 CHAPTER XXI. All the guides in Rome follow a regular routine with the tourist. First of course they steer you into certain shops in the hope that you will buy something, and thereby enable them to earn commissions. Then in turn they carry you to an art gallery, to a church, and to a palace, with stops at other shops interspersed between, and invariably they wind up in the vicinity of some of the ruins. Ruins is a Roman guide's middle name. Ruins are his one best bet. In Rome I saw ruins until I was one myself. We devoted practically an entire day to ruins. That was the day we drove out the Appian Way, glorious in legend and tale, but not quite so all fired glorious when you are reeling over its rough and rutted pavement in an elderly and indisposed open carriage, behind a pair of half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on walking on their hind legs whenever they tire of going on four. The Appian Way, as at present constituted, is a considerable disappointment. For long stretches it runs between high stone walls, broken at intervals by gateways where votive lamps burn before small shrines, and by the tombs of such illustrious dead as Seneca and the Horeti and the Curiti. At more frequent intervals are small wine grogheries. Being built mainly of Italian marble, which is the most enduring and the most unyielding substance to be found in all Italy, except a linen collar that has been starched in an Italian laundry, the tombs are in a pretty fair state of preservation, but the ends without exceptions stand almost desperately in need of immediate repairing. A cow in Italy is known by the company she keeps. She rambles about, in and out of the open parlor of the wayside inn, mingling freely with the patrons and the members of the proprietor's household. Along the Appian Way a cow never seems to care whom she runs with, and the same is true of the domestic fowls and the family donkey. A donkey will spend his day in the doorway of a wine-shop when he might just as well be enjoying the more sanitary and less crowded surroundings of a stable. It only goes to show what an ass a donkey is. A naan, as the fancy writers say, we skirted one of the many wrecked aqueducts that go looping across the country to the distant hills, like great stone straddle-bugs. In the vicinity of Rome you are rarely out of sight of one of those aqueducts. The ancient Roman rulers, you know, curried the favor of the populace by opening baths. A modern ruler could win undying popularity by closing up a few. We slowed up at the Circus of Romulus and found it a very sad circus. As such things go. No elevated stage, no hippodrome track, no center pole, no trapeze, and only one ring. P. T. Barnum would have been ashamed to own it. A broken wall, following the lines of an irregular oval, a cabbage patch where the arena had been, and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry, this was the circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would never have stood for that circus a minute. No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an hour stop at the catacombs of St. Calyxtus. So we stopped. Guided by a brown trappist and all of us bearing twisted tapers in our hands, we descended by stone steps deep under the skin of the earth and wandered through dim, dank, underground passages, where thousands of early Christians had lived and hid and held clandestine worship before rude stone altars, and had died and been buried, died in a highly unpleasant fashion some of them. The experience was impressive but malarial. Coming away from there I had an argument with a fellow American. He said that if we had these catacombs in America we should undoubtedly enlarge them and put in bandstands and lunchplaces and altogether make them more attractive for picnic parties and Sunday excursionists. I contended on the other hand that if they were in America the authorities would close them up and protect the moldered bones of these early Christians from the vulgar gaze and prying fingers of every impious relic hunter who might come along. The dispute rose higher and grew warmer until I offered to bet him fifty dollars that I was right and he was wrong. He took me up promptly. He had sporting instincts, I'll say that for him, and we shook hands on it, then and there, to bind the wager. I expect to win that bet. We had turned off the Appian Way and were crossing a corner of that unutterably hideous stretch of tortured and distorted waste, known as the Campania, which goes tumbling away to the blue Albin Mountains when we came out on the scene of an accident. A two-wheeled mule cart proceeding along a cross-road when the driver asleep in his canopied seat had been hit by a speeding automobile and knocked galley west. The automobile had sped on, so we were excitedly informed by some of the other tourists who had witnessed the collision, leaving the wreckage bottom side up in the ditch. The mule was on her back, all entangled in the twisted ruination of her gaudy gear, kicking out in that restrained and genteel fashion in which a mule always kits when she is desirous of protesting against existing conditions, but is wishful not to damage herself while so doing. The tourists, aided by half a dozen peasants, had dragged the driver out from beneath the heavy cart and had carried him to a pile of mucky straw beneath the eaves of a stable. He was stretched full length on his back, senseless and deathly pale under the smeared grime on his face. There was no blood, but inside his torn shirt his chest had a caved-in look, as though the ribs had been crushed flat, and he seemed not to breathe at all. Only his fingers moved. They kept twitching as though his life was running out of him through his finger ends. One felt that if he would just but grip his hands he might stay its flight and hold it in. Just as we jumped out of our carriage a young peasant woman who had been bending over the injured man set up a shrill outcry, which was instantly answered from behind us, and looking round we saw, running through the bare fields, a great, bulksome old woman with her arms outspread and her face set in a tragic shape, shrieking as she sped toward us in her ungainly, wallowing course. She was the injured man's mother, we judged, or possibly his grandmother. There was nothing we could do for the human victim. Our guides, having questioned the assembled natives, told us there was no hospital to which he might be taken, and that a neighborhood physician had already been sent for. So having no desire to look on the grief of his mother, if she was his mother, a young Austrian deny turned our attention to the neglected mule. We felt that we could at least render a little first aid there. We had our pocket knives out and were slashing away at the twisted maze of ropes and straps that bound the brute down between the shafts, when a particularly shrill chorus of shrieks checked us. We stood up and faced about, figuring that the poor devil on the muck heap had died, and that his people were bemoaning his death. That was not it at all. The entire group, including the fat old woman, were screaming at us and shaking their clenched fists at us, warning us not to damage that harness with our knives, feeling ran high and threatened to run higher. So having no desire to be mobbed on the spot, we desisted and put up our knives, and after a while we got back into our carriage and drove on, leaving the capsized mule still belly up in the debris, lashing out carefully with her skinned legs at the trappings that bound her, and the driver was still prone on the dung hill, with his fingers twitching more feebly now as though the life had almost entirely fled out of him, a grim little tragedy set in the edge of a wide and aching desolation. We never found out his name or learned how he fared, whether he lived or died, and if he died how long he lived before he died. It is a puzzle which will always lie unanswered at the back of my mind, and I know that in odd moments it will return to torment me. I will bet one thing, though, nobody else tried to cut that mule out of her harness. In the chill late afternoon of a Roman day the guides brought us back to the city and took us down into the Roman Forum, which is in a hollow instead of being up on a hill, as most folks imagine it, to be until they go to Rome and see it. And we finished up the day at the Golden House of Nero, hard by the vast ruins of the Coliseum. We had already visited the Forum once, so this time we did not stay long, just long enough for some ambitious pickpocket to get a wallet out of my hip pocket, while I was pushing forward with a flock of other human sheep for a better look at the ruined portico, wherein Mark Antony stood when he delivered his justly popular funeral oration over the body of the murdered Caesar. I never did admire the character of Mark Antony with any degree of extravagance, and since this experience I have felt actually bitter toward him. The guidebooks say that no visitor to Rome should miss seeing the Golden House of Nero. When a guidebook tries to be humorous it only succeeds in being foolish. Practical jokes are out of place in a guidebook, anyway. Imagine a large, old-fashioned brick smoke-house which has been struck by lightning, burned to the roots and buried in the wreckage, and the site used as a pasture-land for goats for great many years. Imagine the debris as having been dug out subsequently until a few of the foundation lines are visible, surround the hole with distressingly homely buildings of a modern aspect, and stir in a miscellaneous seasoning of beggars and loafers and souvenir vendors, and you have the Golden House where Nero meant to round out a life already replete with incident and abounding in romance, but was deterred from so doing by reason of being cut down in the midst of his activities at a comparatively early age. In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best to recruit before my mind's eye the scenes that had been enacted here once on a time. I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall as a great glittering palace and yonder broken roadbed as a splendid Roman highway, and these American-looking tenements on the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors, and all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as arches of triumph and temples of the gods. I tried to convert the clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained at wrist and neck and ankle, I sought to imagine that pestersome flower-vendors as being vestal virgins, the two unkempt policemen who loafed nearby as centurions of the guard, the passing populace as grave senators in snowy togas, the flaunting underwear on the many clothes-lines as silken banners and gilded trappings. I could not make it. I tried until I was lame in both legs and my back was strained. It was a no-go. If I had been a poet or historian, or a person full of Chianti, I presume I might have done it, but I am no poet and I had not been drinking. All I could think of was that the guide on my left had eaten too much garlic and that the guide on my right had not eaten enough. So in self-defense I went away and ate a few strands of garlic myself, for I had learned the great lesson of the proverb, When in Rome be an aroma. CHAPTER XXII. When I reached Pompeii the situation was different. I could conjure up an illusion there, the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been privileged to harbor since I was a small boy. It was worth spending four days in Naples for the sake of spending half a day in Pompeii, and if you know Naples you will readily understand what a high compliment that is for Pompeii. To reach Pompeii from Naples we followed a somewhat roundabout route, and that trip was distinctly worthwhile too. It provided a most pleasing foretaste of what was to come. Once we had cleared the packed and festering suburbs, we went flanking across a terminal vertebrae of the mountain range that sprawls lengthwise of the land of Italy, like a great, spiny-backed crocodile sunning itself, with its tail in the Tyronian Sea and its snout in the Piedmonts, and when we had done this we came out on a highway that skirted the bay. There were gaps in the hills, through which we caught glimpses of the city, lying miles away in its natural amphitheater, and at that distance we could revel in its picturesqueness and forget its bouquet of weird stenches. We could even forget that the automobile we had hired for the excursion had one foot in the grave and several of its most important vital organs in the repair shop. I reckon that was the first automobile built. No, I take that back. It never was a first. It must have been a second to start with. I once owned a half-interest in a sick automobile. It was one of those old-fashioned, late Victorian automobiles cut princess-style with a placket in the back, and it looked like a cross between a Fiat-bed job-press and a tailor's goose. It broke down so easily and was towed in so often by more powerful machines that every time a big car passed it on the road it stopped right where it was and nickered. Of a morning we would start out in that car filled with high hopes and bright anticipations, but even tide would find us returning homeward close behind a bigger automobile, in a relationship strongly suggestive of the one pictured in the well-known nature group entitled Mother Hippo with Young. We refused an offer of $400 for that machine. It had more than $400 worth of things that matter with it. The car we chartered at Naples for our trip to Pompeii reminded me very strongly of that other car of which I was part owner. Between them there was a strong family resemblance, not alone in looks but in deportment also. For patient endurance of manifold ills, for an inexhaustible capacity in developing new and distressing symptoms at critical moments, for cheerful willingness to play full to some other car's dam, they might have been cults out of the same litter. Nevertheless between intervals of breaking down and starting up again and being helped along by friendly passer-by automobiles, we enjoyed the ride from Naples. We enjoyed every inch of it. Part of the way we skirted the hops of the great witches Caldron of Vesuvius. On this day the resident demons must have been stirring their brew with special enthusiasm, for the smoky smudge which always wreathes its lips had increased to a great billowy plume that lay along the naked flanges of the Devil Mountain for miles and miles. Now we would go puffing and panting through some small outlying environs of the city. Always the principal products of such a village seemed to be young babies and macaroni drying in the sun. I am still reasonably fond of babies, but I date my loss of appetite for imported macaroni from that hour. Now we would emerge on a rocky headland and below us would be the sea, eternally young and dimpling like a maiden's cheek, but the crags above were eternally old and all gashed with wrinkles and seemed with folds like the jowls of an ancient squaw. Then for a distance we would run right along the face of the cliff. Directly beneath us we could see little stone huts of fishermen clinging to the rocks just above the high water marks, like so many gray limpets, and then looking up we would catch a glimpse of the vineyards, tucked into man-made terraces along the upper cliffs, like bundled herbs on the pantry shelves of a thrifty housewife, and still higher up there would be orange groves and lemon groves and dusty gray olive groves. Each succeeding picture was Byzantine in its coloring. Always the sea was molten blue enamel, and the faraway villages seemed crafty inlays of mosaic work, and the sun was a disc of hammered Grecian gold. A man from San Francisco was sharing the car with us, and he came right out and said that if he were sure heaven would be as beautiful as the Bay of Naples he would change all his plans and arrange to go there. He said he might decide to go there anyhow, because heaven was a place he had always heard very highly spoken of, and I agreed with him. The sun was slipping down the western sky and was laced with red like a bloodshot eye, with a Jacobs ladder of rainbow shaft streaming down from it to the water when we turned inland, and after several minor stops while the automobile caught its breath and had the heaves and the asthma, we came to Pompey over a road built of volcanic rock. I have always been glad that we went there on a day when visitors were few. The very solitude of the place aided the mind and the task of repealing the empty streets of that dead city by the sea with the life that was hers nearly two thousand years ago. Herculaneum will always be buried, so the scientists say, for Herculaneum was snuggled close up under Vesuvius, and the hissing hot lava came down in waves, and first it slugged the doomed town to death, and then it slagged it over with imprenetrable, flint-hard deposits. Pompey, though, lay further away, and was entombed in dust and ashes only, so that it has been comparatively easy to unearth and make it whole again. Even so, after one hundred and sixty-odd years of more or less dulcetory explorations, nearly a third of its supposed area is yet to be excavated. It was in the year 1592 that an architect named Fontana, in cutting an aqueduct which was to convey the waters of the Sarno to Torre del Anziata, discovered the foundations of the Temple of Isis, which stood near the walls on the inner or land side of the ancient city. It was at first supposed that he had dug into an isolated villa of some rich Roman, and it was not until 1748 that prying archaeologists hid on the truth and induced the government to send a chain gang of convicts to dig away the accumulations of earth and tufa. But if it had been a modern Italian city that was buried, no such mistake in preliminary diagnosis could have occurred. Anybody would have known it instantly by the smell. I do not vouch for the dates. I copied them out of the guidebook, but my experience with Italian cities qualifies me to speak with authority regarding the other matter. A foot we entered Pompey by the restored Marine gate. Our first stop within the walls was at the museum, a comparatively modern building, but containing a fairly complete assortment of the relics that from time to time have been disinterred in various quarters of the city. Here are wall cabinets filled with tools, ornaments, utensils, jewelry, furniture, all the small things that fulfilled everyday functions in the first century of the Christian era. Here is a kit of surgical implements, and some of the implements might well belong to a modern hospital. There are foodstuffs, grains and fruits, wines and oil, loaves of bread baked in seventy-nine A.D. and left in the abandoned ovens, and a cheese that is still in a fair state of preservation. It had been buried seventeen hundred years when they found it, and if only it had been permitted to remain buried a few years longer it would have been sufficiently ripe to satisfy a Bavarian, I think. Armor exhibits are displayed in cases stretched along the center of the main hall. Models of dead bodies discovered in the ruins, and perfectly restored by pouring a bronze composition into the molds that were left in the hardened pumice after the flesh of these victims had turned into dust, and their bones had crumbled to powder. Huddled together are the forms of a mother and a babe, and you see how with her last conscious thought the mother tried to cover her baby's face from the killing rain of dust and blistering ashes. And there is the shape of a man who wrapped his face in a veil to keep out the fumes, and died so. The veil is there, reproduced with a fidelity no sculptor could duplicate, and through its folds you may behold the agony that made his jaw to sag and his eyes to pop from their sockets. Nearby is a dog, which in its last spasms of pain and fright curled up worm fashion and buried its nose in its forepaws and kicked out with its crooked hind legs. Plainly dogs do not change their emotional natures with the passage of years. A dog died in Pompeii in 79 A.D., after exactly the same fashion that a dog might die today in the pound at Pittsburgh. End of section 45 Section 46 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 22 Still More Ruins, Mostly Italian Ones, Part II From here we went on into the city proper, and it was a whole city, set off by itself and not surrounded by those jarring modern incongruities that spoil the ruins of Rome for the person who wishes to give his fancy a slack rain. It is all here, looking much as it must have looked when Nero and Caligula rained, and much as it will still look hundreds of years hence, for the government owns it now and guards it and protects it from the hammer of the vandal and the greed of the casual collector. Here it is, all of it, the tragic theater and the comic theater, the basilica, the greater forum and the lesser one, the marketplace, the amphitheater for the games, the training school for the gladiators, the temples, the baths, the villas of the rich, the huts of the poor, the cubicles of the slaves, shops, offices, work rooms, brothels. The roofs are gone, except in a few instances where they have been restored, but the walls stand and many of the detached pillars stand too, and the pavements have endured well, so that the streets remain almost exactly as they were when this was a city of live beings instead of a tomb of dead memories, with deep groovings of chariot wheels in the flaggings, and at each crossing there are stepping stones, dotting the roadbed like punctuation marks. At the public fountain the well curbs are worn away where the women rested their water jugs while they swapped the gossip of the town, and at nearly every corner is a groggery, which in its appointments and fixtures is so amazingly like unto a family liquor store as we know it, that venturing into one I caught myself looking about for the business bed and slunch, with a collection of greasy foods and a glass receptacle, a crock of pretzels in the corner, and a sign over the bar reading, no checks cashed, this means you. In the floors the mosaics are as fresh as though newly applied, and the ribald and libelous Latin, which disappointed litigants carved on the stones at the back of the law court, looks as though it might have been scored there last week, certainly not further back than the week before that. A great many of the wall paintings in the interiors of rich men's homes have been preserved, and some of them are fairly spicy as to subject and text. It would seem that in these matters the ancient Pompeians were pretty nearly as broad-minded and liberal as the modern Parisians are. The mural decorations I saw in certain villas were almost suggestive enough to be acceptable matter for publication in a French comic paper, almost but not quite. Mr. Anthony Comstock would be an unhappy man where he turned to loosen Pompey, unhappy for a spell, but after that exceedingly busy. We lingered on, looking and marveling, and between wiles wondering whether our automobile's hacking cough had got any better by resting until the sun went down and the twilight came. Following the guidebook's advice we had seen the Colosseum in Rome by moonlight. There was a full moon on the night we went there. It came heaving up grandly, a great, round-faced, full-cream, curdy moon, rich with rennet and yellow with the butter-fats. But by the time we had worked our way south to Naples a greedy fortnight had bitten it quite away, until it was reduced to a mere cheese-rind of a moon, set up on end against the delft blue platter of a perfect sky. We waited until it showed its thin rim in the heavens, and then, in the softened half-glow, with the purplish shadows deepening between the gray-brown walls of the dead city, I just naturally turned to my imagination loose and letter-sore. Standing there with the stage set and the light effects just right, in fancy I repopulated Pompey. I beheld it just as it was on a fair autumnal morning in seventy-nine A.D. With my eyes half-closed I can see the vision now. At first the crowds are masked and mingled in confusion, but soon figures detach themselves from the rest and reveal themselves as prominent personages. Some of them I know at a glance. Yawn tall, imposing man, with the genuine imitation seal-skin collar on his toga, who strides along so majestically, whisking his cane against his leg, can be no other than gum traficanth, leading man of the Bon-Ton stock-company, fresh from his metropolitan triumphs in Rome and, at this moment, the reigning matinee idol of the south. This week he is playing Claude Melnott in the Lady of Lyon. Next week he will be seen in his celebrated characterization of Matthias in the Bells, with special scenery, and for the regular Wednesday and Saturday bargain matinees Lady Audley's secret will be given. Observe him closely. It is evident that he values his art. Yet about him there is no false ostentation. With what gracious condescension does he acknowledge the half-timid, half-daring smiles of the little caramel-chewing floras and faunas who have made it a point to be on Main Street at this hour? With what careless grace does he doff his laurel wreath, which is of the latest and most modest fall block, with the bow at the back, in response to the waved greeting of Mrs. Belladonna Capcissum, the acknowledged leader of the artistic bohemian set, as she sweeps by in her chariot bound for Bloomberg Brothers to do a little shopping. She is not going to buy anything. She is merely out shopping. Then this fair, patrician dame, none is more prominent in the gay life of Pompeii. It was she who last season smoked a cigarette in public, and there is a report now that she is seriously considering wearing an ankle bracelet. With all she is a perfect lady and belongs to one of the old southern families. Her husband has been through the bankruptcy courts twice and is thinking of going through again. At present he is engaged in promoting and writing a little life insurance on the side. Now her equipage is lost in the throng and the great actor continues on his way, making a mental note of the fact that he has promised to attend her next Sunday afternoon's studio tea. Near his own stage door he bumps into Commodius Rotunda, the stout comedian of the comic theater, and they pause to swap the latest Lambs Club repartee. This done, Commodius hulls out a press clipping and would read it, but the other remembers providentially that he has a rehearsal, on, and hurriedly departs. If there are any press clippings to be read, he has a few of his own that will bear inspection. Major Maxillary, managing editor of the Pompeii and Daily News Courier, is also abroad, collecting items of interest and subscriptions for his paper, with a preference given to the latter. He enters the last-chance saloon down at the foot of the street and in a minute or two is out again, wiping his moustache on the back of his hand. We may safely opine that he has been taking a small ad out in trade. At the door of the county courthouse, where he may intercept the taxpayers as they come and go, is stationed our old friend, Colonel Probono Publico. The Colonel has been running for something or other ever since heck was a pup. Today he is wearing his official campaign smile, for he is a candidate for county judge, subject to the action of the Republican Party at the October primaries. He is wearing all his lodge buttons and likewise his G.A.R. pin. For this year he figures on carrying the old soldier vote. See who comes now! It is rigor mortis the worthy coroner. At side of him the Colonel uplifts his voice in hoarsely jovial salutation. Rigsy, my boy, he booms. How are you? And how is Mrs. M. this morning? Well, Colonel, answers his friend, my wife ain't no better. She's mighty puny in complaining. Sometimes I get to wishing the old lady would get well or something. The Colonel laughs but not loudly. That wheeze was old in seventy-nine. In front of the drugstore on the corner a score of young bloods, dressed in snappy togas for varsity men, are skylarking. They are especially brilliant in their flashing interchanges of wit and humor, because the mastodon minstrels were here only last week, with a new line of first-part jokes. Along the opposite side of the street passes Nuxvomica, M.D., with a small black case in his hand, gravely intent on his professional duties. Being a young physician he wears a beard and large rimmed eyeglasses. Young, osseous dome sees him and hails him. O doc, he calls out, come over here a minute. I've got some brand new limerickie for you. Tertiary tonsillitis got him from a traveling man he met day before yesterday when he was up in the city laying in his stock of fall and winter armor. The healer of ills crosses over, and as the group pushed themselves in toward a common center I hear the voice of the speaker. Say, they're all bully, but this is the bullissimus one of the lot. It goes like this. There was a young maid of Sorento who said to her—I have regretted ever since—that at this juncture I came to, and so failed to get the rest of it. I'll bet that was a peach of a limerick. It started off so promisingly. It now devolves on me as a painful yet necessary duty to topple from its pedestal one of the most popular idols of legendary lore. I refer, I regret to say, to the widely famous Roman sentry of old Pompeii. Personally, I think there has been entirely too much of this sort of thing going on lately. Muckrakers, prying into the storied past, have destroyed, one after another, many of the pet characters in history. Thanks to their meddlesome activities we know that Paul Revere did not take any midnight ride. On the night in question he was laid up in bed with inflammatory rheumatism. What happened was that he told the news to Mrs. Revere as a secret, and she in strict confidence imparted it to the lady living next door, and from that point on the word traveled with the rapidity of wildfire. Horatius never held the bridge. He just let the blamed thing go. The boy did not stand on the burning deck, whence all but him had fled. He was among the first in the lifeboats. That other boy, the Spartan youth, did not have his vitals nod by a fox. The Spartan youth had been eating wild grapes and washing them down with spring water. Hence that gnawing sensation of which so much mention has been made. Nobody hit Billy Patterson. He acquired his black eye in the same way in which all married men acquire a black eye, by running against a door-jam while trying to find the ice-water pitcher in the dark. He said so himself the next day. Even Barbara Fretche is an exploded myth. She did not nail her country's flag to the window casement. Being a female, she could not nail a flag or anything else to a window. In the first place she would have used a wad of chewing gum and a couple of hairpins. In the second place, had she recklessly undertaken to nail up a flag with hammer and nails, she would never have been on hand at the psychological moment to invite Stonewall Jackson to shoot her old gray head. When General Jackson passed the house, she would have been in the bathroom bathing her left thumb in witch hazel. Furthermore, she did not have an old gray head. At the time of the Confederate invasion of Maryland she was only seventeen years old. Some authorities say only seven, and a pronounced blonde. Also she did not live in Frederick, and even if she did live there, on the occasion when the troops went through she was in Baltimore visiting a school friend. Finally, Frederick does not stand where it stood in the sixties. The cyclone of 1884 moved it three miles back into the country and twisted the streets round in such a manner as to confuse even lifelong residents. These facts have been repeatedly proved by volunteer investigators and are not to be gained, Said. I repeat that there has been too much of this. If the craze for smashing all our romantic fixtures persists, after a while we shall have no glorious traditions left with which to fire the youthful heart at high school commencements. But in the interest of truth, and also because I made the discovery myself, I feel it to be my solemn duty to expose the Roman sentry, stationed at the gate of Pompeii looking toward the sea, who died because he would not quit his post without orders, and had no orders to quit. Until now this party has stood the acid test of centuries. Everybody who ever wrote about the fall of Pompeii from Plutarch and Pliny the Younger, clear down to Bulwer-Lytton and Burton Holmes, had something to say about him. The lines on this subject by the Greek poet Laryngitis are familiar to all lovers of that great master of classic verse, and I shall not undertake to quote from them here. Suffice it to say that the Roman sentry, perishing at his post, has ever been a favorite subject for historic and romantic writers. I myself often read of him, how on that dread day when the devil's stew came to a boil, and spewed over the sides of Vesuvius, and death and destruction poured down to blight the land, he, typifying fortitude and discipline and unfaltering devotion, stood firm and stayed fast while all about him chaos reigned, and fathers forgot their children, and husbands forgot their wives and vice versa, though probably not to the same extent, and how finally the drifting ashes and the choking dust fell thicker upon him and mounted higher about him until he died and in time turned to ashes himself, leaving only a void in the solidified slag. I had always admired that soldier, not his judgment which was faulty, but his heroism which was immense. To myself I used to say, that unknown common soldier, nameless though he was, deserves to live forever in the memory of mankind. He lacked imagination, it is true, but he was game. It was a glorious death to die, painful, yet splendid. Those four poor wretches whose shells were found in the prison under the gladiator's school, with their ankles fast in the iron stalks, I know why they stayed. Their feet were too large for their own good. But no bonds except his dauntless will bound him at the portals of the doomed city. He was the only chain that held him. And to think that centuries and centuries afterward they should find his monument, a vacant, empty mold in the piled-up pumice. Had I been in his place I should have created my vacancy much sooner, say about thirty seconds after the first alarm went in. But he was one who chose, rather, that men should say how natural he looks, then yonder he goes. And he has my sincere admiration. When I go to Pompeii, if I ever do go there, I shall seek out the spot where he made the supremous sacrifice to authority that ever any man could make, and I shall tarry a while in those hallowed precincts. That was what I said I would do, and that was what I did do that afternoon at Pompeii. I found the gate looking toward the sea, and found all the other gates, or the sights of them, but I did not find the Roman sentry nor any trace of him, nor any authentic record of him. I questioned the guides and, through an interpreter, the curator of the museum, and from them I learned the lamentably disillusioning facts in this case. There is no trace of him, because he neglected to leave any trace. Doubtless there was a sentry on guard at the gate when the volcano belched forth, and the skin of the earth flinched and shivered and split asunder, but he did not remain for the finish. He said to himself that this was no place for a minister's son, and so he girded up his loins, and he went away from there. He went away hurriedly, even as you and I. My Known People Part One Wherever we went I was constantly on the lookout for a kind of tourist who had been described to me frequently and at great length by more seasoned travelers, the kind who wore his country's flag as a buttonhole emblem or as a shirt front decoration and regarded every gathering in every halting-place as providing suitable opportunity to state for the benefit of all who might be concerned how immensely and overpoweringly superior in all particulars was the land from which he hailed, as compared with all other lands under the sun. I desired most earnestly to overhaul a typical example of this species, my intention then being to decoy him off to some quiet and secluded spot, and there destroy him in the hope of cutting down the breed. At length along toward the fag end of our zigzagging course I caught up with him, but stayed my hand and slew not. For some countries, you understand, are so finicky in the matter of protecting their citizens that they would protect even such a one as this. I was fearful, lest, by exterminating the object of my homicidal desires I should bring on international complications with a friendly power. No matter, however, public-spirited and high-minded my intentions might be. It was in Vienna, in a cafe, and the hour was late. We were just leaving after having listened for some hours to a Hungarian band playing waltz tunes and an assemblage of natives drinking beer, when the sounds of a dispute at the booth where raps were checked turned our faces in that direction. In a thick and plushy voice, a short, square person of a highly vulgar aspect was arguing with the young woman who had chards of the check room. Judging by his tones you would have said that the nap of his tongue was at least a quarter of an inch long, and he punctuated his remarks with hiccups. It seemed that his excitement had to do with the disappearance of a neck muffler. From the argument he progressed rapidly to threats and the pounding of a fist upon the counter. Drawing nigh I observed that he wore a very high hat and a very short sack-coat, that his waistcoat was of a combustible plaid pattern with gators to match, that he had taken his fingers many times to the jeweler, but not once to the manicure, that he was beautifully jingled and alcoholically boastful of his native land, and that, a crowning touch, he wore flaring from an upper pocket of his coat a silk handkerchief woven in the design and colors of his country's flag. But praises be it was not our flag that he wore thus. It was the Union Jack. As we passed out into the damp Viennese midnight he was loudly proclaiming that he wash British subjet, and that unless something was done mighty quick would complain to Ismash's rep-centive verse thing in the morning. So though I was sorry he was a cousin, I was selfishly and unfainedly glad that he was not a brother. Since the mysterious and unfathomable scheme of creation it seemed necessary that he should be born somewhere. Still he had not been born in America, and that thought was very pleasing to me. There was another variety of the tourist breed whose trail I most earnestly desired to cross. I refer to the creature who must be closely watched to prevent him or her from carrying off valuable relics as souvenirs, and to facing monuments and statues, and disfiguring holy places with an inconsequential signature. In the flesh, and such a person must be all flesh and no soul, I never caught up with him, but more than once I came upon his fresh spore. In Venice our guide took us to see the nether-prisons of the palace of the doges. From the level of the bridge of size we tramped down flights of stone stairs, one flight after another, until we had passed the hole through which the bodies of state prisoners, secretly killed at night, were shoved out into waiting gondolas, and had passed also the room where pinchers and thumbscrew once did their hideous work, until we came to a cellar of innermost, deeper most cells, fashioned out of the solid rock and stretching along a corridor that was almost as dark as the cells themselves. Here so we were told countless wretched beings, awaiting the tardy pleasure of the torturer of the headsmen, had moldered in damp and filth and pitchy blackness, knowing day from night only by the fact that once in twenty-four hours food would be slipped through a hole in the wall by unseen hands, lying here until oftentimes death or the cruel mercy of madness came upon them before the overworked executioner found time to rack their limbs or lop off their heads. We were told that two of these cells had been preserved exactly as they were in the days of the doges, with no alterations except that lights had been swung from the ceilings. We could well accept this statement as the truth, for when the guide led us through a low doorway and flashed on an electric bulb, we saw that the place where we stood was round like a jug and bare as an empty jug, with smooth stone walls and rough stone floor, and that it contained for furniture just two things, a stone bench upon which the captive might lie or sit, and, led into the wall, a great iron ring, to which his chains were made fast so that he moved always to their grading accompaniment, and the guard listening outside might know by the tell-tale clanking whether the entombed man still lived. There was one other decoration in this hole, a thing more incongruous than even the modern lighting fixtures, and this stood out in bold black lettering upon the low-sloped ceiling. A pair of vandals, a man and wife, no doubt with infinite pains, had smuggled in brush and marking-pot, and somehow or other, I suspect by bribing guides and guards, had found the coveted opportunity of inscribing their names here in the doge's black dungeon. With their names they had written their address, too, which was a small town in the northwest, and after it the legend, send us a postal card. I imagine that then this couple, having accomplished this feat, regarded their trip to Europe as being rounded out and complete, and went home again satisfied and rejoicing. Send them a postal card! We should send them a deep-dish poison pie. Looking on this desecration, my companion and I grew vocal. We agreed that our national law-givers, who were even then framing an immigration law with a view to keeping certain people out of this country, might be better engaged in framing one with a view to keeping certain people in. Our guide harkened with a quiet little smile on his face to what we said. It cannot have been here long, that riding on the ceiling, he explained for our benefit. Presently it will be scraped away, but, and he shrugged his eloquent Italian shoulders and outspread his hand's fan-fashion, but what is the use? Others like them will come and do as they have done. See here and here and here, if you please. He aimed a darting forefinger this way and that, and looking where he pointed we saw now how the walls were scarred with the scribbled names of many visitors. I regret exceedingly to have to report that a majority of these names had an American sound to them. Indeed many of the signatures were coupled with the names of towns and states of the Union. There were quite a few from Canada, too. What I ask you is the wisdom of taking steps to discourage the cutworm and abate the gypsy moth when our government permits these two-legged varmints to go abroad freely and pollute shrines and wonder-places with their scratchings and give the nations over there a perverted notion of what real human beings on this continent are like. For the tourist who has wearied of picture galleries and battlegrounds and ruins and abbeys, studying other tourists provides a pleasant way of passing many an otherwise tedious hour. Certain of the European countries furnished some interesting types, notably Britain, which producing a male biped of a lacrimose and cheerless exterior, who plods solemnly across the continent, wrapped in the plaid mantle of his own dignity, never speaking an unnecessary word to any person whatsoever. And Germany. From Germany comes a stolid gentleman, who usually is shaped like a pickle mounted on legs, and is so extensively and convexedly eyeglast as to give him the appearance of something that is about to be served sooth-cloche. Comparisoned in strange garments he stalks through France or Italy with an umbrella under his arm, his nose being buried so deeply in his guidebook that he has no time to waste upon the scenery or the people. While some ten paces in the rear his wife staggers along in his wake with her skirts dragging in the dust, and her arms pulled half out of their sockets by the weight of the heavy bundles and bags she is bearing. This person, when traveling, always takes his wife and much baggage with him, or rather he takes his wife and she takes the baggage, which by continental standards is regarded as an equal division of burdens. However, for variety and individual peculiarity our own land offers the largest assortment in the tourist line, this perhaps being due to the fact that Americans do more traveling than any other race. I think that in our ramblings we must have encountered pretty nearly all the known species of tourists, ranging from sane and sensible persons, who had come to Europe to see and to learn and to study, clear on down through various ramifications to those who had left their homes and firesides to be uncomfortable and unhappy in fair lands merely because somebody told them they ought to travel abroad. They were in Europe for the reason that so many people run to a fire, not because they care particularly for a fire, but because so many others are running to it. I would, that I had the time, and you, kind reader, the patient, so that I might enumerate and describe in full detail all the varieties and sub-varieties of our race that we saw. The pert, overfed, over-pampered children, the aggressive, self-sufficient, prematurely bored young girls, the money-fattened, boastful Vargarians, scattering coin by the handful, intent only on making a show and not realizing that they themselves were the show. The cultish, pimply youths who thought in order to be high-spirited, they must also be impolite and noisy. Youth will be served, but why, I ask you, why must it so often be served raw? For contrast to such as these we met plenty of people worth meeting and worth knowing, fine, attractive, well-bred American men and women, having a decent regard for themselves and for other folks too. Indeed, this sort largely predominated. But there isn't space for making a classified list. The one-volume chronicler must content himself with picking at a few particularly striking types. I remember with vivid distinctness two individuals, one an elderly gentleman from somewhere in the Middle West and the other an old lady who plainly hailed from the South. We met the old gentleman in Paris and the lady some weeks later in Naples. Though the weather was moderately warm in Paris that week, he wore red woolen wristlets down over his hands, and he wore also celluloid cuffs, which rattled musically, with very large moss-aggot buttons in them, and for ornamentation his watch-chain bore a flat watch key, a secret order badge big enough to serve as a hitching weight, and a peach-stone carved to look like a fruit-basket. Everything about him suggested health underwear, chewing tobacco, and fried mush for breakfast. His whiskers were cut after a pattern I had not seen in years and years. In my mind such whiskers were associated with those happy and long-distant days of childhood, when we yelled soup at a stage-hand and cherished Old Cap Collier as a model of what, if we had any luck, we would be when we grow up. By rights he belonged in the second act of a rural Indian play, of a generation or two ago, but here he was, wandering disconsolently through the Louvre. He had come over to spend four months, he told us, with a heave of the breath, and he still had two months of it unspent, and he just didn't see how he was going to live through it. CHAPTER XXIV. The old lady was in the great national museum at Naples, fluttering about like a distracted little brown hen. She was looking for the Farnese Bull. It seemed that her niece in Knoxville had told her the Farnese Bull was the finest thing in the statutory line to be found in all Italy, and until she had seen that she wasn't going to see anything else. She had got herself separated from the rest of her party and she was wandering about alone, seeking information regarding the whereabouts of the Farnese Bull from smiling but uncomprehending custodians and doorkeepers. These persons she would address at the top of her voice. Plainly she suffered from a delusion, which is very common among our people, that if a foreigner does not understand you when addressed in an ordinary tone, he will surely get your meaning if you screech at him. When we had gone some distance farther on and were in another gallery, we could still catch the calliope-like notes of the little old lady as she besought some one to lead her to the Farnese Bull. But she came right out and spoke of the Farnese Bull as a bull, instead of referring to him as a gentleman cow, was evidence of the extent to which travel had enlarged her vision. For with half an eye any one could tell that she belonged to the period of our social development when certain honest and innocent words were supposed to be indelicate. That she had been reared in a society whose ideal of a perfect lady was one who could say limb without thinking leg. I hope she found her bull, but I imagine she was disappointed when she did find it. I know I was. The sculpturing may be of a very high order. The authorities agree that it is. But I judged the two artists to whom the group is attributed carved the bull last and ran out of material and so skimped him a bit. The unfortunate derse, who was about to be bound to his horns by the sons of Entiope, the latter standing by to see that the boys make a good, thorough job of it, is larger really than the bull. You can picture the lady carrying off the bull, but not the bull carrying off the lady. Numerously encountered are the tourists who are doing Europe under a time limit as exact as the schedule of a limited train. They go through Europe on the dead run, being intent on seeing it all and therefore seeing none of it. They cover ten countries in a space of time which a sane person gives to one, after which they return home exhausted but triumphant. I think it must be months before some of them quit panting, and certainly their poor, misused feet can never again be the feet they were. With them adherence to the time card is everything. If a look at the calendar shows the day to be Monday, they know they are in Munich, and as they lope along they get out their guidebooks and study the chapters devoted to Munich. But if it be Tuesday then it is Dresden, and they give their attention to literature dealing with the attractions of Dresden, seeing Dresden after the fashion of one sitting before a runaway moving picture film. Then they pack up and depart, galloping, for Prague with their tongues hanging out. For Wednesday is Prague, and Prague is Wednesday. The two words are synonymous and interchangeable. Surely to such as these the places they have visited must mean as much to them afterward as the labels upon their trunks mean to the trunks. Just flimsy names pasted on, all confused and overlapping, and certain to be scraped off in time, leaving nothing but faint marks upon an ingerated surface. There is yet again another type, always of the female gender and generally middle-aged and very schoolteacherous in aspect, who in company with a group of kindred spirits is viewing Europe under a contract arrangement, by which a worn and wearied looking gentleman, a retired clergyman usually, acts as an escort and mentor for a given price. I don't know how much he gets ahead for this job, but whatever it is he earns it ninety and nine times over. This lady tourist is much given to missing trains and getting lost and having disputes with natives and wearing rubber overshoes and asking strange questions, but let me illustrate with a story I heard. The man from Cook's had convoyed his party through the Vatican until he brought them to the Apollo Belvedere. As they ranged themselves wearily about the statue, he rattled off his regular patter without pause or punctuation. Here we have the fair-famed Apollo Belvedere found about the middle of the fifteenth century at Frascati, purchased by Pope Julius II, restored by the great Michelangelo, taken away by the French in 1797, but returned in 1815, made of Carrera marble, holding in his hand a portion of the bow, with which he slew the python, observed please the beauty of the pose, the realistic attitude of the limbs, the noble and exalted expression of the face of Apollo Belvedere, he being known also as Phobos, the god of oracles, the god of music and medicine, the son of Lido and Jupiter. Here he ran out of breath and stopped. For a moment no one spoke. Then from a flat-chested little spinster came this query in tired, yet uninterested tones. Who was he? Was he married? He who is intent upon studying the effect of foreign climes upon the American temperament should by no means overlook the colonies of resident Americans in the larger European cities, particularly the colonies in such cities as Paris and Rome and Florence. In Berlin the American colony is largely made up of music students and in Vienna of physicians, but in the other places many folks of many minds and many callings constitute the groups. Some few have left their country for the country's good, and some have expatriated themselves because, as they explain in bursts of confidence, living is cheaper in France than it is in America. I suppose it is, too, if one can only become reconciled to doing without most of the comforts which make life worthwhile in America or anywhere else. Included among this class are many rather unhappy old ladies who somehow impress you as having been shunted off to foreign parts because there were no places for them in the homes of their children and their grandchildren. So now they are spending their last years among strangers, trying with a desperate eagerness to be interested in people and things for which they really care not a fig. With no home except a cheerless pension. Also there are certain folk, products in the main of the Eastern seaboard, who, from having originally lived in America and spent most of their time abroad, have now progressed to the point where they now live mostly abroad and visit America fleetingly once in a blue moon. As a rule these persons know a good deal about Europe and very little about the country that gave them birth. The stock-talk of European literature is at their tongue's tip. They speak of Ibsen in the tone of one morning the passing of a near-dear personal friend, and as for Zola, ah, how they miss the influence of his compelling personality. But for the moment they cannot recall whether Richard K. Fox ran the police gazette or wrote the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. They are up on the history of the Old World. From memory they traced the Bourbon dynasty from the first copper-distilled Charles to the last sour-mashed Louis. But as regards our own revolution they aren't quite sure whether it was started by the Boston Tea Party or Mrs. O'Leary's cow. Languidly they inquire whether that quaint Iowa character, Uncle Champ Root, is still Speaker of the House, and so the present Vice President is named Elihu Underwood, or isn't he? Anyway, American politics is such a bore, but they stand ready at a minute's notice to furnish you with the names, states, and details of all the marriages that have taken place during the last twenty years in the Royal House of Denmark. Someday we shall learn a lesson from Europe. Some fair day we shall begin to exploit our own historical associations. We shall make shrines of the spots where Washington crossed the ice to help end one war, and where Eliza did the same thing to help start another. We shall erect stone markers showing where Charlie Ross was last seen, and Kerry Nation was first cited. We shall pile up tall monuments to Sitting Bull and non-parade Jack Dempsey, and the man who invented the spitball. Perhaps then these truant Americans will come back oftener from Paris and Florence and abide with us longer. Meanwhile, though, they will continue to stay on the other side. And on second thought, possibly it is just as well for the rest of us that they do. In Europe I met two persons, born in America, who were openly distressed over that shameful circumstance and could not forgive their parents for being so thoughtless and inconsiderate. One was living in England, and the other was living in France, and one was a man, and the other was a woman, and both of them were avowedly regretful that they had not been born elsewhere, which I should say ought to make the sentiment unanimous. I also heard, at second hand, of a young woman whose father served this country in an ambassadorial capacity at one of the principal continental courts, until the administration at Washington had a lucid interval, and endeared itself to the hearts of practically all Americans residing in that country by throwing a net over him and yanking him back home. This young woman was so fearful, lest someone might think she cherished any affection for her native land, that once when a legation secretary manifested a desire to learn the score of the deciding game of a world series between the giants and the athletics, she spoke up in the presence of witnesses and said, Ah, baseball, how can any sane person be excited over that American game? Tell me, someone please, how has it played? Yet she was born and reared in a town, which for a great many years has held a membership in the National League. Let us pass on to a more pleasant topic. Let us pass on to those well-meaning but temporarily misguided persons who think they are going to be satisfied with staying on indefinitely in Europe. They profess themselves as being amply pleased with the present arrangement. For no matter how patriotic one may be, one must concede, mustn't one, that for true culture one must look to Europe. After all, America is a bit crude, isn't it now? Of course, sometime, say in two or three years from now, they will run across to the States again, but it will be for a short visit only. After Europe one can never be entirely happy elsewhere for any considerable period of time, and so on and so forth. But as you mentioned in an offhand way that Cedar Bluff has a modern fire station now, or that Tulsa Nuga is going to have a great white way of its own, there are eyes that light up with a wistful light. And when you state casually that Polkdale is planting a civic center with the new county jail at one end and the Carnegie Library at the other, lips begin to quiver under a weight of sentimental emotion. And a month or so later, when you take the ship which is to bear you home, you find a large delegation of these native sons of Polkdale and Tulsa Nuga on board too. At least we found them on the ship we took. We took her at Naples, a big, comfortable German ship with a fine German crew and a double force of talented German cooks working overtime in the galley and pantry, and so came back by the Mediterranean route, which is a most satisfying route, especially if the sea be smooth and the weather good, and the steerage passengers picturesque and light-hearted. Moreover, the coast of northern Africa, lying along the southern horizon as one nearest Gibraltar, is one of the few sites of a European trip that is not disappointing. Four, in fact, it proves to be the same color that it is in the geographies, pale yellow. It is very unusual to find a country making an earnest effort to correspond to its own map, and I think northern Africa deserves an honorable mention in the dispatches on this account. End of Section 49. Section 50 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 XXV. BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE, PART ONE. Homeward bound, a chastened spirit pervades the traveller. He is not quite so much inclined to be gay and blithesome as he was going. The holiday is over, the sightseeing is done. The letter of credit is worn and emaciated. He has been broadened by travel, but his pocketbook has been flattened. He wouldn't take anything for this trip, and, as he feels at the present moment, he wouldn't take it again for anything. It is a time for casting up and readjusting. Likewise, it is a good time for going over in the calm, reflective light of a second judgment, the purchases he has made for personal use and gift-making purposes. These things seemed highly attractive when he bought them, and when displayed against a background of home surroundings will no doubt be equally impressive. But just now they appear as rather a sad collection of junk. His English boxcoat doesn't fit him any better than any other box would. His French waist-kits develop an unexpected garishness on being displayed away from their native habitat, and the writing outfit which he picked up in Vienna turns out to be faulty and treacherous and inkily tearful. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a fountain pen that weeps! And why, when a fountain pen makes up its mind a cryo-spell, does it crawl clear across a steamer-trunk and bury its sobbing countenance in the bosom of a dress-shirt? Likewise, the first few days at sea provide opportunity for sorting out the large and variegated crop of impressions a fellow has been acquiring during all those crowded months. The way the homeward-bound one feels now, he would swap any old master he ever saw for one peep at a set of sanitary bath fixtures. Sight unseen he stands ready to trade two cathedrals and a royal palace for a union depot. He will never forget the thrill that shook his soul as he paused beneath the dome of the pantheon, but he feels that not only his soul but all the rest of him could rally and be mighty cheerful in the presence of a dozen deep-sea oysters on the half-shell, regular, honest-to-goodness North American oysters, so beautifully long, so gracefully, pendulous of shape, that the short-waisted person who undertakes to swallow one whole does so at his own peril. The picture of the Colosseum bathed in the Italian moonlight will ever abide in his mind, but he would give a good deal for a large double-sirloin suffocated Samuel J. Tilden-style with fried onions, beef-steak, ah, what sweet images come thronging at the very mention of the word. The sea vanishes magically, and before his entranced vision he sees the one town, full of regular fellows and real people. Somebody is going to have fried ham for supper. Five thousand miles away he sniffs the delectable perfume of that fried ham as it seeps through a crack in the kitchen window and wafts out into the street. And the word passes round that there is going to be a social session down at the lodge tonight, followed, Mahat, by a small sociable game of quarter-limit upstairs over Corbett's drugstore. At this point our traveler rummages his elk-sput and gives it an affectionate polishing with a silk handkerchief. And oh how he does long for a look at a home newspaper, packed with wrecks and police news and municipal scandals and items about the person's one-nose, and chatty mention concerning congressmen and gunmen and tango teachers and other public characters. Thinking it all over here in the quiet and privacy of the empty sea, he realizes that his evening paper is the thing he has missed most. To the American understanding, foreign papers seem fearfully and wonderfully made. For instance, German newspapers are much addicted to printing their more important news stories in cipher form. The German treatment of a suspected crime for which no arrests have yet been made reminds one of the jokes which used to appear a few years ago in the back part of Harper's magazine, where a good story was always being related to Bichup X, residing in the town of Y, who calling one afternoon upon Judge Z, said to Master Egbert, the pet of the household, aged four, and so on. A German newspaper will daringly state that banker Blank, president of the Bank of Blank at Blank, who is suspected of sequestering the funds of that institution to his own uses, is reported to have departed by stealth for the city of Blank, taking with him the wife of Herr Blank. And such is the high personal honor of the average Parisian newsgatherer that one Paris morning paper, which specializes in actual news as counter-distinguished from the other Paris papers, which rely upon political screeds to fill their columns, locks its doors and disconnects its telephones at eight o'clock in the evening, so that reporters coming in after that hour must stay until press time, lest some of them, such as the fear, will peddle all the exclusive stories off to less enterprising contemporaries. English newspapers, though printed in a language resembling American in many rudimentary respects, seem to our conception's weird propositions, too. It is interesting to find at the tail end of an article, a footnote by the editor, stating that he has stopped the presses to announce in connection with the foregoing that nothing has occurred in connection with the foregoing which would justify him in stopping the presses to announce it, or words to that effect. The news stories are frequently set forth in a puzzling fashion, and the jokes also. That's the principal fault with an English newspaper joke. It loses so in translation into our own tongue. Still, when all is said and done, the returning tourist, if he be at all fair-minded, is bound to confess to himself that, no matter where his steps or his round-trip ticket have carried him, he has seen in every country, institutions and customs his countrymen might copy to their benefit, immediate or ultimate. Having beheld these things with his own eyes, he knows that from the Germans we might learn some much-needed lessons about municipal control and conservation of resources, and from the French and the Austrians about rational observance of days of rest and simple enjoyment of simple outdoor pleasures and respect for great traditions and great memories, and from the Italians about the blessed facility of keeping a good humor, and from the English about minding one's own business and the sane rearing of children and obedience to the law and suppression of unnecessary noises. Whenever I think of this last God-given attribute of the British race, I shall recall a Sunday we spent at Brighton, the favourite seaside resort of middle-class London. Brighton was fairly bulging with excursionists that day. A good many of them were bucolic visitors from up-country, but the majority it was plain to see hailed from the city. No steam carousel shrieked, no ballyhoo blared, no steam pianos shrieked, no barker barked. Upon the piers, stretching out into the surf, bands played soothingly softened airs, and along the waterfront, sand artists and so-called minstrel singers plied their arts. Some of the visitors fished, without catching anything, and some listened to the music, and some strolled aimlessly or sat stolidly upon benches enjoying the sea air. To an American accustomed at such places to din and tumult and rushing crowds and dangerous devices for taking one's breath and sometimes one's life, it was a strange experience but a mighty restful one. On the other hand there are some things wherein we notably excel, entirely too much for me to undertake to enumerate them here. Still I think I might be pardoned for enumerating a conspicuous few. We could teach Europe a lot about creature comforts and open plumbing and personal cleanliness and good food and courtesy to women, not the flashy, cheap courtesy which impels a continental to rise and click his heels and bend his person forward from the abdomen and bow profoundly when a strange woman enters the railway compartment where he is seated. While at the same time he leaves his wife or sister to wrestle with the heavy luggage, but the deeper, less showy instinct which makes the average American believe that every woman is entitled to his protection and consideration when she really needs it. In the crowded streetcar he may keep his seat. In the crowded lifeboat he gives it up. I almost forgot to mention one other detail in which, so far as I could judge, we lead the whole of the old world. Dentistry. Surely you have seen frequent mention in English publications about decayed, gentle women. Well, England is full of them. It starts with the teeth. The leisurely, long, slant-wise course across the Atlantic gives one time also for making the acquaintance of one's fellow passengers and for wondering why some of them ever went to Europe anyway. A source of constant speculation along these lines was the retired hay and feed merchant from Michigan who traveled with us. One gathered that he had done little else in these latter years of his life except to traipse back and forth between the two continents. What particularly endeared him to the rest of us was his lovely habit of pronouncing all words of all languages according to a phonetic system of his own. Yes, sir, you would hear him say, addressing a smoking-room audience of less experienced travelers, my ID is that a fellow ought to go over on an English ship, if he likes the exclusibility, and come back on a German ship if he likes the sociableness. Take my case. The last trip I made I come over on the loosey tanner and went back again on the grocer kay first, and enjoyed it both ways immense. Nor would this chronicle be complete without a passing reference to the lady from Cincinnati, a widow of independent means, who was traveling with her two daughters and was so often mistaken for their sister that she could not refrain for mentioning the remarkable circumstance to you, providing you did not win her everlasting regard by mentioning it first. Likewise I feel that I owe the tribute of a line to the elderly Britain, who was engaged in a constant and highly successful demonstration of the fallacy of the claim set up by medical practitioners to the effect that the human stomach can contain but one fluid pint at a time. All day long, with his monocle-goggling glassy from the midst of his face, like one lone porthole in a tank steamer, he disproved this statement by practical methods, and promptly at nine every evening, when his complexion had acquired a rich magenta-tent, he would be carried below by two accommodating stewards and put, no, not put, decanted, would be decanted gently into bed. If anything had happened to the portlight of that ship, we could have stationed him forward in the bowels with his long face looming over the rail, and been well within the maritime regulations. His face had a brilliancy which even the darkness of the night could not dim, and if the other light had gone out of commission, we could have impressed the aid of the bilious Armenian lady who was sick every minute, and very sick for some minutes, for she was always of a glassy green color. We learned to wait regularly for the ceremony of seeing Sir Monocle and his load toad it off to bed at nine o'clock every night, just as we learned to linger in the offing and watch the nimble knife work when the prize-invalid of the ship's roster had cornered a fresh victim. The prize-invalid it is hardly worthwhile to state was of the opposite sex. So many things ailed her, by her own confession, that she wondered how they all found room on the premises at the same time. Her favorite evening employment was to engage another woman in conversation, preferably another invalid, and by honeyed words and congenial confidences, to lead the unsuspecting prey on and on until she had her trapped, and then to turn on her suddenly and ridicule the other woman's puny symptoms and tell her she didn't even know the rudiments of being ill, and snap her up sharply when she tried to answer back. And then she would deliver a final sting and go away without waiting to bury her dead. The poison was in the post-script. It nearly always is with that type of female. But afterwards she would justify herself by saying people must excuse her manner, she didn't mean anything by it, it was just her way, and they must remember that she suffered constantly. Someday when I have time I shall make that lady the topic of a popular song. I have already fabricated the refrain. Her heart was in the right place, lads, but she had a floating kidney. Arrives a day when you develop a growing distaste for the company of your kind, or in fact any kind. Tis a day when the sea, grown frisky, kicks up its nimble heels and tosses its frothy mane. A cigar tastes wrong, then, and the mere sight of so many meat pies, and so many German salads at the entrance to the dining salon gives one acute displeasure. By these signs you know that you are on the verge of being taken down with climate fever, which, as I set forth many pages ago, is a malady peculiar to the watery deep, and by green travellers is frequently mistaken for seasateness, which indeed it does resemble in certain respects. I may say that I had one touch of climate fever going over, and a succession of touches coming back. At such a time the companionship of others piles on one. It is well then to retire to the privacy of one's state-room and to recline a while. I did a good deal of reclining coming back. I was not exactly happy while reclining, but I was happier than I would have been doing anything else. Besides, as I reclined there on my cozy bed, a medley of voices would often float into me through the half-open port, and I could visualize the owners of those voices as they sat ranged in steamer-chairs along the deck. I quote, You, Raymond, you get down off that rail this minute. My dear, you ought just to go to mine. He never hesitates a minute about operating, and he has the loveliest manners in the operating-room. Wait a minute. I'll write his address down for you. Yes, he is expensive, but very, very thorough. Stuart, bring me Nuss Brandensoza. Well now, Mr.—excuse me, I didn't catch your name. Oh yes, Mr. Blosser. Well, Mr. Blosser, if that isn't the most curious thing. To think of us meeting away out here in the middle of the ocean and both of us knowing Maxi Hotstein in grand rapids. It only goes to show one thing that certainly is a mighty small world. Raymond, did you hear what I said to you? Do you really think it is becoming? Thank you for saying so. That's what my husband always says. He says that white hair with a youthful face is so attractive, and that's one reason why I've never touched it up. Touched up hair is so artificial, don't you think? Isn't the Bay of Naples just perfectly swell? The water, you know, and the land and the sky and everything so beautiful and everything? You, Raymond, come away from that lifeboat. Why don't you sit down there and behave yourself and have a nice time watching for whales? No ma'am, if you're asking me, I must say I didn't care so much for that art gallery stuff—just a lot of pictures and statues and junk like that, so far as I noticed. In fact, the whole thing, Europe itself, was considerable of a disappointment to me. I didn't run across a single night of pithious lodge the whole time and I was over there five months straight, hard-running. Really, I think it must be hereditary. It runs in our family. I had an aunt and her hair was snow-white at twenty-one, and my grandmother was the same way. Oh, yes, the suffering is something terrible. You've had it yourself in a mild form and, of course, you know. The last time they operated on me, I was on the table an hour and forty minutes. And you, an hour and forty minutes by the clock. And for three days and nights they didn't know whether I would live another minute. A crash of glass. Stewart, I should only turned over my drink. Bring me nuzzer branden soza. Just a minute, Mr. Blosser. I want to tell my husband about it. He'll be awful interested. Say listen, Papa, this gentleman here knows Maxi Hochstein out in Grand Rapids. Do you think so, really? A lot of people have said that very same thing to me. They come up to me and say, I know you must be a southerner because you have such a true southern accent. I suppose I must come by it naturally. For while I was born in New Jersey, my mother was a member of a very old Virginia family, and we've always been very strong southern sympathizers, and I went to a finishing school in Baltimore, and I was always being mistaken for a southern girl. Well I sure had enough of it to do me for one spell. I've seen the whole shooting match, and I don't regret what it cost me, but believe me, little old Kee-Cook is going to look pretty good to me when I get back there. Why, then people don't know no more about making a cocktail than a rabbit. That's her standing yonder talking to the captain. Yes, that's what so many people say, but as a matter of fact, she's the youngest one of the two. I say, these are my daughters, and then people say, you mean your sisters. Still, I married very young, at seventeen, and possibly that helps to explain it. Oh, is that a shark out yonder? Well, anyway, it's a porpoise, and a porpoise is a kind of shark, isn't it? When a porpoise grows up, it gets to be a shark. I read that somewhere. Ain't nature just wonderful? Raymond Walter Pelham, if I have to speak to you again, young man, I'm going to take you to the state room and give you something you won't forget in a hurry. Steward, help me get up. As the lazy hours slip by and the spell of the sea takes hold on you and you lose count of the time and can barely muster up the energy to perform the regular noonday task of putting your watch back half an hour. A passenger remarks that this is Thursday and you wonder dimly what happened to Wednesday. Three days more, just three. The realization comes to you with a joyous shock. Somebody cites a seagull. His eager eyes you watch its curving flight. Until this moment you have not been particularly interested in seagulls. Here to fore, being a seagull seemed to you to have few attractions as a regular career, except that it keeps one out in the open air, otherwise it has struck you as being a rather monotonous life, with the sameness as to diet which would grow very tiresome in time. But now you envy that seagull, for he comes direct from the shores of the United States of America, and if so minded may turn around and beat you to them by a margin of hours and hours and hours. Oh, beautyous creature, oh, favored bird. Comes the day before the last day. There is a bustle of getting ready for the landing. Customs blanks are in steady demand at the purser's office. Every other person is seeking help from every other person regarding the job of filling out declarations. The women go about with a guilty look of plotters in their worried eyes. If one of them fails to slip something in without paying duty on it, she will be disappointed for life. All women are natural enemies to all excise men. Dirk the smuggler was the father of their race. Comes the last day. Dead ahead lies a misty, thread-like strip of dark blue, snuggling down against the horizon, where sea and sky merge. You think it is a cloud bank until somebody tells you the glorious truth. It is the Western Hemisphere, your Western Hemisphere. It is New England, dear old New England, charming people, the New Englanders, ah, breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never himself has said, this is my own, my native land, certainly not. A man with a soul so dead as that would be taking part in a funeral, not in a sea voyage. On your lips a word hangs poised. What a precious sound it has, what new meanings it has acquired. There are words in our language which are singular and yet sound plural, such as politics and whereabouts. There are words which are plural and yet sound singular, such as Brigham Young. And there are words which convey their exact significance by their very sound. They need no word-chandlers, no adjective-smiths to dress them up in the fine feathers of fancy phrasing. They stand on their own merits. You think of one such word, a short, sweet word but of four letters. You speak that word reverently, lovingly, caressingly. Nearer and nearer draws that blessed dark blue strip. Nantucket light is behind us. Long island shoulders up alongside. Trunks accumulating gangways, so do stewards and other functionaries. You have been figuring upon the tips which you will bestow upon them at parting. So have they. It will be hours yet before we land. Indeed, if the fog thickens, we may not get in before tomorrow. Yet people run about exchanging good-byes and swapping visiting cards and promising one another they will meet again. I think it is reckless for people to trifle with their luck that way. Forward on the lower deck, the immigrant's cluster, gathering a magpie chorus in many tongues. The four and twenty blackbirds, which were baked in a pie without impairment, the vocal cords have nothing on them. Most of the women were crying when they came aboard at Naples or Palermo or Gibraltar. Now they are all smiling. Their dunnage is piled in heaps and sailors, busy with ropes and chains and things, stumble over it and swear big round German oaths. Why, gracious, we are actually off Sandy Hook. Dear old Sandy, how one loves those homely scotch names. The narrows are high, and Brooklyn, the city beautiful, awaits us around the second turning to the left. The pilot boat approaches. Brave little craft, gallant pilot, do you suppose by any chance he has brought any daily papers with him? He has, hurrah, for the thoughtful pilot. Did you notice how much he looked like the pictures of Santa Claus? We move on more slowly and twice again we stop briefly. The quarantine officers have clamored up the sides and are among us, and to some of us they give cunning little thermometers to hold in our mouths and suck on, and of others they ask chatty, intimate questions with a view to finding out how much insanity there is in the family at present and just what percentage of idiocy prevails. Three cheers for the jolly old quarantine regulations. Even the advance guard of the Custom House is welcomed by one and all, or nearly all. Between wooded shores which seem to advance to meet her and kindly greeting, the good ship shoves ahead. For she is a good ship, and later we shall miss her, but at this moment we feel that we can part from her without a pang. She rounds a turn in the channel. What is that mass which looms on beyond where cloud-coming office-buildings scallop the sky and bridges leap in far-flung spans from shore to shore? That's her all right, the high-picketed gateway of the nation. That's little old New York. Few are the art centers there, few the ruins, and perhaps there is not so much culture lying round loose as there might be. Just bustle and hustle, and the rush and crush and roar of business, and a large percentage of men who believe in supporting their own wives and one wife at a time. Crass perhaps, crude perchance in many ways, but no matter. All her faults are virtues now. Beloved Metropolis, we salute thee, and also we do turn to salute Miss Liberty. This series of adventure tales began with the Statue of Liberty fading rearward through the harbor mists. It draws to a close with the same old lady looming through those same mists and drawing ever closer and closer. She certainly does look well this afternoon, doesn't she? She always does look well, somehow. We slip past her and on past the battery, too, and are nosing up the North River. What a picturesque stream it is, to be sure, and how full of delightful rubbish. In twenty minutes or less we shall be at the dock. Folks we know are there now, waiting to welcome us. As close as we can pack ourselves, we gather in the gangways. Someone raises a voice in song. Tis not the Marseille's hymn that we sing, nor Dai Wachton rhyme, nor Ave Maria, nor God save the king, nor yet is it Columbia the gem of the ocean. In their proper places these are all good songs, but we know one more suitable to the occasion, and so we all join in. Hark happy voices float across the narrowing strip of rolly water between ship and shore. Mid-pleasures and palaces though we may roam. Now then, all together, mates, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. End of section fifty-one. End of Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Read by Cibella Denton, Carrollton, Georgia, September 2007. Sorry about the singing.