CHAPTER XVI London is essentially a he-town. Just as Paris is indubitably a she-town. But untranslatable, unmistakable something which is not to be defined in the plain terms of speech, yet which sets its mark on any long-settled community has branded them both. The one is being masculine, the other is being feminine. For Paris the lily stands, the conventionalized, feminized lily, but London is a lion, a shag-headed, heavy-pod British lion. London thinks of Paris as a woman, rather pretty, somewhat regardless of morals and decidedly slovenly a person, craving admiration but too indolent to earn it by keeping herself presentable, covering up the dirt on a pecan face with rice-powder, wearing paced jewels in her earlobes in an effort to distract criticism from the fact that the ears themselves stand in need of soap and water. London viewed in retrospect seems a great, clumsy, slow-moving giant, with hair on his chest and soil under his nails, competent in the larger affairs and careless about the smaller ones, amply satisfied with himself and disdainful of the opinions of outsiders, having all of a man's vices and a good share of his virtues, loving sport for sport's sake and power for its own sake and despising art for art's sake. You do not have to spend a week or a month or a year in either Paris or London to note these things. The distinction is wide enough to be seen in a day, yes, or in an hour. It shows in all the outer aspects. An over-towering majority of the smart shops in Paris cater to women. A large majority of the smart shops in London cater to men. It shows in their voices, for cities have voices just as individuals have voices. New York is not yet old enough to have found its own sex. It belongs still to the neuter gender. New York is not even a noun. It's a verb transitive, but its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is. New York-like Paris is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill outcries, hysterical babblings, a woman's bridge-whist club at the hour of casting up the score. But London now is different. London, at all hours, speaks with a sustained, sullen, steady, grinding tone, never entirely sinking into quietude, never rising to acute discords. The sound of London rolls on like a river, a river that ebbs sometimes, but rarely floods above its normal banks. It impresses one as the necessary breathing of a grunting and burdened monster who has a mighty job on his hands and is taking his own good time about doing it. In London, mind you, the news boys do not shout their extras. They bear in their hands placards with black-typed announcements of the big news stories of the day, and even these headings seem designed to soothe rather than to excite, saying, for example, such things as special from liner in referring to a disaster at sea, and meaning in Ulster, when meaning that the northern part of Ireland has gone on record as favoring civil war before home rule. The street vendors do not bra on noisy trumpets or ring with bells or utter loud cries to advertise their wares. The policeman does not shout his orders out. He holds aloft the striped sleeve arm of authority and all London obeys. I think the reason why the Londoners turned so viciously on the suffragettes was not because of the things the suffragettes clamored for, but because they clamored for them so loudly. They jarred the public peace. That must have been it. I can understand why an adult American might go to Paris and stay in Paris and be satisfied with Paris. If he were a lover of art and millinery in all their branches. Or why he might go to Berlin if he were studying music and municipal control. Or to Amsterdam if he cared for cleanliness and new cheese. Or to Vienna if he were concerned with surgery, light opera, and the effect on the human lungs of doing without fresh air for long periods of time. Or to Rome if he were an antiquarian and interested in ancient life. Or to Naples if he were an entomologist and interested in insect life. Or to Venice if he liked ruins with water round them. Or to Padua if he liked ruins with no water anywhere near them. No, I'm blessed if I can think of a single good reason why a sane man should go to Padua if he could go anywhere else. But I think I know good and well why a man might spend his whole vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it. For this old foggy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and man-run town, and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part of it as London's grime is, or London's vastness, and London's pettiness, or London's wealth and its stark poverty, or its atrocious suburbs, or its dirty, trade-fretted river, or its dismal back streets, or its still more dismal slums, or anything that is London's. To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite a good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing to turn off a main travel road into one of the crooked byways in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come full face on a house, or a court, or a pump, which figured in epical history or epical literature of the English-speaking race. It is a still greater joy to find it, house, or court, or pump, or what not, looking now pretty much as it must have looked when Good Queen Bess, or Little Dick Whittington, or Chaucer the scribe, or Shakespeare the Player came this way. It is fine to be riding through the country and pass a peaceful green meadow and inquire its name of your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it is a place called Renimede. Each time this happened to me I felt the thrill of a discoverer, as though I had been the first traveller to find these spots. I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic economies of an English barbershop. I used the word economies in this connection advisedly, for compared with the average high-polished, sterilized, and antiseptic barbershop of an American city, this shop seemed a torture cave. In London, pubs are like that, and some dentist establishments and law offices, musty, fusty dens vary unlike their Yankee counterparts. In this particular shop now, the chairs were hard, wooden chairs, the looking glass, you could not rightly call it a mirror, was cracked and bleary, and an apprentice boy went from one patron to another, lathering each face, and then the master followed after him, razor in hand, and shaved the waiting countenances in turn. Flies that looked as though they properly belonged in a livery stable were buzzing about, and there was a prevalent odor which made me think that all the sick pomade in the world had come hither to spend its last declining hours. I said to myself that this place would bear further study, that some day when I felt particularly hardy and daring I would come here and be shaved, and afterward would write a piece about it and sell it for money. So the better to fix its location in my mind I glanced up at the street sign, and behold, I was hard by Drury Lane, where Sweet Nelly once upon a time held her court.  I was remarking to myself that these Britishers were surely a strange race of beings, that if England produced so delectable a thing as green corn, we in America would import it by the ship load and serve it on every table. Whereas here it was so rare that they needs must label it as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, lest people should think it might be an animal, when I chanced to look more closely at the building occupied by the fruiterer and saw that it was an ancient house, half timbered above the first floor, with a queer low brown roof. Going afterward I learned that this house dated straight back to Elizabethan days and still on beyond for so many years that no man knew exactly how many. And I began to understand in a dim sort of way how and why it was that these people held so fast to the things they had and cared so little for the things they had not. Better than by all the reading you have ever done, you absorb a sense and realization of the splendor of England's past when you go to Westminster Abbey and stand, figuratively, with one foot on Johnson and another on Dryden.  More imposing even than Westminster is St. Paul's. I am not thinking so much of the memorials or the tombs or the statues there, but of the tattered battle flags bearing the names of battles fought by the English in every crack and cranny of the world. From Quebec to Lady Smith, from Look Now to Cartoon. Beholding them there, draped above the tombs, some faded but still intact, some mere clotted wisps of ragged silk clinging to blackened standards, gives one an uplifting conception of the spirit that has sent the British soldier forth to growth the globe, never faltering, never slackening pace, never giving back a step to-day, but that he took two steps forward to-morrow, never stopping except for tea. The fool has said in his heart that he would go to England and come away and write something about his impressions, but never write a single solitary word about the Englishman's tea-drinking habit, or the Englishman's cricket-paying habit, or the Englishman's lack of a sense of humor. I was that fool, but it cannot be done. Lacking these things England would not be England. It would be Hamlet without Hamlet, or the Ghost, or the Wicked Queen, or Mad Ophelia, or her tiresome old paw. For most English life and the bulk of English conversation center about sporting topics with the topic of cricket predominating. And at a given hour of the day the wheels of the Empire stop, and everybody in the Empire, from the king in the counting-house counting up his money, to the maid in the garden hanging out the clothes, drops what he or she may be doing and imbibes tea until further orders, and what oceans of tea they do imbib. There was an old lady who sat near us in a tea-shop one afternoon. As well as might be judged by one who saw her in a sitting posture only, she was no deeper than any other old lady of average dimensions. But in rapid succession she tilted five large cups of piping hot tea into herself, and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew, stunned by the spectacle. She must have been fearfully long-waisted.  Still, I doubt whether their four o'clock tea habit is any worse than our five o'clock cocktail habit. It all depends, I suppose, on whether one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled. But we are getting bravely over our cocktail habit as attested by figures in the visual evidence, while their tea habit is growing on them, so the statisticians say. As for the Englishman's sense of humor or his lack of it, I judge that we Americans are partly wrong in our diagnosis of that phase of British character and partly right. Because he is slow to laugh at a joke, we think he cannot see the point of it without a diagram and a chart. What we do not take into consideration is that, through centuries of self-repression, the Englishman has so drilled himself into refraining from laughing in public, for fear you see of making himself conspicuous, it has become a part of his nature. Indeed, in certain quarters, a prejudice against laughing under any circumstances appears to have sprung up. CHAPTER XVI. I was looking one day through the pages of one of the critical English weeklies. Nearly all British weeklies are heavy, and this is the heaviest of the lot. Its editorial column alone weighs from twelve to eighteen pounds, and if you strike a man with a clubbed copy of it, the crime is assault with a dull-blunt instrument, with intent to kill. At the end of a preponderous review of the East India question, I came on a letter written to the editor by a gentleman signing himself with his own name and reading in part as follows. Sir. Laughter is always vulgar and offensive. For instance, whatever there may be of pleasure in a theatre, and there is not much, the place is made impossible by laughter. No, it is very seldom that happiness is refined or pleasant to see. Merriment that is produced by wine is false merriment, and there is no true merriment without it. Laughter is profane, in fact, where it is not ridiculous. On the other hand the English in bulk will laugh at a thing which among us would bring tears to the most hardened cheek and incite our rebellious souls to mayhem and manslaughter. On a certain night we attended a musical show at one of the biggest London theatres. There was some really clever funding by a straight comedian, but his best efforts died a-burning. They drew but the merest ripple of laughter from the audience. Later there was a scene between a sad person made up as a scotchman and another equally sad person of color from the states. These times no English musical show is complete unless the cast includes a North American negro with his lips painted to resemble a wide slice of ripe watermelon, singing ragtime ditties touching on his chicken and his baby doll. This pair took the stage, all others considerably withdrawing, and presently, after a period of heart-rending comicalities, the scotchman, speaking as though he had a mouthful of hot oatmeal, proceeded to narrate an account of a fictitious encounter with a bear. Substantially this dialogue ensued. The scotchman. He was a very fierce grizzly bear, you can, and he rushed at me from behind a jagged rock. The negro. Mr., you mean a jagged rock, don't you? The scotchman. Nay, nay, laddie, a jagged rock. The negro. What stats you say? What? What is a jagged rock? The scotchman, forgetting his accent, why, a rock with a jug on it, old chap. A stage-weight to let that soak into them all in its full strength. A rock with a jug on it would be a jagged rock, wouldn't it, eh? The pause had been sufficient, they had it now, and from all parts of the house a whoop of unrestrained joy went up. Witnessing such spectacles as this, the American observer naturally begins to think that the English en masse cannot see a joke that is the least bit subtle. Nevertheless, however, and to the contrary notwithstanding, as Colonel Bill Sterrett of Texas used to say, England has produced the greatest natural humorous in the world and some of the greatest comedians, and for a great many years has supported the greatest comic paper printed in the English language, and that is punch. Also at an informal Saturday night dinner in a well-known London club, I heard as much spontaneous repartee from the company at large, and as much quiet humor from the chairman, as I ever heard in one evening anywhere. But if you went into that club on a weekday, you might suppose somebody was dead and laid out there, and that everybody about the premises had gone into deep mourning for the deceased. If any member of that club had dared then to crack a joke, they would have expelled him, as soon as they got over the shock of the bounder's confounded cheek. Saturday night? Yes. Monday afternoon? Never. And there you are. Speaking of punch reminds me that we were in London when punch, after giving the matter due consideration for a period of years, came out with a colored jacket on him. If the prime minister had done a Highland fling in costume at high noon in Oxford Circus, it would not have created more excitement than punch created by coming out with a colored cover. Yet to an American's understanding the change was not so revolutionary and radical as all that. Punch's well-known liniments remained the same. There was merely a dab of palest yellow here and there on the sheet. At first glance you might have supposed somebody else had been reading your copy of punch at breakfast, and had been careless in spooning up his soft-boiled egg. They are our cousins, the English are. Our cousins once removed, is true, see standard histories of the American Revolution for further details of the removing. But they are kinsmen of ours beyond a doubt. Even if there were no other evidence, the kinship between us would still be proved by the fact that the English are the only people except the Americans who look on red meat, beef, mutton, ham, as a food to be eaten for the taste of the meat itself, whereas the other nations of the earth regarded as a vehicle for carrying various sauces, dressings, and stuffing southward to the stomach. But to the notice of the American who is paying them his first visit, they certainly do offer some amazing contradictions. In the large matters of business the English have been accused of trickiness, which, however, may be but the voice of envious competition speaking, but in the small things they surely are most marvelously honest. Consider their railroad trains now, to a greenhorn from this side of the blue water, a railroad journey out of London to almost any point in rural England is a secession of surprises, and all pleasant ones. To begin with, apparently there is nobody at the station whose business it is to show you your train, or to examine your ticket before you have found your train for yourself. There is no mad scurrying about at the moment of departure, no bleeding of directions through megaphones.  Sharp on the minute, an unseen hand, at least I never saw it, slams the doors and coyly, you might almost say secretively, the train moves out of the terminal. It moves smoothly and practically without jarring sounds. There is no shrieking of steel against steel. It is as though the rails were made of rubber and the wheel flanges were faced with noise-proof felt. No conductor comes to punch your ticket, no brakeman to bellow the stops, no train butcher bleeding the gabbled invoice of his gumdrops, bananas, and other best-sellers. Glory be! It is also peaceful and soothing, as peaceful and as soothing as the land through which you are gliding, when once you have left behind smoky London and its interminable environs. For now you are in a land that was finished and plenished five hundred years ago, and since then has not been altered in any material aspect whatsoever. Every blade of grass is in its right place. Every wayside shrub seemingly has been restrained and trained to grow in exactly the right and proper way. Streaming by your car window goes a tastefully arranged succession of the thatched cottages, the hud-little towns, the meandering brooks, the ancient inns, the fine old country places, the high hedged estates of the land gentry, with rose-covered lodges at the gates and robust children in the doorways, just as you have always seen them in the picture books. There are fields that are velvet lawns and lawns that are carpets of green-cut plush. England is the only country I know of that lives up exactly and precisely to its storybook descriptions and its storybook illustrations. Eventually you come to your stopping point—at least you have reason to believe it may be your stopping point. As well as you may judge by the signs that plaster the front, the sides, and even the top of the station, the place is either a beef extract or a washing compound. Nor may you count on any travelers who may be sharing your compartment with you to set you right by a timely word or two. Your fellow passengers may pity you for your ignorance and your perplexity, but they would not speak. They could not, not having been introduced. A German or a Frenchman would be giving you gladly what A.D. might, but a well-born Englishman who had not been introduced would ride for nine years with you and not speak. I found the best way of solving the puzzle was to consult the time-card. If the time-card said our train would reach a given point at a given hour, and this was the given hour, then we might be pretty sure it was the given point. Timetables in England are written by realists, not by gifted fiction writers of the Impressionistic School, as is frequently the case in America.  Having ferreted him out in his hiding-place, you hand over your ticket to him, and he touches his cat-brim and says, Q, very politely, which concludes the ceremony so far as you are concerned. Then if you have brought any heavy baggage with you in the baggage-car—pardon, I meant the luggage van—you go back to the platform and pick it out from the heap of luggage that has been dumped there by the train-hands. With ordinary luck and forethought you could easily pick out and claim and carry off some other person's trunk, provided you fancied it more than your own trunk, only you do not. You do not do this any more than, having purchased a second-class ticket or a third-class, you ride first-class, though so far as I could tell there is no check to prevent a person from so doing. At least an Englishman never does. It never seems to occur to him to do so. The English have no imagination. I have a suspicion that if one of our railroads tried to operate its train service on such a basis of confidence in the general public, there would be a most deceitful hiatus in the receipts from passenger traffic to be reported to a distressed group of stockholders at the end of the fiscal year. This, however, is merely a supposition on my part. I may be wrong. CHAPTER XVII. To a greater degree I take it than any other race the English have mastered the difficult art of mining their own fares.  If an Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them, and learns them well. Otherwise, your Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or may not do. An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire to know about things. We do not understand his lack of curiosity in that direction. Both of us forget what I think must be the underlying reasons. We are a race which, until comparatively recently, lived wide distances apart in sparsely settled lands, and were dependent on the passing stranger for news of the rest of the world. Where he belongs to a people who all these centuries have been packed together in their little island like oats in a bin. London itself is so crowded that the noses of most of the lower classes turn up. There is not room for them to point straight ahead without causing a great and bitter confusion of noses. But whether it points upward or outward or downward, the owner of the nose pretty generally refrains from ramming it into other folks' business. If he and all his fellows did not do this, if they had not learned to keep their voices down and to muffle unnecessary noises, if they had not built tight covers of reserve about themselves, as the oyster builds a shell to protect his tender tissues for meditation, they would long ago have become a race of nervous wrecks, instead of being what they are, the most stolid beings alive. In London even royalty is mercifully vouchsafe to reasonable amount of privacy from the intrusion of the gimlet eye and the chisel nose. Royalty may ride in a rotten row of a morning, promenade on the mall at noon, and shop in the Regent Street shops in the afternoon, and, at all times, go unguarded and unbothered. I had almost said, unnoticed. It may be that long and constant familiarity with the institution of royalty has bred indifference in the London mind to the physical presence of dukes and princes and things, but I am inclined to think a good share of it should be attributed to the inborn and ingrown British faculty for letting other folks be. One morning as I was walking at random through the aristocratic district, of which St. James as the solar plexus and park lain the spinal cord, I came to a big mansion where foot guards stood sentry at the wall gates. This house was further distinguished from its neighbors by the presence of a policeman pacing alongside it and a newspaper photographer setting up his tripod and camera in the road, and a small knot of passers-by lingering in the opposite side of the way, as though waiting for somebody to come along or something to happen. I waited, too. In a minute a handsome old man and a well-set-up young man turned the corner afoot. The younger man was leading a beautiful stag hound. The photographer touched his hat and said something, and the younger man smiling a good-natured smile, obligingly posed in the street for a picture. At this precise moment a dirigible balloon came careening over the chimney-pots on a cross-London air-jaunt, and at the side of it the little crowd left the young man and the photographer and set off at a run to follow, as far as they might the course of the balloon. Now, in North America this could not have occurred, for the balloon man would not have been aloft at such an hour. He would have been on the earth, moreover he would have been outside the walls of that mansion-house, along with half a million more or less of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing his own clothes off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly underfoot, bucking the double and tripled police-lines in a mad vain effort to see the flag-pole on the roof or a corner of the rear-garden wall. For that house was Clarence House, and the young man who posed so accommodatingly for the photographer was none other than Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was getting himself married the very next day. The next day I beheld from a short distance the passing of the bridal procession. There were crowds all along the route followed by the wedding-party. There was no scrounging, no shoving, no fighting, no disorderly scramble, no one-seemly congestion about the chapel where the ceremony took place. It reminded me vividly of that which inevitably happens when a millionaire's daughter is being married to a duke in a fashionable Fifth Avenue church. It reminded me of that because it was so different. Fortunately for us we were so placed that we saw quite distinctly the entrance of the wedding-party into the chapel enclosure. Personally I was most concerned with the members of the royal house. As I recollect they passed in the following order. His Majesty, King George V. Her Majesty, Queen Mary, the other four-fifths. Small fractional royalties to the number of a dozen or more. I got a clear view of the side-face of the Queen, as one looked on her profile, which was what you might call firm, and saw the mild-looking little king, who seemed quite eclipsed by her presence. One understood, or any way one thought one understood, why an English assemblage, when standing to chant the national anthem these times, always put such fervor and meaning into the first line of it. Only one, untoward, incident occurred. The inevitable militant lady broke through the lines as the imperial carriage passed and threw a votes for women handbill into His Majesty's lap. She was removed thence by the police with the skill and dexterity of long practice. The police were competently on the job. They always are, which brings me round to the subject of the London Bobby, and leads me to venture the assertion that individually and collectively, personally and officially, he is a splendid piece of work. The finest thing in London is the London policeman, and the worst thing is the shamefully small and shabby pay he gets. He is majestic because he represents the majesty of the English law. He is humble and obliging because, as a servant, he serves the people who make the law. And always he knows his business. In Charing Cross, where all roads meet and snarl up in the bewildering semblance of many fishing-worms in a can, I ventured out into the roadway to ask a policeman the best route for reaching a place in a somewhat obscure quarter. He threw up his arm, semaphore fashion, first to this point of the compass and then to that, and traffic halted instantly. As far as the eye might reach it halted, and it stayed halted too, while he searched his mind and gave me carefully and painstakingly the directions for which I sought. In that packed mob of cabs, and taxis, and buses, and carriages, there were probably dukes and archbishops. Dukes and archbishops are always fussing about in London, but they waited until he was through directing me. It flattered me so that I went back to the hotel and put on a larger hat. I sincerely hoped there was at least one archbishop. Another time I went to Paddington to take a train for somewhere. Using the custom of the country we took along our trunks and traps on the top of the taxi cab. At the moment of our arrival there were no porters handy, so a policeman on post outside the station jumped forward on the instant and helped our chauffeur to wrestle the luggage down on the bricks. When I, rallying somewhat from the shock of this, thanked him and slipped a coin into his palm, he said in effect that, though he was obliged for the shilling, I must not feel that I had to give him anything, that it was part of his duty to aid the public in these small matters. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing as much for an unknown alien, but the effort gave me a severe headache. It gave me darting pains across the top of the skull, at about the spot where he would probably have belted me with this club had I even dared to ask him to bear a hand with my luggage. I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London Bobby is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel of the common law, a police court. I understood then what gave the policeman in the street his authority and his dignity and his humility when I saw how carefully the magistrate on the bench weighed each trifling cause and each petty case, how surely he winnowed out the small grain of truth from the gross and tear and surmise in fiction, how particular he was to give of the abundant store of his patients to any whining rag picker or street beggar who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar or accuser or witness. It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after this when, by invitation, we witnessed the procession at the opening of the High Courts. Considered from the standpoints of picturesqueness and impressiveness, it made one's pulses tingle when those thirty or forty men of the Wigan ermine marched in single and double file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor and Wigan robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, he breached and sword-belted a pace or two behind him, and then in turn the justices, and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them, night escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs of the great machine. What struck into me the deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges. Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament. Men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hot keen eyes, so many smooth chopped, long jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the high-water period of American statesmanship. The Clay Calhoun Benton Webster period. End of Section 35. Section 36 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 XVII Britain in twenty minutes, Part II Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts. I said to myself that if I wanted justice, exact justice, heaping high in timescales, I should come to this shop and give my trade to the old established firm. But if I were looking for a little mercy, I should take my custom elsewhere. I cannot tell why I associated in my mind with this grouped spectacle of the lords of the law, but somehow the scene to be witnessed in Hyde Park just inside the marble arch of a Sunday evening seems bound up somehow with the other institution. They call this place London's safety valve. It's all of that. Long ago the ruling powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction, unlimited, they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines. So without letter hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or what comes to the same thing into speechlessness. When I went to Hyde Park on a certain Sunday rain was falling and the crowds were not so large as usual. A board policeman on duty in this outdoor forum told me still, at that there must have been two or three thousand listeners in sight and not less than twelve speakers. These latter balanced themselves on small portable platforms placed in rows, which such short spaces between them that their voices intermingled confusingly. In front of each orator stood his audience. Sometimes they applauded what he said in a sluggish British way, and sometimes they asked him questions designed to baffle or perplex him. Heckling, I believe this is called, but there was never any suggestion of disorder and never any violent demonstration for or against a statement made by him. At the end of the line nearest the arch, under a flurry light, stood an old bearded man having the look on his face of a kindly but somewhat irritated mookow. At the moment I drew near he was having a long and involved argument with another controversialist, touching on the sense of the word tabernacle as employed scripturally, one holding it to mean the fleshly tenement of the soul, and the other an actual place of worship. The old man had two favorite words, behoove and omit, but behoove was evidently his choice. As an omitter he was only fair, but he was the best behoover I ever saw anywhere. The order next to him was speaking in a soft, sentimental tone, with gestures gently appropriate. I moved along to him, being minded to learn what particular brand of brotherly love he might be expounding. In the same tone a good friend might employ in telling you what to do for chapped lips or a fever blister, he was saying that clergymen and armaments were useless and expensive burdens on the commonwealth, and as a remedy he was advocating that all the priests and all the preachers in the kingdom should be loaded on the dreadnoughts, and then the dreadnought should be steamed to the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, and they are cosily scuttled with all aboard. There was a scattering applause and a voice, now, don't do that! Listen here! I've got a better plan. But the next speaker was blaring away at the top of his voice, making threatening faces and waving his clenched fists aloft, and pounding them with the top of his rostrum. Now this, I said to myself, is going to be something worthwhile. Only this person would not be content merely with drowning all the Parsons and sinking all the warships in the hole at the bottom of the sea. Undoubtedly he will advocate something really radical. I will invest five minutes with him. I did, but I was sold. He was favouring the immediate adoption of a universal tongue for all the peoples of the earth. That was all. I did not catch the name of his universal language, but I judged the one at which he would excel would be a language with few, if any, ages in it. After this disappointment I lost heart and came away. Another phase, though a very different one, of the British spirit of fair play and tolerance, was shown to me at the National Sporting Club, which is the British Shrine of Boxing, where I saw fight for one of the championship belts that Lord Lonsdale is forever bestowing on this or that worshipful fisticuffer. Instead of being inside the ring prying the fingers apart by main force as he would have been doing in America, the referee, dressed in evening clothes, was outside the ropes. At a snap toward from him the fighters broke apart from the clenches on the instant. The audience, a very mixed one, ranging in garb from broad cloths to shoddies, was as quick to approve a telling blow by the less popular fighter as to hiss any suggestion of trickiness or fouling on the part of the favourite. When a contestant in one of the preliminary goes, having been a judge to lose her on points, objected to the decision and insisted on being heard in his own behalf, the crowd, though plainly not in sympathy with his contention, listened to what he had to say. Nobody jeered him down. Had he been a foreigner, and especially had he been an American, I am inclined to think the situation might have been different. I seem to recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from this side went over there and broke the British heart by licking the British champion. And again what happened when a Yankee boy won the marathon at the Olympic Games in London a few years ago. But as this man was a Britain himself, these other Britons harken to his sputterings.  The settled Englishmen declines always to be jostled out of his hereditary state of intense calm. They tell of a man who dashed into the reading-room of the savage-club with the announcement that a lion was loose on the strand. A lion that had escaped from a travelling caravan and was rushing madly to and fro, scaring horses and frightening pedestrians. Great excitement! Most terrific old deers on my word, he added, addressing the company. Over the top of the pink gun an elderly gentleman of a full habit of life regarded him sourly. Is that any reason, he inquired, why a person should rush into a gentleman's club and kick up such a deucid hullabaloo? The first man, he must have been a colonial, gazed at the other man in amazement. Well, he asked, what would you do if you met a savage lion loose on the strand? Sir, I should take a cab. And after meeting an Englishman or two of this type I am quite prepared to say the story might have been a true one. If he met a lion on the strand today he would take a cab. But if to-morrow, walking in the same place he met two lions, he would write a letter to the times complaining of the growing prevalence of lions in the public thoroughfares and placing the blame on the suffragettes or Lloyd George or the nonconformists or the increasing discontent of the working classes. That is what he would do. On the other hand, if he met a squirrel on a street in America it would be a most extraordinary thing. Extraordinary would undoubtedly be the word he would use to describe it. Lions on the strand would be merely annoying, but chipmunks on Broadway would constitute a striking manifestation of the unsettled conditions existing in a wild and misgoverned land. For you see, to every right-minded Englishman of the insular variety, and that is the commonest variety there is in England, whatever happens at home is but part of an orderly and ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens beyond the British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and exceedingly disorganizing. If so be it happens on English soil he can excuse it. He always has an explanation or an extenuation handy. But if it happens elsewhere, well, there you are, you see. What was it somebody once called England? Perfidious alibion, wasn't it? Anyhow, that's what he meant. The party's intentions were good, but his spelling was faulty. And Englishman's newspapers help him to attain this frame of mind. For an English newspaper does not print sensational stories about Englishmen residing in England. It prints them about people resident in other lands. There is a good reason for this, and the reason is based on prudence. In the first place the private life of a private individual is a most holy thing, with which the papers dare not meddle. Besides the paper that printed a faked up tale about a private citizen in England would speedily be exposed and so extensively sued. As for public men, they are protected by exceedingly stringent libel laws. As nearly as I might judge, anything true you printed about an English politician would be libelous, and anything libelous you printed about him would be true. End of Section 36. Section 37 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 XVII. It befalls, therefore, as I was told on most excellent authority, that when the editor of a live London Daily finds the local grist to be dull and uninteresting reading, he straightway cables to his American correspondent or his Paris correspondent, these two being his main standbys for sensations, asking if his choice falls on the man in America for a snappy dispatch, say, about an American train smash-up, or a nature freak, or a scandal in high society with a rich man mixed up in it. He wires for it, and in reply he gets it. I have been in my time a country correspondent for city papers, and I know that what Mr. Editor wants Mr. Editor gets.  Also he gets the idea that a through train in this country is so-called because it invariably runs through the train ahead of it, and that when a man in Connecticut is expecting a friend on the fast express from Boston, and want something to remember him by, he goes down to the station at train time with a bucket. Under the headlining system of the English newspapers, the derailment of a work train in Arizona, wherein several Mexican track layers get messed up, becomes another frightful American railway disaster. But a head-on collision attended by fatalities in the suburbs of Liverpool or Manchester is a distressing suburban incident. Yet the official blue-book issued by the British Board of Trade showed that in the three months ending March 31, 2013, 284 persons were killed and 2,457 were injured on railway lines in the United Kingdom. Just as an English gentleman is the most modest person imaginable and the most backward about offering lift service in praise of his own achievements or his country's achievements, so in the same superlative degree, some of his newspapers are the most blatant of boasters. About the time we were leaving England, the job of remodeling and beautifying the front elevation of Buckingham Palace reached its conclusion, and a dinner was given to the working men who, for some months, had been engaged on the contract. It had been expected that the occasion would be graced by the presence of their majesties, but the king, as I recall, was pasting stamps in the new album the Tsar of Russia sent him on his birthday, and the queen was looking through the files of Godi's lady's book for the year 1874, picking out suitable costumes for the ladies of her court to wear. At any rate they could not attend. Otherwise, though, the dinner must have been a success. Reading the account of it as published next morning in in London newspaper, I learned that some of the guests with rare British pluck wore their caps and corduroy's, that others with true British independence smoked their pipes after dinner, that there was real British beef and genuine British plum pudding on the menu, and that repeatedly those present uttered hearty British cheers. From top to bottom the column was studded thick with British thisses and British thatts. Yet the editorial writers of that very paper are given to frequent and sneering attacks on the alleged yellowness and the boasting proclivities of the jingo-yanky sheets. Also they are prone to spasmodic attacks on the laxity of our marriage laws. Perhaps what they say of us is true, but for unadulterated nastiness I never saw anything in print to equal the front page of a so-called sporting weekly that circulates freely in London, and I know of nothing to compare with the brazen exhibition of a certain form of vice that is to be witnessed nightly in the balconies of two of London's largest music halls. It was upon the program of another London theatre that I came across the advertisement of a lady styling herself London's woman detective, and stating, in so many words, that her specialties were divorce shadowings and secret inquiries. Maybe it is a fact that in certain of our states marriage is not so much a contract as a ninety-day option, but the lady detective who does divorce shadowings and advertises her qualifications publicly has not opened up her shop among us. In the campaign to give the stay-at-home Englishman a strange conception of his American kinsmen, the press is ably assisted by the stage. In London I went to see a comedy written by a deservedly successful dramatist and staged, I think, under his personal direction. The English characters in the play were whimsical and, as nearly as I might judge, true to the classes they purported to represent. There was an American character in this piece, too, a multimillionaire, of course, and a collector of pictures, presumably a dramatically fair and realistic drawing of a wealthy, successful, art-loving American. I have forgotten now whether he was supposed to be one of our meaty Chicago millionaires, or one of our oily Cleveland millionaires, or one of our steely Pittsburgh millionaires, or just a plain millionaire from the country at large, and I doubt whether the man who wrote the lines had any conception when he did write them of the fashion in which they were afterward read. Be that as it may, the actor who essayed to play the American used an inflection, or an accent, or a dialect, or a jargon, or whatever you might choose to call it, which was partly of the old-time, drawly, wild Western school of expression and partly of the old-time, nasal, down-East school. I had thought, and had hoped, that both these actor-created lingos were happily obsolete, but in their full flower of perfection I now heard them here in London. Also the actor who played the part interpreted the physical angles of the character in a manner suggest a pleasing combination of Uncle Joshua Whitcomb, Mike the Bite, Jefferson Brick, and Coal Oil Johnny, with the suggestion of Jesse James interspersed here and there. True, he spat not on the carpet loudly, and he refrained from saying, I've um, and great snakes. Quaint conceits that, I am told, every English actor who respected his art formally employed when wishful to type a stage American for an English audience. But he bragged loudly and emphatically of his money, and how he got it, and of what he would do with it. I do not perceive why it is the English, who themselves so dearly loved the dollar after it is translated into terms of pounds, shillings, and pens, should insist on regarding us as a nation of dollar-grabbers, when they only see us in the act of freely dispensing the aforesaid dollar. They do so regard us, though, and with true British setness, I suppose they always will. Even so, I think that, though they may dislike us as a nation, they like us as individuals. And it is certainly true that they seem to value us more highly than they value colonials, as they call them, particularly Canadian colonials. It would appear that your true Britain can never excuse another British subject for the shockingly poor taste he displayed in being born away from home. And though in time he may forgive us for refusing to be licked by him, he can never forgive the colonials for saving him from being licked in South Africa. When I started in to write this chapter, I meant to conclude it with an apology for my audacity and undertaking, in any wise, to sum up the local characteristics of a country where I had tarried for so short a time. But I have changed my mind about that. I have merely borrowed a page from the book of rules of the British essayists and novelists who come over here to write us up. Why, bless your soul, I gave nearly eight weeks of time to the task of seeing Europe thoroughly, and of those eight weeks I spent upwards of three weeks in and about London, indeed a most unreasonably long time when measured by the standards of the Englishmen of letters who does a book about us. He has his itinerary mapped out in advance. He will squander a whole week on us. We are scarcely worth it, but such as we are we shall have a week of his company. Landing on Monday morning he will spend Monday in New York, Tuesday in San Francisco, and Wednesday in New Orleans. Thursday he will divide between Boston and Chicago, devoting the four noon to one and the afternoon to the other. Friday morning he will range through the Rocky Mountains, and after luncheon, if he is not too fatigued, he will take a carriage and pop in on Yosemite Valley for an hour or so. But Saturday all of it will be given over to the Fair Southland. He is going way down south to sunny South Dakota, in fact, to see the genuine Native American darkies, the real Yankee Blackamores. Most interesting beings, the Blackamores, they live exclusively on poultry fowls, you know, and all their women folk are named Honeygow. He will observe them in their hours of leisure, when, attired in their national costume, consisting of white duck breeches, banjos, and striped shirts with high collars, they gather beneath the rays of the silvery southern moon to sing their tribal melodies on the melon-lined shores of the old Oswego. And by day he will study them at their customary employment as they climb from limb to limb of the cottonwood trees, picking cotton. On Sunday he will arrange and revise his notes, and on Monday morning he will sail for home. Such is the program of Solomon Grundy, Esquire, the distinguished writing Englishman, but on his arrival he finds the country to be somewhat larger than he expected—larger actually than the Midlands. So he compromises by spending five days at a private hotel in New York, run by a very worthy and deserving English woman of the middle classes, where one may get Yorkshire puddings every day and two more days at a wealthy Tuftunders million-dollar cottage at Newport, studying the habits and idiosyncrasies of the common people. And then he rushes back to England and hurriedly involves his impressions of us in a large volume, stating it to be his deliberate opinion that, though we really mean well enough, we won't do, really. He necessarily has to hurry, because, you see, he has a contract to write a novel or play—or both a novel and a play—with Lord Northcliff as the central figure. In these days practically all English novels and most English comedies play up Lord Northcliff as the central figure. Almost invariably the young English writer chooses him for the axis about which his plot shall resolve. English journalists who have been discharged from one of Northcliff's publications make him their villain. And English journalists who hope to secure jobs on one of his publications make him their hero. The literature of the land is in perilous case when it depends on the personality of one man. One shudders to think what the future of English fiction would be should anything happen to his lordship. CHAPTER XVIII. During our scientific explorations in the Eastern Hemisphere, we met two guides who had served the late Samuel L. Clemens, one who had served the late J. Pierpont Morgan, and one who had acted as courier to ex-president Theodore Roosevelt. After inquiry among persons who were also lately abroad, I have come to the conclusion that my experience in this regard was remarkable—not because I met so many as four of the guides who had attended these distinguished Americans, but because I met so few as four of them. One man with whom I discussed the matter told of having encountered in the course of a brief scurry across Europe, five members in good standing of the International Association of Former Guides to Mark Twain. All of them had union cards to prove it, too. Others said that in practically every city of any size visited by them there was a guide who told of his deep attachment to the memory of Mr. Morgan, and described how Mr. Morgan had hired him without inquiring in advance what his rate for professional services a day would be, and how, lingering with wistful emphasis on the words along here and looking meaningly all the while at the present patron, how very, very generous Mr. Morgan had been in bestowing gratuities on parting. Our first experience with guides was at Westminster Abbey. As it happened, this guide was one of the Mark Twain survivors. I think, though, he was genuine. He had documents of apparent authenticity in his possession to help him in proving up his title. Anyhow, he knew his trade. He led us up and down those parts of the Abbey, which are free to the general public, and brought us finally to a wicket gate, opening on the royal chapels, which was as far as he could go. There he turned us over to a severe-looking dignitary in robes, an archbishop, I judged, or possibly only a cannon, who on payment by us of a shilling ahead escorted our party through the remaining enclosures, showing us the tombs of England's queens and kings, or a good many of them anyway, and the black prince's helmet and breastplate, and the exquisite chapel of Henry VII, and the ancient chair on which all the kings sat for their coronations with the famous scotch stone of scone under it. The chair itself was not particularly impressive. It was not nearly so rickety and decrepit as the chairs one sees in almost any London barber shop. Nor was my emotion particularly excited by the stone. I would engage to get a better-looking one out of the handiest rock quarry inside of twenty minutes. This stone should not be confused with the ordinary scones, which also come from Scotland, and which are, by some, regarded as edible. What did seem to us a rather queer thing was that the authorities of Westminster should make capital of the dead rulers of the realm and, except on certain days of the week, should charge an admission fee to their sepulchres. Later on the continent we sustained an even more severe shock when we saw royal palaces, palaces that on occasion are used by the royal proprietors, with the quarters of the monarchs upstairs and downstairs novelty shops and tourist agencies and restaurants, and the like of that. I jotted down a few crisp notes concerning these matters, my intention being to comment on them as evidence of an incomprehensible thrift on the part of our European kins people, but on second thought I decided to refrain from so doing. I recalled the fact that we ourselves are not entirely free from certain petty national economies. Abroad we house our embassies up back streets, next door to bird and animal stores, and at home there is many a public institution where the doormat says welcome in large letters, but the soap is chained and the roller-towel is padlocked to its little roller. Guides are not particularly numerous in England. Even in the places most frequented by the sightseer they do not abound in any profusion. At Madame Tussaud's, for example, we found only one guide. We encountered him just after we had spent a mournful five minutes in contemplation of ex-president Taft. Friends and acquaintances of Mr. Taft will be shocked to note the great change in him when they see him here in wax. He does not weigh so much as he used to weigh by at least one hundred and fifty pounds. He has lost considerable height, too.  His mustache is not a close fit any more, either, and he is wearing a suit of English-made clothes. On leaving the sadly altered form of our former chief executive, we descended a flight of stone steps leading to the chamber of horrors. This department was quite crowded with parents escorting their children about. Like America, England appears to be well-stocked with parents who make a custom of taking their young and susceptible offspring to places where the young ones stand a good chance of being scared into conniption fits. The official guide was in the chamber of horrors. He was piloting a large group of visitors about, but as soon as he saw our smaller party he left them and came directly to us. For they were scotch and we were Americans, citizens of the happy land where tips come from. Undoubtedly that guide knew best. With pride and pleasure he showed us a representative assortment of England's most popular and prominent murderers. The English dearly love a murderer. Perhaps that is because they have fewer murderers than we have and have less luck than we do in keeping them alive and in good spirits to a ripe old age. Almost any American community of fair size can afford at least two murderers, one in jail under sentence, receiving gifts of flowers and angel cake from kind ladies, and waiting for the court above to reverse the verdict in his case because the indictment was shy a comma, and the other out on bail awaiting his time for going through the same procedure. But with the English it is different. We rarely hang anybody who is anybody and only occasionally make an issue of stretching the neck of the various nobody. They will hang almost nobody ham and high, or even higher than that. They do not exactly hang their murderer before they catch him, but the two events occur in such close to session that one can readily understand why a confusion should have arisen in the public mind on these points. First of all, though, they catch him, and then, some morning between ten and twelve, they try him. This is a brief and business-like formality. While the judge is looking in a drawer of his desk to see whether the black cap is handy, the bailiff shoe twelve tradesmen to the jury box. A tradesman is generally chosen for jury service because he is naturally anxious to get the thing over and hurry back to his shop before his helper goes to lunch. The judge tells the jurors to look on the prisoner, because he is going away shortly and is not expected back. So they take full advantage of the opportunity, realizing it to be their last chance. Then in order to comply with the forms, the judge asks the accused whether he is guilty or not guilty, and the jurors promptly say he is. His worship, concurring heartily, fixes the date of execution for the first Friday morning when the hangman has no other engagements. It is never necessary to postpone this event through failure of the condemned to be present. He is always there, there is no record of his having disappointed an audience. So on the date named, rain or shine, he is hanged very thoroughly, but after the hanging is over they write songs and books about him and revere his memory forever more. Our guide was pleased to introduce us to the late Mr. Charles Pease, as done in paraffin, with crept hair and bright shiny glass eyes. Mr. Pease was undoubtedly England's most fashionable murderer of the past century, and his name is imperishably enshrined in the British affections. The guide spoke of his life and works with deep and sincere feeling. He also appeared to derive unfamed pleasure from describing the accomplishments of another murderer, only slightly less famous than the late Mr. Pease. It seemed that this murderer, after slaying his victim, set to dismembering the body and boiling it. They boil nearly everything in England, but the police broke in on him and interrupted the job. Our attention was directed to a large chart showing the form of the victim, the boiled portions being outlined in red and the unboiled portions in black. Considered as a murderer solely, this particular murderer may have been deserving of his fame, but when it came to boiling that was another matter. He showed poor judgment there. It all goes to show that a man should stick to his own trade and not try to follow two or more widely dissimilar colleagues at the same time. Sooner or later he is bound to slip up. We found Stratford upon Avon to be the one town in England where guides are really abundant. There are as many guides in Stratford as there are historic spots. I started to say that there is at least one guide in Stratford for every American who goes there, but that would be stretching real facts, because nearly every American who goes to England manages to spend at least a day in Stratford, it being a spot very dear to his heart. The very name of it is associated with two of the most conspicuous figures in our literature. I refer first to Andrew Carnegie, second to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare who wrote the books was born here, but Carnegie who built the libraries in which to keep the books, and who has done some writing himself, provided the money for preserving and perpetuating the relics. We met a guide in the ancient school house where the bard, I am now speaking of William, not of Andrew, acquired the rudiments of his education, and on duty at the Old Village Church was another guide who for a price shut us the identical gravestone bearing the identical inscription which, reproduced in a design of burnt wood, is today to be found on the walls of every American household, however humble, whose members are wishful of imparting an artistic and literary atmosphere to their home. A third guide greeted us warmly when we drove to the cottage, a mile or two from the town where the Hathaway family lived. Here we saw the high-backed satay on which Shakespeare sat, night after night, wooing and Hathaway. I myself sat on it to test it. I should say that the wooing could not have been particularly good there, especially for a thin man. That satay had a very hard seat, and history does not record that there was a cushion. Shakespeare's affections for the lady must indeed have been steadfast, or perhaps he was of stouter build than his pictures show him to have been. Documents were scattered all over the birthplace house in Stratford in the ratio of one or more to each room. Downstairs a woman guide presided over a battery of glass cases containing personal belongings of Shakespeare's and documents written by him and signed by him. It is conceited that he could write, but he certainly was a mighty poor speller. This has been a failing of many well-known writers. Chaucer was deficient in this regard, and if it were not for a feeling of personal modesty I could apply the illustration nearer home. Two guides accompanied us as we climbed the stairs to the low-roofed room on the second floor where the creator of Shylock and Juliet was born, or was not born if you believe what Ignatius Donnelly had to say on the subject. But would it not be interesting in valued information if we could only get the evidence on this point of old Mrs. Shakespeare, who undoubtedly was present on the occasion? A member of our party, an American, ventured to remark as much to one of the guides, but the latter did not seem to understand him. So the American told him just to keep thinking it over at odd moments, and that he would be back again in a couple of years if nothing happened, and possibly by that time the guide would have caught the drift of his observation. On second thought, later on, he decided to make it three years. He did not want to crowd the guide, he said, or put too great a burden on his mentality in a limited space of time. End of Section 38. If England harbors few guides, the continent is fairly glutted with them. After nightfall the boulevards of Paris are so choked with them that in places they are standing room only. In Rome the congestion is even greater. In Rome every other person is a guide, and sometimes twins. I don't know why, in thinking of Europe, I invariably associate the subject of guides with the subject of tips. The guides were no greedier for tips than the cabmen or the hotel helpers or the railroad hands or the populace at large. Nevertheless this is true. In my mind I am sure guides and tips will always be coupled, as surely as any of those standard team word combinations of our language that are familiar to us all, as firmly paired off as, for example, castor and Pollux, or daemon and pithius, or fair and warmer, or hay and feed. When I think of one I know I shall think of the other. Also I shall think of languages, but for that there is a reason. Tipping, the giving of tips and the occasional avoidance of giving them, takes up a good deal of the tourist time in Europe. At first reading the arrangement devised by the guidebooks of setting aside ten percent of one's bill for tipping purposes seems a better plan and a less costly one than the indiscriminate American system of tipping for each small service at the time of its performance. The trouble is that this arrangement does not work out so well in actual practice as it sounds in theory. On the day of your departure you send for your hotel bill. You do not go to the desk and settle up there after the American fashion. If you have learned the ropes you order your room waiter to fetch your bill to you, and in the privacy of your apartment you pour over the formidable document wherein every small charge is fully specified, and the whole concluding with an impressive array of items regarding which you have no prior recollection whatsoever. Considering the total you put aside an additional ten percent, calculated for division on the basis of so much for the waiter, so much for the boots, so much for the maid and the porter, and the cashier, and the rest of them. It is not necessary that you send for these persons in order to confer your farewell remembrances on them. They will be waiting for you in the hallways. No matter how early or how late the hour of your leaving may be, you find them there in a long and seried rank. You distribute bills and coins until your ten percent is exhausted, and then you are pained to note that several servitors yet remain, lined up and all expectant, owners of strange faces that you do not recall ever having seen before, but who are now at hand with claims, real or imaginary, on your purse. Inasmuch as you have a deadly fear of being remembered afterward in this hotel as a piker, you continue to dip down and fork over, and so by the time you reach the tail end of the procession your ten percent has grown to twelve, or fifteen percent, or even more. As regards the tipping of guides for their services I hit on a fairly satisfactory plan, which I gladly reveal here for the benefit of my fellow man. I think it is a good idea to give the guide on parting about twice as much as you think he is entitled to, which will be about half as much as he expects. From this starting point you then work toward each other, you conceding a little from time to time, he abating a trifle here and there, until you have reached a happy compromise on the basis of fifty-fifty, and so you part in mutual goodwill. The average American on the eve of going to Europe thinks of the European as speaking each his own language. He conceives of the Poles speaking polar, of the Hollenders talking Hollandaise, of the Swiss employing Schweitzer for ordinary conversations and yodeling when addressing friends at a distance, and so on. Such however is rarely the case. Nearly every person with whom one comes in contact in Europe appears to have fluent command of several tongues besides his or her own. It is true this does not apply to Italy, where the natives mainly stick to Italian, but then Italian is not a language, it is a calisthenic. Between Rome and Florence our train stopped at a small way station in the mountains.  Immediately all the loafers in sight drew cards. A drowsy hilsman muffled to his back hair in a long brown cloak, and with buskins on his legs such as a stage bandit wears, was dozing against the wall. He looked as though he had stepped right out of a comic opera to add picturesqueness to the scene. He roused himself and joined in, so did a bearded party who, to judge by his uniform, was either a knight of Pythias or a general in the army, so did the rest of the crowd. In ten seconds they were jammed together in a hard knot and going it on the high speed with the muffler off, fine white teeth showing, arms flying, shoulders shrugging, spinal columns writhing, mustaches rising and falling, legs wiggling, scalps in ears following suit. Feeding hour in the parrot cage at the zoo never produced anything like so noisy and animated a scene. In these parts acute hysteria is not a symptom, it is merely a state of mind. A waiter in soiled habillements hurried up, abandoning chances of trade at the prospect of something infinitely more exciting. He wanted to stick his oar into the argument. He had a few pregnant thoughts of his own craving utterance, you could tell that. But he was handicapped into a state of dumbness by the fact that he needed both arms to balance a tray of wine and sandwiches on his head. Merely using his voice in that company would not have counted. He stood it as long as he could, which was not very long, let me tell you. Then he slammed his tray down on the platform and, with one quick movement, jerked his coat sleeves back to his elbows and inside thirty seconds he had the floor in both hands, as it were. He conversed mainly with the Australian crawl stroke, but once in a while switched to the Spenserian free arm movement and occasionally introduced the Chautauqua salute with telling effect. On the continent guides as a class excel in the gift of tongues, guides and hotel concierges. The concierge at our hotel in Berlin was a big, upstanding chap, half Russian and half Swiss, and therefore qualified by his breeding to speak many languages, for the Russians are born with split tongues and can give cards and spades to any talking crow that ever lived, while the Swiss lagged but a little behind them in linguistic aptitude. It seemed such a pity that this man was not alive when the hands knocked off work on the tower of Babel. He could have put the job through without extending himself. No matter what the nationality of a guest might be, and the guests were of many nationalities, he could talk with that guest in his own language or in any other language the guest might fancy. I myself was sorely tempted to try him on Coptic and early Aztec, but I held off. My Coptic is not what it once was, and partly through disuse and partly through carelessness, I have allowed my command of early Aztec to fall off pretty badly these last few months. All linguistic freakishness is not confined to the continent. The English, who are popularly supposed to use the same language we ourselves use, sometimes speak with a mighty strange tongue. A great many of them do not speak English, they speak British, a very different thing. An English woman of breeding has a wonderful speaking voice, as pure as a Boston woman's and more liquid, as soft as a Southern woman's and with more attention paid to the ours. But the cockney type, why we? During a carriage ride in Florence with a mixed company of tourists, I chanced to say something of a complimentary nature about something English, and a little London bread woman spoke up and said, thanks, it's very nice of you to say so, I'm sure. Some of them talk like that, honestly, they do. Though America English may not be an especially musical speech, it certainly does lend itself most admirably to slaying purposes. Here again the Britishers show their inability to utilize the vehicle to the full of its possibilities. England never produced a Billy Baxter or a George Aide, and I'm afraid she never will. Most of our slang means something. You hear a new slang phrase and instantly you realize that the genius who coined it has hit on a happy and a graphic and an illuminating expression, that at one bound he rose triumphant above the limitations of language and tremendously enriched the working vocabulary of the man in the street. Whereas an Englishman's idea of slinging slang is to scoop up at random some inoffensive and well-meaning word that never did him any harm, and apply it in the place of some other word to which the first word is not related, not even by marriage. And look how deliberately they mispronounce proper names. Everybody knows about Charles Motley and St. John, but take the Scandinavian word fjord. Why, I ask you, should the English insist on pronouncing it Ferguson? At Oxford, the seat of learning, Magdalene is pronounced Modeline, probably in subtle tribute to the condition of the person who first pronounced it so. General admission day is not the day you enter but the day you leave. Full term means three quarters of a term. An ordinary degree is a degree obtained by special examination. An inspector of arts does not mean an inspector of arts but a student, and from this point they go right ahead getting worse all the time. The droll creature who compiled the Oxford Glossary was a true Englishman. When an Englishman undertakes to wrestle with American slang, he makes a fearful hash of it. In an English magazine I read a short story written by an Englishman who is regarded by a good many persons, competent to judge, as being the cleverest writer of English alive today. The story was beautifully done from the standpoint of composition. It bristled with flashing metaphors and whimsical phrasing. The scene of the yarn was supposed to be Chicago and naturally the principal figure in it was a millionaire. In one place the author has this person saying, I reckon y'all feel pretty mean and in another place I reckon I'm not a man with no pull. Another character in the story says, I know you don't cotton to the march of science in these matters and speaks of something that is unusual as being a rum affair. A walled state prison, presumably in Illinois, is referred to as a convict camp and it's warden is called a governor and an assistant keeper is called a warder while a Chicago Daily paper is quoted as saying that larricans directed the attention of a policeman to a person who was doing thus and so. The writer describes a mysterious mirror known as Pilgrim's Pond in which they say a prison official is supposed to be talking now, our fathers made witches walk until they sank. Descendants of the original Puritans who went from Plymouth Rock in the summer of 1621 and founded Chicago will recall this pond distinctly. Cotton Mather is buried on its far bank and from there it is just 10 minutes by trolley to Salem, Massachusetts. It is stated also in this story that the prairies begin a matter of 30 odd miles from Chicago and that to reach them one must first traverse a perfect no man's land. Inglewood and South Chicago papers please copy. End of section 39. Section 40 of Eurick Revised. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Eurick Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Chapter 19, Venice and the Venizans, Part 1. Getting back again to Guides, I am reminded that our acquaintance ship with the second member of the Mark Twain Brotherhood was staged in Paris. This gentleman wished himself on us one afternoon at the Hotel des Envalides. We did not engage him, he engaged us. Doing the trick was such finesse and skill that before we realized it we had been retained to accompany him to various points of interest in and around Paris. However we remained under his control one day only. At nightfall we rested ourselves free and fled under cover of darkness to German soil where we were comparatively safe. I never knew a man who advanced so rapidly in a military way as he did during the course of that one day. Our own National Guard could not hold a candle to him. He started out at 10 a.m. by being an officer of volunteers in the Franco-Prussian War. But every time he slipped away and took a nip out of his private bottle, which was often, he advanced in rank automatically. Before the dusk of evening came he was a corps commander who had been ennobled on the field of battle by the hand of Napoleon III. He took us to Versailles. We did not particularly care to go to Versailles that day, because it was raining, but he insisted and we went. In spite of the drizzle we might have enjoyed that wonderful place had he not been constantly at our elbows, gabbling away steadily except when he excused himself for a moment and stepped behind a tree to emerge a moment later wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Then he would return to us with an added gimpiness in his elderly legs, an increased expansion of the chest inside his tight and shiny frock coat, and a fresh frate of richness on his breath to report another deserved promotion. After he had eaten luncheon, all except such portions of it as he spilled on himself, the colonel grew confidential and chummy. He tried to tell me an off-color story and forgot the point of it, if indeed it had any point. He began humming the Marseillais' hymn, but broke off to say he expected to live to see the day when a column of French troops singing that air would march up under Den London to stack their arms in the halls of the Kaiser's palace. I did not take issue with him. Every man is entitled to his own wishes in those matters. But later on, when I had seen something of the Kaiser's standing army, I thought to myself that when French troops did march up under Den London, they would find it tolerably rough sledding. And if there was any singing done, a good many of them probably would not be able to join in the last verse. Immediately following this, our conductor confided to me that he had once had the honor of serving Mr. Clemens, whom he referred to as Mick Twine. He told me things about Mr. Clemens of which I had never heard. I do not think Mr. Clemens ever heard of them either. Then the Brigadier, it was now after three o'clock, and between three and three thirty he was a Brigadier, drew my arm within his. I, too, am an author, he stated. It is not generally known, but I have written much. I wrote a book of which you may have heard, The Wandering Jew. And then he tapped himself on the bosom proudly. I said I had somehow contracted the notion that a party named Sue, Eugene Sue, had something to do with writing the work of that name. Ah, but you are right there, my friend. Sue surely wrote The Wandering Jew the first time as a novel merely, but I wrote him much better as a satire on the anti-Semitic movement. I surrendered without offering to strike another blow, and from that time on he had his own way with us. The day, as I was pleased to note at the time, had begun mercifully to draw to a close. We were driving back to Paris, and he, sitting on the front seat, had just attained the highest post in the army under the regime of the last empire, when he said, Behold, monsieur, we are now approaching a wine-shop on the left. You are most gracious and kind in the matter of luncheon. Kindly permit me to do the honors now. It is a very good wine-shop. I know it well. Shall we stop for a glass together, eh? It was the first time, since we landed at Calais, that a native-born person had offered to buy me anything, and being ever-desirous to assist in the celebration of any truly notable occasion, I accepted and the car was stopped. We were at the portal of the wine-shop, when he plucked at my sleeve, offering another suggestion. The chauffeur now. He is a worthy fellow, that chauffeur. Shall we not invite the chauffeur to join us? I was agreeable to that, too. So he called the chauffeur, and the chauffeur disentangled his whiskers from the steering-gear, and came and joined us. The chauffeur and I each had a small glass of light wine, but the general took brandy. Then ensued a spirited dialogue between him and the woman who kept the shop. Assuming that I had no interest in the matter, I studied the pictures behind the bar. Presently having reduced the woman to a state of comparative silence, he approached me. M'Sure, he said, I regret that this has happened.  But she forgot she had me to deal with. I am on guard. See her. She is now quelled. I have given her a lesson she will not soon forget. M'Sure, the correct amount of the bill is two francs, ten. Give it to her, and let us be gone. I still have that guide's name and address in my possession. At parting he pressed his card on me and asked me to keep it, and I did keep it. I shall be glad to loan it to any American who may be thinking of going to Paris. With the card in his pocket he will know exactly where this guide lives, and then, when he is in need of a guide, he can carefully go elsewhere and hire a guide. I almost failed to mention that before we parted he tried to induce us to buy something. He took us miles out of our way to a pottery and urged us to invest in its wares. This is the main purpose of every guide—to see that you buy something and afterward to collect his commission from the shopkeeper for having brought you to the shop. If you engage your guide through the porter at your hotel, you will find that he steers you to the shops the hotel people have already recommended to you. But if you break the border's heart by hiring your guide outside, independently, the guide steers you to the shops that are on his own private list. Only once I saw a guide temporarily stumped, and that was in Venice. The skies were leaky that day and the weather was raw, and one of the ladies of the party wore pumps and silk stockings. For the protection of her ankles she decided to buy a pair of cloth gators, and stating her intention she started to go into a shop that dealt in those articles. The guide hesitated a moment only, then threw himself in her path. The shops hereabout were not to be trusted. The proprietors, without exception, were rogues and extortioners. If Madame would have patience for a few brief moments he would guarantee that she got what she wanted at an honest price. He seemed so desirous of protecting her that she consented to wait. In a minute on a pretext he excused himself and dived into one of the crooked ways that spread through all parts of Venice and make it possible for one who knows their windings to reach any part of the city without using the canals. Two of us secretly followed him. Beyond the first turning he dived into a shoe shop. Emerging after a while he hurried back and led the lady to that same shop and stood by smiling softly while she was fitted with gators. Until now evidently gators had not been on his list, but he had taken steps to remedy this, and though his commission on a pair of sixty-cent gators could not have been very large, yet as some philosopher has so truly said every little bit added to what you have makes just a modicum more. Indeed the guide never overlooks the smallest bet. His home mentality is focused on getting you inside a shop. Once you are there he stations himself close behind you, reinforcing the combined importunities of the shopkeeper and his assembled staff with gentle suggestions. The depths of self-abasement to which a shopkeeper in Europe will descend in an effort to sell his goods surpasses the power of description. The London tradesmen goes pretty far in this direction. Often he goes, as far as the sidewalk, clinging to the hem of your garment and begging you to return for one more look. But the Continentals are still worse. End of Section 40 A Parisian shopkeeper would sell you the bones of his revered grandmother if you wanted them and he had them in stock. And he would have them in stock too, because, as I have stated once before, a true Parisian never throws anything away he can save. I heard of just one single instance where a customer desirous of having an article and willing to pay the price failed to get it, and that, I would say, stands without a parallel in the annals of commerce and barter. An American lady visiting her daughter, an art student in the Latin Quarter, was walking along when she saw in a shop window a lace blouse she fancied. She went inside and by signs, since she knew no French, indicated that she wished to look at that blouse. The woman in charge shook her head, declining even to take the garment out of the window. Convinced now, womanlike, that this particular blouse was the blouse she desired above all other blouses, the American woman opened her purse and indicated that she was prepared to buy at the shopwoman's own valuation, without the privilege of examination. The shopwoman showed deep pain at having to refuse the proposition, but refuse it she did, and the would-be buyer went home angry and perplexed and told her daughter what had happened. It certainly is strange, the daughter said. I thought everything in Paris, except possibly Napoleon's tomb, was for sale. This thing will repay investigation. Wait until I pin my hat on. Does my nose need powdering? Her mother led her back to the shop of the blouse, and then the puzzle was revealed. For it was the shop of a dry cleanser, and the blouse belonged to some patron and was being displayed as a sample of the work done inside. But undoubtedly such a thing never before happened in Paris, and probably never will happen again. In Venice not only the guides and the hotel clerks and porters, but even the simple gondolier has a secret understanding with all branches of the retail trade.  It may be your bound for the Rialto, or the Bridge of Size, which is chiefly distinguished from all the other bridges by being the only covered one in the lot, or for the house of the Lady Desdemona. The Lady Desdemona never lived there or anywhere else, but the house where she would have lived, had she lived, is on exhibition daily from nine to five, admission one lira. Or pertain she want to visit one of the Ducal palaces that are so numerous in Venice. These palaces are still tenanted by the descendants of the original proprietors. One family has perhaps been living in one palace three or four hundred years. But now the family inhabits the top floor, doing light housekeeping up there, and the lower floor, where the art treasures, the tapestries, and the family relics are, is in charge of a caretaker who collects at the door and then leads you through.   Really, you reflect, it is rowing by shorthand. You are feasting your eyes on the wonderful color effects and the groupings that so enthuse the artist, and which he generally managed to botch and boggle when he seeks to commit them to canvas.  You fight them off, declaring passionately that you are not in the market for colored glass at this time. The hired hands protest, and the gondolier, cheated out of his commission, sorrows greatly, but obeys your command to move on. At least he pretends to obey it, but a minute later he brings you up broadside at the water-level doors of a shop dealing in antiques, known appropriately as antechitas, or at a mosaic shop or a curio shop. If you ever do succeed in reaching your destination, it is by the exercise of much profanity and great firmness of will. The most insistent and pesky shopkeepers of all are those who hive in the ground floors of the professively converted palaces that face on three sides of the square of St. Mark's. You dare not hesitate for the smallest fractional part of a second in front of a shop here. Lurking inside the open door is a husky puller in, and he dashes out and grabs hold of you and will not let go, begging you in spaghettified English to come in and examine his unapproachable assortment of bargains. You are not compelled to buy, he tells you. He only wants you to gaze on his beautiful things. Leave him not. Venture inside and decline to purchase, and he will think up new and subtle Italian forms of insult and insolence to visit on you. They will have brass bands out for you if you invest in brass knuckles if you do not. There is but one way to escape from their everlasting persecutions, and that is to flee to the center of the square and enjoy the company of the pigeons and the photographers. They, the pigeons, I mean, belong to the oldest family in Venice, their lineages of the purest and most undefiled. For upward of seven hundred years the authorities of the city have been feeding and protecting the pigeons, of which these countless blue and bronze flocks are the direct descendants. They are true aristocrats, and like true aristocrats they are content to live on the public funds and grow fat and sassy thereon, paying nothing in return. No, I take that part back. They do pay something in return, a full measure. They pay by the beauty of their presence, and they are surely very beautiful, with their dainty, mincing peat and feet and the sheen on the proudly arched breastcovers of the cockbirds, and they pay by giving you their trust and their friendship. To cobble the gifts of dried peas, which you buy in little cornucopias from convenient vendors for distribution among them, they come wheeling in winged battalions, creaking and cooing, and a light on your head and shoulders in that perfect confidence which so delights humans when wild or half-wild creatures bestow it on us, though at every opportunity we do our level best to destroy it by hunting and harrying them to death. At night when the moon is up is the time to visit this spot. Standing here with the looming pile of the dogeous palace bulked behind you, and the gorgeous but somewhat garish decorations of the great cathedral softened and soothed into perfection of outlining coloring by the half-light, you can for a moment forget the fallen state of Venice, and your imagination peoples the splendid plaza for you with the ghosts of its dead and vanished greatnesses. You conceive of the place as it must have looked in those old brave wicked days, filled all with knights, with red-robed cardinals and clinking-men at arms, with fair ladies and grave senators, slinking bravos and hired assassins, and also gay with silk and satin and glittering steel and spangling gems. By the eye of your mind you see his illuminated Excellency, the frosted Christmas card, as he bows low before his eminence the pink Easter egg. You see half-hidden behind the shadowed columns of the long portico, an illustrated Sunday supplement in six colors, bargaining with a stick of striped peppermint candy to have his best friend stabbed in the back before mourning. You see giddy poster designs carrying on flirtations with hand-paint in valentines. You catch the love-making, overhear the intriguing, and send the plotting.  But by day imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, stops a hole to keep the wind away, and the wild-ass of the ninety-day tour stamps his heedless hooves over the spot where sleeps the dust of departed grandeur. By day the chug of the motor-boat routes out old sleepy echoes from cracked and crannied ruins, the burnished golden frescoes of St. Mark's blare at you as with brazen trumpets. Every third medieval church has been turned into a moving picture-place, and the shopkeeping parasites buzz about you in vermin-swarms and bore holes in your pocket-book until it is all one large, painful welt. The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. It should be the tapeworm. In Rome it appears to be a standing rule that every authenticated guide should be a violent socialist and therefore rampantly anti-clerical in all his views. We were in Rome during the season of pilgrimages. From all parts of Italy, from Bohemia and Hungary and Spain and Tyrol, even from France, groups of peasants had come to Rome to worship in their mother-church and be blessed by the supreme pontiff of their faith. At all hours of the day they were passing through the streets, bound for St. Peter's or the Vatican, the women with kerchiefs over their heads, the men in their Sunday best, and all with badges and tokens on their breasts. At the head of each straggling procession would be a black-frogged village priest, at once proud and humble, nervous and exalted. A man might be of any religion, or of no religion at all, and yet I failed to see how he could watch unmoved the uplifted faces of these people as they clumped over the cobbles of the holy city, praying as they went. Some of them had been saving up all their lives, I imagine, against the coming of this great day. But our guide, and we tried three different ones, never beheld this sight that he did not sneer at it, and not once did he fail to point out that most of the pilgrims were middle-aged or old, taking this as proof of his claim that the church no longer kept its hold on the younger people, even among the peasant classes. The still more frequent spectacle of a marching line of students of one of the holy colleges, with each group wearing the distinctive insignia of his own country, purple robes or green sashes or what-not, would excite him to the verge of a spasm. But then he was always verging on a spasm anyway, spasms were his normal state. CHAPTER XX The combustible captain of Vienna.  He was profoundly ignorant on a tremendously wide range of subjects. He had a most complete repertoire of ignorance. He must have spent years of study to store up so much interesting misinformation. This guide was much addicted to indulgence of a peculiar form of twisted English, and at odd moments given to the consumption of a delicacy of strictly Germanic origin known in the language of the tutons as a rollmops. A rollmops consisted of a large dill cucumber with a pickled herring coiled round it ready to strike, in the design of the rattlesnake and pine-tree flag of the revolution, the motto in both instances being in effect, Don't Monkey with the buzzsaw. He carried his rollmops in his pocket and, frequently, in art galleries or elsewhere, would draw it out and nibble it while disseminating inaccuracies touching on pictures and statues and things. Among other places he took us to the oldest church in Vienna, as I now recollect it was six hundred years old. No on second thought I will say it must have been older than that. No church could possibly become so moldy and mangy-looking as that church in only six hundred years. The object in this church that interested me most was contained in an ornate glass case, placed near the altar and alongside the relics held to be sacred. It did not exactly please me to gaze at this article, but the thing had a fascination for me, I will not deny that. It seems that a couple of centuries ago there was an officer in Vienna, a captain in rank and a Frenchman by birth, who, in the midst of disorders and licentiousness, lived so godly and so sanctified a life that his soldiers took it into their heads that he really was a saint, or at least had the making of a first-rate saint in him, and therefore must lead a charmed life. So thus runs the tale some of them laid a wager with certain doubting Thomas's, also soldiers, that neither by fire nor water, neither by rope nor poison, could he take harm to himself. Finally they decided on fire for the test. So they waited until he slept, those simple, honest, chuckle-headed chaps, and they slipped in with a lighted torch and touched him off. Well, sir, the joke certainly was on those soldiers. He burned up with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of a celluloid comb. For qualities of instantaneous combustion he must have been the equal of any small-town theater that ever was built, with one exit. He was practically a total loss and there was no insurance. They still have him, or what is left of him, in that glass case. He did not exactly suffer martyrdom, though probably he personally did not notice any very great difference, and so he has not been canonized. Nevertheless, they have him there in that church. In all Europe I only saw one sight to match him, and that was down in the crypt under the church of the Capuchins in Rome, where the dissected cadavers of four thousand dead, but not gone, monks are worked up into decorations. There are altars made of their skulls, and chandeliers made of their thigh bones, frescoes of their spines, mosaics of their teeth and dried muscles, cozy corners of their femurs and pelvises and tibulae. There are two classes of travelers I would strongly advise not to visit the crypt of the Capuchins' church. Those who are just about to have dinner and want to have it, and those who have just had dinner and want to keep on having it. At the Royal Palace in Vienna we saw the finest, largest, and gaudiest collection of crown jewels extant. That guide of ours seemed to think he had done his whole duty toward us and could call it a day and knock off when he led us up to the jewel collections, where each case was surrounded by pop-eyed American tourists, taking on flesh at the sight of all those sparkles and figuring up the grand total of their valuation in dollars on the basis of so many hundreds of carats at so many hundreds of dollars a carat, until reason tottered on a throne, and did not have so very far to totter either. The display of all those gems, however, did not especially excite me. There were too many of them and they were too large. A blue Kimberley in a hotel clerk's shirt front, or a pigeon blood ruby on a Farrow dealer's little finger, might hold my attention and win my admiration. But where jewels are piled up in heaps, like anthracite in a coal bin, they thrill me no more than the anthracite would. A quart measure of diamonds on the average size of a big hailstone does not make me think of diamonds but of hailstones. I could remain as calm in their presence as I should in the presence of a quart of cracked ice. In fact, calmer than I should remain in the presence of a quart of cracked ice in Italy, say, where there is not that much ice cracked or otherwise. In Italy a bucket full of ice would be worth traveling miles to sea. You could sell tickets for it. In one of the smaller rooms of the palace we came upon a casket containing a necklace of great smoldering rubies and a pair of bracelets to match. They were as big as cranberries and as red as blood, as red as arterial blood. And when on consulting the guidebook we read the history of those rubies the sight of them brought a picture to our minds, for they had been a part of the wedding dowry of Marie Antoinette. Once upon a time this necklace had spanned the slender white throat that was later to be sheared by the guillotine, and these bracelets had clasped the same white wrists that were roped together with an L of hangman's hemp on the day the desolated queen rode in her patched and shabby gown to the Place de la Revolution. I had seen paintings in plenty in red descriptions galore of that last ride of the widow-capet going to her death in the tumbrill, with the priest at her side and her poor, fettered arms twisted behind her, and her white face bare to the jeers of the mob. But the physical presence of those precious, useless baubles which had cost so much and yet had brought so little for her made more vivid to me than any picture or any story the most sublime tragedy of the terror, the tragedy of those two bound hands. OLD MASTERS AND OTHER RUINS, PART ONE It is a naturally fine thing for one, and gratifying, to acquire a thorough art education. Personally I do not in the least regret the time I gave and the study I devoted to acquiring mine. I regard those two weeks as having been well spent. I shall not do it soon again, however, for now I know all about art. Let others who have not enjoyed my advantages take up this study. Let others scour the art galleries of Europe seeking masterpieces. All of them contain masterpieces, and most of them need scouring. As for me and mine we shall go elsewhere. I love my art, but I am not fanatical on the subject. There is another side of my nature to which an appeal may be made. I can take my old masters or I can leave them. That is the way I am organized. I have self-control. I shall not deny that the earlier stages of my art education were fraught with agreeable little surprises. Not soon shall I forget the flust of satisfaction which ran through me on learning that this man Dore's name was pronounced like the first two notes in the musical scale, instead of like a cape cod fishing boat. And lingering in my mind as a fragrant memory is the day when I first discovered that Spagnoletto was neither a musical instrument nor something to be served all grotton and eaten with a fork. Such acquirements as these are very precious to me. But for the time being I have had enough. At this hour of writing I feel that I am stocked up with enough of Bouguereau's sorrel ladies and Titian's chestnut ones and Ruben's bay ones and Velasquez's pentose to last me at a conservative estimate for about seventy-five years. I am too young as a theatre-goer to recall much about Liddy at Thompson's blondes, but I have seen sufficient of Botticelli's to do me amply well for a spell. I am still willing to walk a good distance to gaze on one of Rembrandt's portraits of one of his kin-folks, though I must say he certainly did have a lot of mighty homely relatives, and, any time there is a first-rate millet or carat or messonnier in the neighborhood, I wish somebody would drop me a line giving the address. As for pictures by Tintoretto, showing Venetian doges hobnobbing informally with members of the Holy Family, and Raphael's angels, and Michelangelo's lost souls, and Guido's and Marillo's, I have had enough to do me for months and months and months, nor am I in the market for any of the dead fish of the Flemish school. Judging by what I have observed, practically all the Flemish painters were devout churchmen and painted their pictures on Friday. There was just one drawback to my complete enjoyment of that part of our European travels we devoted to art. We would go to an art gallery, hire a guide, and start through. Presently I would come to a picture that struck me as being distinctly worthwhile. To my untutored conceptions it possessed unlimited beauty. There was, it seemed to me, life in the figures, reality in the colors, grace in the grouping. And then, just when I was beginning really to enjoy it, the guide would come and snatch me away. He would tell me, the picture I thought I admired was of no account whatsoever, that the artist who painted it had not yet been dead long enough to give his work any permanent value, and he would drag me off to look at cracked and crumbling canvases depicting collections of saints of lacquered complexions and hardwood expressions, with cast-iron trees standing up against cotton-batting clouds in the foreground, and a few extra halos floating round indiscriminately, like sun-dogs on a showery day, and, up above, the family entrance into heaven hospitably a jar. And he would command me to bask my soul in this magnificent example of real art, and not waste time on inconsequential and trivial things. Guides have the same idea of an artist that a Chinaman entertains for an egg. A fresh egg or a fresh artist will not do. It must have the perfume of antiquity behind it to make it attractive. At the Louvre in Paris, on the first day of the two we spent there, we had for our guide a tall, educated prescient, who had an air about him of being an ex-officer of the army. All over the Continent you are constantly running into men engaged in all manner of legitimate and dubious callings, who somehow impress you as having served in the army of some other country than the one in which you find them. After this man had been chaperoning us about for some hours and we had stopped to rest, he told a good story. It may not have been true. It has been my experience that very few good stories are true, but it served aptly to illustrate a certain type of American tourist numerously encountered abroad. There were two of them, he said in his excellent English, a gentleman and his wife, and from what I saw of them I judged them to be very wealthy. They were interested in seeing only such things as had been recommended by the guide-book. The husband would tell me they desired to see such and such a picture or statue. I would escort them to it and they would glance at it indifferently, and the gentleman would take out his lead pencil and check off that particular object in the book. And then he would say, all right, we've seen that. Now let's find out what we want to look at next. We still serve a good many people like that. Not so many as formerly, but still a good many. Finally I decided to try a little scheme of my own. I wanted to see whether I could really win their admiration for something. I picked out a medium-sized painting of no particular importance and pointing to it said impressively, here, monsieur, is a picture worth a million dollars, without the frame. What's that, he demanded excitedly. Then he called to his wife, who had strayed ahead a few steps. Henrietta, he said, come back here, you're missing something. There is a picture there that's worth a million dollars, and without the frame, too, mind you. She came hurrying back, and for ten minutes they stood there drinking in that picture. Every second they discovered new and subtle beauties in it. I could hardly induce them to go on for the rest of the tour, and the next day they came back for another soul feast in front of it. Later along that guide confided to me that in his opinion I had a keen appreciation of art, much keener than the average lay tourist. The compliment went straight to my head. It was seeking the point of least resistance, I suppose. I branched out and undertook to discuss art matters with him on a more familiar basis. It was a mistake, but before I realized that it was a mistake, I was out on the undertow, sixty yards from shore, going down for the third time with a low gurgling cry. He did not put out to save me, either. He left me to sink in the heaving and abysmal sea of my own fathomless ignorance. He just stood there and let me drown. It was a cruel thing for which I can never forgive him. In my own defense let me say, however, that this fatal indiscretion was committed before I had completed my art education. It was after we had gone from France to Germany and to Austria and to Italy that I learned the great lesson about art, which is that whenever and wherever you meet a picture that seems to you reasonably lifelike, it is nine times in ten of no consequence whatsoever. And unless you are willing to be regarded as a mere ignoramus, you should straightway leave it and go find some ancient picture of a group of overdressed clothing dummies masquerading as angels or martyrs and stand before that one and carry on regardless. When in doubt, look up a picture of St. Sebastian. You never experience any difficulty in finding him. He is always represented as wearing very few clothes, being shot full of arrows to such an extent that clothes would not fit him anyway. Or else seek out St. Lawrence, who is invariably featured in connection with a grid iron or St. Bartholomew, who you remember achieved canonization through a process of flaying and is therefore shown with his skin folded neatly and carried over his arm like a spring overcoat. Following this routine you make no mistake. Everybody is bound to accept you as one possessing a deep knowledge of art, and not mere surface art either, but the innermost meanings and conceptions of art. Only sometimes did I get to wishing that the old masters had left a little more to the imagination. They never withheld any of the painful particulars. It seemed to me they cheapened the glorious end of those immortal fathers of the faith by including the details of the martyrdom in every picture. Still, I would not have that admission get out and obtain general circulation. It might be used against me as an argument that my artistic education was grounded on a false foundation. It was in Rome, while we were doing the Vatican, that our guide furnished us with a sight that, quivered as a human experience, was worth more to me than a year of old masters and young missers. We had pushed our poor blistered feet, a dozen or more of us, past miles of paintings and sculptures and relics and art objects, and we were tired, oh, so tired. Our eyes ached and our shoes hurt us, and the calves of our legs quivered as we trailed along from gallery to corridor and from corridor back to gallery. We had visited the Sistine Chapel, and such was our weariness, we had even declined to become excited over Michelangelo's great picture of the Last Judgment. I was disappointed, too, that he had admitted to include in his collection of damned souls a number of persons I had confidently and happily expected would be present. I saw no one there, even remotely resembling my conception of the person who first originated and promulgated the doctrine that all small children should be told at the earliest possible moment that there is no Santa Claus. That was a very severe blow to me, because I had always believed that the dissent to eternal perdition would be incomplete unless he had a front seat. And the man who first hit on the plan of employing child labor on night shifts and cotton factories, he was unaccountably absent, too. And likewise the original inventor of the toy pistol, in fact the absentees were entirely too numerous to suit me. There was one thing, though, to be said in praise of Michelangelo's Last Judgment. It was too large and too complicated to be reproduced successfully on a souvenir postcard, and I think we should all be very grateful for that mercy, anyway. As I was saying, we had left the Sistine Chapel a mile or so behind us and had dragged our exhausted frames as far as an arched upper portico in a wing of the Great Palace overlooking a paved courtyard enclosed at its farther end by a side wall of St. Peter's. We saw, in another portico, similar to the one where we had halted and running parallel to it, long rows of peasants, all kneeling and all with their faces turned in the same direction. Wait here a minute, said our guide. I think you will see something not included in the regular itinerary of the day. So we waited. In a minute or two the long lines of kneeling peasants raised a hymn. The sound of it came to us in quavering snatches. Through the aisle, formed by their bodies, a procession passed the length of the long portico and back to the starting point. First came Swiss guards in their gay, piebald uniforms, carrying strange-looking pikes and halberds, and behind them were churchly dignitaries, all beard of head, and last of all came a very old and very feeble man, dressed in white, with a wide-brimmed white hat, and he had white hair and a white face, which seemed drawn and worn but very gentle and kindly and beneficent. He held his right arm aloft, with the first two fingers extended in the gesture of the apostolistic benediction. He was so far away from us that in perspective his profile was reduced to the miniature proportions of a head on a postage stamp, but all the same the lines of it stood out clear and distinct. It was his holiness, Pope Pius X, blessing of Pilgrimage.