Section 1 of Mark Twain's Travel Letters from 1891 to 1892. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain at Aix-les-Bers, from the November 8, 1891, Chicago Daily Tribune. Certainly Aix-les-Bers is an enchanting place. It is a strong word, but I think the facts justify it. True, there is a rabble of nobilities, big and little here all the time, and often a king or two, but as those behave quite nicely and also keep mainly to themselves, they are little or no annoyance, and then a king makes the best advertisement there is, and the cheapest. All he costs is a reception at the station by the mayor and the police in their Sunday uniforms, shopfront decorations along the route from station to hotel, brass band at the hotel, fireworks in the evening, free bath in the morning. This is the whole expense, and in return for it he goes away from here with the broad of his back metaphorically stenciled over with display ads, which shout to all the nations of the earth, assisted by the telegraph, rheumatism routed at Aix-les-Bers, gout admonished, nerves braced up, all diseases welcomed and satisfaction given, or the money refunded at the door. We leave nature's noble cliffs and crags undefiled and uninsulted by the advertiser's paintbrush. We use the back of a king, which is better and properer and more effective, too, for the cliff stays still, and few see it, but the king moves across the fields of the world and is visible from all points like a constellation. We are out of kings this week, but one will be along soon, possibly his satanic majesty of Russia. There's a colossus for you, a mysterious and terrible form that towers up into unsearchable space and casts a shadow across the universe like a planet in eclipse. There will be but one absorbing spectacle in this world when we stencil him and start him out. This is an old valley, this of Aix, both in the history of man and the geological records of its rocks. Its little lake of Bourget carries the human history back to the lake dwellers, furnishing seven groups of their habitations, and Dr. William Wakefield says in his interesting local guidebook that the mountains round about furnish geologically a veritable epitome of the globe. The stratified chapters of the earth's history are clearly and permanently written on the sides of the roaring bulk of the Dan du Chât, but many of the layers of race, religion, and government, which in turn have flourished and perished here between the lake dweller of several thousand years ago, and the French republican of today are ill-defined and uninforming by comparison. There were several varieties of pagans. They went their way, one after the other, down into night and oblivion, leaving no account of themselves, no memorials. The Romans arrived two thousand three hundred years ago. Other parts of France are rich with remembrances of their eight centuries of occupation, but not many are here. Other pagans followed the Romans, by and by Christianity arrived some four hundred years after the time of Christ. The long procession of races, languages, religions, and dynasties demolished each other's monuments and obliterated each other's records. It is man's way always. As a result nothing is left of the handiwork of the remotor inhabitants of the region except the constructions of the lake dwellers and some Roman odds and ends. There is a part of a small Roman temple, there is a part of a Roman bath, there is a graceful and battered Roman arch. It stands on a turfy level over the way from the present great bath-house, is surrounded by magnolia trees, and is both a picturesque and suggestive object. It has stood there some one thousand years. Its nearest neighbor, not twenty steps away, is a Catholic church. They are symbols of the two chief eras in the history of Aix. Yes, and of her European world. I judge that the venerable arch is held in reverent esteem by everybody, and that this esteem is its sufficient protection from insult, for it is the only public structure I have yet seen in France which lacks the sign. It is forbidden to post bills here. Its neighbor, the church, has that sign on more than one of its sides, and other signs too, forbidding certain other sorts of desecration. The arch's next nearest neighbor, just at its elbow, like the church, is the telegraph office. So there you have the three great eras bunched together, the era of war, the era of theology, the era of business. You pass under the arch, and the buried caesars seem to rise from the dust of the centuries and flit before you. You pass by that old battered church, and are in touch with the Middle Ages. And with another step you can put down ten francs in shake hands with Oshkosh under the Atlantic. It is curious to think what changes the last of the three symbols stands for, changes in men's ways and thoughts, changes in material civilization, changes in the deity, or in men's conception of the deity, if that is an exacter way of putting it. The second of the symbols arrived in the earth at a time when the deity's possession consisted of a small sky freckled with mustard seed stars, and under it a patch of landed estate, not so big as the holdings of the Tsar today, and all his time was taken up trying to keep a handful of Jews in some sort of order, exactly the same number of them that the Tsar has lately been dealing with in a more abrupt and far less loving and long-suffering way. At a later time, a time within all old men's memories, the deity was otherwise engaged. He was dreaming his eternities away on his great white throne. Steeped in the soft bliss of hymns of praise, wafted aloft without ceasing from choirs of ransom souls, Presbyterians, and the rest. This was a deity proper enough to the size and condition of things, no doubt a provincial deity with provincial tastes. The change since has been inconceivably vast. His empire has been unimaginably enlarged. Today he is master of a universe made up of myriads upon myriads of gigantic suns, and among them, lost in that limitless sea of light, floats that atom, his earth, which once seemed so good and satisfactory and cost so many days of patient labor to build, a mere cork adrift in the waters of a shoreless Atlantic. This is the business era, and no doubt he is governing his huge empire now, not by dreaming his time away in the buzz of hymning choirs with occasional explosions of arbitrary power, disproportion to the size of the annoyance, but by applying laws of a sort proper and necessary to the sane and successful management of a complex and prodigious establishment, and by seeing to it that the exact and constant operation of these laws is not interfered with for the accommodation of any individual or political or religious faction or nation. Mighty has been the advance of the nations and the liberalization of thought. A result of it is a changed deity, a deity of a dignity and sublimity proportioned to the majesty of his office and the magnitude of his empire, a deity who has been freed from a hundred fretting chains and will in time be freed from the rest by the several ecclesiastical bodies who have those matters in charge. It was without doubt a mistake and a step backward when the Presbyterian synods of America lately decided, by vote, to leave him still embarrassed with the dogma of infant damnation. Situated as we are, we cannot at present know with how much of anxiety he watched the balloting, nor with how much of grieved disappointment he observed the result. Well, all these eras above spoken of are modern, they are of last week, they are of yesterday, they are of this morning, so to speak. The springs, the healing waters that gush up from under this hillside village, indeed are ancient, they indeed are a genuine antiquity. They antedate all those fresh human matters by processions of centuries. They were born with the fossils of the Dandusha, and they have been always limpid and always abundant. They furnished a million gallons a day to wash the lake dwellers with, the same to wash the caesars with, no less to wash the Balzac with, and have not diminished on my account a million gallons a day for how many days? Figures cannot set forth the number. The delivery in the aggregate has amounted to an Atlantic, and there is still an Atlantic down in there. By Dr. Wakefield's calculation that Atlantic is three quarters of a mile down in the earth. The calculation is based upon the temperature of the water, which is 114 degrees to 117 degrees Fahrenheit. The natural law being that below a certain depth, heat augments at the rate of one degree for every sixty feet of descent. Eggs is handsome and handsomely situated too on its hill slope, with its stately prospect of mountain range and plain spread out before it and about it. The streets are mainly narrow and steep and crooked and interesting, and offer considerable variety in the way of names. On the corner of one of them you read this, Rue du Puy d'enfer, pit of Hell Street. Some of these sidewalks are only eighteen inches wide. They are for the cats probably. There is a pleasant park and there are spacious and beautiful grounds connected with the two great pleasure resorts, the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs. The town consists of big hotels, little hotels, and pensions. The season lasts about six months beginning with May. When it is at its height there are thousands of visitors here and in the course of the season as many as twenty thousand in the aggregate come and go. These are not all here for the baths. Some come for the gambling facilities and some for the climate. It is a climate where the field strawberry flourishes through the spring, summer, and fall. It is hot in the summer and hot in earnest, but this is only in the daytime. It is not hot at night. The English season is May and June. They get a good deal of rain then, and they like that. The Americans take July and the French take August. By the first of July the open-air music and the evening concerts and operas and plays are fairly under way, and from that time onward the rush of pleasure has a steadily increasing boom. It is said that in August the great grounds and the gambling rooms are crowded all the time and no end of ostensible fun going on. It is a good place for rest and sleep and general recuperation of forces. The book of Dr. Wakefield says there is something about this atmosphere which is the deadly enemy of insomnia, and I think this must be true for, if I am any judge, this town is at times the noisiest one in Europe, and yet a body gets more sleep here than he could at home. I don't care where his home is. Now we are living at a most comfortable and satisfactory pension, with a garden of shade trees and flowers and shrubs, and a convincing air of quiet and repose. But just across the little narrow street is a little market square, and at a corner of that is that church that is neighbor to the Roman arch, and that narrow street, and that billiard table of a marketplace, and that church are able, on a bet, to turn out more noise to the cubic yard at the wrong time than any other similar combination in the earth or out of it. In the street you have the skull bursting thunder of the passing hack, a volume of sound not producible by six hacks anywhere else. On the hack is a lunatic with a whip, which he cracks to notify the public to get out of his way. This crack is as keen and sharp and penetrating and ear-splitting as a pistol shot at close range, and the lunatic delivers it in volleys, not single shots. You think you will not be able to live till he gets by, and when he does get by he only leaves a vacancy for the bandit who sells the petit journal to fill with his strange and awful yell. He arrives with the early morning and the market people, and there is a dog that arrives at about the same time and barks steadily at nothing till he dies, and they fetch another dog just like him. The bark of this breed is the twin of the whip volley, and stabs like a knife. By and by, what is left of you, the church bell gets. There are many bells, and apparently six thousand or seven thousand town clocks, and as they are all five minutes apart, probably by law, there are no intervals. Some of them are striking all the time, at least after you go to bed they are. There is one clock that strikes the hour, and then strikes it over again to see if it was right. Then, for evenings and Sundays, there is a chime, a chime that starts in pleasantly and musically, then suddenly breaks into a frantic roar and boom, and crash of warring sounds that make you think Paris is up, and the revolution come again. And yet, as I have said, one sleeps here, sleeps like the dead. Once he gets his grip on his sleep, neither hack nor whip, nor news fiend, nor dog, nor bell cyclone, nor all of them together can wrench it loose, or mar its deep and tranquil continuity. Yes, there is indeed something in this air that is death to insomnia. The buildings of the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs are huge in size, and each has a theatre in it, and a great restaurant, also conveniences for gambling and general and variegated entertainment. They stand in ornamental grounds of great extent and beauty. The multitudes of fashionable folk sit at refreshment tables in the open air afternoons, and listen to the music, and it is there that they mainly go to break the Sabbath. To get the privilege of entering these grounds and buildings, you buy a ticket for a few francs, which is good for the whole season. You are then free to go and come at all hours, attend the plays and concerts free, except on special occasions, gamble, buy refreshments, and make yourself symmetrically comfortable. Nothing could be handier than those two little theatres. The curtain doesn't rise until eight thirty. Then, between the acts, one can idle for half an hour in the other departments of the building, damaging his appetite in the restaurants or his pocket in the baccarat room. The singers and actors are from Paris, and their performance is beyond praise. I was never in a fashionable gambling hall until I came here. I had read several millions of descriptions of such places, but the reality was new to me. I very much wanted to see this animal, especially the now historic game of baccarat, and this was a good place for aches ranks next to Monte Carlo for high play and plenty of it. But the result was what I might have expected. The interest of the looker on parishes with the novelty of the spectacle, that is to say, in a few minutes. A permanent and intense interest is acquirable in baccarat, or in any other game, but you have to buy it. You don't get it by standing around looking on. The baccarat table is covered with green cloth, and is marked off in divisions with chalk or something. The banker sits in the middle, the croupier opposite. The customers fill all the chairs at the table, and the rest of the crowd are masked at their backs and leaning over them to deposit chips or gold coins. Constantly money and chips are flung upon the table, and the game seems to consist of the croupiers reaching for those things with a flexible sculling oar and raking them home. It appeared to be a rational enough game for him, and if I could have borrowed his oar, I would have stayed. But I didn't see where the entertainment of the others came in. This was because I saw without perceiving and observed without understanding. For the widow and the orphan and the others do win money there. Once an old gray mother in Israel or elsewhere pulled out, and I heard her say to her daughter or her granddaughter as they passed me, there I've won six Louis, and I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. Also there was this statistic. A friend pointed to a young man with a dead stub of a cigar in his mouth, which he kept munching nervously all the time, and pitching hundred-dollar chips on the board, while two sweet young girls reached down over his shoulders to deposit modest little gold pieces, and said, He's only funning now, wanting a few hundred to pass the time, waiting for the gold-room to open, you know, which won't be till well after midnight. Then you'll see him bet. He won fourteen thousand pounds there last night. They don't bet anything there, but big money. The thing I chiefly missed was the haggard people with the intense eye, the hunted look, the desperate mien, candidates for suicide and the pauper's grave. They are in the descriptions as a rule, but they were off duty that night. All the gamblers, male and female, old and young, looked abnormally cheerful and prosperous. However, all the nations were there, closed richly and speaking all the languages. Some of the women were painted and were evidently shaky as to character. These items tallied with the descriptions well enough. The etiquette of the place was difficult to master. In the brilliant and populous halls and corridors you don't smoke, and you wear your hat. No matter how many ladies are in the thick throng of drifting humanity, but the moment you cross the sacred threshold and enter the gambling hall, off the hat must come and everybody lights his cigar and goes to suffocating the ladies. But what I came here for, five weeks ago, was the baths. My right arm was disabled with rheumatism. To sit at home in America and guess out the European bath best fitted for a particular ailment or combination of ailments, it is not possible, and it would not be a good idea to experiment in that way, anyhow. There are a great many curative baths on the Continent, and some are good for one disease, but bad for another. So it is necessary to let a physician name your bath for you. As a rule Americans go to London to get this advice, and South Americans go to Paris for it. Now and then an economist chooses his bath himself, and does a thousand miles of railroading to get to it, and then the local physicians tell him he has come to the wrong place. He sees that he has lost time and money and strength, and almost the minute that he realizes this he loses his temper. I had the rheumatism and was advised to go to Aix, not so much because I had that disease, as because I had the promise of certain others. What they were was not explained to me, but they are either in the following menu or I have been sent to the wrong place. Dr. Wakefield's book says, We know that the class of maladies benefited by the water and baths at Aix are those due to defect of nutrition, debility of the nervous system, or to a gouty, rheumatic, herpetic, or scruffulous diathesis. All diseases extremely debilitating and requiring a tonic and not a depressing action of the remedy. This it seems to find here as recorded experience and daily action can testify. According to the line of treatment, followed particularly with due regard to the temperature, the action of the Aix waters can be made sedative, exciting, derivative, or alternative and tonic. The establishment is the property of France, and all the officers and servants are employees of the French government.   There is every kind of bath for the nose, the ears, the throat, vapor baths, tube baths, swimming baths, and all people's favorite, the douche. It is a good building to get lost in when you are not familiar with it. From early morning until nearly noon people are streaming in and streaming out without halt. The majority come afoot, but great numbers are brought in sedan chairs.  You see nothing of the patient in this diving bell as the bearers tramp along, except a glimpse of his ankles bound together and swathed around with blankets or towels to that generous degree that the result suggests a sore piano leg. By attention and practice the Paul bearers have got so that they can keep out of step all the time, and they do it. As a consequence their veiled churn goes rocking, tilting, swaying along like a bell buoy in a ground swell. It makes the oldest sailor seasick to look at that spectacle. The course is usually fifteen douche baths and five tub baths.  You keep up this distribution through the course. If one course does not cure you, you take another one after an interval. You seek a local physician and he examines your case and prescribes the kind of bath required for it, with various other particulars. Then you buy your course tickets and pay for them in advance, nine dollars. With the tickets you get a memorandum book with your dates and hours all set down in it. The doctor takes you into the bath the first morning and gives some instructions to the two doucheers who are to handle you through the course. The bourbois are about ten cents to each of the men for each bath, payable at the end of the course. Also at the end of the course you pay three or four francs to the superintendent of your department of the bath house. These are useful particulars to know and are not to be found in the books. A servant of your hotel carries your towels and sheet to the bath daily and brings them away again. They are the property of the hotel. The French government doesn't furnish these things. You meet all kinds of people at a place like this and if you give them a chance they will submerge you under their experiences for they are either glad or sorry they came and they want to spread their feelings out and enjoy them. One of them said to me, it's great these baths. I didn't come here for my health. I only came to find out if there was anything to matter with me. The doctor told me if there was the symptoms would soon appear. After the first douche I had sharp pains in all my muscles. The doctor said it was different varieties of rheumatism and the best varieties there were, too. After my second bath I had aches in my bones and skull and around. The doctor said it was different varieties of neuralgia and the best in the market. Anybody would tell me so. I got many new kinds of pains out of my third douche. These were in my joints. The doctor said it was gout, complicated with heart disease, and encouraged me to go on. Then we had the fourth douche and I came out on a stretcher that time and fetched with me one vast, diversified, undulating, continental kind of pain with horizons to it and zones and parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude and isothermal belts and variations of the compass. Oh, everything tidy and right up to the latest developments, you know. The doctor said it was inflammation of the soul and just the very thing. Well, I went right on gathering them in, toothache, liver complaint, softening of the brain, nostalgia, bronchitis, osteology, fits, colioptera, hydrangea, cyclopedia Britannica, delirium tremens, and a lot of other things that I've got down in my list that I'll show you, and you can keep it if you like and tally off the bricobrack as you lay it in. The doctor said I was a grand proof of what these baths could do. Said I had come here as innocent of diseases as a grindstone, and inside of three weeks these baths had sluiced out of me every important ailment known to medical science, along with considerable more that were entirely new and patentable, why he wanted to exhibit me in his bay window. There seems to be a good many liars this year. I began to take the baths and found them most enjoyable, so enjoyable that if I hadn't had a disease I would have borrowed one just to have a pretext for going on. They took me into a stone-floored basin about fourteen feet square, which had enough strange-looking pipes and things in it to make it look like a torture chamber. The two half-naked men seated me on a pine stool and kept a couple of warm-water jets as thick as one's wrist, playing upon me while they needed me, stroked me, twisted me, and applied all the other details of the scientific massage to me for seven or eight minutes. Then they stood me up and played a powerful jet upon me all around for another minute. The cool shower-bath came next, and the thing was over. I came out of the bath-house a few minutes later feeling younger and fresher and finer than I have felt since I was a boy. The spring and cheer and delight of this exaltation lasted three hours, and the same uplifting effect has followed the twenty douches which I have taken since. After my first douche, I went to the chemists on the corner, as per instructions, and asked for half a glass of shy water. It comes from a spring sixteen miles from here. It was furnished to me, but perceiving that there was something to matter with it, I offered to wait till they could get some that was fresh. But they said it always smelt that way. They said that the reason that this was so much ranker than the sulfur water of the bath was that this contained thirty-two times as much sulfur as that. It may be true, but in my opinion that water comes from a cemetery, and not a fresh cemetery either. History says that one of the early Roman generals lost an army down there somewhere. If he could come back now, I think this water would help him find it again. However, I drank the chal and have drunk it once or twice every day since. I suppose it is all right, but I wish I knew what was the matter with those Romans. My first baths developed plenty of pain, but the subsequent ones removed almost all of it. I have got back the use of my arm these last few days, and I am going away now. There are many beautiful drives about aches, many interesting places to visit, and much pleasure to be found in paddling around the little lake Bourget on the small steamers, but the excursion which satisfied me best was a trip to Anisee and its neighborhood. You go to Anisee in an hour by rail, through a garden land that has not had its equal for beauty perhaps since Eden, and certainly Eden was not cultivated as this garden is. The charm and loveliness of the whole region are bewildering. Picturesque rocks, forest-closed hills, slopes richly bright in the cleanest and greenest grass, fields of grain without fleck or flaw, dainty of color, and as shiny and shimmery as silk, old gray mansions and towers, half buried in foliage and sunny eminences, deep chasms with precipitous walls, and a swift stream of pale blue water between, with now and then a tumbling cascade, and all was noble mountains in view, with vagrant white clouds curling about their summits. Then at the end of an hour you come to Anisee and rattle through its old crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a dream of the Middle Ages, and presently you come to the main object of your trip, Lake Anisee. It is a revelation, it is a miracle. It brings the tears to a body's eyes, it is so enchanting. That is to say it affects you just as all things that you instantly recognize as perfect affect you, perfect music, perfect eloquence, perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief. It stretches itself out there in the caressing sunlight and away towards its border of majestic mountains, a crisp and radiant plain of water of the divinous blue that can be imagined. All the blues are there, from the faintest shoal water suggestion of the color, detectable only in the shadow of some overhanging object, all the way through a little blue and a little bluer still, and again a shade bluer, till you strike the deep, rich Mediterranean splendor which breaks the heart in your bosom, it is so beautiful. And the mountains, as you skim along on the steamboat, how stately their forms, how noble their proportions, how green their velvet slopes, how soft the mottlings of sun and shadow that play about the rocky ramparts that crown them, how opulent the vast upheavals of snow banked against the sky in the remotenesses beyond, Mont Blanc and the others. How shall anybody describe? Why, not even the painter can quite do it, and the most the pen can do is to suggest. Up the lake there is an old abbey, Talroir, relic of the Middle Ages. We stopped there, stepped from the sparkling water and the rush and boom and frat and fever of the nineteenth century into the solemnity and the silence and the soft gloom and the brooding mystery of a remote antiquity. The stone-stap at the water's edge had the traces of a worn out inscription on it. The wide flight of stone-steps that led up to the front door was polished smooth by the passing feet of forgotten centuries, and there was not an unbroken stone among them all. Within the pile was the old square cloister with covered arcade all around it, where the monks of the ancient times used to sit and meditate, and now and then welcome to their hospitalities the wandering knight with his tin britches on, and in the middle of the square court, open to the sky, was a stone well-curb, cracked and slick with age and use, and all about it were weeds, and among the weeds moldy brick-bats that the crusaders used to throw at each other. A passage at the further side of the cloister led to another weedy and ruthless little enclosure beyond, where there was a ruined wall closed to the top with masses of ivy and flanking it was a battered and picturesque arch. All over the building there were comfortable rooms and comfortable beds, and clean plank floors with no carpets on them. In one bedroom upstairs were half a dozen portraits, dimming relics of the vanished centuries, portraits of abbots who used to be as grand as princes in their old day, and very rich, and much worshipped and very holy, and in the next room there was a howling chromo and an electric bell. Downstairs there was an ancient wood carving with a Latin word commanding silence, and there was a spang-new piano close by. Two elderly French women, with the kindest and honestest and sincerest phrases, have the abbey now, and they board and lodge people who are tired of the roar of cities, and want to be where the dead silence and serenity and peace of this old nest will heal their blistered spirits and patch up their ragged minds. They fed us well, they slept us well, and I wish I could have stayed there a few years and got a solid rest. Mark Twain. End of Mark Twain at Aix-les-Bains, red by John Greenman. This is Section 2 of Mark Twain's Travel Writers of 1891-1892. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain at Bayreuth. From the Chicago Sunday Tribune, December 6, 1891, recorded by John Greenman. It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good half hour to pack them and pair them into the train, and it was the longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial pilgrimage, for a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own caba, in his own mecca. If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere else in America, and you conclude by the middle of May that you would like to attend the Bayreuth Opera two months and a half later, you must use the cable and get about it immediately, or you will get no seats, and you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky, you will get seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you stop to write, you will get nothing. There were plenty of people in Nuremberg when we passed through, who had come on pilgrimage without first securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth. They had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then gone to Nuremberg, and found neither beds nor standing-room, and had walked those quaint streets all night waiting for the hotels to open and empty their guests into the trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and sisters in the faith. They had endured from thirty to forty hours railroading on the continent of Europe, with all which that implies of worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment, and all they had got and all they were to get for it, was handiness and accuracy in kicking themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two towns when other people were in bed, for back they must go over that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with drowsiness, their bodies were a droop from crown to soul, and all kindhearted people refrained from asking them if they had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie. We reached Bayreuth about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday. We were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in advance. I am not a musical critic and did not come here to write essays about the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits. The little children of Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader intelligence than I. I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the operas, pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I might write about the performances, to put in my odd time, would be offered to the public as merely a cat's view of a king and not of didactic value. Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera house, that is to say the Wagner Temple, a little after the middle of the afternoon. The great building stands all by itself, grand and lovely, on high ground outside the town. We were warned that if we arrived after four o'clock we should be obliged to pay two dollars and fifty cents a piece by way of fine. We saved that, and it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity Europe offers of saving money. There was a big crowd in the grounds about the building, and the ladies' dresses took the sun with fine effect. I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were in full dress, for that was not so. The dresses were pretty, but neither sex was in evening dress. The interior of the building is simple, severely so, but there's no occasion for colour and decoration since the people sit in the dark. The auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with a stage at the narrow end. There is an aisle on each side, but no aisle in the body of the house. Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve, from one side of the house to the other. There are seven entrance doors on each side of the theatre, and four at the butt end. Eighteen doors to admit and emit, one thousand six hundred and fifty persons. The number of the particular door by which you are to enter the house or leave it is printed on your ticket, and you can use no door, but that one. Thus crowding and confusion are impossible. Not so many as a hundred people use any one door. This is better than having the usual and useless, elaborate fireproof arrangements. It is the model theatre of the world. It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes its circuit. It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of Lucifer matches. If your seat is near the centre of a row, and you come in late, you must work your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to get to it. Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until the seats are full, and the filling is accomplished in a very few minutes. Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred heads, making a steep cellar door slant from the rear of the house down to the stage. All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a deep and solemn gloom. The funerial rustling of dresses and the low buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive stillness continued yet during some time. The best preparation for music, spectacle or speech conceivable, I should think our show people would have invented or imported that simple and impressive device for securing and solidifying the attention of an audience long ago, instead of which they continue to this day to open a performance against a deadly competition in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest. Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery, soft, rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments. There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain, not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at some form or time. The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite. It was delicious. But straightway thereafter of course came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored, but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvext to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the bewilderingly beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb acting couldn't mar these pleasures. Because there isn't often anything in a Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting. As a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of them standing still and the other catching flies. Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies. I only mean that the usual operatic gestures, which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other, might suggest the sport I speak of, if the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound. This present opera was Parsifal. Madame Wagner does not permit its representation anywhere but in Beirut. The first act of the three occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing. I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles invented by man for the conveying of feeling. But it seems to me that a chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm or what you please to call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of Parsifal anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody. One person performed at a time, and a long time too, often in a noble and always in a high priced voice. But he only pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long one, then a sharp quick peremptory bark or two, and so on and so on. And when he was done you saw that the information which he had conveyed had not compensated for the disturbance. Not always, but pretty often, if two of them would but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices, but no, they don't do that. The great master who knew so well to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound deals only in barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was deep and only added the singing to his opera for the sake of the contrast it would make with the music. Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it. Strictly described it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be. In Parsifal there is a hermit named Gurnimans, who stands on the stage in the one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another character of the cast endures what he can of it and retires to die. During the evening there was an intermission of three quarters of an hour after the first act and one an hour long after the second. In both instances the theatre was totally emptied. People who had previously engaged tables in the one soul eating-house were able to put in their time very satisfactorily. The other thousand went hungry. The opera was concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money. While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different parts of America and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that, Parsifal seldom pleased at first, but that after one had heard it several times it was almost sure to become the favourite. It seemed impossible, but it was true, for the statement came from people whose word was not to be doubted. And I gathered some further information. On the ground I found part of a German musical magazine, and in it a letter written by Ulig, thirty-three years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused Wagner against people like me, who found fault with the comprehensive absence of what our kind regards as singing, Ulig says Wagner despised, jene plaperude musique, and therefore runs, trills, and schnerkel are discarded by him. I don't know what a schnerkel is, but now that I know it has been left out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life. And Ulig further says that Wagner's song is true, that it is simply emphasized in tone speech. That certainly describes it in Parsifal and in some of the other operas, and if I understand Ulig's elaborate German he apologizes for the beautiful airs in Tanhauser. Very well. Now that Wagner and I understand each other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall stop calling him Wagner on the American plan, and hereafter call him Wagner, as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now. The minute we get reconciled to a person how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name right. Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners of America to hear these operas, when we have lately had a season or two of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts, and possibly this same orchestra. I resolved to think that out at all hazards. Tuesday. Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever had, an opera which has always driven me mad with ignorant delight whenever I have heard it, Tanhauser. I heard it first when I was a youth. I heard it last in the last German season in New York. I was busy yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have another Tanhauser opportunity in a few days, but after five o'clock I found myself free and walked out to the opera house and arrived about the beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the grounds in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I would take a rest on a bench for an hour or two and wait for the third act. In a moment or so the first bugle blew and the multitude began to crumble apart and melt into the theatre. I will explain that this bugle call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theatre is empty and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the feeding house. The first bugle call is blown about a quarter of an hour before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers in uniform march out with military step and send out over the landscape a few bars of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances with the gracious notes. Then they march to the other entrance and repeat. Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two hundred people were still left in the front of the house when the second call was blown. In another half-minute they would have been in the house, but then a thing happened which delayed them. The only solitary thing in this world which could be relied on with certainty to accomplish it, I suppose, an imperial princess appeared in the balcony above them. They stopped and dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a stupor of gratitude and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she must disappear or the doors would be closed upon these worshippers, so she returned to her box. This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty. She had a kind face. She was without heirs.  There are many kinds of princes, but this kind is the most harmful of all. For wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress. The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their sort.  In his time the husband of this princess was valuable. He led a degraded life. He ended it with his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried like a god. In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of open gallery in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them. It is the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is about complete, the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the princely layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo or Niagara or the bones of the mastodon or the guillotine of the revolution or the Great Pyramid or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and pictures. No, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity, interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep drafts that taste good all the way down, and appease and satisfy the thirst of a lifetime. Satisfy it. That is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will still have a degree of interest thereafter when encountered, but never anything approaching the ecstasy of that first view. The interest of a prince is different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a mixture of both, and it does not satisfy its thirst with one's view or even noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing is the value in which men attach to a valuable something which has come by luck and not been earned. A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety and nine which you had to work for, and money won at Farrow or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way. A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday, and gratis support by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of luck. And then, supremist value of all, his is the only high fortune on the earth which is secure. The commercial millionaire may become a beggar. The illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake and be dropped and forgotten. The illustrious general can lose a decisive battle and with it the consideration of men. But once a prince, always a prince, that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune, nor an infamous character, nor an adult brain, nor the speech of an ass, can undefy him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages, the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved. It follows, without doubt or question then, that the most desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I think it also follows that the so-called usurpations, with which history is littered, are the most excusable misdemeanors which men have committed. To usurp a usurpation, that is all it amounts to, isn't it? A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of no great interest next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not so with the European, I am quite sure of it. The same old one will answer, he never stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London, and I called at an Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an hour, and then they arrived frozen. They explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked for circumstance. While passing in the neighbourhood of Marlborough House, they saw a crowd gathering, and were told that the Prince of Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of him. They had waited a half hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the crowd, but were disappointed at last the Prince had changed his mind. I said, with a good deal of surprise, is it possible that you too have lived in London all your lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales? Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed, what an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times! They had seen him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour in the gloom and the bitter cold in the midst of a jam of patience from the same asylum on the chance of seeing him again. It was a stupefying statement, but one is obliged to believe the English even when they say a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one. I can't understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant, I doubt if I would do that, even to get a sight of him, with a slight emphasis on the last word. Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in. Then they said blandly, of course not! He is only a president! It is doubtless a fact that a Prince is a permanent interest, an interest not subject to deterioration. The general who was never defeated, the general who never held a council of war, the only general who ever commanded a connected battle front one thousand two hundred miles long, the Smith who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and re-established it, where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies present and to come, was really a person of no serious consequence to these people. To them, with their training, my general was only a man after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that, a being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, a being of no more blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of ashes and a stink. I saw the last act of Tannhauser. I sat in the gloom and the deep stillness waiting one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how long, then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its rich long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the drop curtain parted in the middle and was drawn slowly aside, disclosing a twilighted wood and a wayside shrine with a white-robed girl praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain it was music, just music, music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take script and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it. To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year, I wish to say bring your dinner-pale with you. If you do, you will never cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal inns are the golden anchor and the sun. At either of these places you can get an excellent meal.  There is no charge for this. The town is littered with restaurants, but they are all small and bad, and they are over-driven with custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often, when you arrive, you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this experience. We have had a daily scramble for life, and when I say we, I include shoals of people.  I think they arrive about a week before the first opera and engage all the tables for the season. My tribe have tried all kinds of places, some outside of the town, a mile or two, and have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance a complete and satisfying meal digestible? No, the reverse. These odds and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in that regard their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade, Brickabrack gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb a Bayreuth restaurant meal it is your possession and your property until the time comes to embalm the rest of you. Some of these pilgrims here become, in effect, cabinets, cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It is believed, among scientists, that you could examine the crop of a dead Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from. But I like this ballast. I think a hermitage scrape up at eight in the evening when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their mementos and gone is the quietest thing you can lay on your kielsen except gravel. Thursday. They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles, and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world, with Materna and Avari in the lead. I suppose a double team is necessary, doubtless a single team would dive exhaustion in a week, for all the plays last from four in the afternoon until ten at night. Nearly all the labour falls upon the half-dozen head-singers, and apparently they are required to furnish all the noise they can for the money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling, they are required to open up and let the public know it. Operas are given only on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas. But the ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing. It is said that the off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the morning till ten at night. Are there two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since there are a hundred and ten names in the orchestra list. Yesterday the opera was Tristan and Esolda. I have seen all sorts of audiences at theatres, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals—but none which was twin to the Wagner audience at by right, for fixed and reverential attention, absolute stillness, and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths, that there are times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams. Yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died. Then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act. There is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would like to be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the opera house in the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated. This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveller finds them after centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dresses they please and sit in the dark and worship in silence.  In some of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the Metropolitan is a showcase for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show their clothes. Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated things and the partaking of them with eye and ear, a sacred solemnity? Manifestly no. Then perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to by right, stand explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion. It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see. There is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world. There is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim, wends to his temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed with his heart and his soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but be torpid and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service. This opera of Tristan and Hisolda last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some and have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in a community of the mad. Sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see. The one groping savage in the College of the Learned, and always during service I feel like a heretic in heaven. But by no means do I ever overlook or minimize the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion. Friday. Yesterday's opera was Parsifal again, the others went, and they show marked advance in appreciation. But I went hunting for relics and reminders of the Margravin Vilhelmina, she of the imperishable memoirs. I am properly grateful to her for her unconscious satire upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand touched or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim. The rest of this multitude here are Wagner's. Tuesday. I have seen my last two operas. My season is ended, and we cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was Parsifal. But the experts have disenchanted me. They say, singing. That wasn't singing. That was the wailing and screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy. Well, I ought to have recognized the sign, the old, sure sign, that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art, it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many acromo. However, my base instinct does me profit sometimes. I was the only man out of three thousand two hundred who got his money back on those two operas. Mark Twain. End of Mark Twain at Beirut, read by John Greenman. This is section three of Mark Twain's travel letters from 1891 to 1892. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, from the Chicago Sunday Tribune of January 3, 1892, Playing the Courier, by Mark Twain. Read by John Greenman. Time would come when we must go from Eggs Le Bein to Geneva, and from thence by a series of day-long and tangled journeys to, by right, in Bavaria. I should have to have a courier, of course, to take care of so considerable a party as mine, but I procrastinated. The time slipped along, and at last I woke up one day to the fact that we were ready to move and had no courier. I then resolved upon what I felt was a foolhardy thing, but I was in the humor of it. I said I would make the first stage without help. I did it. I brought the party from Eggs to Geneva by myself, four people. The distance was two hours and more, and there was one change of cars. There was not an accident of any kind, except leaving a valise and some other matters on the platform, a thing which can hardly be called an accident, it is so common. So I offered to conduct the party all the way to Bayreuth. This was a blunder. Though it did not seem so at the time, there was more detail than I thought there would be. One, two persons, whom we had left in a Geneven pension some weeks before, must be collected and brought to the hotel. Two, I must notify the people on the grand-key who store trunks to bring seven of our stored trunks to the hotel and carry back seven which they would find piled in the lobby. Three, I must find out what part of Europe Bayreuth was in, and buy seven railway tickets for that point. Four, I must send a telegram to my friends in the Netherlands. Five, it was now two in the afternoon, and we must look sharp and be ready for the first night train and make sure of sleeping-car tickets. Six, I must draw money at the bank. It seemed to me that the sleeping-car tickets must be the most important thing, so I went to the station myself to make sure. Hotel messengers are not always brisk people. It was a hot day, and I ought to have driven, but it seemed better economy to walk. It did not turn out so, because I lost my way and trebled the distance. I applied for the tickets and they asked me which route I wanted to go by, and that embarrassed me and made me lose my head. There were so many people standing around and I not knowing anything about the routes, and not supposing there were going to be two, so I judged it best to go back and map out the road and come again. I took a cab this time, but on my way upstairs at the hotel I remembered that I was out of cigars, so I thought it would be well to get some while the matter was in my mind. It was only around a corner and I didn't need the cab. I asked the cabman to wait where he was. Thinking of the telegram and trying to word it in my head, I forgot the cigars and the cab, and walked on indefinitely. I was going to have the hotel people send the telegram, but as I could not be far from the post office by this time I thought I would do it myself. But it was farther than I had supposed. I found the place at last and wrote the telegram and handed it in. The clerk was a severe-looking, fidgety man, and he began to fire French questions at me in such a liquid form that I could not detect the joints between his words. And this made me lose my head again. But an English man stepped up and said the clerk wanted to know where he was to send the telegram. I could not tell him because it was not my telegram, and I explained that I was merely sending it for a member of my party. But nothing would pacify the clerk but the address, so I said that if he was so particular I would go back and get it. However, I thought I would go and collect those lacking two persons first, for it would be best to do everything systematically, and in order, and one detail at a time. Then I remembered the cab was eating up my substance down at the Hotel Leander, so I called another cab and told the man to go down and fetch it to the post office and wait till I came. I had a long, hot walk to collect those people, and when I got there they couldn't come with me because they had heavy satchels, and must have a cab. I went away to find one, but before I ran across any I noticed that I had reached the neighborhood of the Grand Quay, at least I thought I had, so I judged I could save time by stepping around and arranging about the trunks. I stepped around about a mile, and although I did not find the Grand Quay, I found a cigar shop and remembered about the cigars. I said I was going to buy Reut, and I wanted enough for the journey. The man asked me which route I was going to take. I said I did not know. He said he would recommend me to go by Zurich and various other places, which he named, and offer to sell me seven second-class through tickets for $22 a piece, which would be throwing off the discount which the railroads allowed him. I was already tired of riding second-class on first-class tickets, so I took him up. By and by I found natural and company's storage office, and told them to send seven of our trunks to the hotel, and pile them up in the lobby. It seemed to me that I was not delivering the whole of the message. Still it was all I could find in my head. Next I found the bank and asked for some money, but I had left my letter of credit somewhere and was not able to draw. I remembered now that I must have left it lying on the table where I wrote my telegram, so I got a cab and drove to the post office and went upstairs, and they said that a letter of credit had indeed been left on the table, but that it was now in the hands of the police authorities, and it would be necessary for me to go there and prove property. They sent a boy with me, and we went out the back way and walked a couple of miles and found the place, and then I remembered about my cabs, and asked the boy to send them to me when he got back to the post office. It was nightfall now, and the mayor had gone to dinner. I thought I would go to dinner myself, but the officer on duty thought differently, and I stayed. The mayor dropped in at half-past ten, but said it was too late to do anything tonight, come at nine-thirty in the morning. The officer wanted to keep me all night, and said I was a suspicious-looking person, and probably did not own the letter of credit, and didn't know what a letter of credit was, but merely saw the real owner leave it lying on the table, and wanted to get it because I was probably a person that would want anything he could get, whether it was valuable or not. But the mayor said he saw nothing suspicious about me, and that I seemed a harmless person, and nothing the matter with me but a wandering mind, and not much of that, so I thanked him, and he set me free, and I went home in my three cabs. As I was dog-tired, and in no condition to answer questions with discretion, I thought I would not disturb the expedition at that time of night, as there was a vacant room I knew of at the other end of the hall. But I did not quite arrive there, as a watch had been set, the expedition being anxious about me. I was placed in a galling situation. The expedition sat stiff and forbidding on four chairs in a row, with shawls and things all on, satchels and guide-books in lap. They had been sitting like that for four hours, and the glass going down all the time. Yes, and they were waiting, waiting for me. It seemed to me that nothing but a sudden happily contrived and brilliant tour de force could break this iron front and make a diversion in my favour. So I shied my hat into the arena, and followed it with a skip and a jump, shouting blithely, Here we all are, Mr. Merryman. Nothing could be deeper or stiller than the absence of applause which followed. But I kept on. There seemed no other way, though my confidence, poor enough before, had got a deadly check, and was in effect gone. I tried to be jockened out of a heavy heart. I tried to touch the other hearts there and soften the bitter resentment in those faces by throwing off bright and airy fun, and making of the whole ghastly thing a joyously humorous incident. But this idea was not well conceived. It was not the right atmosphere for it. I got not one smile, not one line in those offended faces relaxed. I thawed nothing of the winter that looked out of those frosty eyes. I started one more breezy, poor effort, but the head of the expedition cut into the centre of it and said, Where have you been? I saw by the manner of this that the idea was to get down to cold business now. So I began my travels, but was cut short again. Where are the two others? We have been in frightful anxiety about them. Oh, they're all right. I was to fetch a cab.  Don't you know it is eleven o'clock? Where did you leave them? At the pension? Why didn't you bring them? Because we couldn't carry the satchels. And so I thought, You should not try to think. One cannot think without the proper machinery. It is two miles to that pension. Did you go there without a cab? I—well, I didn't intend to. It only happened so. How did it happen so? Because I was at the post office, and I remember that I had left a cab waiting here. And so, to stop that expense I sent another cab to—to—to what? Well, I don't remember now, but I think the new cab was to have the hotel pay the old cab and send it away. What good would that do? What good would it do? It would stop the expense, wouldn't it? By putting the new cab in its place to continue the expense? I didn't say anything. Why didn't you have the new cab come back for you? Oh, that is what I did. I remember now. Yes, that is what I did. Because I recollect that when I—well, then, why didn't it come back for you? To the post office? Why, it did. Very well then. How did you come to walk to the pension? I—I don't quite remember how that happened. Oh, yes, I do remember now. I wrote the dispatch to send to the Netherlands, and oh, thank goodness you did accomplish something. I wouldn't have had you fail to send—what makes you look like that? You are trying to avoid my eye. That dispatch is the most important thing that you haven't sent that dispatch. I haven't said I didn't send it. You don't need to. Oh, dear, I wouldn't have had that telegram fail for anything. Why didn't you send it? Well, you see, with so many things to do and think of, I—they're very particular there. And after I had written the telegram, oh, never mind, let it go. Explanations can't help the matter now. What will he think of us? Oh, that's all right. That's all right. He'll think we gave the telegram to the hotel people, and that they—why, certainly. Why didn't you do that? There was no other rational way. Yes, I know, but then I had it on my mind that I must be sure to get to the bank and draw some money. Well, you are entitled to some credit, after all, for thinking of that. And I don't wish to be too hard on you, though you must acknowledge yourself that you have cost us all a good deal of trouble, and some of it not necessary. How much did you draw? Well, I—I had an idea that—that—that what? That—well, it seems to me that in the circumstances, so many of us, you know, and—and what are you mooning about? Do turn your face this way and let me—why, you haven't drawn any money. Well, the banker said, never mind what the banker said, you must have had a reason of your own, not a reason exactly, but something which— Well, then the simple fact was that I hadn't my letter of credit. Hadn't your letter of credit? Hadn't my letter of credit? Don't repeat me like that. Where was it? At the post office. What was it doing there? Well, I forgot it and left it there. Upon my word, I've seen a good many couriers, but of all the couriers that ever I—I've done the best I could. Well, so you have poor thing, and I'm wrong to abuse you so when you've been working yourself to death while we've been sitting here only thinking of our vexations, instead of feeling grateful for what you were trying to do for us. It will all come out right. We can take the 7.30 train in the morning just as well. You've bought the tickets? I have, and it's a bargain, too—second class. I'm glad of it. Everybody else travels second class, and we might just as well save that ruinous extra charge. What did you pay? Twenty-two dollars a piece, through to Bayreuth. Why, I didn't know you could buy through tickets anywhere but in London and Paris. Some people can't, maybe, but some people can—of whom I am one of which, it appears. It seems a rather high price. On the contrary, the dealer knocked off his commission. Dealer? Yes, I bought them at a cigar shop. That reminds me, we shall have to get up pretty early, and so there should be no packing to do. Your umbrella, your rubbers, your cigars—what is the matter? Hang it, I've left the cigars at the bank. Just think of it. Well, your umbrella—I'll have that all right. There's no hurry. What do you mean by that? Oh, that's all right. I'll take care of—where is that umbrella? It's just the nearest step. It won't take me—where is it? Well, I think I left it at the cigar shop. But anyway, take your feet out from under that thing. It's just as I expected. Where are your rubbers? They—well, where are your rubbers? It's got so dry now. Well, everybody says there's not going to be another drop. Where are your rubbers? Well, you see, well, it was this way. First, the officer said, What officer? Police officer? But the mayor, he—what mayor? Mayor of Geneva. But I said, Wait, what is the matter with you? Me? Nothing. They both tried to persuade me to stay and stay where. Well, the fact is, where have you been? What's kept you out till half past ten at night? Oh, you see, after I lost my letter of credit, I—you are beating around the bush a good deal. Now answer the question in just one straightforward word. Where are those rubbers? They—well, they're in the county jail. I started a placating smile, but it petrified. The climate was unsuitable. Spending three or four hours in jail did not seem to the expedition humorous. Neither did it to me at bottom. I had to explain the whole thing, and, of course, it came out that we couldn't take the early train, because that would leave my letter of credit in hawks still. It did look as if we had all got to go to bed estranged and unhappy, but by good luck that was prevented. There happened to be mention of the trunks, and I was able to say I had attended to that feature. There, you are just as good and thoughtful and painstaking and intelligent as you can be, and it's a shame to find so much fault with you, and there shan't be another word of it.  This bit deeper than some of the other things, and made me uncomfortable, because I wasn't feeling as solid about that trunk-errant as I wanted to. There seemed somehow to be a defect about it somewhere, though I couldn't put my finger on it, and didn't like to stir the matter just now, it being late, and maybe well enough to let well enough alone. Of course there was music in the morning, when it was found that we couldn't leave by the early train, but I had no time to wait, I got only the opening bars of the overture, and then started out to get my letter of credit. It seemed a good time to look into the trunk business, and rectify it if it needed it, and I had a suspicion that it did. I was too late. The concierge said he had shipped the trunks to Zurich the evening before. I asked him how he could do that without exhibiting passage tickets. Not necessary in Switzerland. You pay for your trunks, and send them where you please. Nothing goes free but your hand baggage. How much did you pay on them? A hundred and forty francs? Twenty-eight dollars. There's something wrong about that trunk business, sure. Next I met the portier. He said, You have not slept well, is it not? You have the worn look. If you would like a courier, a good one has arrived last night, and is not engaged for five days already, by the name of Ludy. We recommend him, thus heist. The Grand Hotel Bourrivage recommends him. I declined with coldness. My spirit was not broken yet, and I did not like having my condition taken notice of in this way. I was at the county jail by nine o'clock, hoping that the mayor might chance to come before his regular hour, but he didn't. It was dull there. Every time I offered to touch anything, or look at anything, or do anything, or refrain from doing anything, the policeman said it was, de faune. I thought I would practice my French on him, but he wouldn't have that either. It seemed to make him particularly bitter to hear his own tongue. The mayor came at last, and then there was no trouble. For the minute he convened the Supreme Court, which they always do whenever there is valuable property in dispute, and got everything ship-shape and sentries posted, and had prayer by the chaplain. My unsealed letter was opened, and there wasn't anything in it but some photographs, because as I remember now I had taken out the letter of credit so as to make room for the photographs, and had put the letter in my other pocket, which I proved to everybody's satisfaction by fetching it out and showing it with a good deal of exaltation. So then the court looked at each other in a vacant kind of way, and then at me, and then at each other again, and finally let me go, but said it was imprudent for me to be at large, and asked me what my profession was. I said I was a courier. They lifted up their eyes in a kind of reverent way, and said, I said a word of courteous thanks for their apparent admiration, and hurried off to the bank. However, being a courier was already making me a great stickler for order and system, and one thing at a time, and each thing in its own proper turn. So I passed by the bank, and branched off and started for the two lacking members of the expedition. A cab taxied by, and I took it upon persuasion. I gained no speed by this, but it was a reposeful turnout, and I liked the reposefulness. The week-long jubilations over the six hundredth anniversary of the birth of Swiss liberty, and the signing of the compact, were at flood-tide, and all the streets were closed in fluttering flags. The horse and the driver had been drunk three days and nights, and had known no stall nor bed meantime. They looked, as I felt, dreamy and seedy. But we arrived in the course of time. I went in and rang, and asked a housemaid to rush out the lacking members. She said something which I did not understand, and I returned to the chariot. The girl had probably told me that those people did not belong on her floor, and that it would be judicious for me to go higher, and ring from floor to floor till I found them. For in those Swiss flats there does not seem to be any way to find the right family, but to be patient and guess your way along up. I calculated that I must wait fifteen minutes, there being three details inseparable from an occasion of this sort. First, put on hats and come down and climb in. Second, return of one to get my other glove. Third, presently return of the other one to fetch my French verbs at a glance. I would muse during the fifteen minutes and take it easy. A very still and blank interval ensued, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder and started. The intruder was a policeman. I glanced up and perceived that there was new scenery. There was a good deal of a crowd, and they had that pleased and interested look, which such a crowd wears when they see that somebody is out of luck. The horse was asleep, and so was the driver, and some boys had hung them, and me, full of gaudy decorations, stolen from the innumerable banner-poles. It was a scandalous spectacle. The officer said, I'm sorry, but we can't have you sleeping here all day. I was wounded and said with dignity, I beg your pardon, I was not sleeping, I was thinking. Rather you can think if you want to, but you've got to think to yourself. You disturbed the whole neighborhood. It was a poor joke, but it made the crowd laugh. I snore at night sometimes, but it is not likely that I would do such a thing in the daytime and in such a place. The officer undecorated us and seemed sorry for our friendliness, and really tried to be humane, but he said we mustn't stop there any longer or he would have to charge us rent. It was the law, he said, and he went on to say, in a sociable way, that I was looking pretty moldy, and he wished he knew I shut him off pretty austerely and said I hoped one might celebrate a little these days, especially when one was personally concerned. Personally, he asked, how? Because, six hundred years ago, an ancestor of mine signed the contract. He reflected a moment, then looked me over and said, Ancestor, it's my opinion you signed it yourself, for of all the old aged relics, that ever, but never mind about that. What is it you are waiting here for so long? I said, I'm not waiting here so long at all. I'm waiting fifteen minutes till they forget a glove and a book and go back and get them. Then I told him who they were that I had come for. He was very obliging and began to shout inquiries to the tears of heads and shoulders projecting from the windows above us. Then a woman away up there sang out, Oh, Zay, why, I got Zemekab and Zay left here long ago, half past eight, I should sign. It was annoying. I glanced at my watch, but didn't say anything. The officer said, It is a quarter to twelve, you see. You should have inquired better. You have been asleep three quarters of an hour and in such a sun as this.  It is wonderful. And you will miss your chain, perhaps. You interest me greatly. What is your occupation? I said I was a courier, and it seemed to stun him, and before he could come to, we were gone. When I arrived in the third story of the hotel, I found our quarters vacant. I was not surprised.  The nearer it is to train time, the sure they are to go. I sat down to try and think out what I had best do next. But presently the haul-boy found me there and said the expedition had gone to the station half an hour before. It was the first time I had known them to do a rational thing, and it was very confusing. This is one of the things that make a courier's life so difficult and uncertain. Just as matters are going the smoothest, his people will strike a lucid interval and down go all the arrangements to wreck and ruin. The train was to leave at twelve noon sharp. It was now ten minutes after twelve. I could be at the station in ten minutes. I saw I had no great amount of leeway, for this was the lightning express, and on the Continent the lightning expresses are pretty fastidious about getting away some time during the advertised day. My people were the only ones remaining in the waiting-room. Everybody else had passed through and mounted the train, as they say in those regions. They were exhausted with the nervousness and fret, but I comforted them and heartened them up, and we made our rush. But, no, we were out of luck again. The doorkeeper was not satisfied with the tickets. He examined them cautiously, deliberately, suspiciously. Then glared at me a while, and after that he called another official. The two examined the tickets and called another official. These called others, and the convention discussed and discussed, and gesticulated, and carried on until I begged that they would consider how time was flying, and just pass a few resolutions and let us go. Then they said very courteously that there was a defect in the tickets and asked me where I got them. I judged I saw what the trouble was now. You see, I had bought the tickets in a cigar shop, and, of course, the tobacco-smell was on them. Without doubt the thing they were up to was to work the tickets through the Custom House and collect duty on that smell. So I resolved to be perfectly frank. It is sometimes the best way. I said, Gentlemen, I will not deceive you. These railway tickets— Ah, pardon, Monsieur. These are not railway tickets. Oh, I said. Is that the defect? Truly, yes, Monsieur. These are lottery tickets, yes, and it is a lottery which has been drawn two years ago. I am affected to be greatly amused. It is all one can do in such circumstances. It is all one can do, and yet there is no value in it.   I said cheerily it was all right, just one of those little accidents that was likely to happen to anybody. I would have the right tickets in two minutes and we would catch the train yet and, moreover, have something to laugh about all through the journey. I did get the tickets in time, all stamped and completed, but then it turned out that I couldn't take them because, in taking so much pains about the two missing members, I had skipped the bank and hadn't the money. So then the train left, and there didn't seem to be anything to do but go back to the hotel, which we did, but it was kind of melancholy and not much was said. I tried to start a few subjects, like scenery and transubstantiation and those sorts of things, but they didn't seem to hit the weather right. We had lost our good rooms, but we got some others, which were pretty scattering, but would answer. I judged things were brightened now, but the head of the expedition said, Send up the trunks. It made me feel pretty cold. There was a doubtful something about that trunk business. I was almost sure of it. I was going to suggest, but a wave of the hand sufficiently restrained me and I was informed that we would now camp for three days and see if we could rest up. I said, All right, never mind ringing. I would go down and attend to the trunk myself. I got a cab, and went straight to Mr. Charles Naturell's place, and asked what order it was I had left there, to send seven trunks to the hotel. And were you to bring any back? No. You were sure I didn't tell you to bring back seven that would be found piled in the lobby? Absolutely sure you didn't. Then the whole fourteen are gone to Zurich or Jericho or somewhere, and there is going to be more debris around that hotel when the expedition, I didn't finish, because my mind was getting to be in a good deal of a whirl. And when you are that way you think you have finished a sentence when you haven't. And you go mooning and dreaming away.  I left the cab there, I forgot it, and on my way back I thought it all out and concluded to resign, because otherwise I should be nearly sure to be discharged. But I didn't believe it would be a good idea to resign in person. I could do it by message. So I sent for Mr. Ludy and explained that there was a courier going to resign on account of incompatibility or fatigue or something, and as he had four or five vacant days I would like to insert him into that vacancy if he thought he could fill it. When everything was arranged I got him to go up and say to the expedition that, owing to an error made by Mr. Naturals people, we were out of trunks here and would have plenty in Zurich, and we'd better take the first train, freight, gravel or construction, and move right along. He attended to that and came down with an invitation for me to go up. Yes, certainly. And while we walked along over to the bank to get money and collect my cigars and tobacco, and to the cigar shop to trade back the lottery tickets and get my umbrella, and to Mr. Naturals to pay that cab and send it away, and to the county jail to get my rubbers, and leave PPC cards for the mayor and Supreme Court, he described the weather to me that was prevailing on the upper levels there with the expedition, and I saw that I was doing very well where I was. I stayed out in the woods till 4 p.m. to let the weather moderate, and then turned up at the station just in time to take the five o'clock express for Zurich along with the expedition, now in the hands of Mr. Ludi, who conducted its complex affairs with little apparent effort or inconvenience. Well, I had worked like a slave while I was in office, and done the very best I knew how, yet all that these people dwelt upon or seemed to care to remember was the defects of my administration, not its creditable features. They would skip over a thousand creditable features to remark upon and reiterate, and fuss about, just one fact. Till it seemed to me they would wear it out, and not much of a fact either, taken by itself, the fact that I elected myself courier in Geneva, and put in work enough to carry a circus to Jerusalem, and yet never even got my gang out of the town. I finally said I didn't wish to hear any more about the subject it made me tired, and I told them to their faces that I would never be a courier again to save anybody's life, and if I live long enough I'll prove it. I think it's a difficult, brain-wracking, overworked, and thoroughly ungrateful office, and the main bulk of its wages is a sore heart and a bruised spirit. Mark Twain End of Playing the Courier by Mark Twain, read by John Greenman.