 CHAPTER VII. THENCE AND ON AND ON TO VERBOTENLAND. PART I. I, Rome, the Roma of the ancients, the mistress of the olden world, this sacred city, I, Rome, if only your stones could speak. It is customary for the tourist, taking his cue from the guide-books, to carry on like this, forgetting in his enthusiasm that, even if they did speak, they would doubtless speak Italian, which would leave him practically where he was before. And so, having said it myself according to formula, I shall proceed to state the actual facts. If coming forth from a huge and dirty terminal you emerge on a splendid plaza, miserably paved, and see a priest, a soldier, and a beggar, a beautiful child wearing nothing at all to speak of, and a hideous old woman with the eyes of a Madonna looking out of a tragic mask of a face, a magnificent fountain, and nobody using the water, and a great overpowering smell. Yes, you can see a Roman smell, a cart mule with ten dollars' worth of trappings on him, and a driver with ten cents' worth on him, a palace like a dream of stone entirely surrounded by nightmare hovels, a new, shiny, modern apartment house, and shouldering up against it a cankered rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains, a church that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's cave of gold and gems and porphyryx and onyx within, a wide and handsome avenue starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew of slums, a grime and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the center there stands a statue which is worth its weight in minted silver and which carries more than its weight in dirt. If in addition everybody in sight is smiling and good-natured unhappy and is trying to sell you something or wheel you out of something or pick your pocket of something, you need not, for confirmatory evidence, seek the vast dome of St. Peter's rising yonder in the distance or the green tops of the cedars and the dusky clumps of olive groves on the hillsides beyond. You know you are in Rome. To get the correct likeness of Naples we merely reduce the priests by one-half and increase the beggars by two-thirds. We rich in the color masses, thicken the dirt, raise the smell to the nth degree and set half the populace to singing. We establish in every second doorway a mother with her offspring tucked between her knees and forcibly held there while the mother searches the child's head for a flee. Anyhow it is more charitable to say it is a flee, and we add a special touch of gorgeousness to the street-pictures. For here a cart is a glory of red tires and blue shafts and green hubs and pink body and purple tailgate, with a canopy on it that would have suited Sheba's queen, and the mule that draws the cart is caperizoned in brass and plumage like a circus pony, and the driver wears a broad red sash, part of a shirt and half a pair of pants, usually the front half. With an outfit such as that, you feel he should be peddling Aurora Borealis' or at the very least Rainbows. It is a distinct shock to find he has only Chianti or cheeses or garbage in stock. In Naples also there is, even in the most prosaic thing, a sight to gladden your eye if you but hold your nose while you look on it. On the stalls of the truck-vendors the cauliflower's and the cabbages are racked up within artistic effect we could scarcely equal if we had roses and orchids to work with. The fishmonger's cart is a study in still life, and the trip is what artists call a harmonious interior. Nearly all the hotels in Italy are converted palaces. They may have been successes as palaces, but with their marble floors and their high ceilings and their dank dark corridors they distinctly fail to qualify as hotels. I should have preferred them remaining unsaved and sinful. I likewise observed a peculiarity common to hotelkeepers in Italy. They all look like cats. The proprietor of the converted palace where we stopped in Naples was the very image of a tomcat we used to own, named Plutarch's Lives, which was half Maltese and half Mormon. He was a cat that had a fine, carrying voice, though better adapted for concert work than parlor singing, and a sweetheart in every pot. This hotelkeeper might have been the cat's own brother with clothes on. He had Plut's roving eye and his bristling whiskers and his sharp white teeth, and Plut's silent, stealthy tread, and his way of purring softly until he had won your confidence and then sticking his claw into you. The only difference was he stuck you with a bill instead of a claw. Another interesting idiosyncracy of the Italian hotelkeeper is that he invariably swears to you his town is the only honest town in Italy, but begs you to beware of the next town which, he assures you with his hand on the place where his heart would be if he had a heart, is full of thieves and liars and counterfeit money in pickpockets. Half of what he tells you is true. The latter half. The tourist agencies issue pamphlets telling you how you may send money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy, and then append a footnote warning you against sending money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy. Likewise, you are constantly being advised against carrying articles of value in your trunk, unless it is most carefully locked, bolted, and strapped. It is good advice, too. An American I met on the boat coming home told me he failed to take such precautions while traveling in Italy, and he said that when he reached the Swiss border his trunk was so light he had to sit on it to keep it from blowing off the bus on the way from the station to the hotel, and so empty that when he opened it at both ends the draught whistling through it gave him a bad cold. However, he may have exaggerated slightly. If you can forget that you are paying first-class prices for fourth-rate accommodations, forget the dirt in the carriages and the smells in the compartments, a railroad journey through the Italian peninsula is a wonderful experience. I know it was a wonderful experience for me. I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously on the sloping withers of razor-backed mountains. Towns that were old when the Saviour was born, or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all pocked and pecked with age, looping their arches across the land for miles on miles, or the fields scored and sacrificed by three thousand years of unremitting, restless, everlasting agriculture, or the wide-horned Italian cattle that browsed on those fields, or yet the woman who darted to the door of every signal-house we passed and came to attention with a long cudgel held flat against her shoulder like a sentry's musket. I do not know why a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick when an Italian train passes a flag station any more than I know why when a squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine-house for exercise they should carry carbines and knapsacks. I only know that these things are done. In Tuscany the vineyards make a fine show, for the vines are trained to grow up from the ground and then are bound into streamers and draped from one fruit-tree or one shade-tree to another, until the whole hillside becomes one long confusing vista of leafy festoons. The thrifty owner gets the benefit of his grapes and of his trees, and of the earth below, too, for there he raises vegetables and grains and the like. Like everything else in the land the system is an old one. I judge it was old enough to be hackneyed when Horace wrote of it. Now each man, basking on his slopes, weeds to his widowed tree the vine, then, as he gaily quaffs his wine, salutes the god of all his hopes. Classical quotations interspersed here and there are wonderful helps to a guidebook, don't you think? In rural Italy there are two other scenic details that strike the American as being most curious. One is the amazing prevalence of family washing, and the other is the amazing scarcity of bird life. To himself the traveler says, What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in this country? Everybody is forever washing clothes, but nobody ever wears it after it is washed. And what has become of all the birds? For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the answer to the other when he passes a meat dealer's shop in the town, and sees, spread on the stalls, heaps of pitiably small starlings and sparrows and finches exposed for sale. An Italian will cook and eat anything he can kill that has wings on it, from a cassowary to a katydid. Thinking this barbarity over I started to get indignant, but just in time I remembered what we ourselves have done to decimate the canvas-backed duck and the wild pigeon and the rice bird and the red-worsted pulse-warmer and other pleasing wild creatures of the earlier days in America, now practically or wholly extinct. And I felt that before I could attend to the tom-tits in my Italian brother's eye I must needs pluck a few buffalos out of my own, so I decided, in view of those things, to collect myself and endeavor to remain perfectly calm. We came into Venice at the customary hour, to wit, eleven p.m., and had a real treat as our train left the mainland and went gliding far out, seemingly right through the placid adiatic to where the beaded lights of Venice showed like a necklace about the withered throat of a long-abandoned bride, waiting in the rags of her moldered wedding-finery for a bridegroom who comes not. Better even than this was the journey by gondola from the terminal, through narrow canals and under stone bridges, where the water lapped with little-mounding tongues at the walls and the tall, gloomy buildings almost met overhead, so that only a tiny strip of star-button sky showed between. And from dark windows high up came the tinkle of guitars and the sound of song pouring from throats of silver. And so we came to our hotel, which was another converted palace, but baptism is not regarded as essential to salvation in these parts. From the whole Venice did not impress me as it has impressed certain other travelers. You see, I was born and raised in one of those Ohio Valley towns where the river gets emotional and temperamental every year or two. In my youth I had passed through several of these visitations, when the family would take the family plate and the family cow and other family treasures and retire to the attic floor to wait for the spring rise to abate, and when really the most annoying phase of the situation for a housekeeper, sitting on the top landing of a staircase watching the yellow wavelets lap inch by inch over the keys of the piano and inch by inch climb up the new dining-room wallpaper, was to hear a knocking at a front window upstairs and go to answer it and find that Moscow Burnett had come in a John boat to collect the water tax. The grand canal did not stir me as it has stirred some. So far back as eighty-four I could remember when Jefferson Street at home looked almost exactly like that. Going through the Austrian Tirol between Vienna and Venice I met too old and dear friends in their native haunts, the plush hat and the hot dog. When such a thing as this happens away over on the other side of the globe it helps us to realize how small a place this world is after all, and how closely all peoples are knitted together in common bonds of love and affection. The hot dog, as found here, is just as we know him throughout the length and breadth of our own land, a dropsicle vener-verse entombed in the depths of a rye-bred sandwich, with a dab of horse radish above him to mark his grave, price, creation over, five cents the copy. The woolly plush hat shows no change either, except that if anything it is slightly woollier in the Alps than among us. As transplanted the dinky little bow at the back is an affectation purely, but in these parts it is logical and serves a practical and utilitarian purpose, because the mountain byways twist and turn and double, and the local beverages are potent brews, and the weary mountaineer, homeward bound afoot at the close of a market-day, may, by the simple expedient of reaching up and fingering his bow, tell instantly whether he is going or coming. This is also a great country for churches. Every group of chalets that calls itself a village has at least one long-spired gray-shirts in its midst, and frequently more than one. In one sweep of hillside view from our car window I counted seven church steeples. I do not think it was a particularly good day for churches either. I wished I might have passed through on a Sunday when they would naturally be thicker. Along this stretch of railroad the mountaineers come to the stations wearing the distinctive costume of their own craggy and slab-sided hills, the curling pheasant feather in the hat brim, the tight-fitting knee-breaches, the gaudy stockings, and the broad suspendered belt with rows of huge brass buttons spangling it up and down and crosswise. Such is your pleasure at finding these quaint habillements still in use amid setting so picturesque that you buy freely of the fancy-dressed individual's wares, for he always has something to sell. And then, as your train pulls out, if by main force and awkwardness you jam a window open, as I did, and cast your eyes rearward for a farewell peak, as I did, you will behold him, as I did, pulling off his parade clothes and climbing into the blue overalls and the jean-jumpers of prosaic civilization, to wait until the next carload lot of foreign tourists rolls in. The European peasant is indeed a simple, guileless creature, if you are careless about how you talk. In this district and on beyond, the sight of women doing the bulk of the hard and dirty farm work becomes common. You see women plowing, women hoeing, women carrying incredibly huge bundles of faggots and fodder on their head, women hauling heavy carts, sometimes with a straining, panting dog for a teammate, sometimes unaccompanied except by a stalwart father or husband or brother or son, who, puffing a china-bold pipe, walks alongside to see that the poor human-draft animals do not shirk or balk or shy over the traces. To one coming from a land where no decent man raises his hand against a woman, except of course in self-defense, this is indeed a startling sight to see, but worse is in store for him when he reaches Bohemia on the upper edge of the Austrian Empire. In Bohemia, if there is a particularly nasty and laborious job to be done, such as spading up manure in the rain or grubbing sugar-beats out of the half-frozen earth, they wish it on the dear old grandmother. She always seemed to me to be a grandmother, or old enough for one anyway. Perhaps, though, it is the life they lead and not the years that bends the backs of these women and thickens their waists and mats their hair and turns their feet into clods and their hands into swollen red monstrosities. Surely the walrus in Alice in Wonderland had Germany in mind when he said the time had come to speak of cabbages and kings. Because Germany certainly does lead the known world in those two commodities. Everywhere in Germany you see them, the cabbages by the millions and the billions, growing rank and purple in the fields and giving promise of the time when they will change from vegetable divine and become the fragrant and luscious trailing sauerkraut. But the kings in stone or bronze stand up in the marketplace or the public square, or on the bridge abutment, or just back of the brewery in every German city in town along the route. By these surface indications alone the most inexperienced traveler would know he had reached Germany, even without the halt at the custom house on the border, or the crossing watchmen in trim uniform jumping to attention at every road crossing, or the beautifully upholstered, hand-swept state forests, or the hedges of willow trees along the brooks, sticking up their stubby, twiggy heads like so many disreputable hearth-brooms, or the young grain stretching in straight rows cross-wides of the weedless fields and looking at a distance like fair green-printed lines evenly spaced on a wide-brown page. Also one observes everywhere surviving traces that are unmistakable of the reign of that most ingenious and wide awake of all the earlier rulers of Germany, King Verboten the Great. In connection with the life and works of this distinguished ruler is told an interesting legend well worthy of being repeated here. It would seem that King Verboten was the first crowned head of Europe to learn the value of keeping his name constantly before the reading public. Ramaziz III of Egypt, that enterprising old constant advertiser who swiped the pyramids of all his predecessors and had his own name engraved thereon, had been dead for many centuries and was forgotten when Verboten mounted the throne, and our own Teddy Roosevelt would not be born for many centuries yet to come, so the idea must have occurred to King Verboten spontaneously as it were. Therefore he took counsel with himself, saying, I shall now erect statues to myself. Dinosties change and wars rage, and folks grow fickle and tear down statues. None of that for your uncle Dudley K. Verboten. Know this is what I shall do. On every available site in the length and breadth of this my realm I shall stick up my name. And wherever possible, near to it I shall engrave or paint the names of my two favorite sons, Ausgang and Angang, to the end that come what may we shall never be forgotten in the land of our birth. And then he went and did it, and it was a thorough job, so thorough a job that to this good year of our Lord you may still see the name of that wise king everywhere displayed in Germany, on railroad stations and in railroad trains, on castle walls and dead walls and brewery walls, and the back fence of the young lady's high school. And nearly always too you will find hard buy over doors and passageways the names of his two sons, each accompanied or undiscovered by the heraldic emblem of their house, a barbed man and a feathered arrow pointing horizontally. And so it was that King Verboten lived happily ever after and in the fullness of time died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by his wives, his children, and his courtiers, and all of them sorrowed greatly and wept, but the royal sign-painters sorrowed most of all. I know that certain persons will contest the authenticity of this passage of history. They will claim Verboten means an hour-tongue forbidden, and that Ausgang means outgoing and Eingang means incoming, or in other words exit and entrance, but surely this could not be so. If so many things were forbidden a man in Germany would be privileged only to die, and probably not that unless he died according to a given formula, and certainly no human being with the possible exception of the comedian who used to work the revolving door-trick in Hanlon's Phantasma could go out of and come into a place so often without getting dizzy in the head. No, the legend stands as stated. Even as it is there are rules enough in Germany, rules to regulate all things and all persons. At first, to the stranger, this seems an irksome arrangement, this posting of rules and orders and directions and warnings everywhere, but he finds that everyone, be he high or low, must obey or go to jail. There are no exceptions and no evasions, so that what is a duty on all is a burden on no one. Take the trains, for example. Pretty much all over the continent the railroads are state owned and state run, but only in Germany are they properly run. True, there are so many uniformed officials aboard a German train that frequently there is barely room for the paying travelers to squeeze in, but the cars are sanitary and the schedule is accurately maintained, and the attendants are honest and polite and cleanly of person, wherein lies another point of dissimilarity between them and those scurvy, musty, fusty brigands who are found managing and operating trains in certain nearby countries. I remember a cup of coffee I had while going from Paris to Berlin. It was made expressly for me by an invalided commander in chief of the artillery corps of the Imperial Army, so I judged him to be by his costume, air, and general deportment, who was in charge of our carriage and also of the small kitchen at the far end of it. He came into our compartment and bowed and clicked his heels together and saluted, and wanted to know whether I would take coffee. Wrecklessly I said I would. He filled in several blanks of a printed form, and went and cooked the coffee and brought it back, pausing in intervals as he came along to fill in other blanks. Would I take cream in my coffee? I would, so he filled in a couple of blanks. Would I take sugar? I said I would take two lumps. He put in two lumps and filled in another blank. I really prefer my coffee with three lumps in it, but I noticed that his printed form was now completely filled in, and I hated to call for a third lump and put him to the trouble of starting his literary labours over again. Since by that time the coffee would be cold. So I took it, as it was, with two lumps only, and it was pretty fair coffee for European coffee. It tasted slightly of the red tape and the chicory, but it was neatly prepared and promptly served. And so, over historic streams no larger than creeks would be in America, and by castles and cabbages and kings and cows, we came to Berlin, and after some of the other continental cities Berlin seemed a mighty restful spot to be in, and a good one to tarry in a while. It has few historical associations, has Berlin, but we were loaded to the gills with historical associations by now. It does not excel greatly in old masters, but we had already gazed with a languid eye upon several million old masters of all ages, including many very young ones. It has no ancient monuments and tombs, either, which is a blessing. Most of the statuary in Berlin is new and shiny and provided with all the modern conveniences. The present Kaiser attended completely to that detail. Wherever in his capital there was space for a statue, he has stuck up one in memory of a member of his own dynasty, beginning with a statue, a piece, for such earlier rulers as Otho the oboe player, and Joaquin, surnamed the half-a-ton. Let someone correct me if I have the names wrong, and finishing up with forty or fifty for himself. That is, there were forty or fifty of him when I was there, there are probably more now. In its essentials Berlin suggests a progressive American city with two tonic trimmings. Conceive a bit of New York and a good deal of Chicago, a scrap of Denver, a slice of Hoboken, and a whole lot of Milwaukee, conceive this combination as being scoured every day until it shines. Conceive it as beautifully, though somewhat profusely governed, and laid out with magnificent drives, and dotted with big, handsome public buildings, and full of reasonably honest and more than reasonably kindly people, and you have Berlin. It was in Berlin that I picked up the most unique art treasure I found anywhere on my travels. A picture of the composer Verdi that looked exactly like Uncle Joe Cannon, without the cigar, whereas Uncle Joe Cannon does not look a thing in the world like Verdi, and probably wouldn't if he could. I have always regretted that our route through the German Empire took us across the land of the Hessians after dark, for I wanted to see those people. You will recollect that when George III of England first put into actual use the doctrine of hands across the sea, he used the Hessians. They were hired hands. CHAPTER VIII. It was at a small dinner-party in a home out in Pesse, which is to Paris what Flatbush is to Brooklyn, that the event here and after set forth came to pass. Our host was an American who had lived abroad a good many years, and his wife, our hostess, was a French woman as charming as she was pretty and as pretty as she could be. The dinner was going along famously. We had hors d'oeuvres, the soup and the hair, all very tasty to look on and very soothing to the palate. Then came the fowl, roasted, of course. The roast fowl is the national bird of France, and along with the fowl something exceedingly appetizing in the way of hearts of lettuce garnished with breasts of hot-house tomatoes cut on the bias. When we were through with this the servants removed the debris and brought us hot plates. Then with the air of one conferring a real treat on us the butler bore around a taurine arrangement full of smoking hot string beans. When it came my turn I helped myself copiously and waited for what was to go with the beans. A pause ensued to my imagination an embarrassed pause. Seeking a cue I glanced down the table and back again. There did not appear to be anything to go with the beans. The butler was standing at ease behind his master's chair, ease for a butler, I mean, and the other guests that seemed to me were waiting and watching. To myself I said, Well, sir, that butler certainly has made a J. Henry Fox pass of himself this trip. Here just when this dinner was getting to be one of the notable successes of the present century he has to go and derange the whole running schedule by serving the salad when he should have served the beans, and the beans when he should have served the salad. It's a sickening situation, but if I can save it I'll do it. I'll be well-bred if it takes a leg. So wearing the manner of one who has been accustomed all his life to finishing off his dinner with a mess of string beans, I used my putting iron, and from the edge of the fair green I hold out in three. My last stroke was a dandy, if I do say it myself. The others were game, too, I could see that. They were eating beans as though beans were particularly what they had come for. Out of the tail of my eye I glanced at our hostess, sitting next to me on the left. She was placid, calm, perfectly easy. Unadressing myself mentally, I said, there's a thoroughbred for you. You take a woman who got prosperous suddenly and is still acutely suffering from nervous culture, and if such a shipwreck had occurred at her dinner table she'd be utterly prostrated by now. She'd be down and out, and we'd all be standing back to give her air. But when they're born in the purple it shows in these big emergencies. Look at this woman now, not a ripple on the surface, balmy as a summer evening. But in about one hour from now, Central European time, I can see her accepting that full butler's resignation before he's had time to offer it. After the beans had been cleared off the right of way we had the dessert and the cheese and the coffee and the rest of it. And as we used to say in the society column, down home, when the wife of the largest advertiser was entertaining, at a suitable hour those present dispersed to their homes, one in all voting the affair to have been one of the most enjoyable occasions among the events of the season. We all knew our manners, we had proved that. Personally I was very proud of myself for having carried the thing off so well. But after I had survived a few tables dote in France, and a few more in Austria, and a great many in Italy, where they do not have anything at the hotels except tables dote, I did not feel quite so proud. For at this writing in those parts the slender, silph-like string bean is not playing a minor part, as with us. He has the best spot on the evening bill. He is a headliner. So is the cauliflower, so is the Brussels sprout. So is any vegetable whose function among our own people is largely scenic. Therefore I treasured the memory of this incident and brought it back with me, and I tell it here at some length of detail because I know how grateful my country women will be to get hold of it. I know how grateful they always are when they learn about a new gastronomic or winkel. Mind you, I am not saying that the notion is an absolute novelty here. For all I know to the contrary prominent hostesses along the Gold Coast of the United States, Bar Harbor to Palm Beach Inclusive, may have been serving one lone vegetable as a separate course for years and years. But I feel sure that throughout the interior the disclosure will come as a pleasant surprise. The directions for executing this coup are simple and all the deadlier because they are so simple. The main thing is to invite your chief opponent as a smart entertainer. You know the one I mean, the woman who scored such a distinct social triumph in the season of 1912 to 13 by being the first woman in town to serve tomato bisque with whipped cream on it. Have her there by all means. Go ahead with your dinner as though not sensational and revolutionary were about to happen. Give them in proper turn the oysters, the fish, the tray, the bird, the salad. And then all by itself alone and unafraid bring on a dab of string beans. Wait until you see the whites of their eyes and aim and fire at will. Settle back, then, until the first hushed shock has somewhat abated, until your dazed and suffering rival is glaring about in a well-bred but flustered manner looking for something to go with the beans. Hold her eye while you smile a smile that is compounded of equal parts, superior wisdom and gentle contempt for her ignorance, and then slowly deliberately dip a fork into the beans on your plate and go to it. Believe me it cannot lose. Before breakfast time the next morning every woman who was at that dinner will either be sending out invitations for a dinner of her own and ordering beans, or she will be calling up her nearest and best friend on the telephone to spread the tidings. I figured that the intense social excitement occasioned in this country a few years ago by the introduction of Russian salad dressing will be as nothing in comparison. This stunt of serving the vegetables as a separate course was one of the things I learned about food during our flittings across Europe, but it was not the only thing I learned by a long shot it was not. For example I learned this, and I do not care what anybody else may say to the contrary either, that here in America we have better food and more different kinds of food and food better cooked and better served than the afeat monarchies of the old world ever dreamed of, and quality and variety considered it cost less here bite for bite than it cost there. Food in Germany is cheaper than anywhere else almost I reckon, and selected with care and discrimination a German dinner is an excellently good dinner. Certain dishes in England, and they are very certain for you get them at every meal, are good too and not overly expensive. There are some distinctive Austrian dishes that are not without their attractions either. Speaking by and large however I venture the assertion that, taking any first rate restaurant in any of the larger American cities and balancing it off against any establishment of like standing in Europe, the American restaurant wins on cuisine, service, price, flavor and attractiveness. Centuries of careful and constant press agenting have given French cookery much of its present fame. The same crafty processes of publicity continued through a period of eight or nine hundred years have endowed the European scenic effects with a glamour and an impressiveness that really are not there, if you can but forget the advertising and consider the proposition on its merits. Take their rivers now, their historic rivers if you please. You are traveling heaven help you on a continental train, between spells of having your ticket punched or torn apart or otherwise mutilated and getting out at the border to see your trunk ceremoniously and solemnly unloaded and unlocked, and then as ceremoniously relocked and reloaded after you have conferred largesse on everybody connected with the train, the customs regulations being mainly devised for the purpose of collecting not tariff but tips. Between these periods which constitute so important a feature of continental travel, you come let us say to a stream. It is a puny stream as we are accustomed to measure streams boxed in by stone walls and regulated by stone dams and frequently it is mud-colored and more frequently still runs between muddy banks. In the west it would probably not even be dignified with a regular name, and in the east it would be of so little importance that the local congressman would not ask an annual appropriation of more than half a million dollars for the purposes of dredging, deepening and diking it. But even as you cross it you learn that it is the Tiber or the Arno, the Elb or the Poe, and such as the force of precept and example, you immediately get all excited and worked up over it. English rivers are beautiful enough in a restrained, well managed, landscape garden sort of way, but Americans do not enthuse over an English river because of what it is in itself, but because it happens to be the Thames or the Avon, because of the distinguished characters in history whose names are associated with it. These gets much of its reputation the same way. I think of one experience I had while touring through what we had learned to call the Dotson District. Our route led us alongside a most inconsequential looking Little River. Its contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway against the semi- jellied current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheel-buckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm, small lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan and only getting hotter at the job. In America that stream would have been known as Mink Creek or Cassidy's Run or by some equally poetic title, but when I found out it was the Danube, no less, I had a distinct thrill. On closer examination I discovered it to be a counterfeit thrill, but nevertheless I had it. What applies in the Maine to the scenery applies in the Maine to the food. France has the reputation of breeding the best cooks in the world, and maybe she does, but when you are calling in France you find most of them out. They have immigrated to America where a French chef gets more money in one year for exercising his art and gets it easier than he could get in ten years at home and is given better ingredients to cook with than he ever had at home. The hotel in Paris at which we stopped served good enough meals, all of them centering, of course, round the inevitable poulets rotis, but it took the staff an everlastingly long time to bring the food to you. If you grew reckless and ordered anything that was not on the bill it upset the entire establishment, and before they calmed down and related into you it was time for the next meal. Still, I must say we did not mind the waiting, near at hand the fascinating spectacle was invariably on exhibition. At the next table sat an Italian countess. Anyhow they told me she was an Italian countess, and she wore jewelry enough for a dozen countesses. Every time I beheld her, with a big emerald earring gleaming at either side of her head, I thought of a Lenox Avenue local in the New York subway. However, it was not so much her jewelry that proved such a fascinating sight, as it was her pleasing habit of fetching out a gold-mounted toothpick and exploring the most remote and intricate dental recesses of herself in full view of the entire dining room, meanwhile making a noise like somebody sickening a dog on. The Europeans have developed public toothpicks beyond anything we know. They make an outdoor pastime and function of it, whereas we pursue this sport more or less privately. Over there a toothpick is a family heirloom and is handed down from one generation to another, and is operated in company ostentatiously. In its use some Europeans are absolutely gifted. But then we beat the world at open-air gum-chewing, so I reckon the honors are about even. This particular hotel, in common with all other first-class hotels in Paris, was forgetful about setting forth on its menu the prices of its best dishes and its special dishes. I take it this arrangement was devised for the benefit of currency-quilted Americans. A Frenchman asks the waiter the price of an unpriced dish and then orders something else. But the American, as a rule, is either too proud or too foolish to inquire into these details. At home he is beset by hideous fear that some waiter will think he is of a mercenary nature, and when he is abroad this trade in him is accentuated. So in his carefree American way he orders a portion of a dish of an unspecified value, whereupon the head waiter slips out to the office and ascertains by private inquiry how large a letter of credit the American is carrying with him, and comes back and charges him all the traffic will bear. As for the keeper of a fashionable café on a boulevard or in the rue de la paix, well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant proprietor on Broadway is a kindly Christian soul who is in business for his health, and not feeling very healthy at that. When you dine at one of the swagger boulevard places the head waiter always comes just before you have finished and places a display of fresh fruit before you, with a winning smile and a bow and a gesture which taken together would seem to indicate that he is extending the compliments of the season and that the fruit will be on the house, but never did one of the intriguing scoundrels deceive me. There years before I had read statistics on the cost of fresh fruit in a Paris restaurant, and so I had a care. The sight of a bunch of hot-house grapes alone was sufficient to throw me into a cold perspiration right there at the table, and as for South African peaches I carefully walked around them, getting farther away all the time. A peach was just the same as a pest-house to me in Paris. Alas, though, no one had warned me about French oysters, and since, just once, I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part, one financial and the other goos-de-tour-y. They were not particularly flavorous oysters, as we know oysters on this side of the ocean. The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he tastes something like an indisposed muscle and something like a touch of biliousness, but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes. The café proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu. A person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious display of his affluence on finding a pearl in an oyster would swallow the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirt front. That would stamp him as a person of wealth. However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant in price or of excessively low grade. We had one of the surprises of our lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we went to a little obscure café that was off the tourist route, and therefore, as yet, unspoiled and un-commercialized. This place was up a back street near one of the markets, a small and smell-some place it was decorated most atrociously. In the front window, in close juxtaposition, were a platter of French snails and a platter of sticky confections full of dark spots. There was no mistaking the snails for anything except snails, but the other articles were either current buns or plain buns that had been made in an unscreened kitchen. Within were marble-top tables of the Louis Kahn's period and stuffy wall-seats of faded, dusty red velvet, and a waiter in his shirt-sleeves was wandering about with the sheaf of those long French loaves tucked under his arm like golf-sticks, distributing his loaves among the diners. But somewhere in its mysterious and odorous steps, that little bourgeois café harbored an honest-to-goodness cook. He knew a few things about grilling a pig's knuckle, that worthy person. He could make the knuckle of a pig taste like the wing of an angel, and what he could do with a skillet, a pinch of herbs, and a calf's sweetbread past human understanding. Certain animals in Europe do have the most delicious diseases anyway, notably the calf and the goose, particularly the goose of Strasbourg, where the pâté de foie gras comes from. The engorged liver of a Strasbourg goose must be a source of joy to all except its original owner. Several times we went back to the little restaurant round the corner from the market, and each time we had something good. The food we ate there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment awaiting us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn, to get some of that wonderful provincial cookery that, through all our reading days, we had been hearing about. You will doubtless recall the description, as so frequently and graphically dished up by the inspired writers of travelogue stuff, the picturesque, tumble-down place, where on a cloth of coarse linen, white, like snow, old Marie, her wrinkled face a beam with hospitality and kindness, places the delicious omelette she has just made, and brings also the marvellous salad and the perfect fowl, and the steaming hot coffee fragrant as breezes from Arabi the blessed, and the van ordinaire that is even as honey and gold to the thirsty throat. You must know that passage. We went to sea for ourselves. At a distance of half a day's automobile run from Paris we found an establishment answering to the plans and specifications. It was shoved jam up against the road, as is the French custom, and it was surrounded by a high broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks on the airs of a quarantine steer. Within the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other, and some facing always at once, so that for the housefly so numerously encountered on these premises it was but a short trip and a merry one from the stable to the dining-room and back again. Sure enough, Old Marie was on the job. Not desiring to be unkind or unduly critical, I shall merely state that as a cook Old Marie was what we, who have been in France, and speak the language fluently, would call l'alumite. The omelette she turned out for us was a thing that was very firm and durable, containing, I think, leather findings with a sprinkling of chopped henbane on the top. The coffee was as feeble a counterfeit as chicory usually is when it is masquerading as coffee, and the van Ordinaire had less of the van to it and more of the Ordinaire than any we sampled elsewhere. Right here let me say this for the much-faunted van Ordinaire of Europe. In the end it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, not like the ordinary Egyptian adder, but like a patent adder in the office of a loan shark, which is the worst stinger of the whole adder family. If consumed with any degree of freedom it puts a downy coat on your tongue next morning that causes you to think you inadvertently swallowed the pillow in your sleep. Good domestic wine costs as much in Europe as good domestic wine costs in America, possibly more than as much. The souffle potatoes of Old Marie were not bad to look on, but I did not test them otherwise. Even in my own country I do not care to partake of souffle potatoes unless I know personally the person who blew them up. So at the conclusion of the repast we nibbled tentatively at the dessert, which was a pancake with jelly, done in the image of a medicated bandage but not so tastiest one. And then I paid the check, which was of august proportions, and we came sadly away, realizing that another happy dream of youth had been shattered to bits. Only the tablecloth had been as advertised. It was coarse, but white like snow, like snow three days old in Pittsburgh. Yet I was given to understand that was a typical rural French inn, and fully up to the standards of such places. But if the manager of a roadhouse within half a day's ride of New York or Boston or Philadelphia served such food to his patrons at such prices the sheriff would have him inside of two months, and everybody would be glad of it, too, except the sheriff. Also no humane man in this country would ask a self-respecting cow to camp overnight in such outbuildings as abutted on the kitchen of this particular inn. I am not denying that we have in America some pretty bad country hotels, where good food is mostly barbarously mistreated and good beds are rare to find. But we admit our shortcomings in this regard, and we deplore them. We do not shellack them over with a glamour of bogus romance, with intent to deceive the foreign visitor to our shores. We warn him in advance of what he may expect and urge him to carry his rations with him. It is almost unnecessary to add that Old Marie gave us veal and poulé roti. According to the French version of the story of the flood only two animals emerged from the ark when the waters receded. One was an immature hen and the other was an adolescent calf. At every meal except breakfast, when they do not give you anything at all, the French give you veal and poulé roti. If at lunch you had the poulé roti first and afterward the veal, why, then at dinner they provide a pleasing variety by bringing on the veal first and the poulé roti afterward. The veal is inevitably stringy and coated over with weird sauces, and the poulé never appears at the table in her recognizable members, such as wings and drumsticks, but is chopped up with a cleaver into cross-sections and strange-looking chunks of the wreckage are sent to you. Moreover they cook the chicken in such a way as to destroy its original taste, and the veal in such a way as to preserve its original taste, both being inexcusable errors. Nowhere in the larger Italian cities, except by the exercise of a most tremendous determination, can you get any real Italian cooking or any real Italian dishes. At the hotels they feed you on a pale, sad, table-dote imitation of French cooking, invariably buttressed with the everlasting veal and the eternal poulé roti. At the finish of a meal the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small withered apples and a bunch of fly-specked sour grapes, and on another plate the mortal remains of some excessively diseased cheese, wearing a tinfoil shroud and appropriately laid out in a small white, coffin-shaped box. After this had happened to me several times I told the waiter with gentle irony that he might as well screw the lid back on the casket and proceed with the obsequities. I told him I was not one of those morbid people who loved to look on the faces of the strange dead. The funeral could not get under way too soon to suit me. It seemed to me that this funeral was already several days overdue. That was what I told him. In my travels the best place I ever found to get Italian dishes was a basement restaurant under an old brownstone house on 47th Street in New York. There you might find the typical dishes of Italy. I defy you to find them in Italy without a search warrant. However, while in Italy the tourists may derive much entertainment and instruction from a careful study of table manners. In our own land we produce some reasonably boisterous trenchermen, and some tolerably careless ones too. Several among us have yet to learn how to eat corn on the ear and at the same time avoid corn in the ear. A dish of asparagus has been known to develop fine acoustic properties, and in certain quarters there is a crying need for a soundproof soup. But even so, and admitting these things as facts, we are but mere beginners in this line when compared with our European brethren. In the caskets of memory I shall ever cherish the picture of a particularly hairy gentleman, apparently of Russian extraction, who patronized our hotel in Venice one evening. He was what you might call a human hazard. A golf player would probably have thought of him in that connection. He was eating flour dumplings, using his knife for a niblick all the way round, and he lost every other shot in a concealed bunker on the edge of the rough. And he could make more noise sucking his teeth than some people could make playing on a fife. There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats his spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches round the tines of his fork, and then lifting it inboard and L at a time. This is not correct. The true Neapolitan does not eat his spaghetti at all. He inhales it. He gathers up a loose strand and starts it down his throat. He then respires from the diaphragm, and like a troop of trained angleworms, that entire mass of spaghetti uncoils itself, gets up off the plate and disappears inside him, en masse, as it were, and making him look like a man who is chinning himself over a set of bead portiers. I fear we in America will never learn to siphon our spaghetti into us thus. It takes a nation that has practiced deep breathing for centuries. Section 18 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 9. The Deadly Poulet Routine, Part 1. Under the head of European disillusionments, I would rate, along with the van ordinaire of the French vineyard and inkworks, the barmaid of Britain. From what you have heard on this subject, you confidently expect the British barmaid to be buxom, blonde, blooming, billowy, buoyant, but especially blonde. On the contrary, she is generally brunette, frequently middle-aged, in appearance often fair to middling homely, and in manner nearly always abounding with a stiffness and hauteur that would do credit to a belted earl, if the belting had just taken place and the earl was still groggy from the effects of it. Also, she has the notion of personal adornment that is common in more than one social stratum of women in England. If she has a large, firm, solid mound of false hair overhanging her brow like an impending landslide, and at least three jingly bracelets on each wrist, she considers herself well-dressed, no matter what else she may or may not be wearing. Often this lady is found presiding over an American bar, which is an institution now commonly met with in all parts of London. The American bar of London differs from the ordinary English bar of London in two respects. Namely, there is an American flag draped over the mirror, and it is a place where they sell all the English drinks and are just out of all the American ones. If you asked for a bronx the barmaid tells you they do not carry seafood in stock, and advises you to apply at the fishmongers, second turning to the right, sir, and then over the way, sir, just before you come to the bottom of the road, sir. If you ask for a Mamie Taylor, she gets it confused in her mind with a sally lun, and sends out for a yeast cake and a cookbook. And while you are waiting, she will give you a genuine Yankee drink, such as a brandy and soda, or she will suggest that you smoke something and take a look at the evening paper. If you do smoke something, beware—oh, beware—of the native English cigar. When rolled between the fingers it gives off a dry, rustling sound similar to a shuck mattress. For smoking purposes, it is also open to the same criticisms that a shuck mattress is. The flames smolder in the walls and then burst through it in unexpected places, and the smoke sucks up the air shaft and mushrooms on your top floor. Then the deadly backdraft comes and the fatal fire-damp, and when the firemen arrive you are a ruined tenement. Except the German, the French, the Belgian, the Austrian, and the Italian cigar, the English cigar is the worst cigar I ever saw. I did not go to Spain. They tell me, though, the Spanish cigar has the high qualifications of badness. Spanish cigars are not really cigars at all, I hear. They fall into the classification of defective flues. Likewise, beware of the alleged American cocktail occasionally dispensed with the air of pride and accomplished triumph by the British barmaid of an American bar. If for the purposes of experiment and research you feel that you must take one, order with it instead of the customary olive or cherry, a nice boiled vegetable marrow. The advantage to be derived from this is that the vegetable marrow takes away the taste of anything else and does not have any taste of its own. In the eating line the Englishman depends on the staples. He sticks to the old standbys. What was good enough for his father's is good enough for him. In some cases almost too good. Menotonia victuals does not distress him. He likes his food to be humdrum, the humdrum or the better. Speaking with regard to the whole country, I am sure we have better beef uniformly in America than in England, but there is at least one restaurant on the stand where the roast beef is just a little bit superior to any other roast beef on earth. English mutton is incomparable too, and English breakfast bacon is a joy forever. But it never seems to occur to an Englishman to vary his diet. I submit samples of the daily menu. Luncheon, roast beef, boiled mutton, potatoes boiled, cabbage boiled, jam tart, custard, cheese, coffee, tea, dinner, boiled mutton, roast beef, cabbage boiled, potatoes boiled, custard, jam tart, coffee, cheese, tea. I know now why an Englishman dresses for dinner. It enables him to distinguish dinner from lunch. His regular desserts are worthy of a line. The jam tart is a death mask that went wrong and, in consequence, became morose and heavy of spirit. And the custard is a soft-boiled egg which started out in life to be a soft-boiled egg. And at the last moment, when it was too late, changed its mind and tried to be something else. In the city, where luncheon place is abound, the steamer works over time and the stew pan never rests. There is one place well advertised to American visitors where they make a specialty of their beef steak and kidney pudding. This is a gummy concoction containing steak, kidney, mushroom, oyster, lark, and sometimes W and Y. Dr. Johnson is said to have been very fond of it. This, if true, accounts for the doctor's disposition. A helping of it weighs two pounds before you eat it and 10 pounds afterward. The kidney is its predominating influence. The favorite flower of the English is not the primrose. It is the kidney. Wherever you go among the restaurants, there is always somebody operating on a steamed flower dumpling for kidney trouble. The lower orders are much addicted to a dish known, if I remember the name right, by the euphonious title of Toad in the Hole. Toad in the Hole consists of a full-grown and fragrant sheep's kidney entombed in an excavated retreat at the heart of a large and powerful onion and then cooked in a slow and painful manner so that the onion and the kidney may swap perfumes and flavors. These people do not use this combination for a weapon or for a disinfectant or for anything else for which it is naturally purposed. They actually go so far as to eat it. You pass a cabin's luncheon and get a whiff of a freshly opened Toad in the Hole and you imagine it is the German invasion starting and wonder why they are not removing the women and children to a place of safety. All England smells like something boiling, just as all France smells like something that needs boiling. Seemingly the only Londoners who enjoy any extensive variety in their provender are the slum dwellers. Out Whitechapel Way, the establishment of a tripe dresser and draper is a sight wondrous to behold and will almost instantly eradicate the strongest appetite. But it is not to be compared with an East End meat shop where there are skinned sheep faces on slabs and various vital organs of various animals disposed about in clumps and clusters. I was reminded of one of those 14th Street Museums of Anatomy, tickets 10 cents each, boys under 14 not admitted. The East End butcher is not only a thrifty but an inquiring soul. Until I viewed his shop I had no idea that a sheep could be so untidy inside and as for a cow, he finds things in a cow she didn't know she had. Breakfast is the meal at which the Englishman rather excels. In fact, England is the only country in Europe where the natives have the faintest conception of what a regular breakfast is or should be. Moreover, it is now possible in certain London hotels for an American to get hot bread and ice water at breakfast, though the English roundabout look on with undisguised horror as he consumes them and the manager only hopes that he will have the good taste not to die on the premises. It is true that in lieu of the fresh fruit an American prefers, the waiter brings at least three kinds of particularly sticky marmalade and, in accordance with a custom that dates back to the time of the druids, spangles the breakfast cloth over with a large number of empty saucers and plates, which fulfill no earthly purpose except to keep getting in the way. The English breakfast bacon, however, is a most worthy article and the broiled kipper is juicy and plump and does not resemble a dried autumn leaf, as our kipper often does, and the fried soul on which the Englishman banks his breakfast hopes invariably repays one for one's undivided attention. The English boast of their fish, but excusing the kipper they have but three of note, the turbot, the place, and the soul, and the turbot tastes like turbot and the place tastes like fish, but the soul, when fried, is most appetizing. I've been present when the English gooseberry and the English strawberry were very highly spoken of, too, but with me this is merely hearsay evidenced. We reached England too late for berries. Happily, though, we came in good season for green filbert, which is gathered in the fall of the year, being known then as the Kentish Cob Nut. The Kentish Cob beats any nut we have except the paper shell pecan. The English postage stamp is also much tastier than ours. The space for licking is no larger if as large, but the flavor lasts. End of Section 18. Section 19 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 9. The Deadly Poulet Routine, Part 2. As I said before, the Englishman has no great variety of things to eat, but he is always eating them, and when he is not eating them he is swigging tea. Yet in these regards the German excels him. The Englishman gains a lap at breakfast, but after that first hour the German leaves him hopelessly distanced, far in the rear. It is due to his talents in this respect that the average Berliner has a double chin running all the way round, and four rolls of fat on the back of his neck, all closely clipped and shaved, so as to bring out their full beauty and symmetry, and a figure that makes him look as though an earthquake had shaken loose everything on the top floor, and it all fell through into his dining room. Your Truber-Linner eats his regular daily meals, four in number and all large ones, and in between times he now and then gathers a bite. For instance, about 10 o'clock in the morning he knocks off for an hour and has a few cups of hard-boiled coffee and some sweet, sticky pastry with whipped cream on it. Then about four in the afternoon he browses a bit just to keep up his appetite for dinner. This, though, is but a snack, say a school of Bismarck herring and a kraut pie, some more coffee and more cake, and one thing and another, merely a preliminary to the real food, which we'll be coming along a little later on. Between acts at the theater he excuses himself and goes out and prepares his stomach for supper, which we'll follow at 11 by drinking two or three steins of thick Munich beer, and nibbling on such small tidbits as a rosary of German sausage or the upper half of a raw Westphalian ham. There are 47 distinct and separate varieties of German sausage and three of them are edible, but the Westphalia ham in my judgment is greatly overrated. It is pronounced Westphalia with the accent on the last part, where it belongs. In Germany, however, there is a pheasant agreeably smothered in the young cabbage, which is delicious and in season plentiful. The only drawback to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the grasping and avaricious German restaurant keeper has the confounded nerve to charge you in our money, 40 cents for a whole pheasant and half a pack of cabbage, say enough to furnish a full meal for two tolerably hungry adults and a growing child. The Germans like to eat and they love a hearty eater. There should never be any trouble about getting a suitable person to serve us at the Kaiser's court if the administration at Washington will but hearken to the voice of experience. To the Germans, the late Dr. Tanner would have been a distinct disappointment in an ambassadorial capacity, but there was a man who used to live in my congressional district who could qualify in a holy minute if he were still alive. He was one of nature's noblemen, untutored but naturally gifted, and his name was John Wesley Bass. He was the champion eater of the world, specializing particularly in eggs on the shell and co-voicers out of the can with pepper sauce on them and soda crackers on the side. I regret to be compelled to state, however, that John Wesley is no more. At one of our McCracken County annual fairs a few years back, he succumbed to over ambition coupled with a mistake in judgment. After he had established a new world's record by eating at one sitting five dozen raw eggs, he rashly rode on the steam merry-go-round. At the end of the first quarter of an hour he fainted and fell off a spotted wooden horse and never spoke again, but passed away soon after being removed to his home in an unconscious condition. I have forgotten what the verdict of the coroner's jury was. The attending physician gave it some fancy Latin name, but among laymen the general judgment was that our fellow townsmen had just naturally been scrambled to death. It was a pity too. The German people would have cared for John Wesley as an ambassador. He would have eaten his way right into their affections. We have the word of history for it that Vienna was originally settled by the Celts, but you would hardly notice now. On first impressions you would say that about Vienna there was a noticeable suggestion, a perceptible trace of the Teutonic, and this applies to the Austrian food in the main. I remember a kind of Wienerschnitzel, breaded, that I had in Vienna, in fact for the moment I do not seem to recall much else about Vienna. Life there was just one Wienerschnitzel after another. In order to spread sweetness and light and to the end furthermore, that the ignorant people across the salted seas might know something of a land of real food and much food and plenty of it and plenty of variety to it, I would that I might bring an expedition of Europeans to America and personally conduct it up and down our continent and back and forth crosswise of it. And if I had the money of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller, I would do it too, for it would be a greater act of charity than building public libraries or endowing public baths. I would include in my party a few delegates from England where every day is all souls day and a few sausage-surfitted Teutons and some galls wearied and worn by the deadly Poulet routine of their daily life and a scattering representation from all the other countries over there. In a special, I would direct the Englishman's attention to the broiled Pompano of New Orleans, the Kingfish Filet of New York, the Sandabbe of Los Angeles, the Boston Scrod of the Massachusetts Coast and that noblest of all panfish, the Fried Crappy of Southern Indiana. To these and to many other delectable fishling would I introduce the poor fellow and to him and his fellows, I feign would offer a dozen a piece of Smith Island oysters on the half-shell. And I would take all of them to New England for baked beans and brown bread and codfish balls, but on the way we would visit the shores of Long Island for a kind of soft clam, which first is steamed and then is esteemed. At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they should each have a broiled lobster measuring 30 inches from tip to tip, fresh caught out of the Piscotaco River. Vermont should come to them in hospitality and in pity, offering buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. But Rhode Island would bring a genuine Yankee blueberry pie and directions for the proper consumption of it, namely discarding knife and fork to raise a crusty dripping wedge of blueberry pie in your hand to your mouth and to take a first bite, which instantly changes the ground flour plan of that pie from a triangle to a crescent and then to take a second bite and then to lick your fingers and then there isn't any more pie. Down in Kentucky, I should engage mandi berry, colored, to fry for them some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real cornbread. In Creole, Louisiana, they should sample crawfish scumble and in Georgia, they should have possum baked with sweet potatoes and in Tidewater, Maryland, Terrapin and Canvasback and in Illinois, young gray squirrels on toast and in South Carolina, boiled rice with black-eyed peas and in Colorado, cantaloupes and in Kansas, young sweet corn and in Virginia, country hams, not cured with chemicals, but with hickory smoke and loving hands and in Tennessee, jowl and greens. And elsewhere, they should have their whacking full of prairie hen and suckling pig and barbecued chote and sure enough, beef steak and goobers hot from the parching box and scrapple and yams roasted in hotwood ashes and hot biscuit and waffles and Parker House rolls and the thousand and one other good things that may be found in this our country and which are distinctively and uniquely of this country. Finally, I would bring them back by way of Richmond and there I would give them each an eggnog compounded with fresh cream and made according to a recipe older than the revolution. If I had my way about it, no living creature should be denied the right to bury his face in a brimming tumbler of that eggnog except a man with a drooping red mustache. By the time those gorged and converted pilgrims touched the Eastern seaboard again, any one of them if he caught fire would burn for about four days with a clear blue flame and many valuable packing house byproducts could be gleaned from his ruins. It would bind us all foreigner and native alike in closer ties of love and confidence and it would turn the tide of travel westward from Europe instead of eastward from America. Let's do it sometime and appoint me conductor of the expedition. End of section 19. Section 20 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 10. Modes of the Moment, a fashion article, part one. Among the fur-bearing races, the adult male of the French species easily excels. Some fine peltries are to be seen in Italy and there is a type of farming Englishman who wears a stiff set of burnishers projecting out round his face in a circular effect suggestive of a halo that is slipped down. In connection with whiskers, I have heard the Russians highly commended. They tell me that from a distance it is very hard to distinguish a mishook from a bosque dell, whereas a grand duke nearly always reminds one of something tasty and luxuriant in the line of ornamental arbor work. The German military man specializes in mustaches, preference being given to the Texas long-horn mustache and the walrus and kitty cat styles. A dehorned German officer is rarely found and a muley one is practically unknown. But the French lead all the world in whiskers, both the wildwood variety and the domesticated kind trained on a trellis. I mention this here at the outset because no Frenchman is properly dressed unless he is whiskered also. Such details properly appertain to a chapter on European dress. Probably every freeborn American citizen has at some time in his life cherished the dream of going to England and buying himself an outfit of English clothes. Just as every woman has had hopes of visiting Paris and stocking up with Parisian gowns on the spot where they were created and where, so she assumes, they will naturally be cheaper than elsewhere. Those among us who no longer harbor those fancies are the men and women who have tried these experiments. After she has paid the tariff on them, a woman is pained to note that her Paris gowns have cost her as much as they would cost her in the United States. So I have been told by women who have invested extensively in that direction. And though a man, by the passion of the moment, may be carried away to the extent of buying English clothes, he usually discovers on returning to his native land that they are not adapted to withstand the trying climatic conditions and the critical comments of press and public in this country. What was contemplated as a triumphal re-entrance becomes a foot trace to the nearest ready-made clothing store. English clothes are not meant for Americans but for Englishmen to wear. That is a great cardinal truth which Americans would do well to ponder. Possibly you have heard that an Englishman's clothes fit him with an air. They do so, they fit him with a lot of air around the collar and a great deal of air adjacent to the waistband and through the slack of the trousers. Frequently they fit him with such an air that he is entirely surrounded by space as in the case of a vacuum bottle. Once there was a Briton whose overcoat collar hugged the back of his neck so they knew by that he was no true Briton but an impostor and they put him out of the union. In brief the kind of English clothes best suited for an American to wear is the kind Americans make. I knew these things in advance or anyway I should have known them. Nevertheless I felt our trip abroad would not be complete unless I brought back some London clothes. I took a look at the shop windows and decided to pass up the ready-made things. The coat shirt, the shaped sock, the collar that will fit the neckband of a shirt and other common American commodities seem to be practically unknown in London. The English dress shirt has such a dinky little bosom on it that by rights you cannot refer to it as a bosom at all. It comes nearer to being what women used to call a gimp. Every show window where I halted was jammed to the gun whales with thick fuzzy woolen articles and inflammatory plaid waistcoats and articles in crash for tropical wear. Even through the glass you could note each individual crash with distinctness. The London shopkeeper adheres steadfastly to this arrangement. Into his window he puts everything he has in his shop except the customer. The customer is in the rear with all avenues of escape expertly fenced off from him by the proprietor and the clerks. But the stock itself is in the show window. There are just two department stores in London where according to the American viewpoint the windows are attractively dressed. One of these stores is owned by an American and the other I believe is managed by an American. In Paris there are many shops that are veritable jewel boxes for beauty and taste but these are the small specialty shops very expensive and highly perfumed. The Paris department stores are worse jumbles even than the English department stores. When there is a special sale underway the bargain counters are rigged up on the sidewalks. There in the open air buyer and seller will chaffer and bicker and wrangle and quarrel and kiss and make up again for all the world to see. One of the free sites of Paris is a frugal Frenchman with his face extensively haired over pawing like a sky terrier through a heap of marked down lingerie picking out things for the female members of his household to wear. Now testing some material with his tongue now holding a most personal article up in the sunlight to examine the fabric while the wife stands humbly, dumbly by waiting for him to complete his selections. So far as London was concerned I decided to deny myself any extensive orgy and haberdashery. From similar motives I did not invest in the lounge suit to which an Englishman is addicted. I doubted whether it would fit the lounge we have at home though with stretching it mighted that. My choice finally fell on an English raincoat and a pair of those baggy knee breeches such as an Englishman wears when he goes to Scotland for the moor shooting or to the National Gallery or any other damp, misty, rheumatic place. I got the raincoat first. It was built to my measure, at least that was the understanding, but you give an English tailor an inch and he takes an L. This particular tailor seemed to have labored under the impression that I was going to use my raincoat for holding large public assemblies or social gatherings in. Nothing that I could say convinced him that I desired it for individual use. So he modeled it on a generous spreading design big at the bottom and sloping upward toward the top like a pagoda. Equipped with guy ropes and a center pole it would make a first rate marquee for a garden party. In case of bad weather the refreshments could be served under it. But as a raincoat I did not particularly fancy it. When I put it on I sort of reminded myself of a covered wagon. End of section 20. Section 21 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 10. Modes of the Moment. A Fashion Article. Part 2. Nothing daunted by this I looked up the address of a sporting tailor in a side street off Regent Street whose genius was reputed to find an artistic outlet in knee breeches. Before visiting his shop I disclosed my purpose to my traveling companion, an individual in whose judgment and good taste I have ordinarily every confidence and who has a way of coming directly to the meat of a subject. What do you want with a pair of knee breeches? Inquired this person crisply. Why, for general sporting occasions, I replied. For instance, what occasions? For golfing, I said, and for riding, you know, and if I should go west next year they would come in very handy for the shooting. To begin with, said my companion, you do not golf. The only extensive riding I have ever heard of your doing was on railway trains. And if these knee breeches you contemplate buying are anything like the knee breeches I have seen here in London, and if you should wear them out west among the impulsive Western people, there would undoubtedly be a good deal of shooting, but I doubt whether you would enjoy it. They might hit you. Look here, I said. Every man in America who wears duck pants doesn't run a poultry farm. And the presence of a sailor hat in the summertime does not necessarily imply that the man under it owns a yacht. I cannot go back home to New York and face other and older members of the when I was in London club without some sartorial credentials to show for my trip. I am firmly committed to this undertaking. Do not seek to dissuade me, I beg of you. My mind is set on knee breeches and I shan't be happy until I get them. So saying, I betook myself to the establishment of this sporting tailor in the side street off Regent Street. And there without much difficulty I formed the acquaintance of a salesman of suave and urbane manners. With his assistance I picked out a distinctive, not to say striking, patterned in an effective plaids. The goods, he said, were made of the wool of a Scotch sheep in the natural colors. They must have some pretty fancy-looking sheep in Scotland. This done, the salesman turned me over to a cutter who took me to a small room where incompleted garments were hanging all about like the quartered carcasses of animals in a butcher shop. The cutter was a person who dropped his ages and then, catching himself, gathered them all up again and put them back in his speech, in the wrong places. He surveyed me extensively with a square and a measuring line, meantime taking many notes and told me to come back on the next day but one. On the day named and at the hour appointed I was back. He had the garments ready for me. As with an air of pride he elevated them for my inspection, they seemed commodious, indeed voluminous. I had told him when making them to take all the latitude he needed, but it looked now as though he had got it confused in his mind with longitude. Those breeches appeared to be constructed for cargo rather than speed. With some internal misgivings I lowered my person into them while he held them in position and when I had descended as far as I could go without entirely emuring myself, he buttoned the due dabs at the knees, then he went round behind me and cinched them in abruptly so that of a sudden they became quite snug at the waistline. The only trouble was that the waistline had moved close up under my armpits, practically eliminating about a foot and a half of me that I had always, there to fore, regarded as indispensable to the general effect. Right in the middle of my back, up between my soldier blades there was a stiff, hard clump of something that bored into my spine uncomfortably. I could feel it quite plainly, lumpy and rough. I was that, sir, he cheerly asked me over my shoulder, but it seemed to me there was a strained, nervous note in his voice. A bit of all right, eh, sir? Well, I said, standing on tiptoe in an effect to see over the top, you've certainly behaved very generously toward me. I'll say that much. Mid-ships there appears to be about four or five yards of material I do not actually need in my business, being, as it happens, neither a harem favorite nor a professional sack gracer. And they come up so high I'm afraid people will think the gallant coast guards have got me in a life-boy and are bringing me ashore through the surf. You'll be wanting them a bit loose, sir, you know, he interjected, still snuggling close behind me. All our gentlemen like them loose. Oh, very well, I said, perhaps these things are mere details. However, I would be under deep obligations to you if you'd change them from barking tine to schooner rig and lower away this gaff topsoil, which now sticks up under my chin so that I can luff and come up in the wind without capsizing, and say, what is that hard lump between my shoulders? Nothing at all, sir, he said hastily, and now I knew he was flurried. I can fix that, sir, in a jiffy, sir. Anyhow, please come around here in the front while I can converse more freely with you on the subject. I said, I was becoming suspicious that all was not well with me back where he was lingering. He came reluctantly, still half embracing me with one arm. Petulantly I wrestled my form free and instantly those breeches seemed to leap outward in all directions away from me. I grabbed for them, and barely in time I got agripped on the yawning top hem. Peering down the cave-like orifice that now confronted me, I beheld two spectral white columns, and recognized them as my own legs. In the same instant also I realized what that hard clump against my spine was, because when he took his hand away, the clump was gone. He had been standing back there with some eight or nine inches of superfluous waistband bunched up in his fist. The situation was embarrassing, and it would have been still more embarrassing had I elected to go forth wearing my breeches in their then state. Because to avoid talk he would have had to go along too, walking immediately behind me and holding up the slack. And such a spectacle with me filling the tonneau and he back behind on the rumble would have caused comment undoubtedly. The pants-maker was up a stump. He looked reproachfully at me, chidingly at the breeches and sternly at the tape measure, which he wore draped around his neck like a pet snake, as though he felt convinced one of us was at fault, but he could not be sure which one. I'm afraid, sir, he said, that your figure is changing. I guess you're right, I replied with a soft sigh. As well as I can judge, I'm not as tall as I was day before yesterday, by at least 18 inches. And I've mislaid my diaphragm somewhere, haven't I? Have them off, please, sir, he said, resignedly. I'll have to alter them to conform, sir. Come back tomorrow. I had them off and he altered them to conform, and I went back on the morrow. In fact, I went back so often that after a while I became really quite attached to the place. I felt almost like a member of the firm. Between calls from me, the cutter worked on those breeches. He cut them up and he cut them down. He sheared the back away and shingled the front and shifted the buttons to and fro. Still, even after all this, they were not what I should term an unqualified success. When I sat down in them, they seemed to climb up so high on me for a naft that I felt as short-waisted as a crush hat in a state of repose. And the only way I could get my hands into the hip pockets of those breeches was to take the breeches off first. As ear muffs, they were fair, but as hip pockets, they were failures. Finally, I told them to send my breeches just as they were to my hotel address and I paid the bill. I brought them home with me. On the day after my arrival, I took them to my regular tailor and laid the case before him. I tried them on for him and asked him to tell me, as man to man, whether anything could be done to make those garments habitable. He called his cutter into consultation and they went over me carefully, meantime uttering those commiserating, clucking sounds one tailor always utters when examining another tailor's handiwork. After this, my tailor took a lump of chalk and charted out a kind of Queen Rosamond's maze of cross marks on my breeches and said I might leave them and that if surgery could save them, he would operate. At any rate, he guaranteed to cut them away sufficiently to admit of my breast bone coming out into the open once more. End of section 21. Section 22 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 10. Modes of the Moment, a Fashion Article, Part 3. In a week, about, he called me on the telephone and broke the sad news to me. My English riding pants would never ride me again. In using the shears, he had made a fatal slip and had irreparably damaged them in an essential location. However, he said I need not worry because it might have been worse. From what he had already cut out of them, he garnered enough material to make me a neat outing coat and by scrimping he thought he might get a waistcoat to match. I have my English raincoat. It is still in a virgin state so far as wearing it is concerned. I may yet wear it and I may not. If I wear it and you meet me on the street and we are strangers, you should experience no great difficulty in recognizing me. Just start in at almost any spot on the outer orbit and walk round and round as though you were circling a Shideshow tent looking for a chance to crawl under the canvas and see the curiosities for nothing. And after a while, if you keep on walking as directed, you will come to a person with a plain but substantial face and that will be me in my new English raincoat. Then again, I may wear it to a fancy dress ball sometime. In that case, I shall stencil pikes, peek or bust on the side breath and go as a prairie schooner. If I can succeed in training a Missouri hound dog to trail along immediately behind me, the illusion will be perfect. After these two experiences with the English tailor I gave up, instead of trying to wear the apparel of the foreigner, I set myself to the study of it. I would avoid falling into the habit of making comparisons between European institutions and American institutions that are forever favorable to the American side of the argument. To my way of thinking, there is only one class of tourists. Americans to be encountered abroad are worse than the class who go into hysterical rapture over everything they see merely because it is European. And that is the class who condemn offhand everything they see and find fault with everything merely because it is not American. But I must say that in the matter of outer habillement, the American man wins the decision on points nearly every whack. In his evening garb, which generally fits him, but which generally is not pressed as to trouser legs and coat sleeves, the Englishman makes an exceedingly good appearance. The swallow-tailed coat was created for the Englishman and he for it. But on all other occasions the well-dressed American leads him, leads the world for that matter. When a Frenchman attires himself in his fanciest regalia, he merely succeeds in looking effeminate. Whereas a German, under similar circumstances, bears a wadded in, bulged out, stuffed up appearance. I never saw a German in Germany whose hat was not too small for him. Just as I never saw a Japanese in Occidental garb whose hat was not too large for him, if it was a derby hat. If a German has on a pair of trousers that flare out at the bottom in a coat with angel sleeves, I think that is the correct technical term. And if the front of his coat is spangled over with the largest-sized horn buttons obtainable, he regards himself as being dressed to the minute. As for the women, I believe even the super-critical Mantua-makers of Paris have begun to concede that, as a nation, the American women are the best dressed women on earth. The French women have a way of arranging their hair and of wearing their hats and of draping their furs about their throats that is artistic beyond comparison. There may be a word in some folks' dictionaries fitly to describe it. There is no such word in mine, but when you have said that much, you have said all there is to say. A French woman's feet are not shod well. French shoes, like all European shoes, are clumsy and awkward-looking. English children are well-dressed because they are simply dressed, and the children themselves, in contrast to the overdressed, overly-aggressive youngsters so frequently encountered in America, are mannerly and self-effacing and have sane, simple, childish tastes. Young English girls are fresh and natural, but frequently frumpy, and the English married woman is generally dressed in poor taste and appears to have the most limited wardrobe. Apparently the husband buys all he wants, and then, if there is any money left over, the wife gets dispended on herself. Venturing one morning into a London chapel, I saw a dowdy little woman of this type kneeling in a pew, chanting the responses to the service. Her blouse gaped open all the way down her back, and she was saying with much fervor, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done. She had, too, but she didn't know it, as she knelt there unconsciously supplying a personal illustration for the spoken line. The typical high-born English woman has pale blue eyes, a fine complexion, and a clear-cut, rather expressionless face, with a profile suggestive of the portraits seen on English postage stamps of the early Victorian period. But in the arranging of her hair, any French shop girl could give her lessons, and any smart American woman could teach her a lot about the knack of wearing clothes with distinction. In England, that land of cased, which is rigid enough to be cast iron, all men, with the exception of petty tradespeople, dressed to match the vacations they follow. In America, no man stays put. He either goes forward to a circle above the one into which he was born, or he slips back into a lower one, and so he dresses to suit himself or his wife or his tailor. But in England, the professional man advertises his calling by his clothes. Extreme stage types are ordinary types in London. No southern, silver-tongued orator of the old-time, string-tied, slouch-headed, long-haired variety ever clung more closely to his official makeup than the English barrister clings to his spats, his shad-bellied coat, and his eyeglass dangling on a cord. At a glance one knows the medical man or the journalist, the military man in undress or the gentleman farmer. Also, by the same easy method, one may know the working man and the penny postman. The working man has a cap on his head and a necker-chiff about his throat, and the legs of his corduroy trousers are tied up below the knees with string. Else he is no working man. When we were in London, the postmen were threatening to go on strike. From the papers I gathered that the points in dispute had to do with better hours and better pay. But if they had been striking against having to wear the kind of cap the British government makes a postman wear, their cause would have had the cordial support and intense sympathy of every American in town. It remains for the English clerk to be the only Englishman who seeks by the clothes he wears in his hours of ease to appear as something more than what he really is. Off duty he fairly dotes on the high hat of commerce. Frequently he sports it in connection with an exceedingly short and bobby sack coat and trousers that are four or five inches too short in the legs for him. The Parisian shopman harbors similar ambitions, only he expresses them with more attention to detail. The new hour arriving, the French shop hand doffs his apron and his air of deference. He puts on a high hat and a frock coat that have been on a peg behind the door all the morning, gathers up his cane and his gloves and becoming on the instant a swagger and a swaggering boulevardier, he saunters to his favorite sidewalk cafe for a cordial glass full of pink or green or purple drink. When his little hour of glory is over and done with, he returns to his counter, sheds his grandeur and is once more your humble and ingratiating servitor. In residential London on a Sunday afternoon, one beholds some weird and wonderful costumes. On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a Kensington suburb, I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a little cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of his breed. He was, presumably, going to church, for he carried a large testament under his arm. He wore, among other things, a pair of white spats, a long-tailed coat and a high hat. It was not a regular high hat either, but one of those trick-performing hats which, on signal, will lie doggo or else sit up in bag, and he was riding a bicycle of an ancient vintage. The most impressively-got-up civilians in England, or in the world, either, for that matter, are the assistant managers and the deputy cashiers of the big London hotels. Compared with them, the lilies of the field are as lilies in the bulb. Their collars are higher, their ties are more resplendent, their frock coats more floppy as to the tail and more flappy as to the lapel, than it is possible to imagine until you have seen it all with your own wondering eyes. They are haughty creatures, too, austere and full of a starchy dignity, but when you come to pay your bill, you find at least one of them lined up with the valet and the waiter, the manservant and the maidservant, the ox and the ass, hand out and palm open to get his tip. Having tipped him, you depart, feeling ennobled and uplifted, as though you had conferred a purse of gold on a marquee. End of Section 22. Section 23 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 11. Dress to Kill, Part 1. With us, it is the dress of the women that gives life and color to the shifting show of street life. In Europe it is the soldier, and in England the private soldier particularly. The German private soldier is too stiff and the French private soldier is too limber and the Italian private soldier has been away from the dry cleansers too long. But the British Tommy Atkins is a perfect piece of work, what with his dinky cap tilted over one eye and his red tunic that fits him without blemish or wrinkle and his snappy little swagger stick flirting the air. As a picture of a first class fighting man, I know of but one to match him and that is a khaki clad service-headed Yankee regular. Long may he weigh. There may be something finer in the way of a military spectacle than the change of horse guards at Whitehall or the march of the foot guards across the green in St. James's Park on a fine bright morning, but I do not know what it is. One day, passing Buckingham Palace, I came on a foot guard on duty in one of the little sentry boxes just outside the walls. He did not look as though he were alive. He looked as though he had been stuffed and mounted by a most expert taxidermist. From under his bare skinned shackle and from over his brazen chin strap his face stared out unwinking and solemn and barren of thought. I said to myself, it is taking a long chance but I shall ascertain whether this party has any human emotions. So I halted directly in front of him and began staring fixedly at his midriff as though I saw a button unfastened there or a buckle disarranged. For a space of minutes I kept my gaze on him without cessation. Finally the situation grew painful but it was not that British Grenadier who grew embarrassed and fidgety. It was the other party to the transaction. His gaze never shifted, his eyes never wavered but I came away feeling all wriggly. In no outward regard whatsoever did the soldiers on the continent compare with the soldiers of the British archipelago. When he is not on actual duty the German private is always going somewhere in a great hurry with something belonging to a superior officer, usually a riding horse or a specially heavy valise. On duty and off he wears that woodenness of expression or rather that wooden lack of expression which is found nowhere in such flower of perfection is on the faces of German soldiers and German toys. The Germans proved they have a sense of humour by requiring their soldiers to march on parade with the goose step and the French proved they have done it all by encasing the defenseless legs of their soldiers in those foolish red flannel pants that are manufactured in such profusion up at the pantheon. In the event of another war between the two nations I anticipate a frightful mortality among pants especially if the French forces should be retreating. The German soldier is not a particularly good marksman as marksmen go but he would have to be the worst shot in the world to miss a pair of French pants that were going away from him at the time. Still when all is said and done there is something essentially Frenchy about those red pants. There is something in their length that instinctively suggests a too long and something in their breath that makes you think of Toulouse. I realized that this joke as it stands is weak and imperfect. If there were only another French seaport called Toubug I could round it out and improve it structurally. If the English private soldier is the trimest the Austrian officer is the most beautiful to look on. An Austrian officer is godier than the door opener of a London cafe or the porter of a Paris hotel. He achieves effects and godiness which even the Italian officer cannot equal. The Italian officer is addicted to cock feathers and horsetails on his helmet. To bits of yellow and blue let into his clothes. To tufts of red and green hung on him in unexpected and unaccountable spots. Either the design of bottled Italian Chianti is modeled after the Italian officer or the Italian officer is modeled after the bottle of Chianti. Which though I'm not prepared to say without further study of the subject. But the Austrian officer is the walking sunset effect of creation. For color schemes I know of nothing in nature equal to him except the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Circus parades are unknown in Austria. They are not missed either. After an Austrian officer a street parade would seem a colorless and commonplace thing. In his uniform he runs to striking contrasts. Canary yellow with light blue facings, silvers and greys, bright greens with scarlet slashings and so on. His collar is the very highest of all high collars and the heaviest with embroidery. His cloak is the longest and the widest, his boots the most varnished, his sword belt the broadest and the shiniest and the medals on his bosom are the most numerous and the most glittering. Alf Ringling and John Philip Sousa would take one look at him and then mutually filled with an envious despair they would go apart and hold a grand lodge of sorrow together. Also he constantly wears his spurs and his sword. He wears them even when he is in a cafe in the evening listening to the orchestra, drinking beer and allowing an admiring civilian to pay the check. And that apparently is every evening. There was one Austrian colonel who came one night into a cafe in Vienna where we were and sat down at the table next to us and he put our eyes right out and made all the lights dim and flickery. His epaulets were two hairbrushes of augmented size, gold-mounted, his plumesaw marks were outlined in bullion and along his garboard strake ran lines of gold braid. But strangest of all to observe was the locality where he wore what appeared to be his service stripes. Instead of being on his sleeves they were at the extreme southern exposure of his coat tails. I presume an Austrian officer acquires merit by sitting down. This particular officer's saber kept jingling and so did his spurs and so did his bracelet. I almost forgot the bracelet. It was an ornate affair of gold links fastened on his left wrist with a big gold locket and it kept slipping down over his hand and rattling against his cuff. The chain bracelet locked on the left wrist is very common among Austrian officers. It adds just the final needed touch. I did not see any of them carrying lournettes or shower bouquets but I think in summer they wear veils. One opportunity is afforded the European who is neither a soldier nor a hotel cashier to dress himself up in comic opera clothes and that is when he a hunting goes. An American going hunting puts on his oldest and most serviceable clothes. A European his giddiest, gayest, gladdest regalia. We were so favored by gracious circumstances as to behold several English gentlemen suitably attired for the chase. And we noted that the conventional morning costume of an English gentleman expecting to call informally on a pheasant or something during the course of the forenoon consisted in the mane of a perfect deer of a Norfolk jacket all over plates and pockets with large leather buttons like oak galls adhering thickly to it with a belt high up under the arms and a saucy tail sticking out behind, knee breeches, a high stock collar, shin high leggings of buff or white and a special hat, a truly adorable confection by the world's leading he milliner. If you dared to wear such an outfit of field in America the very dicky birds would fall into fits as you passed. The chipmunks would lean out of trees and just naturally laugh you to death. But in a land where the woodlands are well kept groves and the undergrowth instead of being weedy and briary is sweet-scented fern and gorse and bracken. I suppose it is all eminently correct. Thus apparel the Englishman goes to Scotland to shoot the grouse, the ghillie, the heathercock, the niblick, the haggis, and other scotch game. Thus apparel he ranges the preserve of his own fat, fair-shires in ardent pursuit of the English rabbit, which pretty nearly corresponds to the guinea pig, but is not so ferocious, and the English hare, which is first cousin to our molly cottontail, and the English pheasant, but particularly the pheasant. There was great excitement while we were in England concerning the pheasants. Either the pheasants were preying on the mangle-worsals or the mangle-worsals were preying on the pheasants. At any rate it had something to do with the land-bill, practically everything that happens in England has something to do with the land-bill, and Lloyd George was in a free state of perspiration over it, and the papers were full of it, and altogether there was a great pother over it. We saw pheasants by the score. We saw them first from the windows of our railroad carriage, big, beautiful birds nearly as large as barnyard fowls and as tame, feeding in the bare cabbage patches, regardless of the train chugging by not 30 yards away. And later we saw them again at still closer range as we strolled along the ha- and holly-line roads of the wonderful southern counties. They would scuttle on ahead of us, weaving in and out of the hedged roads, and finally, when we insisted on it and flung pebbles at them to emphasize our desires, they would get up with a great drumming of wings and a fine comet-like display of flowing tail feathers on the part of the cockbirds, and go booming away to what passes in Sussex and Kent for dense cover. Meaning by that, thickets such as you might find in the upper end of Central Park. They say King George is one of the best pheasant shots in England. He also collects postage stamps when not engaged in his regular regal duties, such as laying cornerstones for new workhouses and receiving presentation addresses from charity children. I have never shot pheasants, but having seen them in their free state as above described and having in my youth collected postage stamps intermittently, I should say, speaking offhand, that of the two pursuits postage stamp collecting is infinitely the more exciting and dangerous. Through the closed season, the keepers mind the pheasants, protecting them from poachers and feeding them on selected grain, but a day comes in October when the hunters go forth and take their stands at spaced intervals along a cleared aisle flanking the woods. Then the beaters dive into the woods from the opposite side, and when the tame and trusting creatures come clustering about their feet expecting provender, the beaters scare them up by waving their umbrellas at them, I think, and the pheasants go rocketing into the air. Rocketing is the correct sporting term. Go rocketing into the air like a flock of Sunday supplements, and the gallant gunner downs them in great multitudes, always taking care to avoid messing his clothes. For after all, the main question is, not what did he kill, but how does he look? At that I hold no brief for the pheasant, except when served with breadcrumb dressing and current jelly he is no friend of mine. It ill becomes Americans with our own record behind us to chide other people for the senseless murder of wild things, and besides, speaking personally, I have a reasonably open mind on the subject of wild game shooting. Myself, I shot a wild duck once. He was not flying at the time. He was, as the stock word goes, setting. I had no self-approaches afterward, however. As between that duck and myself, I regarded it as an even break, as fair for one as for the other, because at the moment I was, as we say, setting too. But if, in the interests of true sportsmanship, they must have those annual massacres, I certainly should admire to see what execution, a pickled half dozen of American quail hunters used to snap shooting in the cane jungles and briar patches of Georgia and Arkansas could accomplish among English pheasants until such time as their conscience mastered them and they desisted from slaughter. End of section 23.