were climbing out of a smokestack. Presenting the case as though it were a suppositious one purely, I said to him, presuming now that one of your guest is in the bathtub and finds he has forgotten to lay in any towels beforehand, such a thing might possibly occur, you know, how does he go about summoning the man-servant me with a view to getting some? Oh, sir, he replied, that's very simple. You noticed two push buttons in your bathroom, didn't you? I did, I said, and that's just the difficulty. One of them is for the maid and the other is for the waiter. Quite so, sir, he said, quite so. Very well then, sir, you ring for the waiter or the maid, or if you should chance to be in a hurry for both of them, because you see one of them might chance to be in one moment, I said, let me make my position clear in this matter. This lady Susanna, I do not know her last name, but you will doubtless recall the person I mean, because I saw several pictures of her yesterday in her national art gallery. This lady Susanna might have enjoyed taking a bath with a lot of snoopy old elders lurking round in the background, but I am not so constituted. I was raised differently from that. With me bathing has ever been a solitary pleasure. This made a note selfishness apart, but such is my nature and I cannot alter it. All my folks feel about it as I do. We are a very peculiar family that way. When bathing we do not invite an audience, nor do I want one. A crowd would only embarrass me. I merely desire a little privacy, and here and there a towel. Ah, yes, quite so, sir, he said, but you do not understand me. As I said before you ring for the waiter or the maid. When one of them comes you tell them you the man-servant on your floor, and when he comes you tell him you require towels, and he goes to the linen cupboard and gets them and fetches them to you. Sir, it is very simple, sir. But why, I persisted, why do this thing by a relay system? I do not want any famishing gentleman in this place to go practically un-marmaladed at breakfast, because I am using the waiter to conduct preliminary negotiations with the third party in regard to a bath-tow. It is so very simple, sir," he repeated patiently. You ring for the waiter or the maid. I checked him with a gesture. I felt that I knew what he meant to say. I also felt that if any word of mine might serve to put this establishment on an easy-running basis, they could have it and welcome. CHAPTER III LISTEN, I SAID. You will kindly pardon the ignorance of a poor, red, partly-damp American who has shed his eagle-feathers but still has his native curiosity with him. Why not put a thread on the bathroom labelled man-servant or valet or towel-boy or something of that general nature? And then, when a sufferer wanted towels and wanted them quick, he could get them without blocking the wheels of progress and industry. We may still be shooting Mohawk Indians and the American bison in the streets of Buffalo, New York, and we may still be saying, by G Hosefat, I swan to calculate. Anyway, I note that we still say that in all your leading comic papers, but when a man in my land goes a-toweling, he goes a-toweling, and that is all there is to it, positively. In our secret lodges it may happen that the worshipful master calls the august sword-bearer to him and bids him communicate with the grand outer guardian and see whether the candidate is suitably attired for admission, but in ordinary life we cut out the middleman whenever possible. Do you know what I mean? Oh, yes, sir," he said, but I fear you do not understand me. As I told you, it's very simple, so very simple, sir. We've never found it necessary to make a change. You ring for the waiter or for the maid, and you tell them to tell the man-servant. All right," I said, breaking in. I could see that his arguments were of the circular variety that always came back to the starting point. But as a favor to me, would you kindly ask the proprietor to take the carriage-starter and have him inform the waiter that when in future I ring the bathroom bell in a given manner, to wit, one long, determined ring, followed by three short, passionate rings, it may be regarded as a signal for towels? So, saying, I turned on my heel and went away, for I could tell he was getting ready to begin all over again. Later on I found out for myself that, in this particular hotel, when you ring for the waiter or the maid, the bell sounds in the service room, where those functionaries are supposed to be stationed, but when you ring for the man-servant, a small, arm-shape device like a semaphore drops down over your outer door. But what has this man-servant done that he should be thus discriminated against? Why should he not have a bell of his own? So far as I might judge, the poor fellow has few enough pleasures in life as it is. He has no place as a separate bell. And why all this mystery and memory over so simple and elemental a thing as a towel? To my mind, it merely helps to prove that among the English the art of bathing is still in its infancy. The English claim to have discovered the human bath, and they resent mildly the assumption that any other nation should become addicted to it. Whereas I argue that the burden of the proof shows we do more bathing to the square inch of surface than we did. At least we have superior accommodations for it. The day is gone in this country when Saturday night was the big night for indoor aquatic sports and pastimes, and no gentleman, as was a gentleman, would call on his lady-love and break up her plans for the great weekly ceremony. There may have been a time in certain rural districts when the bathing season for males practically ended on September 15, owing to the water in the horse-pond time has passed. Along with every modern house that is built today in country or town we expect bathrooms and plenty of them. With us the presence of a few bathtubs more or less creates no great amount of excitement, nor does the mere sight of open plumbing particularly stir our people. Whereas in England a hotel keeper who has bathrooms on the premises advertises the fact on his stationery. If in addition to a few bathrooms the continental hotel keeper has a decrepit elevator, he makes more noise over it than we do over a Pompeii and Palm Room or an Etruscan roof garden. He hangs a sign above his front door testifying to his magnificent enterprise in this regard. The continental may be a born hotel keeper, as has been frequently claimed for him, but the trouble is he usually has no hotel to keep. It is as though you set an interior decorator to run a room and expect him to make it attractive. He may have the talents but he is lacking in the raw material. It was in a London apartment house out made of veil-way that I first beheld the official bathtub of an English family establishment. It was one of those bathtubs that flourished in our own land at about the time of the green-back craze, a coffin shaped, boxed-in affair lined with zinc and the zinc was suffering from tether or other serious skin trouble and was peeling badly. There was a current superstition about the place to the effect that the bathroom and the water supply might on occasion be heated with a device known in the vernacular as a geyser. The geyser was a sheet-iron contraption in the shape of a pocket ink stand and it stood on a perch in the corner, like a Russian icon with a small blue flame flickering underneath it. It looked as though its sire might have been a snare drum and its dam and that it got its looks from its father and its heating powers from the mother side of the family. And the plumbing fixtures were of the type that passed out of general use on the American side of the water with the Rutherford B. Hayes administration. I was given to understand that this was a fair sample of the average residential London bathroom, though the newer apartment houses that are going up have better ones, they told me. In English country houses, the dearth of bathing appliance must be very careful. I ran through the columns of the leading English fashion journal and read the descriptions of the large country places that were offered for sale or lease. In many instances, the advertisements were accompanied by photographic reproductions in half-tone, showing magnificent old places with Queen Anne Fronts and Tudor Towers and Elizabethan Endtales and Georgian Mortises and whatnot. Seeing these views, I could conjure young curates in flat hats enviving tea on green lawns of housekeepers named Meadows or Fleming in rustling black silk of old giles, fifty years man and boy on the same place, wearing a smock front and leaning on a pitchfork with a wisp of hay caught in the tines, lamenting that the all hasn't been the same, sir, since the young master was killed riding to Owens and then pensively wiping his eyes on a stray strand of the hay. With no great stretch of the imagination I could picture a gaudy, morose old lord with a secret sorrow and a brandy breath. I could picture a profligate air going deeper and deeper in debt, but refusing to the bitter end to put the yaks to the roots of the ancestral oaks. I could imagine these parties readily, because I had frequently read about both of them in the standard English novels, and I had seen them depicted in all the books, but I did not notice in the appended descriptions any extended notice of heating arrangements most of the advertisements seemed to slur over that point altogether. And, as regards bathing facilities in their relation to the capacities of these countryplaces, I quote at random from the figures given eighteen rooms and one bath, sixteen rooms and two baths, fourteen rooms and one bath, twenty-one rooms and two baths, eleven rooms and one bath, thirty-four rooms and two baths. Remember that by rooms bedrooms were meant. The reception rooms and parlors and dining halls and offices and the like were listed separately. I asked a well-informed Englishman how he could reconcile this discrepancy between bedrooms and bathrooms with the current belief that the English had a practical monopoly of the habit of bathing. After considering the proposition at some length, he said, I should understand there was a difference in England between taking a bath and taking a tub, that though an Englishman might not be particularly addicted to a bath he must have his tub every morning. But I submit that the facts prove this explanation to have been but a feeble subterfuge. Let us, for an especially conspicuous example, take the house that has thirty-four sleeping chambers and only two baths. Let us imagine the house to be full of guests, with every bedroom occupied, and if it is possible to do so without blushing let us further imagine a couple of pink and white English gentlemen in the two baths. If preferable members of the opposite sex may imagine two ladies. Very well, then, this leaves the occupants of thirty-two bedrooms to all be provided with large tin tubs at approximately the same hour of the morning. Where would any household muster the crews to man all those portable tin tubs? And where would the proprietor take his battery of thirty-two tubs when they were not in use? Not in the family picture gallery, surely. For my reading of works of fiction describing the daily life of the English upper classes, I know full well that the picture gallery is lined with family portraits. That each Kenvast countenance there shows the haughty aquiline but slightly cataral nose, which is a heritage of this house. That each pair of dark and brooding eyes hide in their depths that dread nemesis which, through all the fateful centuries, has dogged this brave but ill-starred race until now alas, the place must be let furnished to some beastly creature in trade, such as an American millionaire. Here at this end we have the founder of the line, dubbed a knight on the gory field of Hastings, and there at that end we have the present heir, a knighted dub. We know they cannot put the tubs in the family picture gallery. There is no room. They need an armory for that outfit, and no armory is specified in the advertisement. So I, for one, must decline to be misled or deceived by specious generalities. If you are asking me my opinion, I shall simply say that the bathing hammock of Mary England is a venerable myth, and likewise so is the fresh air fetish. The air an Englishman makes is that he mistakes cold air for fresh air. In cold weather an Englishman arranges to use splinter jack straws, kindling fashion, in an open grate somewhat resembling in size and shape a wall pocket for bedroom slippers. On this substructure he gently deposits one or more carboniferous nodules the size of a pigeon egg and touches a match to the whole. In the more fortunate instances the result is a small reddish ember smoking intermittently. He stands by and feeds the glow with a desert spoonful of fuel administered at intervals, and imagines he really has a fire and that he is really being warmed. Why the English insist on speaking of coal in the plural when they only use it in the singular is more than I can understand. Conceited that we overheat our houses and our railroad trains and our hotel lobbies in America, nevertheless we do heat them. In winter their interiors are warmer and less damp than the outer air, which is more than can be said for the lands across the sea that have to go outdoors to thaw. If there were any outdoor sleeping porches in England I missed them when I was there, but as regards the ventilation of an English hotel I may speak with authority, having patronized one. To begin with the windows have heavy shades. Back of these in turn are folding blinds, then long close curtains of muslin, then finally thick, manifold shrouding draperies of some air-proof woolen stuff. At night time the maid enters your room, seals the windows, pulls down the shades, locks the shutters, closes the curtains, and draws the draperies. And then I think, cocks all the cracks with oakum. When the occupant of that chamber retires to rest he as his hermetic as old romacies the first, safe in his tomb ever dared hope to be. That reddish aspect of the face noted in connection with the average Englishman is not due to fresh air, as has been popularly exposed, it is due to the lack of it. It is caused by congestion. For years he has been going along trying to breathe without having the necessary ingredients at hand. At that England excels the rest of Europe in fresh air, just as it excels in the matter of bathing facilities. There is some fresh air left in England, an abundant supply in warm weather, and a stray bit here and there in cold. On the continent there is none to speak of. End of section 6 Section 7 of Europe Revised This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb Chapter 4 Jacques the Forsaken Part 1 In Germany the last fresh air was used during the Thirty Years War, and there has since been no demand for any. Austria has no fresh air at all, never did have any, and therefore has never felt the need of having any. Italy, the northern part of it anyhow, is also reasonably shy of this commodity. In the German speaking countries all street cars and all railway trains sail with batten patches. In their palmiest days the Jimmy Hope Gang could not have opened a window in a German parking car. Not without blasting and trying to open a window in the ordinary first or second class carriage provides healthful exercise for an American tourist, while affording a cheap and simple form of amusement for his fellow passengers. If by superhuman efforts and at the cost of a fingernail or two he should get one open, somebody else in the compartment as a matter of principle immediately objects, and the retired citizen in charge of a German train comes and seals it up again, for that is the rule and the law, and then the natives are satisfied and sit in sweet content together, breathing a line of second handed air that would choke a salamander. Once a good many years ago, in the century before the last I think it was, a member of the teutonic racial stock was accidentally caught out in the fresh air, and some of it got into his lungs, and being a reference to which the lungs were unused it sickened him, in fact I am not sure but that it killed him on the spot. So the emperors of Germany and Austria got together and issued a joint UK on the subject, and so far as the traveling public was concerned forever abolished those dangerous experiments. Over there they think a draft is deadly, and I presume it is if you have never tampered with one. They have a little saying, a little thing. As with fresh air on the continent, so also with baths, except perhaps more so. Indeference to the strange and unaccountable desires of their English speaking guests to the larger hotels in Paris are abundantly equipped with bathrooms now, but the Parisian boulevardiers continue to look with darking suspicion on a party who would deliberately immerse his person in cold water. Their beings seem to recoil in horror from the bear it is plainly to be seen they think his intelligence has been attained by cold water externally applied. They fear that through a complete undermining of his reason he may next be committing these acts of violence on innocent bystanders rather than on himself, as in the present distressing stages of his mania. Especially I would say this is the attitude of the habitue of Montmartre. I can offer no visual proof to back the bird, but by other testimony I venture the assertion that when a boulevardier feels the need of a bath he hangs a muskbag round his neck, and then, as the saying is, the warmer the sweeter. His companion of the gentler sex apparently has the same idea of performing daily ablutions that a tabby-cat has. You recall the tabby-cat system, do you not? Two swipes over the brow with a moistened paw, towards wipe over each ear, a kind of circular rubbing effect across the face, and call it a day. Drowning must be the most frightful death that a Parisian sidewalk-favorite can die. It is not so much the death itself, it is the attendant circumstances. Across the river in the older quarters of Paris there is excitement when anybody on the block takes a bath. Not so much excitement as for a fire, perhaps, but more than for a funeral. The eve of the fatal day the news spreads through the district that tomorrow poor Jacques is going to take a bath. A further reprieve has been denied him. He cannot put it off for another month, or even for another two weeks. His doom is nigh at hand, there is no hope, none. Kindly old Angeline, the midwife shakes her head sadly as she goes about her simple duties. On the morrow the condemned man rises early and sees his wife. He eats a hearty breakfast, takes an affectionate leave of his family, and says he is prepared for the worst. At the appointed hour the tumbrel enters the street, driven by the paid executioner, a descendant of the original sanson, and bearing the dread instrument of punishment a large oblong tin tub. The rumble of the heavy wheels over the cobble seems to wake an agonized cord in every section descends on Jacques, but who can tell, so the neighbors say to themselves, when the same fate may strike some other household now happily unconscious. All along the narrow way sorrow-drooped heads protrude in rows, from every casement dangled whiskers lank and stringy with sympathy, for in this section every true Frenchman has whiskers, and if by chance he is not his wife has, so that there are whiskers for him. From the windows of the doomed wretches apartments a derrick protrudes, a cross-arm with a pulley and a rope attached. It bears a grimly significant resemblance to a gallows tree. Under the direction of the presiding functionary the tub is made fast to the tackle and hoisted upwards as pianos and safes are hoisted in American cities. It halts at the open casement. It vanishes within. The whole place resounds with horror and commiseration. Ah, the poor Jacques, how he must suffer, hark to that low, sickening thud, tis the accursed soap dropping from his nerveless grasp, hiss to that water like unto a death-rattle. It is the water gurgling in the tub. And what means that low, poignant, smothered gasp? It is the last convulsive cry of Jacques descending into the depths. All is over. Let us pray. The tub, emptied but stained, is lowered to the waiting cart. The executioner kisses the citizen who has held his horse for him during his absence and departs. The whole district still hums with ill-suppressed excitement. Questions fly from tongue to tongue. Was the victim brave at the last? Was he resigned when the dread moment came? And how is the family bearing up? It is hours before the place settles down when somebody else takes a bath on a physician's prescription. Even in the sanctity of a Paris hotel a bath is more or less a public function unless you lock your door. All sorts of domestic servitors drift in, filled with morbid curiosity to see how a foreigner deports himself when engaged in this strange, barbaric rite. On the occasion of my first bath on French soil, after several of the hired help had thus formally, causing me to cower low in my porcelain retreat, I took advantage of a moment of comparative quiet to rise drippingly and draw the latch. I judged the proprietor would be along next, and I was not dressed for him. The Lady Susanna, of whom mention has previously been made, must have stopped at a French hotel at some time of her life. This helps us to understand why she remained so calm when the now practiced bathing still remains a comparative novelty in the best French circles, I imagine. I based this presumption on observations made during a visit to Versailles. I went to Versailles. I trod with reverent step those historic precincts adorned with art treasures unaccountable, with curio's magnificent, with relics invaluable. I visited the little palace and the big. I ventured deep into many of the ladies regarding whom there has been a good deal of talk subsequently. Francis Grandis and Marius Monarch deported himself. And I found out what made the Marius Monarch marry, so far as I could see there was not a bathroom on the place. He was a true Frenchman, was Louis XIV. Section 8 of Europe provides. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Europe revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Chapter 4 Jacques the Forsaken Part II In Berlin at the Imperial Palace our experience was somewhat similar. Led by a guide we walked through acres of state drawing rooms and state dining rooms and state reception rooms and state picture rooms and we were told that most of them or at least many of them were the handiwork of the late Andreas Schluter. The deceased Schluter was an architect, a painter, a sculptor, a woodcarver, a decorator all rolled into one. He was the George M. Cohen of his time and I think he also played the clarinet, being a German. We traversed miles of these Schluter masterpieces. Eventually we heard sounds of martial music without and we went to a window overlooking a paved courtyard. And from that point we presently beheld a fine sight. For the moment the courtyard was empty except that in the center stood a great mass of bronze by Schluter I think a heroic equestrian statue of St. George in the act of destroying the first adulterated German sausage. But in a minute the garrison turned out and then in through an arched gateway filed the relief guard headed by a splendid band with bell-hung standards jingling at the head of the column and young officers stalking along as stiff as ramrods and soldiers marching with the goose-step. In the German army the private who raises his knee the highest and sticks his shank out ahead of him the straightest and slams his foot down the hardest and jars his brain the painfulest is promoted to be a corporal and given a much heavier pair of shoes so that he may make more noise and in time utterly destroy his reason. The goose-step would be a great thing to enjoy in grasshoppers or cutworms in a plague gear in a Kansas sweet field. At the Kaiser's palace we witnessed all these sites but we did not run across any bathrooms or bath tubs. However we were not in the public end of the establishment and I regarded as probable that in the other wing where the Kaiser lives when at home there are plenty of bathrooms. I did not investigate personally. The Kaiser was out at Potsdam and I did not care to call in his absence. Bathrooms are plentiful at the hotel where we stopped at Berlin. I had rather hoped to find the bedroom equipped with an old-fashioned German feather bed. I had heard that one scaled the side of a German bed on a step ladder and then fell headlong into its smothering folds like a gallant fireman invading a burning rag warehouse. But this hotel happened to be the best hotel that I ever saw outside the United States. It had been built and it was managed on American lines plus German domestic service which made an incomparable combination and it was furnished with modern beds and provided with modern bathrooms. Probably as a delicate compliment to the Kaiser the bath towels were starst until the fringes at the ends bristled up stiffly a curl just like the ends of his imperial majesty's equally imperial mustache. Just once and only once I made the mistake of rubbing myself with one of those towels just as it was. I should have softened it first by a hackling process as we used to hackle the hemp in Kentucky but I did not. For two days I felt like an etching I looked something like one too. In Vienna we could not get a bedroom with a bathroom attached they did not seem to have any but we were told there was a bathroom just across the hall which we might use with the utmost freedom. This bathroom was a large long lofty marble walled vault it was as cold as a tomb and as gloomy as one and very smelly. Indeed it greatly resembled the pictures I have seen of the sepulchre of an Egyptian king only I would have said that this particular king had been skimpily involved by the royal undertakers in the first place and then imperfectly packed. The bathtub was long and marked with scars and it looked exactly like a rifled mummy case with the lid missing which added greatly to the prevalent illusion. We used this bathroom ad-lib but when I went to pay the bill I found an official had been keeping tabs on us and that all baths had been charged up at a rate of sixty cents apiece. I had provided my own soap too. For that matter the traveller provides his own soap everywhere in Europe outside of England. In some part soap is regarded as an edible and in some as a vice into foreigners but everywhere except in the northern countries it is a curio. So in Vienna they made us furnish our own soap and then charged us more for a bath than they did for a meal. Still by their standards I dare say they were right. A meal is a necessity but a bath is an exotic luxury and since they have no extensive tariff laws in Austria it is but fair that the foreigners should pay the tax. Speaking of bathing reminds me of washing and speaking of washing reminds me of an adventure I had in Vienna in connection with a white waistcoat. Or, as we would call it down here where I was raised, a dress vest. This vest had become soiled through travel and wear across Europe. At Vienna I entrusted it to the laundry along with certain other garments. When the bundle came back my vest was among the missing. I was unable to comprehend the brand of German I use in casual conversation so through an interpreter I explained to her that I was shy one white vest. For two days she brought all sorts of vests and submitted them to me on approval. Thin ones and thick ones old ones and new ones slick ones and woolly ones fringed ones and frayed ones. I think the woman had a private vest mine somewhere and went and tapped a fresh vein which was the right vest she brought me. Finally I told her in my best German, meantime accompanying myself with appropriate yet graceful gestures that she need not concern herself further with the affair. She could just let the matter drop and I would interview the manager and put in a claim for the value of the lost garment. She looked at me daisily a moment while I repeated the injunction more painstakingly than before and her standing seemed to break down the barriers of her reason and she said yah yah. Then she nodded emphatically several times smiled and hurried away and in twenty minutes was back bringing with her a begging friar of some monastic order or other. I would take it as a personal favor if some student of the various teutonic tongues and jargons would inform me whether there is any word in Viennese for white vest that sounds like Catholic priest. However, we prayed together that brown brother and I. I do not know what he prayed for but I prayed for my vest. I never got it though. I doubt whether my prayer ever reached heaven it had such a long way to go. It is farther from Vienna to heaven than from any other place in the world I guess, unless it is Paris. That vest is still wandering about the damp filled corridors of that hotel moving in a plaintive manner for its mate, which is myself. It will never find a suitable adopted parent. It was especially co-opered to my form by an expert clothing contractor, and it will not fit anyone else. No, it will wander on and on the starchy bulge of its bosom dimly phosphorescent in the gloaming, its white pearl buttons glimmering spectrally, and after a while the hotel will get the reputation of being haunted by the ghost of a flower barrel, and will have to lose custom. I hope so, anyway. It looks to me my one chance of getting even with the owner for penalizing me in the matter of baths. From Vienna we went southward into the Tyrolese Alps. It was a wonderful ride, that ride through the Semmering and on down to northern Italy. Our absurdly short little locomotive drawing our absurdly long train went boring in and out of a wrinkly shoulder seam like a stubbly needle going through a tuck. I think in thirty miles we threaded thirty tunnels. After that I was practically asphyxiated and lost count. If I ever take that journey again I shall wear a smoke helmet and be comfortable. But always between tunnels there were views to be seen that would have revived one of the seven sleepers. Now on the great grand-daddy long legs of all the spidery trestles that ever were built would go roaring across a mighty gorge, its sides clothed with perpendicular gardens and vineyards, and with little gray towns clustering under the ledges on its sheer walls like mud daubers nests beneath an eave. Now perched on a ridgy outcrop of rock like a single tooth in a snaggled reptilian jaw would be a deserted tower making a fellow think of the good old feudal days when the robber barons robbed the traveler instead when the job is so completely attended to by the pirates who weigh and register baggage in these parts. Then whish roar eclipsed darkness and sulfur-edded hydrogen where you would dive into another tunnel and out again, gasping on a breathtaking panorama of mountains. Some of them would be standing up against the sky like the jagged top of a half-finished cut-out puzzle and some would be buried so deeply in clouds that only their naked blue noses showed sharp above the feather-bed mattresses of mists in which they were snuggled as befitted mountains of teutonic extraction. And nearly every eminence was crowned with a ruined castle or hotel. It was easy to tell a hotel from a ruin, it had a sign over the door. At one of those hotels I met up with a homesick American. He was marooned there in the rain waiting for the skies to clear so and he was beginning to get moldy from the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had become an obsession with me. I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs about the place. He said a bathtub in these altitudes was as rare as a chamois and the chamois was entirely extinct so I might make my own calculations. But he said he could show me something that was even a greater curiosity than the bathtub and he told me to wear a moon-faced barometer hung alongside the front entrance of the hotel. He said he had been there a week now and had about lost hope but every time he threatened to move on the proprietor would take him out there and prove that they were bound to have clearing weather within a few hours because the barometer registered fair. At that moment streams of chilly rainwater were coursing down across the dial of the barometer but it registered fair even then. He said the American did that it was the most stationary barometer he had ever seen and the most reliable not facilitating and given to moods like most barometers but fixed and unchangeable in its habits. I matched it though with a thermometer I saw in the early spring of 1913 at a coast resort in Southern California. An eastern tourist would venture out on the winds swept and drippy veranda of a morning after breakfast. He would think he was cold. He would have many of the outward indications of being cold. His teeth would be chattering like a morse sounder and inside his white duck pants his knees would be knocking together with a low muffled sound. He would be so pricked with goose flesh that he felt like Saint Sebastian but he would take a look at the thermometer sixty-one in the shade and such was the power of mercury and a mind combined over matter that he would immediately jerk up not a hundred yards away at a drugstore was one of those fickle-minded variable thermometers showing a temperature that ranged from fifty-five downward to forty but the hotel thermometer stood firm at sixty-one no matter what happened. In a season of trying climatic conditions it was a great comfort. A boon really not only to its owner but to his guests. Speaking personally however I have no need to consult the barometer's face what the weather is going to do or the thermometer's tube to see what it has done. No person needs to do so who is favored naturally as I am. I have one of the most dependable soft corns in the business. Rome is full of baths, vast ruined ones erected by various emperors and still bearing their names such as carouselous baths and Titus's baths and so on. Evidently the ancient Romans were very fond of taking baths. Other striking dissimilarities between the ancient Romans and the modern Romans are perceptible at a glance. End of Section 8 Section 9 of Europe Revised This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe Revised by Irvin S. Kov Chapter 5 When the 7 a.m. Tuttut leaves for anywhere. Being desirous of tendering sundry hints and observations to such of my fellow countrymen as may contemplate trips abroad I shall, with their kindly permission devote this chapter to setting forth briefly the following principles which apply generally to railroad travel in the old world. First on the continent all trains leave at or about 7 a.m. and reach their final destination at or about 11 p.m. You may be going a long distance or a short one, it makes no difference. You leave at 7 and you arrive at 11. 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 $18.75 for what it cost me over on the other side in registration fees excess charges mental wear and tear, freightage forwarding and warehouse bills tips, bribes, indulgences and acts of verity and piracy I should be able to laugh in the income taxes 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 train-hands of pry 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 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 deluxe 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 use that came into popularity with us at the time of the Philadelphia Centennial. Send or 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. 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 someone'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 toodling 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 shits crowds of person 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 Zorastier Quintus P. Zorastier. 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. End of Section 9 Section 10 of Europe Revised This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb Chapter 6 La Belle France being the first stop Part 1 Except 80 or 90 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 suity 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 sprung 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 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 patented hammock bugged 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 gollic 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 flem and solidity 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 Frank note which I had entrusted to a sandwich vendor 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 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 dancers 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 that shining little silver fish there could have been a more animation and enthusiasm and incitement 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 pointing the wrong way and in these fields were peasants and sabats 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 haystacks wearing tufts on their poles like headdresses the windmills had a rakish air and the scarecrows in the trunk 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 we thought we would be able to get 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 tight little island we had just quit for we had two Englishmen in our compartment fit and proper representatives of a certain breed of Englishmen 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 climb silently but nonetheless 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 on it 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 two best 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 soar and more I imagine he 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 carry-all and a hat box and his tea caddy and his plaid blanket done up in a shawl strap 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 chopped 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 End of Section 10 Section 11 of Europe Revised This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb Chapter 6 La Belle France being the first stop Part 2 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 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 curse whoosh that ever was I reckon he sneezed eight times 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 lease cupors awash it made a ruin of him the prophet Isaiah could not have remained dignified wrestling with a sneeze 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 top most 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 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 nore 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 train shed and then we stepped right into the recreation hall of the state hospital for the criminal insane at Matiawan, 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 something and the lunatics some of them being in uniform and some in civilian dress were leaping from crag to crag uttering maniacal shrieks diverse 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 sakura blueing with them in the 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 people 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 I had cleared our baggage and started for the cab stand 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 we read of being short exchanged and built 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 shop girl wearing her new cheap fetching hat in such a way as to send her 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 eminent peril of their lives while one lighted his cigarette butt from the cigarette butt of his friend a handful of roistering soldiers swinging as they swept six abreast along the wide ready 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 woman lift a baby-laden baby carriage over an awkward spot in the curbing and the working man 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 an astout 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 hair and the East Indian Fekir makes a friend and companion of the King Cobra but it remained for these ingenious people of 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 Frank but in the Lyra 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 Lyra and that nearly everybody in Rome is one also end of section 11