Transcriber’s Notes.

Hyphenation has been standardised.
Other changes made are noted at the end of the book.


[Illustration: ARMED AND EQUIPPED, AS ADVISED BY FRIENDS.]




  _A JOURNEY
  OF A JAYHAWKER_

  _BY
  W. Y. MORGAN_

  _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
  ALBERT T. REID_


  MONOTYPED AND PRINTED BY
  CRANE & COMPANY, PRINTERS
  TOPEKA
  1905




  Copyright 1905,
  BY W. Y. MORGAN.




PREFACE.


These letters were written to the Hutchinson Daily News, and are
printed in book form without revision. With this understanding the
reader will kindly overlook inconsistencies and inaccuracies, which
easily creep into what is only an impression and not a study. Any other
mistakes are to be charged to the printer and proof-reader, who are
likewise to be credited for the correct grammar and English which may
be found in some places.

There is no excuse for the publication of these letters. No one is
guilty except the writer, and he is responsible only to his conscience,
which is not sensitive.

  W. Y. MORGAN.

  HUTCHINSON, KANSAS, December 1, 1905.




  _To the
  PEOPLE OF HUTCHINSON,
  Who have stood for much from the same
  source, and for whom there is no
  relief in sight, this book is
  respectfully dedicated._




CONTENTS.


                                           _Page._

      GOING TO EUROPE                      11

      LEAVING THE LAND                     17

      CROSSING THE ATLANTIC                24

      FIRST DAY IN IRELAND                 31

      BY KILLARNEY’S LAKES                 37

      IRELAND AND THE IRISH                44

      THE CITY OF PLEASURE                 53

      PARIS AND PARISIANS                  60

      RURAL FRANCE                         69

      GETTING INTO ITALY                   79

      ROME AND ROMANS                      86

      VENICE, THE BEAUTIFUL                93

      SOME THINGS ON ART                  100

      AN ITALIAN FOURTH AND SO FORTH      106

      ACROSS THE ALPS                     117

      GENEVA AND CHILLON                  123

      SOMETHING OF SWITZERLAND            130

      SWISS AND SWITZERLAND               136

      IN THE BLACK FOREST                 145

      STORIES OF STRASSBURG               152

      IN OLD HEIDELBERG                   159

      WORMS AND OTHER THINGS              167

      RICH OLD FRANKFORT                  174

      DOWN THE RHINE                      180

      COLOGNE WATER AND OTHERS            188

      IN DUTCH LAND                       197

      THE DAM DUTCH TOWNS                 204

      THE KINGDOM OF BELGIUM              212

      EUROPEAN ART AND GRUB               219

      IN OLD, OLD ENGLAND                 231

      THE GREATEST OF CITIES              238

      AT KING EDWARD’S HOUSE              246

      THE TOWER AND OTHER THINGS          253

      IN RURAL ENGLAND                    259

      RAILROADS IN EUROPE                 266

      THE TIME TO QUIT                    275




A JOURNEY OF A JAYHAWKER.




GOING TO EUROPE.


  BOSTON, May 25, 1905.

When one decides to make a European trip he immediately becomes
impressed with the importance of his intention, and thinks that
everyone else is likewise affected. Of course this is a mistake, but
you have to stop and think before you realize it. You go down the
street imagining everyone is saying, “There is a man who is going to
Europe.” In fact, the other fellow is probably merely wondering whether
or not you will pay the two dollars you owe him or stand him off for
another thirty days. You are in an exhilarated state. You think over
the cherished desires of a lifetime to see London, Paris, Rome, and
the places made famous by history. You can’t pick up a paper but you
read some reference to a place or thing which you are going to see
across the Atlantic, and which ordinarily you would skip as you do
a patent-medicine advertisement. You go to reading the accounts of
Emperor William’s plans as if you would soon meet William and talk them
over with him. You read about the comings and goings of nobility and
wonder if the pope knows you are likely to call on him some day in
July, and whether the Swiss Guards will realize the honor of a visit
from an American citizen by the name of Morgan or Jones. You read of
European travel and sights, and, worst of all, you actually get to
believe the things. In fact, you work yourself up to a fine point of
enthusiasm and in your mind go cavorting around among ancient heroes
and crowned heads. As a first guess I would say that probably the most
successful part of a trip to the Old World is the one you take in
advance.

[Illustration]

As soon as I disclosed my European intentions, I began to get advice
from friends and old travelers. This is a trying experience. Everybody
has ideas as to what should be done, and no two will agree. One of the
first questions to be settled is that of clothing. The importance of
this is impressed upon the prospective tourist. In the first place I am
told to take no baggage except the very simplest that can be carried
in the hand. In the second place I am advised that when traveling in
Europe, even more than in this country, one should be prepared for all
kinds of climate and be ready with the proper clothes to meet every
emergency. Every bit of information is absolutely as true as common
law or the gospel, for the informant has either made the trip, or
his wife’s cousin has, or he knows a man who knows another man who
did,—and you are told what happened with all the harrowing details.
Clothes do not make the man or the woman, but they help out a lot. So
that our friends will realize the difficulties we may meet. I will
admit that we are going to the “simple” extreme, taking only light
baggage, very little more than a clean collar and a pleasant smile. If
royalty wants to call upon us, royalty will not find us prepared with
the clothes required by the books of etiquette, unless I can hire a
dress suit or borrow one from the head waiter.

[Illustration]

I have also discovered that it is going to be difficult to please
everybody with our route. Nearly every person has something that just
must be seen, and not to do so would make a trip to Europe a flat
failure. Most of these important places are dug up by inspiration from
the memory of some novel or play. There is the scientific man who urges
German universities, the musically inclined who would make Wagnerian
objects the great points, the historical student who prescribes
battlefields, the sportive gent who urges Monte Carlo, the classical
enthusiast who can think of nothing less than a thousand years old,
the art-lover who has a list of seventy-seven different styles of
Madonnas, the novel-reader who would wander over the country of Scott,
the social oracle who would spend the time in London and “Paree,” the
enthusiast in civics who is interested in government railroads, the
initiative and referendum of Switzerland, and the man whose ideas of
a trip abroad are condensed in the parting injunction, “Take one for
me at Munich or Heidelberg.” It is shocking to see the disappointed
look of the friendly adviser if you do not agree with him that his
recommendation is the great thing in Europe. A friend of mine who is
an archæologist said: “Of course you are going to Greece?” Now I had
not thought of Greece, and ventured to say so. “What, not going to
Greece!” was the withering answer in a tone which plainly meant that
you were undoubtedly going to throw your opportunity away like an empty
sack when the peanuts are gone. Another type of adviser is the man who
says: “You must see the Coliseum,” when you know the man would not know
the Coliseum if he were to meet it in the road. He has simply heard
some one say something about the Coliseum, and takes that word in order
to show off his superior knowledge of the sights of Europe. During the
weeks of preparation we have made “itineraries” to suit the suggestions
of our friends. It is easy to make an itinerary, and no trouble at all
to change it the next day when a more profitable route is offered. On
a rough estimate I should say that in the last few weeks we have made
European itineraries enough to take about seventeen years’ time, and
we are intending to be away only about three months. The fact is that
while Europe is only a little continent, not near as big as the United
States, it has been fought over, scrapped over, built over, written
about and has been doing business for so many hundreds of years that
there is hardly a pin-point on the map which for some good reason you
do not want to visit. It is like taking a newspaper article about seven
columns long and condensing it to a small paragraph. You feel you are
cutting out all the really good places, and about the extent of your
trip is to the points to which you have ordered your mail sent and
where you have to go to change trains.

[Illustration]

And then there is the friend who can’t go to Europe and who could
hardly get to Newton if he had to pay for a round-trip ticket, who
comfortingly says: “I wouldn’t go to Europe until I had seen all of
my own country.” This remark has been made to me so often in the last
few weeks that I have learned to dodge when I see it coming. I have
traveled around some in the United States, and as a matter of fact
the people in one section are pretty much the same as the people in
another, and it is people that I like to see and not mountains or
museums. Of course some parts are more so than others. There is no
State like Kansas and no people like Kansans. The object of a trip to
Europe is to see something different, as different as possible. It
is to get the local “color” for the things you read about. It is to
learn if the men and women of the Old World are as they are pictured
in books, and to compare them with the people whom you associate
with every day at home. I am told that in Paris even little children
can talk French, and that in Germany the people stand it to have an
emperor and never organize any boss-buster movements or bolt the party
nominations. I have read about these things all my life, and they may
be true. I want to see them. I am not from Missouri, but I have lived
near enough to want to be shown.

We sailed from Hutchinson on the Santa Fe. After touching at a few
places we reached Boston safely, and unless the police intervene we
will embark this afternoon on the White Star steamship Arabic. It is
still two hours until we go aboard but I am already seasick, or am
imagining how it will feel, which is nearly as bad. I am not afraid
of water. I have lived too long on the Arkansas and Cow creek and my
boyhood was spent on the shores of the Cottonwood. But nevertheless and
notwithstanding, I feel as I think everybody must when he takes his
first long ocean voyage. I never noticed so many accounts of wrecks as
I have in the last month. If there was an item in a newspaper about
the wreck of some ocean steamer or the drowning of a passenger, and I
did not see the piece, some friend always did, and brought it to me
to comfort me. Statistics prove that it is as safe to travel across
the ocean in a steamship as across Kansas in a railroad train. This is
comforting, but statistics do not look big and substantial when you
contemplate a week’s existence with nothing but a few boards and bolts
between yourself and the place where McGinty went. One little man in a
little old boat seems mighty small in the middle of a big ocean.




LEAVING THE LAND.


  STEAMSHIP ARABIC, May 29, 1905.

In spite of the fact that a trip across the Atlantic is not considered
dangerous or exceptional, there is always a lot of sentiment which
comes up into the throat of the traveler when he goes aboard the
ship that is to take him out of his own country and across the ocean
to a foreign land. Long before the Arabic was to sail it was filled
with passengers and friends who had come to say good-by and wave
farewell. The custom is whenever a friend is to start on such a trip
to accompany him or her to the dock, send flowers to be placed in the
stateroom, and to stand on the wharf and wave a handkerchief until the
responding figure on the deck of the ship is no longer recognizable
in the distance. Of course, we were so far from home that there was
nobody to do these honors for wandering Kansans, so we picked out
a few nice-looking people who seemed to be there for curiosity and
vigorously shouted and waved good-by to them, and they had the good
taste to respond. A Colorado man who had been on the trip before told
me afterward that the young fellow who had called so cheerily and waved
so vigorously at him as the steamer pulled away from land, was a hotel
porter whom he had hired for a half-dollar to come to the wharf and bid
him godspeed on his journey.

The Arabic turned away from the dock at 4.30 in the afternoon of
May 25, and steamed slowly and majestically down the harbor and out
toward the ocean with a half-dozen little pilot-boats and revenue
cutters whistling and dancing like a lot of little dogs frisking and
playing around a big dog as it walks down the street. The old ship
Constitution, heroine of America’s early naval warfare, was passed,
the forts and the navy yard with the modern warships and guns, the
last island and the last American flag faded into the distance, and a
solemn thought of leaving one’s native land and of possible seasickness
makes one choke with patriotism and foreboding. It is too late now to
back out. There is no chance to get off. For a week the ship will never
stop, and there will be no place upon which the eye can rest except
water and sky. A flood of sentiment rushes through one and leaks a
little at the eyes as the mind turns to those who have been so near and
dear and are now to be so far away. That is the feeling experienced
by all travelers, and I want to be recorded present and voting on the
question, although as a matter of fact while the Arabic was leaving the
dock and country I was quarreling with the purser over the stateroom
and trying to get the steward to help me handle baggage when he was so
full of American liquor that he could do nothing but say “yessir” (hic)
and smile.

[Illustration: NO TIME FOR SENTIMENT.]

No doubt everyone has noticed how the apparently little things of life
occupy us at most critical and important times. I remember when at
a certain stage I was accomplishing an object to which I had worked
industriously and whole-heartedly. I should have been filled with
happiness and pride as I faced a large crowd of people. As a matter of
fact I was miserable because my collar did not fit my shirt and kept
bobbing up and down in a refractory way. The first time I saw Niagara
Falls, whither I had gone to be overcome with the grandeur and beauty
of the scene, I put in all my time trying to find a place to get a
sandwich. It is said that when Gladstone was making his great fight for
Irish home rule he was sitting on his bench in parliament, apparently
wrapped in deep thought. His colleagues did not disturb him, for they
supposed he was pondering the question which was agitating every
mind. Finally he straightened himself up and said to himself, but so
those near could hear: “After all, I will plant that rosebush in the
front instead of at the side of the doorway.” The energetic man who
is traveling amid picturesque and historical places puts in more time
figuring out time-tables and wondering whether he will get dinner in a
dining-car or at a lunch station, than he does in soulful meditation
on the wonders of nature or the handiwork of man. And the general
run of women, I am firmly convinced by circumstantial evidence, will
approach the subject of a European trip or a church wedding, not with
the thoughts of the lands to be visited or the responsibility to be
assumed, but with minds full of the problem of whether four shirtwaists
and a skirt will do better than two dresses. This peculiarity of
humanity has often impressed me, so I was not surprised when I realized
as I returned more or less triumphant from my battles with purser and
steward that I missed most of the thrills and throbs that had been
promised me by all the guidebooks and books of travel that I had read.

An ocean voyage is being robbed of most of its terrors. The Arabic is
a big ship, one of the largest. It stretches out over so many waves
that it does very little rolling or plunging. We have been out for
three days and there have been really no cases of seasickness. I fully
expected to be seasick, and it is a great disappointment. However, I
am not going to ask the company to refund my fare on that account.
Everybody is afraid of seasickness, and down in his heart everybody
wishes that everybody else might be sick and he alone left to proudly
walk the deck and smile at the victims. The only person who suffers
from seasickness is the individual affected. You may run a sliver in
your finger and the family will gather around with words of sympathy.
You may get a cinder in your eye and your friends will hurry forward to
help get it out. But if you are suffering with seasickness, and death
would almost be welcome, your friends will only grin and their words of
condolence are false and mocking.

[Illustration]

A modern steamship is constructed for safety, comfort, and almost
luxury. When you get those three qualities there is very little left of
the poetry or novelty of ocean traveling. We still speak of the ship
“sailing,” although, of course, it doesn’t. The modern ship steams. We
have read all of our lives about the beautiful white-wings and the
jolly jack tars. The reality is a mammoth engine out of sight, a big
smoke-stack, and a lot of black, dust-covered, sweaty firemen. The
“sailors” no longer climb the rigging and the masts, but go down in
the hole and shovel coal. My ideas of the sea came from Oliver Optic.
I want to hear the boatswain pipe, the mate’s command, “All hands
belay ship,” and see the captain as he stands at his post and with
an occasional “Steady, my hearties,” direct the seamen as they sing
their songs and clamber up the masts. That is beauty and poetry. But
the reality is that the captain whistles down the tube to the engineer
and he gives the order, “More coal, you sons of guns; stop that noise
and fire up.” That is fact, and makes traveling comfortable but not
soul-inspiring.

[Illustration]

The White Star line, on which we are traveling, belongs to the big
steamship company merger, formed by Pierpont Morgan a few years ago.
It is really owned by American capital and controlled by American
financiers, but the ships carry the British flag and are manned by
British officers and men. England manages things so that it pays to
carry the English flag. I have a great deal of respect for England.
With all our American enterprise, energy and ability, we look like
a tallow candle beside an electric light when it comes to ships and
international commerce. The government of England always looks after
its shipping interests and encourages capital to send English vessels
and English crews carrying English merchandise to the furthermost
parts. Prizes, bounties, subsidies and favors of all kinds have been
used to make the merchant marine of Great Britain greater than that of
the rest of the world. The English are a great people, and they are
conscious of it. And they see to it that everybody else understands the
fact. There isn’t anything in this American-owned ship that comes from
the United States except what the passengers have in their baggage.
The crew from captain to cook are English. The supplies are all bought
in England. The ships are built and repaired at Belfast. Coal for the
voyage both ways comes from Wales. English meats and even ice-cream are
purchased in Liverpool for the round trip. You can’t buy an American
postage stamp, and United States money is not taken except at exchange
below par. The American who has been going through life under the
impression that America is the whole thing has his feelings stepped on
nearly every time he turns around.

[Illustration]

The daily life on a steamship is a good deal like I am told it is on
a limited Santa Fe Pullman train, only there is a little more room.
There are all kinds of people on the Arabic, mostly from England, the
United States or Boston. Soon after we left port I met a fellow who
looked like somebody from home. I asked him where he was from, and he
said Nevada. I said I was from Kansas, and he enthusiastically grasped
my hand and said, “Then we are neighbors.” You do get a good deal of
that feeling. Afterward we met some folks from Colorado, and to see
us warm up to each other would have made you think we were a long
separated but happily reunited family. When anyone asks me where I hail
from and I say “Kansas,” the answer is nearly always “Oh.” And then I
shut my eyes and wait for the next remark. It never fails to come: “Do
you know Carrie Nation?” If I get a fair show I generally manage in
the course of conversation to incidentally ring in a few things about
Kansas that they never heard before (and once in a long while something
I never heard before myself). I don’t have to confine myself to things
I can prove. Colorado and Nevada will stand by me, and if the returning
English tourists are not regretting they did not see the wonderful
State of Kansas they are simply figuring me out a liar. The poet said:
“How sweet it is for one’s country to die.” Let us add: “How sweet it
is for one’s country to lie.”

That reminds me of a good joke on myself. An Englishman was complaining
of the voyage and wishing he was in old. England. I did a little
rapture talk about the ocean, and said I loved to go on the deck,
watching the never-ending blue of water and sky and just lie and lie
and lie there. He said: “I believe you told me you were a newspaper
man.”




CROSSING THE ATLANTIC.


  STEAMSHIP ARABIC, June 1, 1905.

I have come to a realization of the work of Christopher Columbus. It
took nerve to keep on sailing day in and day out, week in and week out,
with no sight of anything that looked like land,—nothing but a great
stretch of water, not even a stick in it. If I had been on board the
Santa Maria I would surely have joined the crowd of sailors who wanted
to quit and go home. We have come now nearly 3,000 miles through the
Atlantic, and if someone had not been over the route before and we did
not believe that land would appear at a certain time it would certainly
look as if the ocean would never end. If Columbus were to make the trip
now on the Arabic he would probably be as surprised as were the Indians
when the Spaniards landed on San Salvador something over 400 years ago.
The monotony of the ocean is only broken by an occasional passing ship,
and a high-strung imagination. We have met or passed five ships in
seven days. Each one has provided us with excitement for half a day. We
took sides as to whether the strange vessel was a Cunarder, an American
liner, a North German Lloyd or what not. Every line that crosses the
ocean would have partisans and each corner of the argument would be
vigorously sustained by expert evidence. I decided on a system. I
always maintained that the ship was an American liner. By sticking
to the text and not changing I hit it once, which was better than the
average. Then we have long and sometimes bitter discussions as to the
number of miles the Arabic will make in the next twenty-four hours.
Tips are anxiously obtained from officers, sailors, stewards and cooks.
Every man who ever bet in his life and some who never do at home, back
their opinions with their money. And when we are not arguing or betting
we are eating. Passengers on this line are full-fed. The day begins
with 8 o’clock breakfast, at 10:30 a lunch is served, on deck, at 1
o’clock an elaborate lunch, at 4 o’clock tea, cakes and sandwiches are
distributed, and at 7 o’clock a course dinner. People do all of these
and eat sandwiches and stuff between times and then wonder why their
stomachs are “disturbed.”

[Illustration]

It takes all kinds of people to make up the world, and there are
samples of most of the varieties on an ocean steamer. Some of our
passengers are very swell and some are very bum. But they meet on
the level—provided you can call the deck of a ship level when it is
usually tilted one way or the other at an angle of 20 to 30 degrees.
In the spirit of investigation I listened to the talk of a couple of
ladies who are society leaders and members of the 400 at home. The
subjects they discussed were babies, servants and clothes, and they
talked just about like the women-folks of Kansas. There is a touch of
human nature through all of us.

When I left home I decided not to change my watch until I got to
Europe. At Boston I was only one hour behind and could easily remember
and count on that. But every day on the ocean the clock has been
shoved up thirty-five minutes for the 400 miles traveled eastward the
preceding twenty-four hours. When it got so we were eating noonday
lunch at 8 A. M. by my watch I gave it up and turned the hands around.
When we reach London we will be about six hours ahead of Hutchinson
time, and anyone can see the ridiculous side of getting up at 2 o’clock
in the morning and going to bed at 4 in the afternoon. By a strange
coincidence the sun has changed its time for rising and setting to
agree with the ship’s clock.

[Illustration]

There is great system on a big ship. Everything is done just so and
no other way. I have had a hard time locating the “stewards.” I never
realized what a steward was before. We have a bedroom steward, who
looks after the stateroom, a bath steward who runs the bathroom, a deck
steward in charge of the deck, an assistant deck steward, a library
steward, a smoking-room steward, a table steward, and a few more whose
titles I can’t remember. One steward never gets on another’s line of
duty. If you want a deck chair you must see the deck steward, if you
want a blanket you must see the saloon steward, and so on. If I fall
overboard I hope the proper steward will be around, for the system is
so fine that I fear the other stewards would refuse to act until the
proper steward could be called. Each steward will be expecting a tip
when the voyage is ended, and if he weren’t a “steward,” he probably
could not get it so easily.

[Illustration]

Sunday we had religious service in the saloon. (Not the kind of a
saloon that Mrs. Nation holds service in.) It was the Church of England
service, but out of respect to the American passengers the reader ran
in President Roosevelt’s name in the prayer for the royal family. It
was a quiet, beautiful day and the amount of the collection was small.
I was told by an officer that when Sunday is a stormy day and the boat
acts as if it might tip over most any time, the passengers contribute
much more liberally to the offering than they do when the day is fair.
Some people go to church on board ship who never see the inside of a
church on land. I suppose they learn from the sailors the advantage of
casting an anchor out to the windward.

[Illustration]

We will see land in a few hours, the southwest coast of Ireland. A few
hours later we will land at Queenstown. It will be mighty good to get
one’s feet on ground that doesn’t move just when you don’t expect it
to. We will find out what has happened in the world, for we haven’t
had any news for a week. They are betting on whether or not the Jap
and Russian fleets have met during our absence from the earth. Like a
great many good things, the best part of an ocean voyage is the end. I
have enjoyed the trip very much, but if I get a chance to walk back to
America I will be mighty glad to take it.




IRELAND.




FIRST DAY IN IRELAND.


  CORK, IRELAND, June 3.

The first vivid impression made upon me in Ireland was the morning
after we landed. We had come ashore late at night at Queenstown, and
except for the Irish names and Irish brogue there was nothing to
indicate but that we were going through an American custom-house into
an American hotel. But when we went to breakfast up came the waiter
attired in full dress and extra long-tailed coat with a red vest. I
had always supposed the pictures of an English or Irish waiter in such
livery at breakfast was a joke. It is not a joke. It is a most serious
and proper attire, and I suppose an Irish waiter in a first-class hotel
would as soon appear to serve breakfast without any pants as without
the long swallowtail coat. And when I saw that, I knew I was far away
from home.

[Illustration]

A European breakfast is “rolls and coffee.” In anticipation I had
thought of hot rolls and delicious coffee. Put this down: There are no
hot rolls in Ireland, and I am guessing there will be none in Europe.
“Rolls” means plain, very plain, cold bread, hard and a trifle stale.
The coffee is bum and the cream is skim-milk. An English hotel, for
that is what Irish first-class hotels are, ought to put more into the
eating and less into the waiter’s uniform. Along with other Americans
at that first breakfast, we joined in a howl and managed to get some
eggs.

[Illustration]

Queenstown is one of the largest and best of the British harbors. It
has an important navy yard and several English warships are anchored
among the numerous merchant vessels. The town is on the side of a high
hill which comes down to the water’s edge, and the narrow streets go up
and down the slope at every angle except a right angle to the street
along the waterfront. The chief resources of Queenstown are sailors
and tourists, and the main occupations of the leading inhabitants
are lodging-houses and saloons. Over nearly every store is the sign,
“Licensed to sell ale, porter and spirits seven days in the week.”

[Illustration]

[Illustration: THE IRISH JAUNTING (JOLTING) CAR.]

There is nothing much to Queenstown except the quaintness that comes
from age and dirt, and I have seen enough American towns with the same
characteristics to make this an old story. But we walked and climbed
to the top of the hill, and there I saw a panorama spread out before
me which will stick to my memory a good long while. The large harbor,
locked on three sides and part of the fourth with land, made a blue
setting for the white of the numerous ships. Little sailboats drifted
over the quiet water and tugs and launches darted in and out among the
big vessels. Eight-oared boats from the warships, manned with uniformed
sailors from the royal navy, skimmed back and forth, the eight oars
rising and falling as one. Flags were flying from mastheads, and the
decks were lively with the work of the day. Up from the shore on every
side except where the ocean’s blue appeared, rose the greenest green
hills you ever saw, and they reached to the bluest blue sky you ever
saw, a frame for the picture which no artist could ever hope to portray.

[Illustration]

An Irish woman whose son had gone to America and sent back for the
mother and little sister, had never been far from home before. Leading
the little girl by the hand she was walking to Queenstown and came in
sight of the harbor from the top of the hill. The beauty of the scene
impressed her, but she added a lesson for the benefit of the daughter:
“Look at the beautiful sight and see how wonderful is the work of
Nature. See the big ships side by side, and all around them their
little ones.”

[Illustration]

Queenstown is the harbor for Cork, which is twelve miles up the
river Lee. It is the commercial metropolis of southern Ireland and
has furnished more policemen to America than any town of twice its
size in the United States. Of course the first thing we did was to
ride in a jaunting-car and go to Blarney Castle. The castle looks
just about as it did last summer on the Pike at St. Louis. But the
surrounding grounds are as pretty as they can be. I hesitate when it
comes to describing the park with its stately trees, its beautiful
grassy slopes crowned with wild flowers, its moss and ivy which cling
to wall and tree, covering defects, revealing charms, enhancing
beauties. The castle itself was built by McCarthy, king of Munster,
in 1446, and while of course uninhabited and in partial ruin, is in
good preservation, to make an Irish bull of it. We climbed to the top,
we reveled in the rich scene around us, kissed the blarney stone and
cheerfully gave the care-taker twice the usual fee because she said
Americans were the best people on earth. Then we had the nicest lunch
that has come our way since we left Kansas—an Irish lunch of bread
and butter, cold ham and milk. We had traveled all morning and climbed
among ruins from 12 to 2 o’clock. If you want the best lunch on earth,
no matter what it is made of, climb towers for a couple of hours.

[Illustration]

There are some things that are peculiarly Irish. The jaunting-car is
one of them. It is the favorite vehicle for driving. It looks like a
two-wheel cart, driver’s seat in the front end and passengers’ seats
back to back, facing outward. My fellow-traveler, Mr. McGregor, says
the Irish brogue has perverted into jaunting-car the real name, which
is jolting-car. The driver is always a good fellow and he keeps the
horse on the gallop much of the time. You have to learn to keep your
seat on a jaunting-car as you do on a bicycle. You also have to learn
to weigh the statements of your driver as to distances and legends as
you do the promises of a candidate for office. We suggested to one
that a jaunting-car driver had to lie. “We never lie, sir,” said the
Irishman. “But we stretch it a little.”

After a week on shipboard, during which time I had patiently shaved
myself, I yearned for the comforting work of a good barber. At the
best hotel in Cork, a city of 80,000 people, I went to the best barber
shop in town. The chair was just like a common wooden kitchen chair,
only not quite so comfortable. There was a head-rest made out of a
two-by-four scantling, and when the barber pulled my head back onto
that I knew my dream of a comfortable shave was to be a nightmare. He
made the lather in a wash-basin and I think he honed the razor on a
grindstone. It cut all right when it didn’t pull out by the roots. When
the operation was finished he combed my hair with my head still back,
washed my face with cold water and rubbed it with a coarse towel. The
barber charged me twopence (equivalent to four cents). And that was my
first experience with a European tonsorial artist. Perhaps sometime in
my life I have felt cross at a barber at home because the razor pulled
or because he squirted bay rum into my eye. But in the future I will
never murmur, except to recall my experience in Cork and thank God for
American barbers.

[Illustration]

The day we came to Cork there was an election for poor-law guardians,
only a local affair, but I attended. The voting is by Australian
ballot just as in America. The suffrage is restricted to householders,
including those who pay a certain rent, and women vote the same as men.
The politicians at the polling-place treated me well and explained all
the methods. One of the workers told the judge that they should let me
vote, as when he had visited his brother in America they had let him
vote twice while there. I proposed that if they would let me vote for
poor-law guardians in the county of Cork I would let any of them vote
for councilman in the Fourth ward of Hutchinson. We had a good friendly
visit, and it was easy to see that Irishmen are politicians in the Old
World as well as the New. After a man or woman voted he or she was
always given a drink at the nearest place where “spirits” are sold. But
when the polls closed instead of going ahead and counting the votes,
the judges adjourned until noon the next day—the invariable custom. It
was not until the afternoon following the election when it was learned
who “stood at the top of the poll.” We couldn’t stand the pressure that
long in America.

There were placards up all around telling the voters to “vote the
straight ticket,” “vote for the interest of labor,” and “vote for your
own interests.” The newspapers the next day told of the vicious conduct
of the opposition and the immoral practices resorted to. But as a rule
the Irish people are like Americans, accepting the result with good
feeling and promises of what will be done to the other fellows the next
time.




BY KILLARNEY’S LAKES.


  KILLARNEY, June 8, 1905.

We have spent four days in the Irish mountains and have ridden a
hundred miles in a jaunting-car and coach. I have had mountain scenery,
lake scenery and plain scenery for every meal in the day. I enjoy
scenery, but I fear I am getting it in too large quantities and am
having it shaken too well while taking. Sunday was spent in Glengariff,
a picturesque place where the mountains rise abruptly from the salt
water of Bantry bay. Monday we coached from Glengariff to Killarney and
Tuesday we did the lakes with a jaunting-car, slightly assisted by a
row-boat. The Irish mountains are not as high as the Rocky Mountains,
but they are a very good imitation. The Rockies are grand and
beautiful. The mountains of Cork and Kerry are pretty and beautiful.
The Irish mountains are covered with green. It is as if the Rocky
Mountains were smaller, covered with ivy and moss, dotted here and
there with whitewashed cottages and flocks of sheep, and topped with a
blue sky which is bluer than any indigo and clearer than any crystal.

[Illustration]

There are several ruined castles about Killarney. I am already getting
to shy at ruined castles. The proposal to visit one makes my feet
ache as an approaching thunder-storm affects some people’s corns. We
first went to Muckross Abbey, a well-preserved ruin about 400 years
old. The Muckross family, which owned the estate, has played out,
and the property has been bought by Guinness, the Dublin brewer, who
was made a lord by Queen Victoria. Whatever the earl of Kenmare does
not own around Killarney belongs to Guinness. You can imagine how
Muckross Abbey looked 300 years ago when the old monks lived there and
occupied the cells and cloister now unroofed. The banquet hall has a
big fireplace and there are dark spiral stairways running up and down
such as you read about in Ivanhoe. On the tombstones are inscriptions
telling of the virtues and sanctity of knights and lords who would be
considered tough bats if they lived nowadays and swaggered around as
they did in the good old times. I like to look at old tombstones and
wonder what the men who lie beneath them would say if they could read
the catalogue of virtues accredited to them. I always think of the
little girl who had evidently been visiting Muckross Abbey, or some
such place, and anxiously inquired if the people in those days did not
bury bad folks, as all who were interred there were supremely good. And
then the thought comes up that all of these men were great and strong
in their time, making history and imagining that they were cutting a
gash in the world. Now they are forgotten and their deeds unknown, and
they are the subjects of sportive remarks by tourists from a country
they never heard of.

The lakes of Killarney have been praised in prose and verse, and they
are up to the advance advertising. They are not large, but they nestle
among the mountains and reflect on their clear surface the heights that
surround them. There is a legend everywhere and the Irish driver knows
them all. Here is a reasonable one: One of the O’Donohues, which family
was once the royal power in Kerry, was hunting in the mountains. He
met the devil, and the two had an altercation in which O’Donohue got
decidedly the best of the argument. The devil became so angry that he
bit a big chunk out of a mountain. O’Donohue took his shillelah and hit
the devil so hard a crack that he dropped the mouthful of mountain into
the lake. This tale must be true, for as the driver said: “There’s the
place the devil bit and it is called so to this day, and out in the
lake is the little island of rock, just as the devil dropped it into
the water.”

[Illustration]

Everybody who has read Tom Moore—and if anyone has not he should do
so—will remember the lines:

    “There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
    As the vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.”

The meeting of the three Killarney lakes was referred to, and Moore was
telling truth as well as poetry. The upper lake and the middle lake
narrow to small streams and flow together as they merge into the little
rosebud of a mouth which the lower lake puts up to greet them. There is
a rapid which the boat shoots for a sixpence, but it was not thrilling.
In the triangular park made by lakes and mountains are said to be
specimens of every kind of tree known. The driver told this proudly,
but when I called for a cottonwood he couldn’t produce. Then I told him
all about the wonderful cottonwood, and he promised to see the keeper
and find out why they couldn’t have one in Killarney.

[Illustration]

That reminds me of my experience with music. The first morning I
awoke in Ireland at Queenstown I heard the voices of a number of
sailors of the royal navy, and as the melodious sounds rolled into the
window I was surprised to realize that they were singing “Under the
Anheuser-Busch.” At the hotel in Cork the orchestra played the same. At
the theatre that night it was greeted with an encore. The driver on the
jaunting-car whistled the tune. And last night when I had made friends
with a cottager and was sitting with him by the side of a peat fire and
he was telling me of Ireland’s woes, his little girl came in and he
proceeded to show her off. First he had her sing an old Gaelic song.
Then he said, “Now give us an American song,” and she responded with
“Under the Anheuser-Busch.”

[Illustration]

I have hardly met an Irishman but has told me he had brothers and
sisters in America. At Glengariff the hotel proprietor said at least
2,000 young men and women had gone to America from that parish in
the last few years—the brightest and best of the young people, he
said—nearly all of them to Boston. From Killarney nearly all go
to New York. I told them how Boston and New York were ruled by the
Irish, and put the question as to why the Irish couldn’t run Ireland.
I am trying to answer that conundrum to my own satisfaction, and am
gathering ideas on the subject from everyone I meet.

[Illustration]

The ordinary Irish village like Killarney is a quaint picture. The
streets are narrow, mostly eight to twelve feet wide. The main street
is about thirty feet wide. Nearly all the houses are a story or a story
and a half, thatched roof, whitewashed walls, dirt floors except in
one room, low ceilings, doors and windows, full of chickens, cats and
children. I have not yet seen a pig in the parlor. The pig is kept in
a little room at one side. But the chickens have as much liberty of
the house as anybody and the goat is monarch of the outside. There is
very seldom any yard, the houses being built right up to the street.
The house is heated by a fireplace and the cooking is done in the same.
Peat is the fuel, and it is cleaner and not sooty like coal. The dirt
floor and the chickens in the house sound as though the Irish cottage
would be dirty, but the whitewash and the scrubbing-brush fight on
the other side, and you don’t get that impression. The women-folks
are always neat-looking and everybody is pleasant and cheerful. Every
window has a window-box of geraniums. There are usually so many
children that the house does not hold them, and the street is always
filled with them. Remember when you are driving through a town the
street is filled with children, and if you are an American and not
used to it your heart will be jumping into your throat for fear some of
them will be run over—but I am told they never are.

After the chickens and the children the most novel sight is the donkeys
with their two-wheel carts, the only ordinary carriages for passengers
or freight of the people. The donkey is the size of our mountain burro,
and has the same degree of intelligent expression. All of the hauling
is done by this patient animal, and he is looked upon as a valued
member of the family.

In riding or walking the rule of the country is the same as in
England—turn to the left. I have not yet gotten over the yearning to
grab the lines from the driver when he turns to the left to avoid a
passing carriage. Fortunately the other driver is always fool enough to
also turn to the left. I confided my trouble to an Irish driver, and he
said it was ridiculous to turn to the right.

[Illustration]

One of my traveling companions is a man who chews tobacco, and he had
neglected to lay in a supply before leaving America. No one else used
the weed that way and there was no help for him. The Irish chew and
smoke the same plug tobacco, very dry and not tasting like American
tobacco. For a week my friend had been looking through shops trying
to find something that would touch the spot. Last night soon after
reaching Killarney he came to me greatly excited and said, “Hurry! the
finest scenery since we left home.” Away we went down the narrow street
and up to a window in which was a familiar shape and a sign, “Battle
Ax.” I don’t chew myself, but I have some bad habits, and I could
appreciate the tear of joy that glistened in my fellow-traveler’s eye
as he gazed on that sign and felt that he had met an old friend just
from home.




IRELAND AND THE IRISH.


  DUBLIN, June 9, 1905.

In my short stay in the Emerald Isle I have endeavored to find out what
is the matter with Ireland. Why is it that a country of great beauty
and resources, with a healthful and productive climate, an intelligent
and attractive people, is a country where poverty is widespread,
although disguised by picturesque surroundings, and is accepted in
such a matter-of-fact and almost nonchalant manner? Why is it that the
population of Ireland is decreasing while the number of successful
and prosperous Irishmen is rapidly increasing in America, Canada, and
Australia? A very intelligent Irishman at Glengariff told me why it
was, and this in brief is his story:

A thousand years ago Ireland was ahead of all neighbors in education,
religion, and refinement. Then came the civil wars between the
chieftains. Then came England, and by utilizing the demoralization of
the civil wars and playing one chieftain against another, acquired
sovereignty. But this was only nominal, for the Irish chieftains
did not submit permanently. In Glengariff country the O’Sullivans
maintained practical independence. Finally the English rulers adopted
the policy of confiscating the land of the rebellious chieftains and
giving it to English soldiers and queen’s favorites. In many places
this meant the massacre of the people. The O’Sullivans and their
fighting men who escaped went to France and continued to strike at
their Saxon foes. But the land passed into the ownership of strangers,
who kept it only for the profit they could get out of it. The new
Irish nobles lived in London and their agents ran the estates. When
the nobles needed more money their agents advanced the rents. If the
people who tilled the soil and whose tenancy had been unquestioned for
generations, could not pay, they were evicted. Families were ejected
from the places they had cultivated and made valuable and were set out
on the road. This was done not without fighting for their rights by the
Irish people, but by the superior force of English soldiers. No Irish
farmer owns his place—he is only a tenant at the mercy of his absentee
landlord, who does not know him. In other countries the feudal tenure
has not worked so harshly, because the landlords lived among the people
and were bound to them by ties of race, common history, and natural
affection. But the fact that there was no way for an Irishman to get
his own home, or have a reasonable chance to advance in fortune or
freedom, sent the brightest to America, and left the others to struggle
hopelessly along, knowing that the best they could do was to “pay the
rent,” which was fixed like some railroad charges in the United States,
on the basis of “all the traffic would stand.”

From the parish of Glengariff more than half the young men and at
least half the young women have gone to the land of promise across the
sea, and are sending back money to help the parents and brothers and
sisters at home, either to “pay the rent” or to pay their passage to
America.

What is true at Glengariff applies to the rest of Ireland. The ancient
chieftains, the O’Sullivans, the O’Donohues, the McCartys and the
rest, were succeeded by absentee landlords, and the law of supply and
demand backed up by the English army simply worked out. At Killarney
whatever land does not belong to the earl of Kenmare is the property
of Guinness. The lakes and rivers are full of fish, but no Irishman
can catch a fish; the mountains are full of game, but no one can hunt
it except the owner of the estate. The farms are well tilled, but no
one can buy the land upon which he works. It makes an American mad,
and he says, “How do you stand it?” But it is the law, and along every
country road there is a policeman and behind the policeman is the power
of England. Far up on the mountain-side, several miles from town or
settlement, I saw a fine stone building which on inquiry I found was a
police station. The police, or the constabulary, as they are called,
were not there to protect the lives of the citizens, but to prevent
hunting and fishing in the brooks and mountains. So, after all, it is
no wonder the Irishman leaves his beautiful island and emigrates to
America.

[Illustration]

The Irish have kept the English Parliament in an uproar for a
generation on this land question, and in recent years they have
secured some friendly legislation. A court can now fix the rent rate
on appeal—but the English government names the court. So far as
Englishmen of the present day are concerned they would be glad to get
out of the Irish problem and let the Irish have their land, but of
course that can’t be done. The present parliament provided a plan for
the eventual purchase of land by tenant, at a price to be fixed by the
court if the two parties cannot agree. This is a step in the right
direction and the Irish are glad of it, but as my Glengariff friend
said, “It will not do any good in this generation.” And the exodus to
America continues.

[Illustration]

The Irish are very intelligent. I do not think the poor people of any
other country are naturally so bright and so full of perception and
understanding. They are kind and gentle. They are affectionate and
patriotic. The English say they are “lazy,” but under the circumstances
you could hardly expect them to be yearning for work, when more work
means more valuable holdings, and that only means more rent for the
landlord. The Irish have a reputation among the English for honesty.
They are religious, and I thought at first they gave too much to the
church and did not keep enough for themselves, when I saw the large
and rich cathedrals. But, as an Irishman told me, “We’d rather give to
the Lord than the landlord.” Public schools are providing education
for the rising generation, and in the public school the boys and girls
are being taught the Irish language and prepared for the coming fight
which the Irish must make to capture Ireland—not probably for an
independent government, but for actual ownership of the Irish soil.

[Illustration]

Taxes are heavy. The burden of taxation is the income tax. “That falls
on the landlord,” the thoughtless might say. Not on your life. The tax
is simply added to the rent. There are fine public roads in Ireland,
as good in the country districts as Main street in Hutchinson will be
when it is paved. The only advantage a despotic government has over
a popular government is that it builds better roads. When the people
elect their own road bosses and levy their own road taxes I notice the
roads are not so good as when some prince or cabinet minister who does
not care what the people think, levies the tax and orders the road
built right. The Irish statesmen are struggling for Irish ownership of
Irish soil and an Irish parliament to deal with Irish affairs. They are
“getting on,” and, as I said before, they make so much trouble in the
English Parliament that I know the English would be glad to get rid of
Irish local politics and give them back their parliament, if it were
not for pride,—and the next parliament may cut out the pride.

[Illustration]

I want to record one fact which I was surprised to find. The Irish are
very temperate. I have been in city, town and country for ten days,
have not been careful about keeping in the nice parts of town, and
I have seen only one man under the influence of liquor, and he was
an English sailor at Queenstown. This is in spite of the fact that
every inn and grocery sells “spirits” and nearly everybody seems to
drink them if he or she has the price. Perhaps the reason is that in
Ireland all the liquor-selling is done by women—barmaids. Perhaps the
influence of women behind the bar makes for temperance. I won’t state
that as my conclusion, but just submit it for what it is worth to those
who are trying to solve the liquor question in other countries.

[Illustration]

Dublin is a good deal like an American city. It is full of business and
not as Irish as the inland towns or Cork, although it has statues to
O’Connell, Curran and Grattan, and will have one to Parnell. The lord
lieutenant-governor, the representative of the king, resides at Dublin,
and a big garrison of soldiers gives it an English tone. There is a
fine university, which we visited. It was started by Queen Elizabeth,
and has only recently been opened to Catholics and to women. Dublin has
some great stores where Irish linen and Irish lace should naturally be
cheap. If Mrs. Morgan were writing this letter she could add a chapter.
I will only tell this little story: I was telling an Irish driver how
nice everybody had been to us in Ireland and how pleasant the Irish
were to Americans. “Yis,” he said. “Whin you go down the strate,
everybody sez: ‘There’s some Americans, God bless ’em: mark up the
prices on the linen and lace.’”




FRANCE.




THE CITY OF PLEASURE.


  PARIS, FRANCE, June 19, 1905.

Since my last letter to The News we have been “going some,” and I will
leave a few ideas I may have gleaned about England until I get back
there on my return from the continent. We are pushing for a short visit
to Italy before the summer gets too far advanced.

To use a classical expression, Paris is a bully sort of a town. If
there is anything you want and don’t know where it is, I am satisfied
you will find it in Paris. In England it was customary to close up and
go to bed sometime after midnight and to rest on Sunday. Nobody in
Paris thinks of either proposition. The only difference between Paris
at midnight and Paris at midday is that it is livelier at midnight. The
performance is continuous and it is worth the price of admission.

[Illustration]

Coming into a country where your language is not generally spoken is
always a little trying on the nerves. The French people have made it
as easy as possible, but the ways are strange and the helpless tourist
can only do as others do and trust to Providence and the power of a
little money distributed as well as possible. I do not know how much
Providence has had to do with it, but I do believe there are mighty few
doors in France which a piece of money will not unlock. When I came
into France I knew only two French expressions, one meaning “How much?”
and the other, “Thank you.” With that vocabulary we went through the
custom-house examination, a five-hour railroad journey, landed in a
big city station, got a carriage, reached the hotel and an interpreter
without any more trouble than we would have in Sterling. Of course
everybody from conductor to porter knew we were Americans and could
not speak French, knew what we ought to do next and showed the way,
and all we had to do was to look pleasant and hand out small change.
And it doesn’t cost much to be liberal in France. I gave the conductor
an equivalent to our 10 cents, and I know he thought I was rich. The
porter who took my baggage through the custom-house and brought me a
carriage was deeply impressed with my financial standing when I gave
him 6 cents worth of French coppers. The coachman who brought Mrs.
Morgan and myself with four big grips from the station to the hotel,
two miles, charged me the full price, 30 cents for everything, and
when I tossed him another dime like a millionaire he took his hat off
three times. The French people I have met have been very polite. They
always tip their hats and go out of their way to show me, and they are
never so discourteous as to refuse 2 cents. Imagine giving a Santa Fe
conductor 10 cents for showing you where to sit in the car!

[Illustration]

As a lesson in political economy I will put in my observation so far
as I have gone: Everything in Europe that is made or done by labor is
cheap. I was offered a tailor-made suit of clothes in London for $18
that would cost $30 in Hutchinson. A farm laborer in England gets about
50 cents a day and boards himself. The barber shaves you for 2 or 3
cents. Bread and meat are higher than in the United States. You can
see how the wage-earner gets it going and coming. I am learning a few
things from experience that I had been told before, but I want to visit
a few more places before I try to form my conclusions and put them into
print.

Paris is a beautiful city. In spite of the great business houses, the
manufactories and the banks which I have seen, it strikes me as a kind
of play town. Every day in the week in Paris looks like an American
town on the Fourth of July, and on Sunday it is Fourth of July and
Christmas together and then some. The men who are working at wages
that would make Americans vicious, are as light-hearted and pleasant
appearing as a Sunday school picnic. The women are as vivacious as a
lot of school ma’ams at institute. As soon as work is completed it
seems as if every Parisian only goes home to put on his good clothes
and then comes down town accompanied by his wife, or somebody’s wife.
Half the places of business along the principal streets are restaurants
and a good many of the others are also restaurants. The Frenchman
sits at a little table on the sidewalk in front of the café and puts
in the evening drinking one glass of wine or absinthe, chatting with
his neighbor and watching the women go by with their good clothes
and bright faces. Every French woman is an artist when it comes to
clothes. The goods may not cost much, but the gown is tastefully made,
and if the lady wants to she sticks on a bow or jabs a flower in her
hat, regardless of every rule except that it looks pretty there—and it
always does. Bright and light gowns, hats that are up-to-date or ahead,
hair to match the hat and hose to match the dress—and the artist’s
work is done. No wonder the men hurry down town and sit on the sidewalk!

[Illustration]

In the afternoon and evening the Paris streets look like a spring
millinery opening—also like a display of samples of fine hosiery.
Perhaps I ought not to go into the subject, but it will not be a fair
description of Paris if I leave it out, and I must warn any other
Kansan who may venture this way. When a Parisian lady walks along a
sidewalk that is perfectly clear and clean she daintily lifts her dress
so as to display only the top of the shoe, maybe an inch or two more.
Sometimes she thoughtlessly raises the gown a little higher. When she
reaches the street-crossing—but I had better stop, for she doesn’t. I
have always been of the opinion that under such circumstances a plain,
respectful man should look the other way and I have a crick in my neck
from looking—the other way—since I came to Paris. Remember this is in
fine weather when the walks and crossings are clean. “They say” that
when the walks are muddy the result is even more startling to a staid
observer from Kansas. If the weather gets bad I don’t know what I will
do.

[Illustration: IN PARIS: LOOKING THE OTHER WAY.]

The philosophy in the above is that it gives you an idea of Paris
with its brilliantly lighted streets, the men eating and drinking,
sitting at the little tables along the walks, the well-dressed people,
the brilliant colors, the laughter, the bright and polite conduct of
men and women, the holiday appearance, the pleasure that everyone is
having, and the general gait at which Parisians travel. As another
example let me add, fully one-third of that part of Paris which in
any other city would be devoted to business, is given up to public
gardens, playgrounds for children, parks and drives,—not out in the
country or to one side, but right through the center of Paris. The
houses, business and residence, are none of them more than six stories
high, and I am told the law does not permit higher structures. It is
a good idea, for you get air and sunlight, which you often do not
in New York and Chicago, and you can occasionally see out over the
city. About every so often is a circle or square from which radiate
from six to a dozen avenues and boulevards. These streets divide into
others which reach forward to other squares, and are intersected at
every conceivable angle by cross-streets. The object of this plan was
to place artillery in the square and thus command the streets and
boulevards against the revolutionists, who have always been doing or
about to do something in Paris. The houses, five or six stories high,
are built right up from the sidewalk, and have inner courts. Usually
there are stores or shops in the downstairs rooms facing the street
and living-rooms back and above. And speaking of stores, most of them
are about ten by twelve feet, one-half display window. The interior
is lined with mirrors which make the room look large and two or three
customers like a crowd. The French use mirrors every chance—there are
three beautiful mirrors in our small bedroom. The shops are generally
decorated with flowers, pictures and statuary and a sign “English
spoken,” the latter being usually a delusion and a snare. Instead of
naming a street or avenue and then sticking to it, the names of the
streets frequently change. The boulevard our hotel is on begins as
the Madeleine, runs two blocks and then becomes the Capoucins, two
blocks more and it is the Italiens. We are on the Capoucins part,
and besides the Boulevard des Capoucins, there is street “Rue des
Capoucins,” and a square “Place des Capoucins,” each in a different
section. The necessity of a stranger in Paris keeping sober is very
apparent. The streets, squares and public buildings are adorned
with frequent statues—good ones. Almost any way you turn there is
something beautiful to look at. The French are artists and lovers of
art. If there were such a thing as a Kansas joint in Paris it would be
decorated like an art gallery. But the joints in Paris are open and run
twenty-four hours a day, seven days in the week, and the police never
interfere with anything that goes on except in case of a disturbance of
the peace or abuse of the government.

[Illustration]

The French like Americans and don’t like the English or the Germans.
But that does not mean they refuse anybody’s money. In our country when
a man gets a comfortable income he grows gray-haired and wrinkled
trying to make more. A Frenchman spoke to me of this trait, and said
that when one of his countrymen reached the point where he could live
nicely on what he had accumulated or the salary he was receiving, he
quit worrying and took to the cafés and boulevards to enjoy life.
Perhaps the French way is the best, at least the French look happier
over mighty little than we do over much more. They go in for “pleasure”
and they enjoy it as do no other people I have seen.




PARIS AND PARISIANS.


  PARIS, June 20, 1905.

Almost the first thing we did after we reached Paris was to go to
the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine did its bloody work
during the French Revolution. It is now a beautiful square adorned
with statues, and is the center of the pleasure-ground of Paris. After
tightly shutting our eyes so as to avoid seeing the gay Parisians
passing by, we recalled the terrible scenes which took place a little
more than a hundred years ago. Here Louis XVI., the unfortunate
king, paid the penalty for the crimes of his family and class. Here
Marie Antoinette was executed, and scores and hundreds of the French
nobility. Poor Marie Antoinette, who always did and said the wrong
thing, has been the recipient of the sympathy of the world. But in
addition to the sorrow for her I have never been able to get over my
sympathy for the thousands of women who marched to Versailles and
when the king and queen appeared to quiet them, cried, “Give us bread
for our children!” For France at that time was suffering as no other
nation has suffered from physical oppression and poverty resulting
from misgovernment and utter disregard of the lives and property of
the people. In order to carry on wars and build monuments and palaces
and indulge in personal dissipation and pleasure, the rulers of France
had sucked the life of the nation like the juice from an orange. The
French still make a great fuss over Louis XIV., “The grand monarch,”
who made France the leading nation of Europe. But it was the logical
outcome of his methods and grinding government that resulted in
the degradation of the people, their poverty and distress, and the
revolution which sent his great grandson to the block.

After the French Jacobins executed their king and queen they began
to fall out and “revolute” against each other, and so nearly all the
leaders of the revolution went to the guillotine and got it where Louis
and Antoinette did—in the neck. In a little more than two years over
2,800 persons perished here by the guillotine, and the place is very
appropriately called “de la Concorde.” Around the square are statues
representing eight of the cities of France, the one for Strassburg
still there, but draped in black and with emblems of mourning for the
city and province taken from France by Germany at the end of the last
war. Every Frenchman has in his heart the intent to lick the Germans
and recover Alsace.

[Illustration]

I will not attempt to describe in detail the great palaces of the
Tuileries and the magnificent gardens, the Louvre with its acres of
paintings and statuary, most of which I did not see because it was
like eating pie—there is a limit. These are historic grounds, for
back and forth among statues of peace and beautiful works of art
the French people have fought each other time and again, sometimes
destroying but always rebuilding. From Place de la Concorde extends the
Champs-Elysées (pronounced Shame-on-Lizzy, as near as I can get it).
This is a great avenue 400 yards wide and over a mile long, consisting
of parallel boulevards running through trees and flowers, playgrounds
and palaces here and there, and at all times of the day and night
filled with people and carriages.

The Champs-Elysées and the Bois de Boulogne, a park of over 2,000 acres
in which it terminates, are the fashionable drives of Paris. It cost
only 40 cents an hour for Mrs. Morgan and I to drive with the Parisian
élite, and we took advantage of the opportunity to see Paris society.
The carriages in the early evening extend in procession over miles of
boulevard, and are often six or eight abreast. The drives wind around
through woods, by good-sized lakes, along sides of cascades, and the
carriages are filled with the swellest lot of gowns and cutest little
dogs I have ever seen. Nearly every woman has a dog on her string
as well as a man. In all of this style there is a general lack of
formality which is appropriate to the scenery. It is not an uncommon
sight to see the ladies and gentlemen with their arms around each
other. It isn’t so bad when you get used to it, and the fashion is
considered strictly proper in France. I am no longer shocked when I
see a young man just ahead of me in the street put his arm around his
girl, and in the street cars and automobiles the sight is a frequent
one and never attracts comment or disapproval. At first Mrs. Morgan and
I nudged each other at such things, but in less than a week’s time the
novelty has disappeared.

I like the Champs-Elysées, for it looks a good deal as First avenue in
Hutchinson would if it were about ten times as wide and the city kept
up the parking.

[Illustration]

And that leads me to repeat an observation which I have made before. It
takes a strong government to do big things. You couldn’t get the people
in America to put up money to construct palaces, widen boulevards, set
up statues in all directions and devote the main part of the city to
trees, flowers, walks and drives, playgrounds and art galleries. But
whether the government of France has been a monarchy or a republic
has made no difference in the fact that it exercised nearly absolute
power over such things. The government appoints the officials in all
cities and provinces and the government has the army. We talk about
“government ownership” as if it were something new. The government
of France has been in business more than a century. For example, the
government has the monopoly of the tobacco business—manufactures and
sells all the tobacco used in France, charges what it pleases and
puts out mighty poor stuff. The government has owned the Sèvres china
decorating factory for over a century, and the Gobelin tapestry, and I
don’t know how many more such things. Lack of knowledge of the language
has kept me from finding out all on these subjects I am going to before
I get home, but it seems to me that whenever the French government
sees some exceptionally profitable business, it just takes hold of
the proposition and passes a law forbidding anyone else competing.
The French are used to this sort of thing and accept it as the
inevitable. I wonder if Americans would stand for it and for all the
petty regulations that go with it. An army of workingmen is required
to maintain all these parks, palaces, art galleries, opera-houses and
government institutions, and I suspect the number is never reduced. A
friend was telling how in a short ride on a government railroad his
ticket was examined by five conductors. We reached the conclusion that
this work, which in America would have been done by one man, was strung
out for the good political reason—more jobs. Of course nothing like
that would happen in America.

[Illustration]

The workingmen still wear the long blouse outside the trousers, which
looks like a heavy night-shirt and reaches below the knees. At the
time of the great revolution the workingmen were so poor that they
could not afford to wear trousers and the long blouses were all that
covered them. Hence came the nickname “sanscullottes,” meaning “without
breeches,” and as all who have read the story of the revolution or
Victor Hugo’s books will remember, the Sansculottes, the men without
breeches, made up the mob which upset the throne and established the
republic.

[Illustration]

The French still worship Napoleon. They have forgiven the sacrifice of
blood and treasure which he forced from them, and remember the glory
and the greatness of the empire. And in spite of the fact that Napoleon
III. quit the emperor business under a cloud, having been removed
from office after his surrender to the Germans in 1870, he is well
thought of, for during his reign France and Paris prospered and times
were good. There is a large party in France that favors the return of
the present representative of the Napoleon family, Prince Victor, to
the throne. We went to the Church of Madeleine, the most beautiful and
fashionable church in Paris, and over the altar is a beautiful painting
of Napoleon receiving the crown from the pope, with Christ in the
background of the picture. That is just like the French.

[Illustration]

I made an effort to get into the meeting of the Chamber of Deputies,
the French congress, but failed. You have to have a ticket of
admission, and it must be applied for several days in advance. They
tell me the session is a good deal like an old-time Kansas Populist
convention, where everybody said what he wanted to and then everybody
was of the same opinion still. The meeting often gets so tumultuous
that the president of the body adjourns it. Such an assembly must be
guarded by careful and tactful leadership or it will end in a row. I
can’t understand French politics. There are really no parties such as
we have. A large majority favor the republic. The minority is composed
of Clericals, Bonapartists, Radicals, and Socialists. The government
party is divided into factions, and the issues are personal rather
than on economic questions. The minority is of course divided, and the
result is that the government wins somehow or other nearly every time.
If it should lose, a new cabinet would be formed; but that would be
taken from the same party as the old, and would be merely a different
lot of statesmen. The French republic is all right so long as there is
no serious trouble, but a Dreyfus incident, or a war, or hard times
might overturn the government, and nobody knows whether the monarchists
might not get on top again. The church is opposed to the policy of
the republic, which has been to decrease the power of the church,
cut off the parochial schools, and take education out of the hands
of the religious bodies. The men in France are not very religious,
leaving that part of life to the women and children. But a large and
respectable party is in opposition to the government on account of the
way it has confiscated church property and driven out the religious
orders.

[Illustration]

There are only a few electric lines in Paris, and they are not in the
main part of the city. The people use carriages a great deal, for they
are so cheap; and also omnibuses. The usual means of traveling in the
city, aside from the cab, is the omnibus, which is double-decked,
carrying as many people on top as inside. This seems a trifle slow to
Americans, but it works all right in Paris. The ’buses make regular
processions up and down the principal streets, and as they are nearly
always filled inside and outside, they add immensely to the Parisian
picture. There is an underground railroad and there are dummy lines
in the suburbs, but I think the people of Paris like to travel where
they can see and be seen. The cabs are victorias. Automobiles are
everywhere, and if you go to Paris to live and want to cut any ice you
must get one.

[Illustration]

I saw a little scene which seemed to show up Parisian character. A cab
collided slightly with another. Immediately both drivers were off their
vehicles, gesticulating and talking about 300 words a minute. As they
shook their fists and grew red in the face with the words that came so
fast they interfered with each other, I thought somebody would surely
be killed. Nobody noticed them. No one paid any attention. And finally
the two exhausted men climbed back to their places and drove on. I
know they used French words to each other that in America would have
ensured a police court trial for disturbance of the peace. A French
friend to whom I mentioned the matter said it was the invariable way,
and he thought the French method of taking out their wrath in words was
better than the American way of fighting it out. Perhaps he was right,
but as I afterward saw the scene repeated in different forms it always
occurred to me that it was childish. And that reminds me to say that
the Frenchman is in the habit of playing with his children, taking part
in their games as excitedly as they do.

[Illustration]

The French people are industrious and they save their money. France
is really a rich nation. Most of the money is made in what seem small
ways to Americans. The French are what we call “thrifty.” No matter
how little they earn they save something, and the whole family
works,—men, women and children. When their day’s labor is ended the
whole family goes out for a good time—cheap, or within their means.
Their natural temperaments and the beautiful surroundings make it easy
for them to do this, and it is very seldom a Frenchman leaves his
native land. He doesn’t travel much, but he believes in other people
traveling and coming to France to spend their money. He is willing to
help in the good work of separating foreigners from their cash, but he
is gentlemanly about it. I like the French people even though I can’t
understand some of the ways their minds work.




RURAL FRANCE.


  MARSEILLES, FRANCE, June 23, 1905.

Rural France is a picture. Seen from a car-window it is a succession of
fields and villages, at this time of year a continuous combination of
greens and white. French farms are small. I suppose twenty or thirty
acres is a big place, and many are much less than that. But the land
is fertilized, drained, irrigated and worked to the limit. The people
live in villages and not much on their own farms. Each village has a
common pasture. During the day the farmers go out onto their little
places and in the evening they return to town to spend the hours with
their neighbors and friends. The houses are all white stone with red
tiled roofs and the villages are numerous, one every two or three miles
in every direction. A farm of twenty acres is divided into strips
for various crops, so that the landscape is striped with the fields
of wheat, alfalfa, potatoes and grass, which seem to be the popular
products. Cattle are not so numerous, but sheep are plentiful, goats
abound and hogs (always white that I have seen) are on every place.
A strip of land a hundred yards wide in wheat will run across the
twenty acres, and the next strip will be some other crop, making the
hues of green vary. The most extensive crop besides grass is grapes,
and hillsides which in our country would be considered too steep and
too stony for cultivation are covered with vines. Nature is like the
French, artistic when she has a chance, and the combination produces a
beautiful effect. Coming from Paris to Marseilles through the valleys
of the Seine and the Rhone, it was 500 miles of continuous agriculture
and pretty towns. Do you wonder it looks like a picture, with the
villages of white houses and red tops, the fields and hills of green,
and the rivers like ribbons running here and there?

France is ahead of England and Ireland in this point: Nearly every
French farmer owns his own place, even if it is small. In Great Britain
the big landlords own the land and rent it to tenants. In France the
farmers, or peasants, as they are called, are landlords of their own if
it is small. The French nobility lost their possessions and they were
bought up by the people. A French farmer does not have the opportunity
to make himself a large land proprietor. He can work all his days and
only hope to accumulate a little place and enough to take care of him
in his last days. But he is able to do that, and it has been almost
impossible to do so in Great Britain.

The farms are separated from one another by high stone walls. In
driving along the highway these walls shut off the view of the fields
and you have to get up above the walls to see the picture. The stone
walls are the evidence that the place is the exclusive property of
the owner. The grass field is inclosed by these high fences, and the
gates are locked at night as if they were afraid somebody would steal
the land. It looks strange indeed to a tourist from the land of
quarter-sections and barb wires.

Every Frenchman has to serve in the army three years. This is not
militia service, but regular soldiery. It takes three of the best
years out of a young man’s life. Of course it gives some compensation
in the way of discipline, and in continental Europe every nation has
to keep its pockets full of rocks and its people ready for war with
the neighbors. A republic cannot neglect this matter any more than a
monarchy, and France loses a great deal by the withdrawal of its young
men from the producing class during a time when they could be very
useful.

[Illustration]

In the fields men and women work side by side. The women of France have
plenty of rights. They can plow or rake hay all day long, and then they
can indulge in the recreation of housework in the evening. This is
harvest-time, and on nearly every farm I saw the whole family at work,
not with reapers and mowers, but with good sickles and hand-rakes.
The women seem to age earlier than in America, but this fact is true
wherever I have been outside of the United States.

That reminds me of a mistaken notion I had before coming here. I
thought the women of the United States were more active in a business
way than the women of other countries, and had progressed in taking
hold of what is generally called “men’s work” more than the women of
Europe. That is a mistake. Proportionately women have more to do with
business in England and France than they do in America. Nearly all
the hotels in Great Britain are managed by women. Shops, stores and
offices are filled with women. The fact is, the combined labor of
husband and wife is necessary among “the great plain people,” to get
enough to support the family, and in Ireland, England and France this
is taken as a matter of course. Especially in France do I find women
managing business, and doing so with the skill and success which shows
that it is neither a new thing nor a side occupation. In America it is
generally accepted that a man who can do so will take the brunt of the
work and a woman will find her time fully occupied with housekeeping.
And there is also a widespread practice of raising the girls to sit in
the parlor while their mother washes the dishes. That is not the way
they do in France. A young woman is brought up to expect what she will
get—a young man whom she will have to help, or they will go hungry.
There are not many chances for a young man to get ahead fast. He has
no reason to believe that he will be better fixed than his father or
than his grandfather. In fact, in France a boy usually follows the
occupation of his father, so that a family for generations will be
farmers, shoemakers, shopkeepers, etc. In America a farmer usually
wants his son to study law, while a lawyer hopes his son will be a
business man, and a merchant sees the advantage of rural life. Our
people change around from generation to generation, and I doubt on that
account if we make as good workmen as the French do, who are brought up
in their occupation. Of course our people would be discontented with
the French way, but the Frenchmen seem to be satisfied and they get
a good many compensating advantages to offset the opportunities which
young Americans have, but of which young Frenchmen never dream.

[Illustration]

There are some disadvantages under which these Europeans labor which
they should remove. They never get any pie. Here in a land where the
cherries grow big and red and juicy, a Frenchman will grow to manhood
and old age without knowing the taste of cherry pie. It is a great
misfortune. Since landing in Europe I have never seen a piece of pie
of any description, from Queenstown to Marseilles. They have “tarts”
and “sweetmeats,” but these can’t approach pie any more than Cow creek
can be compared to the Mississippi river. Even in the best hotels and
restaurants of London there is no sign of pie on the bill of fare,
and the French cooks, who can make old hash taste like choice bits of
fresh meat or better, have not learned the science of constructing
pie, mince, apple, pumpkin, cherry or any kind of pie. I do not know
how they do it, but the railroad restaurants are run without pie. Even
the crowned heads go through life without knowing the taste of pumpkin
pie, and one of my ideas of royalty in my early days was that a king or
prince could have custard pie with flaky brown crust three times a day.
No wonder the rulers of Europe are afraid of revolution. If they would
see that their subjects had square meals and pie at least for dinner,
the heads that wear the crowns need not be so uneasy.

And the Europeans are trying to live without hot cakes for breakfast. I
suppose there is not a man or woman in Europe who would recognize by
experience the rich and regal buckwheat cake, or the corn cake, or the
pancake. I can’t understand why the reformers in this country do not
get to the point, and see that the people have flapjacks for breakfast
as well as pie for dinner, and then let the disbanding of the armies
proceed.

[Illustration]

Every American citizen who is sane and patriotic believes that he is
a fisherman, and tries to prove it whenever he gets near a creek or
river. Whether he actually catches any fish or not, he “goes fishing.”
I was somewhat worked up in Ireland and England because the streams
were nearly all private property and the ordinary citizen had no chance
to fish any more than he did to attend the wedding of the prince. I was
glad to know that it is different in France. Last Sunday in Paris we
walked along the banks of the Seine as it runs through the city between
the stone walls and under the stone bridges. The stream was lined with
fishermen. One of the privileges the citizens of Paris enjoy is to fish
in the Seine, and I was told that there were at least 10,000 Frenchmen
watching the corks on the river that afternoon. I waited for a long
time to see them catch a French fish. Occasionally one of the men or
women would pull up a line, but the bait was never missing. Finally I
asked a friend who has been in Paris some time if anybody ever caught
a fish. He said he had never really heard of anyone but there was a
tradition that along about the time of Napoleon III. somebody did
catch a fish in the Seine. He doubted the story, but said I could
believe it if I wanted to. And yet there are theologians and doctors
of divinity who say the French people are losing in faith, when these
thousands were demonstrating to the contrary and were heartily enjoying
the privilege the government gives and for which the Parisians would
doubtless fight, the right to fish in the river.

[Illustration]

This city of Marseilles, in which we are spending a couple of days, is
the principal seaport of France. It was established by the Phœnicians,
and was an important town when Julius Cæsar was setting up the
primaries in Rome. It is the port from which France does business with
southern Europe, Africa, Asia, and even America. Consequently the
harbor is full of all kinds of shipping, the streets are crowded with
Arabs, Greeks, Spaniards, Turks, Italians, and representatives of all
nations which use the sea, and the town has the largest collection of
odors and smells that I have met. As a strange fact I will add that
Marseilles is the first large city I have visited in Europe with a good
up-to-date electric railway system. Americans do not come here very
much. So far as I know, Mrs. Morgan and I are the only Americans in the
city, and there is not a soul at our hotel who can speak English. So
you see we are running up against a little real foreign experience.




ITALY.




GETTING INTO ITALY.


  ROME, June 27, 1905.

One can hardly realize until he has had some experience how quick
and how decided is the transition from one country to another, and
especially the change in language. At 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon we
were in France, everybody around us and on the train talking French.
At 6 o’clock we were in Italy: everybody was talking Italian, and the
French language had disappeared as quickly as did the English when
we landed at Calais. You know when you are going from one country to
the next, also, because the custom-house is on the line and you have
to haul out all your dirty clothes and souvenirs for the officials to
examine to see if you are a smuggler. Let me tell how we came into
Italy.

[Illustration]

We boarded the train on the French railroad at Monte Carlo and had
an hour’s ride to the frontier. By this time I had picked up enough
French so I could get along reasonably well with the help of the
sign language and a little money. But neither of us knew a word of
Italian, and there was no one with us that day who could talk English.
At Vintimille, where we crossed the line, we had to change trains,
have our tickets signed and our baggage examined in forty minutes.
With a full realization that nobody could understand me and I could
understand no one, I tackled the job, putting my trust in Providence
and a pocketful of small Italian coins which I had secured at Monte
Carlo. When the train stopped in the Vintimille station a porter came
alongside and according to the custom of the country I handed the four
“bags” which constitute our baggage to him through the car-window. Then
we got out and I told him in English what I wanted. He reeled off a lot
of Italian and two or three bystanders chipped in, and a hotel runner
attempted to capture us. But I took out my through ticket, pointed
to it, jingled the coins in my pocket, and the porter understood. Of
course I did not know at first whether he did or not, but we followed
him and he led us into the custom-house and put our grips on a big
table. Up came an inspector and jabbered Italian and I jabbered back
in English. We both laughed, and of course neither understood what the
other wanted. He asked me several questions, to all of which I said,
“Can’t understand,” and then he gave me a final grin and said, “Tobac?”
To that I said “No,” and shook my head. Without looking into the grips
at all he chalked something on them which I suppose corresponds to our
“O. K.,” threw up his hands and said something to the porter which made
him and the surrounding onlookers burst forth in a loud guffaw. I felt
as I suppose a poor Dago does when he strikes America. I again showed
my ticket to the porter and pointed to the place where it must be
signed. He puzzled over that a while and then took it and went away for
a few minutes and came back with the work properly done. Then he took
us to the Italian train the other side of the station, put our bags in
the racks and we hoped we were on the right train—we were. I gave that
porter a lot of Italian money, aggregating about 20 cents American,
and he saluted me as if I were a duke or a saint. Mrs. Morgan says I
spoiled him with my extravagant tip. But I felt so grateful to him that
I didn’t care if I did make him proud with all that money at once. Let
him swell up inside and parade the avenue all the evening and take his
family out to dinner if he wants to. Let him take that 20 cents and
pose as an Italian Rockefeller.

Then we were in Italy and couldn’t even read the signs. It makes you
foolish to look over the door of your car and see the words which mean
“Smoking permitted,” or “Smoking forbidden” and not know which. We were
the only people in the compartment, and the conductor took a great deal
of interest in us. He tried to tell us something and I tried to tell
him something, but when we got through neither of us had added to our
stock of knowledge. After the train had been going for a while he came
to us and began to make signs and chatter. He held up both hands with
the fingers extended. Mrs. Morgan was quite sure he meant $10 fine for
smoking in that compartment, so I threw away my cigar, but he didn’t
stop. At last I realized that he was making the signs of a man eating
and drinking. I guessed he meant by both hands that the train would
stop ten minutes for lunch, or that we wouldn’t get anything to eat
until 10 o’clock. When the train stopped at the next station it turned
out that the first of these two was right.

The road from Vintimille to Genoa is a branch, and the ticket had to
be signed and trains changed again at Genoa, and we also wanted to get
a sleeping-car on to Rome. We had twenty-seven minutes at the station
in Genoa, which is bigger than the Union Depot at Kansas City. Again
I threw the grips out of the window and followed the porter. Then I
left Mrs. Morgan with the baggage while the porter led me a merry chase
around the block to the office where the ticket was to be signed or
“viséd.” It was 11 o’clock at night, and you can imagine how it felt
to be guided around among those Italians wondering all the while if
the porter knew what I wanted. But he did and I returned in safety,
and then I tried to find out about the sleeping-car. In French this
is called a “Litts-salon,” and in German a “Schlaf-wagen,” literally
a sleep-wagon. I tried English, French and German, but finally found
the sleeper by examining the train,—next to the engine, of course,
just where I wasn’t expecting it. We got on board safely, and after
distributing a lot more Italian coppers I found we had transacted the
business and had five minutes to spare,—as good time as I could have
made in America to do all those things. All I then had to do was to
hand out the required sleeper fare, $7.50 to Rome, 300 miles, three
times what Mr. Pullman would have charged. But I reserve my comments
on European sleeping-cars until I get a little more experience for a
letter on railroads in the Old World.

And this is an old world. When I was in Boston I looked with awe upon
the churches and monuments of 1776. In England these years seemed
recent, and it took a cathedral or a castle of Elizabeth’s time or back
to William the Conqueror. But here in Rome the very latest and newest
buildings that we look at are those of the early Christians, and to get
a real thrill they have to show me something B. C. It is really a good
deal like living back in those times. I can’t read the newspapers and
don’t know what has happened since I left Paris nearly a week ago. At
that time the Russians and Japs were either going to have a conference
or a fight, or both. Sometimes I wonder what has occurred, but
generally I am concerning myself with what Julius Cæsar did, standing
by the old forum and imagining Mark Antony denouncing the boss-busters,
or wondering if Cicero’s speech against Catiline was not a political
blunder which would make the old man trouble at the next city election.
The only difficulty is to make the modern Italians fit in with the old
Romans. Somehow or other it is hard to imagine the lazy gents who hold
out their hands for coppers as real Romans who ruled the world.

[Illustration]

The first real striking feature of Italy we noticed at Vintimille was
the policemen. They wear handsome full-dress uniforms with red braid
down the trousers, gilt lace and epaulets on the coats, tri-cornered
hat with an immense plume, and carry in sight a sword and revolver.
An Italian policeman walking his beat makes a gorgeous Knight Templar
uniform look cheap. You never see one policeman—there are always
two together. The police of the whole country are appointed by the
royal government, not by local officials, and are selected from the
army. They are good-looking fellows, and wear their tight, heavy coats
buttoned up in front regardless of the fact that it is Italy and
the climate is not better than Kansas the last of June. One of the
troubles with Italy is that it is really a second-class power, but it
tries to keep up an army and navy in rivalry with Germany, Russia,
and France. Every Italian must put in three years in active service.
Take a country about the size of Kansas, fill it up with an army of
300,000 men and you see soldiers in every direction. Immense cathedrals
and palaces filled with valuable gems and works of art, an army of
expensive uniforms, and a poverty-stricken people,—that is Italy.
The tourist hurries along and shuts his eyes to the distress as much
as he can, visits the galleries and the churches, the ruins and the
historic spots. He tries to see only the Italy of 2,000 years ago. He
is fortunate if he can keep himself worked up in an ecstasy over the
Cæsars and the old masters, so that the half-clothed children, the
broken-down women and the men working without hope, do not leave an
impression on his heart. I can’t shut my eyes tight enough to avoid
seeing those things and sympathizing with the poor Italian people who
have no show.

But here we are in Italy, not the Italy of to-day, but the Italy of
Cæsar and Cicero, Nero and Constantine, the Italy where Paul and
Peter planted the Christian religion and where they died the death
of martyrs; the Italy of temples and colosseums, cathedrals and
catacombs,—the Italy we read about, if you please, and not the Italy
now on the map.




ROME AND ROMANS.


  ROME, June 29, 1905.

There is so much in the point of view. Here are things which I have
studied about, read about, wondered about. Some of them on close
inspection are impressive yet. Others are commonplace. And there are
even some which are ridiculous. On approaching Rome I had tried to take
an inventory of the things I most wanted to see first: The Forum, St.
Peter’s, the Appian Way, the Coliseum, the Sistine Chapel, the Tarpeian
Rock, the Vatican, and the list was as long as I could set down. But
really the words that kept haunting me and which were always in my mind
were “the yellow Tiber.” Like every other school-boy of my time, I had
learned and recited “Horatius at the Bridge,” and I wanted to see the
raging torrent which saved Rome when Horatius held back the foe until
the Romans had cut down the only bridge. I kept saying to myself:

    “Then up spake brave Horatius,
    The captain of the gate:
    ‘To every man upon this earth
    Death cometh soon or late;
    And how can man die better
    Than when facing fearful odds,
    For the ashes of his fathers
    And the temples of his gods?’”

[Illustration: THE ITALIAN NOBLEMAN OF THE STAGE, AND THE REAL THING]

Accordingly the first observation I made in Rome was of the Tiber. It
is yellow, all right, and about as wide as the Cottonwood river.
It seemed impossible to associate that stream with the Tiber of
which historians had told and poets sung. But it was the Tiber, all
right—from another view-point.

[Illustration]

Now with St. Peter’s it was different. I have seen some right nice
churches in America, but of course they do not come up to European
cathedrals. St. Paul’s in London was disappointing, and Notre Dame
in Paris was not up to the advance advertising. But when it comes
to impressiveness St. Peter’s at Rome is to my mind the greatest
imaginable. It is so big and yet so proportioned, so grand and yet so
substantial, so full of precious memories of martyrs and divines and
so tastefully and magnificently decorated with pictures that tell the
story of the faith it stands for. All the people in Hutchinson could
worship in one side of St. Peter’s, and yet there is none of that
barny, barracksy look which usually goes with great size and capacity.
The length is 232 yards, the transept is 150 yards and the height of
the nave 151 feet, the dome is 435 feet to the cross. But figures don’t
tell anything about St. Peter’s. The interior is tapestry and painting,
gold without tinsel, pictures without tawdry effect, and columns that
add and do not detract from the dignity of the structure. Under the
great dome is the tomb of Peter, the disciple who made so much trouble,
but knowing his energy and power, whom Christ made the rock upon which
the church was to be built.

Next door to St. Peter’s is the Vatican, where the pope resides, and
the first thing we saw there was the Sistine Chapel. Here is where my
view-point differs from most people. I concede that the paintings in
the Sistine Chapel are beautiful, especially in their design and their
color. The old masters who did the work under the direction of Michael
Angelo have never been equaled in their ability to make rich color.
But I contend that the subject of a picture should count as well as
the drawing and the color. When Michael Angelo attempted to paint God
Almighty he couldn’t do it. The color is all right and the proportions
are perfect, but all that Michael Angelo did was to paint a man a
little larger than Adam, and that does not come up to my ideal of the
Divine. The fact is that neither Michael Angelo nor anyone else can put
onto canvas such a subject, and therefore Michael should not have tried
it. His fault was in his judgment of what can be painted. The entire
effect of the remainder of the beautiful ceilings and walls with their
paintings of scenes from Old and New Testament, was spoiled for me when
I couldn’t get away from that central figure, that failure of ability
to do the impossible.

I would like to have the support of the women-folks in my theory in
regard to the failure of the Sistine Chapel, so I will add that in the
picture where Michael paints the devil, he makes the devil half snake
and the upper half a woman. If I remember correctly, the great painter
was an old bachelor,—probably not one of his own motion.

The paintings mix up the pagan with the Christian. “The Last Judgment”
has Christ the central figure as judge, surrounded by apostles and
saints, and the hell part of the painting is according to Dante, with
the old Roman idea of the boatman Charon ferrying the lost across the
river. In this picture Michael Angelo made a hit. He put the face of
an enemy of his, an officer of the pope, on the painting of Minos, one
of the leading devils of hell. The offending official had objected to
some of the artist’s work on account of the nudity of the figures, and
Michael has sent him down the ages as the face of a devil.

[Illustration]

But there is no call for me to describe paintings and statuary and
cathedrals. A hasty sketch like this is not giving them fair treatment.
You can’t go anywhere in Rome without running into something beautiful
or something historic. Go down a street and there will be the baths
of Diocletian, turn around and there will be the Forum, and next is
the Coliseum, the Arch of Constantine, Trajan’s forum and column, the
Palace of Tiberius, the Stadium, and so on until you can’t rest with
the long list of things you saw and ought to remember, and some that
you ought to have seen but didn’t because you were just too tired to
look around. The Forum, the Coliseum and all this kind of things look
just like the pictures, and they are there,—that’s all I can say about
them, although the feeling of actually having seen and touched is one
of a great deal of satisfaction and worth going to Rome to have.

I don’t know how many churches there are in Rome. There are eighty
dedicated to the Virgin and fully as many to St. Peter. They are
filled with great paintings and statuary. Rome is the center of the
greatest Christian church, and for centuries the civilized world, or
a large part of it, has sent its gifts to the temples and shrines.
Thousands and tens of thousands of young men are studying here for the
priesthood. The streets are filled with their black gowns and hats.
Here and there along the streets and roads are shrines erected to
patron saints. All the churches are open seven days in the week, and
there are always people in them at their devotions.

As a contrast to the power and greatness of the present church we went
to see the catacombs, the burrows in the earth to which the Christians
of the early centuries fled for safety, and in which they buried their
dead. The catacombs of St. Calixtus, which we visited are said to
contain twelve miles of underground passages. Along the sides and in
the occasional niches and chapels are the places where the bodies were
put. The passages go down thirty to forty feet and the catacombs are
from four to six stories downward, just as a building is that much
above ground. In these places the early Christians kept alive their
faith under the terrible persecution of the emperors. Amid the tombs
they met and worshipped in spite of imperial decree and certain death
if captured. Rude pictures and inscriptions on the walls tell part
of the story which has made the world wonder ever since as the Roman
government did then, at the power of the faith for which men and women
would so live and so die.

[Illustration]

Coming out of the catacombs we drove along the Appian Way, the great
military road constructed over 300 years B. C. I had expected to have a
good thrill of enthusiasm over the Appian Way, but somehow it did not
come. The Appian Way is an ordinary good country road lined with old
houses, wine gardens, ruins and high fences. There are still a number
of villas and palaces, but the owners are poor and the basements are
usually rented out for stables and the upper apartments for tenements.
Italian noblemen are generally poor, and if they have palaces are
obliged to rent rooms and keep boarders.

[Illustration]

Another cherished hope of mine is gone. I had read about the beautiful
Italian peasant girls and have seen them on the stage singing in opera
and dressed in fetching short skirts and bright-colored bodices.
Italian girls work in the fields with the boys and then help their
mothers with the children, and most of them look tired and sickly. The
fetching skirts hang like loose wall-paper and the “bright bodice”
looks as if the girl was wearing her mother’s old corset outside her
clothes.

The largest and most numerous ruins in Rome are those of the public
baths erected by the state and by the emperors. The Romans in those
days were sporty, banqueted all night and bathed all next day to get
over the effects. But there are no public baths now—at least none of
consequence. And judging by the ordinary senses of sight and smell,
bathing has become one of the lost arts with a large number of the
Romans of to-day.




VENICE, THE BEAUTIFUL.


  VENICE, July 3, 1905.

I suppose everybody knows about Venice, the city built in the
water. During the sixth century the “barbarians” from the north
were overrunning Italy, killing or making slaves of the people and
destroying the cities and towns. A number of the inhabitants of
northeast Italy fled for safety to a group of small islands in the
shallow bay of the Adriatic sea, and there built up little villages
which were united in a republic and became the city and suburbs which
we call Venice. They naturally were a seafaring and trading people,
and Venice was the port of commerce between the Orient and Europe.
The Crusades stimulated business, and Venice was the most important
trading-point on the Mediterranean. At that time there was no Suez
canal and no knowledge of an ocean route to Asia, and all commerce
passed through Venice. The little republic grew strong and powerful,
captured and retained possessions in Italy and the islands of the
Mediterranean. Venice was one of the powers of Europe about the
fifteenth century, and thought she had the world by the tail. But the
Turks captured Constantinople, other routes to Asia were discovered
about the time Columbus reached America, and Venice as a great
political power and business center suffered a collapse. In other
words, the boom in Venice busted and Venice has never done much on her
own account since. The first few hundred years the government was that
of a republic, but about the close of the thirteenth century the nobles
who had won leadership through trade and war declared their offices
hereditary, and thereafter Venice was an aristocracy with a president
called “the doge.” During the French Revolution the French captured
Venice, and then Austria got it, and finally, in 1868, it was united
with the kingdom of Italy, where it belongs.

[Illustration]

Built on islands, crossed by canals like streets in other cities,
without a carriage or a horse, Venice is a strange, and to me, an
attractive place. The railroad runs out on a long trestle bridge. It
is hardly appropriate to say “landed” in a place like Venice, but we
arrived here at ten o’clock at night. The porter for the hotel to which
we were going took us through the station and put us into a gondola,
and away we went, down back streets and under bridges, with no light
except a few corner lamps and the stars. The Venetian gondoliers may be
poetical, but their looks do not invite the confidence of the traveler
when he intrusts himself to their hands for the first time and late at
night. Little chills creep up and down your back as you see the gondola
going straight for a corner—sure to hit it, but accidentally doesn’t.
After you get acquainted with the ways of the city you learn to trust
the gondolier, but the first time, late at night, you have your doubts.
You may forget just how you arrived in other cities, but not in Venice.

The Grand canal, the main street in Venice, is about seventy-five
yards wide and averages sixteen feet deep. The paving question does
not bother the city council in Venice. Most of their canal streets
are only twelve to thirty feet in width. There are also a few real
streets four to ten feet wide, on the inside of the blocks formed by
the canals, and the total result is a labyrinth of alleys and canals
which are impossible for a stranger to get head or tail of. Along the
Grand canal and many others the fine houses of the old prosperous
times loom up straight from the water six or seven stories. For
example, the front of our hotel, on the Grand canal, has absolutely
no sidewalk, only marble steps leading to the water, up which the
tide rises about two and a half feet twice a day. The architecture of
Venice is Oriental, and is refreshing after the Roman and Greek styles
everywhere else in Italy. The churches and public buildings, mostly
constructed between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, have round
Moorish towers and are decorated with gold and colors and have very
ornate pillars and façades. That makes Venice a beautiful city, and
so it is,—if you don’t go into the little back alleys where you see
the undecorated side. Of the 125,000 people one-fourth have no means
of support except charity. In the last few years Venice has revived
the glass industry and has developed the lace-making, and times are
better than they were. But just think of a people where one-fourth have
no chance to earn their living! We visited one of the big lace-making
suburbs on the island of Burano. The lace, which Mrs. Morgan says is
“b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l” and over which all good women rave, is made by
girls and women who sit all day on straight-back chairs and labor over
the pillow,—and get about twenty-five cents a day wages. We visited
the glass-blowers at Murano, the finest in the world, and skilled
workmen get up to two dollars a day for a dexterity and ability which
would easily command three or four times that amount in America. The
people live mostly on fish and vegetables, are very poor and apparently
very happy. They are the best-looking folks I have seen in Italy, and
evidently enjoy the improvident life which would drive an American to
strong drink, or if he were in Italy would drive him to drink the water.

[Illustration]

The center of Venice is “the Piazza of St. Mark,” a square about two
hundred yards long and nearly half as wide, paved with marble and
inclosed by fine buildings, including the great Church of St. Mark,
the old palace of the doge, the present royal palace, and a glittering
array of shops. I should say there were ten thousand beautiful shops
in Venice selling lace, glass, art works, beads, curios, pictures,
etc. Of course there are not that many, but there seem to be. There
is practically nothing else of importance. Venice is a good deal like
the world’s fair grounds, all glitter and glass, Oriental towers and
marble palaces, beautiful bridges and lagoons, and everybody trying to
separate the stranger from his money.

[Illustration]

Venice is a night town. In the evening the canals are filled with
gondolas and everybody is out for a good time. Regular musical clubs
drift along with the sweetest Italian opera rendered with real ability,
and arias and Italian serenades and love songs until you think the
world is nothing but lights glancing on the water, drifting gondolas,
song and gladness. Every few minutes one of the singers will pass
the hat and you contribute two or three cents and remember you are
still on earth. We sit at our hotel and watch the gay crowd in the
passing gondolas, or for a few cents get into one, lean back on the
easy cushions, smoke a two-cent cigar, and forget all about these poor
people with their poverty and their fleas. They have forgotten them
themselves.

[Illustration]

The patron saint of Venice is St. Mark. In the early days, say a
thousand years ago and more, some doge dreamed that Venice would never
prosper until the bones of St. Mark were brought here for burial. The
bones happened to be in Asia or Africa, and for years the Venetians
put in their time fighting the Turks and trying to capture the relics.
Finally the bright idea struck them that it would be easier to steal
St. Mark’s bones than capture them by battle, and an enterprising
Venetian merchant did the job. The remains of St. Mark were brought to
Venice and a beautiful cathedral with Oriental towers and rich colors
built above them. The doge’s dream was no fake, for after that Venice
prospered greatly. Tradition says that St. Mark used to have a winged
lion for a companion, and accordingly the winged lion is the Venetian
emblem. The cathedral and the public buildings are full of Oriental
works of art captured or stolen from the Turks during the years of
the Crusades when Venice was a stronghold of Christendom. Venetian
painters have done St. Mark and the lion in every conceivable place,
and wherever you go you see his kindly face, the quill pen he used in
writing, and the playful winged lion. The only horses in the city are
of bronze, and decorate the façade of St. Mark’s cathedral. Except for
these rather poor imitations I suppose nine-tenths of the people of
Venice never saw a horse. Incidentally I will add that it is a great
advantage to live in a city where you are not awakened at daylight by
the rumble of wagons and carts over stone-paved streets.

[Illustration]

The government of Venice during the Middle Ages was something fierce.
Nominally a republic, it was controlled by the nobles, who had a
general assembly, which selected a senate of seventy-five, of which
there was an inner council of ten and a secret tribunal of three, who
met masked and did not know each other’s identity. If you lived in
Venice at that time and had an enemy you wanted to do away with, you
would drop a letter accusing him of treason into the letter-box shaped
like a lion’s head in the counter outside the room of the council of
three. It was a pretty sure thing that he would not be heard from
again. Of course you would have to do this first, for your enemy might
be dropping in a letter while you were thinking about it.

We went through the rooms of the various councils down the secret
stairway and over the “Bridge of Sighs,” which connected the palace
with the prison across the canal street. This was the way the
prisoners were brought for trial, and if they went back it was to
torture and death. The jails in those times were not built for health
or sanitary purposes, and were evidently not examined by the county
commissioners. The dungeons are dark and damp, and the guide tells you
some awful stories of the rack, the thumbscrew and the block. You can
imagine the “good old days” and shudder as you think of the cruelty and
the crime. Paraphrasing Byron, who wrote some lines on the subject:

    I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
    Visions of Old from those deep dungeons rise,—
    The shrieks of pain, the terrifying cries,
    Then I reflect: Perhaps it’s mostly lies.




SOME THINGS ON ART.


  VENICE, ITALY, July 3, 1905.

Because I have not been writing much to The News on the subject of art,
it must not be supposed that I am omitting the regular work of every
tourist. Nor do I want it presupposed that I don’t know enough about
art to tell the difference between a renaissance and a vermicelli. If
industry and a desire to thoroughly do the job so it will not have to
be done a second time will count for anything, I have been an arduous
lover of art in all its forms since I passed the custom-house on the
Italian border. Everybody knows that the center of art is Italy and
that anything that isn’t old and Italian is second-class. When you
come to Italy you expect to see the heights of the artistic and you
are expected to have fits of ecstasy over the said heights. I have had
’em every time the guidebook told me to. I have endeavored in every
way to show that a plain, common citizen of Kansas knew what to do
when brought face to face with Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo and
the other gentlemen since whose death the world has never really seen
much in art. According to my pedometer I have traveled through 171
miles of cathedrals, 56 miles of public buildings and 85 miles of art
galleries—all in ten days. Some people may think my pedometer is too
rapid, but I know it is too slow. You know a good bird dog learns never
to “set” for anything but a game bird. And it is well established
that people with a certain kind of rheumatism can tell the approaching
changes in the weather by the twinges in their joints. And it is a fact
that even when I do not know there is a cathedral or an art gallery
within a hundred miles, let me approach one accidentally and my feet
will begin to ache. Then I know what is before me and I try to do my
duty. If the work of absorbing Italian art should prove too much for
me, the words could be as appropriately put on my tombstone as they
were over the early citizen of Dodge who died with a dozen bullets in
his body and a half-dozen enemies lying on the floor:

      HERE LIES BILL.
    HE DONE HIS DAMDEST.
      ANGELS COULD DO
          NO MORE.

[Illustration]

There are three places where you always find art in Italy: First and
foremost, the churches; second, the public buildings; third, the art
galleries and museums. The churches come first, because the Catholic
Church has always been the support and promoter of art. For centuries
it was the only strong power that encouraged artists. It had the
tasteful men of the age and it had the money. The great artists both
in painting and sculpture would have had no opportunity and their
works would have been destroyed if it had not been for the church. In
return, the artists took the subjects of religion and portrayed them
most beautifully and effectively. There is hardly a church in Italy
which does not have paintings by some of those old painters which
would be worth a fortune now if they were for sale. The Catholic faith
especially appeals to the artistic sense, and the history of the church
furnished a boundless field of subjects. Walls and ceilings of churches
are covered with magnificent pictures, the exteriors are decorated
with sculpture, and the architecture of the buildings is brilliant and
effective. To see paintings, statues or architecture in Italy you first
go to the churches, and there you see the greatest and best.

After the churches the art treasures and galleries are found in the
public buildings, and there we get what is left of the art of Greece
and Rome, together with much of a later time. The old pagan mythology
furnished most of the ancient art, together with a few attempts at
transferring abstract ideas into concrete form. Of course I don’t
want to set up as an art critic—I have trouble enough without that.
But according to the way I was raised, a large per cent. of ancient
sculpture isn’t fit to be exhibited to young folks—or to old men.
Probably the times were different and fashions in art were acute, but
the Grecian and Roman sculptors paid no attention to the rules of
common decency as generally understood in this generation. While doing
my duty in the art galleries I have actually blushed so much that
it grew noticeable to the other art critics, and I fear that I lost
standing with them. Of course I am not a regular critic, but I know a
few things, and this is one of them.

Another objection I have to the old masters is that they never
considered any subject too big for them. I have written something of
this when I kicked on Michael Angelo attempting to make a picture of
God Almighty. There is too much of that kind of business in Italian
art. And another thing is that they couldn’t paint good animals. Some
of the pictures by the great masters have horses or lions in them, and
I believe even the horses would laugh at their own appearance.

Aside from these unimportant objections and a trifling criticism of a
great deal of ignorance about drawing and the fitness of things, the
“old masters,” by which is meant the great painters from about 1400 to
1600, are certainly worthy of their reputation. Everybody I met knew
more about art than I did—so they thought—and everyone said: “What
wonderful color.” The old masters certainly did know how to mix paints
so as to make the most beautiful and most lasting colors. I think
Titian’s red-headed girls are the prettiest reds I have ever seen.
Raphael’s paintings cannot be criticized by me—their feeling and their
execution will make a cynical Kansan stand and admire. Michael Angelo
I did not take to so well as I did Titian and Raphael, but he did a
lot of work, and he, too, had the ability to make his pictures like
life. The other great painters of Italy in these two centuries of the
renaissance have not been equaled in any period since, and in spite of
the fact that the experience of one generation ought to help the next,
I do not believe that the modern Italian painters, or the Englishmen
and Americans who go to Italy and copy, can come within several blocks
of equaling the work of the “old masters.”

There is one more objection I have to the “old masters,” and I would
like to tell it to their faces. They had the habit of taking a great
subject and making it a means of flattery for wealthy patrons. For
example, a picture of Christ or the Virgin sitting and talking
confidentially with some old scamp of a Medici. Of course I don’t blame
the old artists. The Medici were a lot of thugs, thieves, highwaymen,
murderers, and lovers of art. They put up handsomely for the great
masters, and undoubtedly assisted much in promoting art at a time when
the princes and nobility of Italy were not respectable according to our
standard. This flattery by the old masters may have been necessary to
make a living, but I don’t think it is Art.

[Illustration]

I had one objection which has been overruled on the ground that it
was simply because my apprenticeship in art had been too short. Every
artist painted a “Madonna.” Each had a different ideal or model. Mary
was a Jewess. But the Italian artists nearly all ran in pictures
of Italians, and each had a different style. It makes a confusing
aggregation. I think I have seen a thousand Madonnas, five hundred
Magdalens, and from one to three hundred of each of the saints. There
is a sameness of subject and a variance in execution which makes me
a little nervous. I haven’t worked at the art business as long as I
should, and therefore I may be too hasty in my judgment, although I
am fairly perspiring art at every pore and the climate of Italy in the
latter part of June and the first of July has nearly as much cause for
perspiration as the climate of Kansas.




AN ITALIAN FOURTH AND SO FORTH.


  MENAGIO, ITALY, July 5, 1905.

At an early hour yesterday morning, July 4, we left the hotel in
Venice in a gondola, and defiantly waving in the air was an American
flag which I carried as proudly and as exuberantly as a ten-year-old
boy would at a picnic in Kansas. We met several Americans at the
station, and they waved and cheered “Old Glory.” We met all kinds
of Italians, who looked as amused and curious as a lot of Americans
would at an Italian carrying a green, white and red banner down the
streets of Hutchinson. I flaunted the stars and stripes in the faces
of the Italian policemen, and they seemed to enjoy it. Several people
tried to find out from me what it all meant, and in spite of the fact
that I told them in good English that this was the Fourth of July,
the anniversary of independence, they shook their heads and did not
“comprehendo.” The weather was very hot and very dry, the train was
dusty, and the conditions as near ideal for a successful Fourth of July
celebration as could be imagined. The American flag that day floated
in the Italian breeze from Venice to Milan and then to Lake Como. The
inability to make the Dagoes understand what I meant was embarrassing
at times, and I longed vainly for a pack of firecrackers or a few
good torpedoes. The conductor on the train was greatly interested. We
talked in sign language and all the Italian I knew and all the English
he knew, but to no effect. Finally I said the word “liberty,” and as
the Italian word is about the same, he caught on and I could tell he
was approving. “Vive l’America!” I cried, and he took off his hat and
said it after me and smiled agreement to the remarks I was making on
what the old flag meant. I gave him a big tip, 10 cents,—5 cents for
hurrahing for America and 5 cents for listening to my speech.

To-night we are out of the heat of the fertile plains of Lombardy and
are in a delightful cool place on the shore of Lake Como, the prettiest
and pleasantest place I have seen since we left Killarney. The last
part of the day the flag waved over Como, Bellagio, Cernobio, Nesso,
Colomo, Bellano, and all the other “o’s” that make the list of Italian
towns look like the roster of an Irish Fenian society, only the o is at
the wrong end of the names.

[Illustration]

Speaking of “tipping” the conductor reminds me of the tipping system in
Italy, which is a subject of the greatest importance to the traveler. I
think I have seen only one man in Italy who did not hold out his hand,
and that was an armless beggar at the Milan station who had a tin cup
in which you were expected to deposit. The tipping custom is general
in Europe, but it reaches its greatest development in Italy. Everybody
you meet is so courteous and polite, willing to show you or tell you or
take you, but always expecting something. You tip the conductor, the
porter, the hotel manager, the chambermaid, the “man chambermaid,” the
elevator boy, the waiter, the head waiter, the clerk, the interpreter,
the attendants, the driver, the man who opens the door, the church
janitor, the policeman, and everybody you ask a question or who is
there to answer if you do ask, and then you tip a few more just because
they expect it. This looks like an alarming expenditure of money.
But as a matter of fact the total amount of tips is not more than is
expected at a big hotel in New York. And when you tip the waiter at the
restaurant he does not keep it, but all tips go into a common fund that
is divided and is the wages the waiters receive in most cases.

Here is a schedule of “tips,” which, after considerable study and
comparison with that of others, I have figured as about right:

  Baggageman, 2 cents.
  Elevator boy, 2 cents.
  Chambermaid, 3 cents.
  Man chambermaid, 3 cents.
  Waiter, per day, 5 cents.
  Head waiter, 10 cents.
  Manager of hotel, 20 cents.
  Miscellaneous men and boys, each 1 cent.
  Railroad conductor, 5 cents.
  Policeman, 2 cents.
  Driver, 2 cents.
  Italian nobleman, 3 cents.
  Italian merchant, 2 cents.
  Clerk in store, 1 cent.
  Ordinary civility, 1 cent.

I haven’t met the king or queen, but I estimate that if I did and asked
a favor they would look like about 30 cents.

The Italian money is like the French money, based on a unit which is
equivalent to 20 cents. So when you give a man 10 cents you give him
a half-lire or half-franc. The lire is divided into 100 centimes, and
when you give a man 2 cents you hand him a great big copper coin with
“ten centimes” on it. This small unit of measurement causes an American
a peculiar sensation. For example, I had to buy a shirt in Venice and
it was marked 5.50. That looked like a big price for a shirt, but
reduced to American currency it was only $1.10. I bought some of the
long Italian cigars which look like stogies and have straws down the
center so they will draw. They were 30 centimes each—only 6 cents
American. For a carriage and driver to go anywhere in Rome, carrying
Mrs. Morgan and myself and a lot of baggage, it was 1.00, twenty
American cents. When two Americans can ride a couple of miles in a
comfortable victoria for 20 cents they don’t walk much, and they feel
as if they were beating somebody and are perfectly willing to “tip” the
driver an extra 2 cents. So when you are “doing” Italy and get used to
the custom, you do not mind carrying a pound or so of copper coins and
distributing them whenever you speak to a native.

The effect of this custom on the people must be very pernicious. And
it takes away the charm of recognizing courtesy and hospitality as a
national trait when you remember that you pay for it and it is cheap.

[Illustration]

I wrote from Paris that the government of France has the monopoly of
the tobacco business. In Italy the government has the monopoly of
tobacco and salt, the two great necessities. It looks funny to go
along the street and see the little government shops with the sign in
Italian, “Tobacco and Salt.” The Italian government doesn’t sell good
tobacco or good salt. The best cigars are from the island of Luzon,
manufactured into alleged cigars in the government factories in Italy.
The salt is heavy and coarse, something like old-style yellow-brown
sugar. If you don’t like the tobacco or the salt you can go without,
for the government allows no competitor who might do better.

[Illustration]

I have learned a little Italian, not so much but I can forget it when I
cross the line. And that leads me to tell of a little experience with
a moral. I had been so annoyed by the numerous beggars and vendors
of trinkets that I asked a hotel porter who knew some English what I
should say in Italian to tell them to go away. He told me something
that sounded like “Muffa tora.” Accordingly I went around for a couple
of days saying “Muffa tora” to all that bothered me. Then a friend who
knew a little more Italian happened to hear me and suggested that my
language was too strong. The words were about what in America is meant
by “Go-to-hell.” And there I had been going around St. Peter’s, St.
Paul, and all the churches and art galleries in Rome, saying to half
the people who approached me, “Go-to-hell,” “Go-to-hell.” A little
knowledge is a dangerous thing.

[Illustration]

Of course Americans stop at the best hotels, and they are about the
same everywhere, being based on the French model. They are from
one-third to one-half cheaper than the best hotels in American cities.
We are supposed to get three meals a day: First, rolls and coffee;
second, about 12 o’clock, what is really a late breakfast but is called
“dejeuner” and has three to five courses: eggs (always—generally
omelet), macaroni, a cutlet or chop with potatoes, a roast meat,
cheese, and fruit. No coffee or tea or anything to drink except water,
which they say is bad and unhealthful. Dinner at 7 o’clock and a good
meal: Soup, fish, cutlet or chop with macaroni, roast, vegetables,
roast chicken and salad, cheese, small cakes, and fruit. No coffee
or tea. If you want coffee after dinner you have it served in the
lounging-room or out-of-doors, and it is extra. Nobody but Americans
drink water, and they do not use enough to hurt. When you enter the
hotel you are received by the “hall porter,” really the manager, who
bows and takes you or sends you to a room. After a while he sends up
for your name and nationality, but that is for the police. There is
no hotel register. When you pay your bill and are leaving the porter
rings a bell and everybody from proprietor to chambermaid appears to
say “good-by,” speed the parting guest and receive the parting tips. At
first your royal reception and leave-taking makes quite an impression
and you feel “set up,” but after a while it gets to be a bore and you
try to escape it but can’t. The cooking and service are first-class,
better than in America. There is one kind of dishes I steer clear of,
those labeled on the bill of fare, “a la Americaine.” They are like
those served in Hutchinson, “a la Italia,” or “a la Français,” which
means that they are probably spoiled by the cook trying to do something
he does not understand.

Of course in the small Italian hotels the cooking is different, but
they tell me it is good. The restaurants where the poorer people eat
are full of garlicky smells which can be heard for a block. The staple
articles of food for Italians are soup, macaroni and vegetables, all
flavored with garlic. The ordinary Italian does not eat meat. There are
probably several reasons why, but the first one is that he has not the
price, and that is enough. When a man is working for 30 cents a day he
is a stranger to roast beef, for meat is as high as it is in America.

[Illustration]

I haven’t seen a real clothing store in Italy. There are two classes
of Italians only: The rich, who have a tailor, and the poor, who put
the goods together themselves. Again I want to repeat what I have
said before: The things that are cheap in Europe are those in which
labor is the principal factor. When it comes to hiring a man to do
work, you name your price. That is why carriage-driving, servants,
clothes-making, the building trades and labor of every kind from
lace-makers to railroad engineers, are so low.

[Illustration]

The Italian shopkeepers have a well-deserved reputation as bargainers.
Go into a shop, ask a price, and very likely the proprietor or clerk
will say “So much: what will you give?” Americans have a reputation of
being “easy,” and so they usually start us with a price of “6 francs,”
when they will come down to one or two rather than lose a sale. When
you get through you never know just how much you have been beaten—you
only know you have been. Some stores advertise “fixed prices,” but they
are unfixed if necessary. The process of “shopping” thus has another
and delicious feature for the American “shopper.”

[Illustration]

I have found the Italians honest. We hardly ever lock our room. I am
always leaving the umbrella, but somebody always finds it and brings
it to me, and I can’t say that much for Americans. The hackmen do not
overcharge, or at least not near as much as in Chicago or New York. I
think a stranger is better treated in Rome than in Kansas City. But
then comes the suspicious thought—we pay for it.

[Illustration]

Previous to this trip I had often heard people talk about the fleas in
Italy, and had thought it was very funny. It is no joke. At first I was
much amused when I would see a well-dressed lady stop suddenly on the
street, elevate her skirt and go hunting. I now consider it a perfectly
justifiable and proper action. If there is a game law in Italy with a
closed season on fleas it is not at this time of the year. I have seen
the anxious, heart-stricken look on the faces of the martyrs and saints
as painted by the old masters, and I know now where they got their
models, for I have seen the man and the woman conscious of the march
of the flea along the small of the back or in some other unreachable
place, and have seen the haunted, hunted look on the face as conjecture
what the flea would do next changed into realization. The Italian flea
works a good deal like the American mosquito, only he makes no music
and you can only tell where he is by sad experience. He can dodge
better than some politicians and he can get in his work early and
often. I am growing accustomed to the sensation myself, but I do not
think I shall ever enjoy it. The Bible says the wicked flee when no man
pursueth, but in Italy the wicked flea is improving each minute whether
anyone pursueth or not. Mingled with art and old masters, lagoons, and
gondolas, cathedrals and Cæsars, blue sky and green fields, will always
be my recollection of the flea that never takes a siesta and to whom
the poets have never done justice.




SWITZERLAND.




ACROSS THE ALPS.


  BRIEG, SWITZERLAND, July 7, 1905.

“Beyond the Alps lies Italy” with all of its art and history and fleas.
After a day on Lake Lugano and Lake Maggiore, where the two countries
of Italy and Switzerland meet, and where the customs officers examined
our baggage three times in the course of a trip around the water,
we crossed the Alps, among which we had been for two days, and are
now in the oldest republic on earth, Switzerland. We came over the
Simplon Pass in a stage-coach and not through a tunnel, as we could
have done. The Simplon Pass is historic and picturesque. As soon as
the tunnel is completed, which has been seven years in building, the
railroad train will rush through the mountains and the stage-coach will
be an old fogy luxury. But the way to go over the Alps for pleasure
and observation is not to take a tunnel train, but ride over on the
outside of a coach with five horses and see the panorama as you pass
by. After a fortnight spent among the great works of man, cathedrals,
coliseums and galleries, one day was enough in the Simplon to prove
that Nature is still ahead. The great amphitheatres of the mountains,
the magnificent stage-settings of forest and peak, left the coliseum
and the forum far behind. The changing hues of the slopes, now gradual
and now precipitate, sometimes bare and sometimes covered with pasture
and vineyard or forest, were in colors which even the old masters could
not equal. It was an all-day drive over a fine road, through narrow
gulches, alongside rushing rivers, under waterfalls of melted snow,
finally through the snow itself, and then down, almost sliding, with
the coach-wheels locked so they were like runners, into the quaint
little town of Brieg.

[Illustration]

The road over the Simplon was built by Napoleon. All over the map of
Europe you will see such monuments to the name of the great emperor.
I do not give Napoleon much credit for the job, as it was a military
necessity to him. He had to keep an army in Italy and always be on the
lookout for his enemies there, so he ordered the Simplon Pass, up to
the time only a trail, to be provided with a macadamized road, and it
was done. I have seen so many of such roads in Europe that I would be
willing to support Napoleon for road overseer or street commissioner
any time. The road was completed in 1807, and the tunnel under the Pass
will be finished in 1906. It is sixteen miles long, large enough for a
double track, and has been constructed from both ends at the same time.
To my mind it is a great engineering feat to start two small holes in
a mountain, sixteen miles apart, and figure so accurately that those
holes will meet some place in the center over a mile from the daylight
on top. I suppose it looks easy to the engineer who knows how, but it
is miraculous to me. A good many lives have been lost and a lot of
money spent on this tunnel, but those are the sacrifices the world
demands before it will move on.

The road over the Pass is forty-five miles long. Soon after starting,
all agriculture disappeared, except vineyards and pasture. The
vineyards continued almost up to the snow. Wherever there was enough
ground there were vines, and in many places the mountain-side was
terraced and in the made land the vines were growing profusely.
Literally speaking, there are mountains of vineyards in northern Italy
and in Switzerland.

[Illustration]

Cattle-raising in the Alps is done in small herds and is mostly on the
Swiss side. The stock looks smooth and fine. Along with a drove of cows
are always a few goats. In the early summer the herdsmen drive the
animals up the paths and trails to the little patches of rich pasture,
where they feed until fall, neither man nor beast coming down until
driven by the cold. I saw cattle pasturing on the mountain-side where
it was so steep it seemed they must have feet like flies or they would
tumble down. Of course the animals inherit the mountain knowledge, and
I suppose they don’t know there is such a thing as a level meadow.
Here and there men and women would be cutting grass with a scythe,
spreading the hay out to dry, and then actually rolling it down the
mountain-side. Like all people who live in mountainous countries, the
Swiss herdsmen along the Simplon looked intelligent, cheerful and poor.

[Illustration]

And that brings me to another broken idol. I had always heard of a
Swiss “chalet,” and had supposed it was an artistic, smart-looking
house perched up on a peak for everybody to see. A real Swiss chalet
is a half dugout in a valley, built of stone and whitewashed once, in
which the family lives upstairs and the cattle spend the winter in the
basement, never going out until the springtime comes. Now I can see
the economy, the advantages and the necessity of a Swiss “chalet,”
but I can’t see anything beautiful or poetic, for such qualities are
not present. I had the same experience with an Italian “villa,” which
I found by observation was usually a plain-appearing stone house
built around a court, inhabited by Italians, goats and chickens, and
principally remembered by the noisome odor.

[Illustration]

I have done some touring in the Rocky Mountains, and I was curious
to see what difference there would be between the Rockies and the
Alps,—both having peaks of about the same height, and each forming the
backbone of a continent. The Alps have more snow than the Rockies. All
of the peaks are snow-covered and the gulches of snow run far down the
mountain-side here in July. Only an occasional peak in Colorado has
snow, and then only a little, not enough to call it “snow-covered.” To
my mind the Rockies are more grandly picturesque. The sides of the Alps
are cultivated and covered with vines, dotted with pasture and cattle
nearly up to the timber-line. The Rockies are still as nature left
them, more stern and desolate, awe-inspiring and effective. The Alps do
not look like the Rockies, except in height and steepness. The foliage
of the trees is not the same, and the Alps have a tamer appearance than
the American range. A town in the Rockies is out of harmony with the
scenery. A village in the Alps adds to the beauty. Perhaps I do not
make myself clear, but there is a great difference, and I think the
Rockies are far ahead from a mountain standpoint.

[Illustration]

Switzerland has no language of its own. The Swiss have four distinct
languages, and the people of one part of the country do not understand
the other. In some of the cantons (corresponding to our states) the
language is French, in some German, in some Italian, and in some a
composite speech based on the Latin and called “the Romance language.”
Remember, this is a country of about the same area (15,000 miles) as
the Seventh Congressional district of Kansas, but also remember it
is cut up by the mountains into natural divisions which are hard to
overcome. I am getting used to hearing one language in one town and
another in the next across an imaginary line. But four kinds of talk
within a little country like Switzerland is going to be hard to contend
with.

[Illustration]

Right at the top of the Simplon Pass among the snows that never
entirely melt is a “hospice,” maintained for generations by an order of
monks and devoted to taking care of poor travelers or relieving those
in distress or who lose their way. On every pass between Switzerland
and Italy there is such a hospice. The monks have the great St. Bernard
dogs (named from the St. Bernard Pass, a little distance away), and
when the snows get deep the dogs do much of the work of rescue. I had
heard of these great institutions since boyhood, and wondered if they
would turn out badly when actually seen. But they are all right, and
their good work has not been exaggerated in the thrilling stories in
which they have figured.

[Illustration]

There are many very large and very picturesque waterfalls, many more
than in the Rockies. The constantly melting snow keeps them running,
and it is not uncommon to see the water tumbling or jumping down a
sheer descent of two hundred to five hundred feet. I would like to
take a few waterfalls of that kind back to Kansas and put them up
in the sand-hills. I offered an Italian gentleman on the coach who
spoke some English to trade him 160 acres of western Kansas land for
a good first-class waterfall. Almost fifteen minutes after I made the
proposition he laughed. It doesn’t do any good to be funny with people
who don’t know your language.




GENEVA AND CHILLON.


  GENEVA, July 9, 1905.

This little city, now containing nearly 100,000 inhabitants, has been
a storm-center in Europe for 2000 years. Cæsar mentions it, and during
the early centuries when Rome was conquering and governing most of
the known world, Geneva was an important place, both from a strategic
standpoint as a gate to Helvetia and as a prosperous and loyal town.
It was either the capital of the country or a ruling city during all
of the Dark and Medieval ages, and was one of the first where people
learned popular sovereignty and applied it to the detriment of the
reigning king or duke. By playing one side against another in the
struggle for sovereignty the popular leaders fought for freedom of
conscience, and about the year 1500 secured practical independence.
Then the Reformation commenced, and Calvin fled from Paris to Geneva.
The people there were naturally “agin the government,” and they took
up Calvin’s doctrine, and during the years of fighting over religion
Geneva was the center from which Protestantism drew most of its
leadership and inspiration. They fought for freedom of conscience and
worship, and if anybody disagreed with them they killed him promptly
to convince him of his error. Calvin ruled Geneva during his life, and
after his death his cause went marching on. During the last century
Geneva has made a reputation for manufacturing watches, jewelry and
musical instruments. It is only fair to say that the best Geneva
watches are now made in America. The work here is nearly all done by
hand in the home of the workman, and the watchmakers of Geneva have had
a hard time competing with Yankee machinery and ingenuity.

[Illustration]

The surroundings of Geneva are peaceful and beautiful. The big lake of
blue water comes to an end at the Geneva quay and rushes out into the
world as the river Rhone, clear and sparkling. Mont Blanc, a quiet old
stager of a mountain, whose head is always covered with snow, looks
over the city like a stately sentinel at his post. Mountains rise all
around the lake and are covered with vineyards, almost the only product
of the soil, stretching far up the heights connecting the blue of the
lake with the blue of the sky and the snowy peaks and white clouds
which watch over them. Amid such surroundings we had decided to rest a
few days from our travel, and I found it the best place in the world
just to sit in the hotel garden from which the lake, Mont Blanc and the
entire picture are visible, and just loaf and loaf and loaf.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: THE ALPINE HUNTER OF TO-DAY]

The great amusement of tourists who come to Switzerland is
mountain-climbing. I have learned the game. Men and women come in at
night recounting the wonderful feats they have accomplished and the
dangers they have escaped. Everybody carries an “alpenstock,” which
is a sharp-pointed cane with a chamois handle, and whenever he climbs
a peak he has a ring burned around the stick, and shows it as proudly
as the Indian once did the notches which meant deaths of enemies. I
am a little skeptical, and listen to the climbing stories as I do to
fish stories at home. It is too much like golf where you keep your own
count. Perhaps I shall yield to the demands of environment enough to
get me an alpenstock and have a few rings burned in it so I can have a
few chips in the game, as it were. The men run to knickerbockers, wear
feathers in their hats and carry packs on their shoulders. The women
wear short skirts which don’t hang well and big shoes with nails in
the soles—I am speaking now of people who do the thing right, and not
those who sit on the porch and loaf.

[Illustration]

The Swiss themselves are degenerating from the simple-hearted people
they were. They have fallen before the temptations of the tourists.
They see the American and the Englishman with lots of money to spend,
and they find it easier to separate the stranger from his cash than
they do to hunt chamois and herd cattle. It is a cause of much regret
to the intelligent Swiss that this is so, but I do not notice the
intelligent mourners going out into the mountains and setting an
example of industry. They sell the jewelry, the souvenirs, the milk
and the wine at advanced prices, and they have the greatest number
of hotels and boarding-houses of any country on earth. If you enjoy
handsome little shops with trinkets and gew-gaws, jewelry and
picture cards, carved wood and imitation stones, as I do, you would
thoroughly enjoy wandering through Geneva. The Geneva artisan will take
a chair-leg and make a musical instrument. Sit down on a sofa and you
will be startled to hear a piece of Wagner’s played by the concealed
music-box.

[Illustration]

The language spoken in Geneva is French. I do not think it is good
French, for the people here do not understand the French with the fine
Parisian accent I brought from Paris. But a large proportion of the
people understand English. I am of the opinion that in spite of the
fact that French is still the international language in Europe, the one
you can use with educated people nearly anywhere, the English-American
is the coming language. Very few people in Europe travel. The Germans
do so more than others, but the French seldom do, the Italians rarely,
and the Spanish and the Russians practically never. The English come
to the continent in great numbers, and the Americans are in droves. In
a place like Geneva in the principal shops and on the promenades you
would say that fully half the people were English-speaking. In order to
take care of these profitable guests the Swiss and others are learning
enough of the language to sell them cheap goods at high prices, and
they will learn more. It is not an uncommon experience to go into a
store and after laboriously constructing a question in alleged French
to get an answer in very fair English.

I am told that up to a few years ago the American traveler was
regarded with a little contempt by the people of continental Europe,
and considered as only so much soil from which to gather wealth. But
Americans of experience tell me that since the war with Spain all this
has changed. As for myself, these Europeans have always spoken in the
friendliest way of America, even when they did not know there were any
Yankees around. The theory that we were only a commercial people and
would not fight (the world loves a fighter) was disproven so thoroughly
that they have rather gone to the other extreme, and Americans are now
very popular as Americans and not merely for their money. Europe also
has the highest opinion of McKinley and Roosevelt. With a great deal of
pride in my heart I read a leading editorial in the London Times saying
that Roosevelt’s letter to Russia and Japan urging peace was one of the
greatest of state papers. The Times added that it was “straightforward,
frank and clear—the American idea of diplomacy.” All of Europe now
regards America as a great and friendly power, and an American swells
up considerably more over his country when he is in other nations
than he does at home, where he is apt to get fussy and cynical. The
English are not popular on the continent, though England is feared and
respected. The Americans are liked because they are believed to be fair
and square.

[Illustration]

At the other end of Lake Geneva is the castle of Chillon. It is about
as big as the court-house in Hutchinson, and looks like the old
sugar-mill, only more so. Byron did a great deal for the people in that
neck of the woods, for his poem made the castle famous, and tourists
come by the hundreds and buy. In return they have named the big hotel
the Byron, which shows they are not ungrateful. Byron’s poem had the
poor prisoner confined in a dungeon with two brothers, and he had the
torture of seeing them die. The facts are that there never was any
“prisoner of Chillon” except in the brilliant imagination of Lord
Byron. Of course many prisoners were confined in the dungeon. Every
castle in Europe has a dungeon, and none of them were constructed with
an idea of sanitary conditions or the health of the prisoners. But the
dungeon at Chillon is the lightest and airiest dungeon I have seen. It
is as comfortable as a good many hotel rooms in the United States. The
only prisoner of note that had any such experience was a preacher named
Bonnivard, who was kept there for two years because he believed or
didn’t believe in Calvin,—I have forgotten which it was. Bonnivard had
no brothers, and lived a number of years afterward and said he enjoyed
his confinement at Chillon because he had so much time to think. Our
guide showed our party the pathway the prisoner’s feet had worn in
the rock where he had walked back and forth within the limit of his
chains. I couldn’t see the path, although everybody else did. The rest
of the castle of Chillon is very interesting, as it was the residence
of a fine line of dukes who were always fighting either for or against
the king. Our guide, who spoke only French, told us all about it, but
I shall not repeat what she said. The people of Hutchinson would not
understand her remarks any better than I did.

My idea of a good joke is to have a guide who can only talk French tell
an American who can’t understand French something very important or
serious. The Frenchman tells his story with rapidity, earnestness and
gestures. The American listens with frank impatience and punctuates the
French sentences with American ejaculations which have no connection
with the subject. The Frenchman acts mad, but he isn’t at all. The
American acts pleasant, but he is really mad.

[Illustration]

The castle of Chillon is in the lake, about sixty feet from the shore.
You reach the entrance over a bridge after fighting your way through
the sellers of souvenirs. That is one thing the old dukes did not have
to contend with. If they were still doing business I think they would
fill up the dungeon with the salesmen and salesladies.




SOMETHING OF SWITZERLAND.


  ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, July 12, 1905.

Switzerland is a succession of beautiful lakes, mountains and big
hotels, dotted here and there with manufacturing towns and vineyards.
It has been said that you cannot get too much of a good thing, but
that is a mistake. Even the man who loves pie must admit that after he
has had all the pie he can consume three times a day for a week, he
would want to change the subject. After one has been traveling through
Swiss scenery for seven days he is almost satisfied. We no longer chase
across the car to see a big mountain-peak, or hurry out of the hotel
soon after our arrival to behold the lake. And men and women with
feathers in their hats and alpenstocks in their hands do not make us
turn our heads. The sight of a little level country would look mighty
good, and a comfortable seat on the porch comes nearer to filling the
longing in my heart than the sight of a waterfall or an old castle
several minutes’ walk distant.

[Illustration]

Lucerne is the center of the tourist travel. All roads into Switzerland
lead to Lucerne, and the scenery is more varied than at any other of
the show places. The town is on the lake and the mountains are around
it. From my hotel I could see Mount Pilatus, the place where they say
Pontius Pilate finally found a resting-place. At the other end of the
view is the snow-covered Rigi, and there are all kinds of Alps in the
background. Lucerne looks like an American summer resort. It is made up
of hotels and souvenir shops, and elegantly dressed women parade up and
down the promenade walks, while rich old gentlemen sit uncomfortably
around the piazzas and wish the women-folks had let them stay at home.
It is astonishing how many men act as if they would give a good deal to
be at work somewhere rather than in Switzerland “enjoying themselves.”
A lot of people do not know how to have a good time or how to see a
strange and delightful place. I meet many people who do not care for
Europe, or Italy, or Switzerland,—the people who bring a stack of
trunks and good clothes and have to put in their time dressing up only
to be out-dressed by somebody else.

But Lucerne has one thing different. It is the “Lion of Lucerne,” the
monument erected in honor of the Swiss soldiers who died in the French
palace defending the rotten Bourbon dynasty when the revolutionists
broke in and captured the king and queen. The lion (twenty-eight feet
in length) is carved out of a sandstone ledge, and is the finest
monument or statue I ever saw. The king of beasts is dying, agony on
his face, a broken lance in his side, and his huge paw resting on a
shield of the lilies of France. The more I looked at the great work
of Thorwaldsen the more I felt it, and I went back again and again to
see it,—the real test of effect. Nearly everyone has seen copies or
pictures of this work, but it is one of the things that no copy can do
justice to, for the size and substance of the stone, the pathos and
power of the subject and the skill and the genius of the sculptor have
met most perfectly and impressively.

[Illustration]

Near Lucerne is the scene of the early struggle for Swiss liberty.
Around the lake of Lucerne are the three cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and
Unterwalden, whose representatives met some 500 years ago and entered
into the compact to stand together for freedom, a compact which has
never been broken. Here William Tell refused to take off his hat to the
hat the tyrant Gessler had set up and ordered all to salute. To punish
Tell the governor ordered him to take his bow and arrow and shoot an
apple from the head of his son. Tell’s aim was true, but as he turned
away another arrow dropped from his coat. When asked why he had that,
he said it was for Gessler if the boy had been hurt. Gessler took Tell
in a boat and was carrying him to a dungeon, when a storm arose and
Tell was released in order to use his skill as a boatman. He knew that
the world wasn’t big enough for both himself and Gessler, so he soon
after inserted an arrow into the tyrant’s ribs, and the Austrians had
to get a new governor.

Some cynical historians doubt this Tell story, but I do not. It is just
as good a story as a lot which appear in history and it is good enough
to be true.

After the Tell revolution, which was in the thirteenth century, those
Swiss cantons never lost their freedom, although they had to fight
for it about every generation. The Hapsburg family, which reigned in
Austria, was always trying to conquer the Swiss, and although its power
was great enough to overcome any army they could collect, it could not
cope with the mountains and gulches in which the Swiss were at home,
and where one man who knew the land was equal in fighting value to a
dozen knights in armor or on horseback. On that account the Swiss,
especially the people of these “forest cantons,” have been a free
people through all the changes in the world during more than 500 years.
Sometimes they have been selfish and narrow in their ideas of freedom,
considering that they were the only people on earth, and they have
until the last century held serfs and domineered despotically over weak
neighbors. But they were always far in advance of the rest of the world
in their ideas of personal liberty. Switzerland is the one country
which has always been a refuge to exiled patriots, rebels, conspirators
and pretenders. Switzerland will not surrender a fugitive from another
country on a political charge. The judges who sentenced Charles I. of
England to death sought refuge in Switzerland when Charles II. came
to the throne. Charles demanded that the judges be given up to him,
and brought every influence to bear, but the Swiss stood by their
law of refuge. To-day the anarchists and nihilists of Russia and the
revolutionists of every country from Roumania to Spain have their
headquarters in Geneva or some other Swiss town.

It will be noticed that I think a good deal of the Swiss, and that
I have written some criticism of the Italians. I went through Italy
without ever being overcharged, “held up,” or worked by cab-drivers,
hotel-keepers, or anyone at all. But in Switzerland, the land of
freedom and education, I have had all these things done to me. I have
been surprised and pleased by the way the people of Europe treat
strangers, even if they do want tips. I had not been meanly treated
from the time I left Boston until I reached Switzerland. The last man I
did business with in my native land was a Boston hackman, who charged
me twice what he should when he brought us to the ship. I did not meet
his equal until I got to Lucerne. I hope there is no connection between
personal liberty, republican government, and the swindling of strangers.

[Illustration]

Yesterday we went to St. Gallen, a little industrial town near
Constance. The women will recognize the name of this town if the men
do not, for it is the place Swiss embroideries come from. I found
out one thing there: Most of the Swiss hand embroidery is made by
machinery. The Swiss are called the Yankees of Europe. They are up to
almost all the tricks of the trade. They are changing from a pastoral
and agricultural people, except right in the mountains, and are making
money out of manufactories and tourists. The men and women do not wear
the ridiculous and charming peasant costumes, except in beer-gardens
and summer-resort hotels. In fact, I am impressed with the sameness
of people’s clothes everywhere. There is no longer any such thing as
characteristic costume. I saw the men’s clothes in Italy all cut and
made just as in France, England, or America. The women have the same
styles in the country districts of Switzerland that they do in Kansas
or in Paris. Of course some people know how to wear their clothes
better than others, and there is a difference in fit and make, but the
styles are the same from Hutchinson to St. Gallen.

I am learning some things in geography. Mont Blanc, the biggest
mountain in Switzerland, is in France. Constance, one of the best Swiss
resorts, is in Germany. Switzerland is such a busy little country that
it bulges out all around.




SWISS AND SWITZERLAND.


  NEUHAUSEN, SWITZERLAND, July 13, 1905.

Soon after I arrived in Switzerland I inquired at a Geneva hotel
the name of the President of the Republic of Switzerland. The hall
porter (about the same as chief clerk) could not tell me, nor could
he find out on inquiry around the office. Several times in Geneva I
asked the same question, but always in vain. One or two men thought
they knew, but they were not sure, and, as I learned afterward, they
guessed wrong. I kept at the work of finding out who was the chief
executive until I reached Lucerne. In a bookstore there my question
aroused the interest of the proprietor, who spoke good English, and he
inquired around until he found out that the President of Switzerland is
named Brenner. During the process I suppose I asked a dozen educated
Swiss, and three-fourths of them could give me promptly the name of
the President of the United States, but not the name of their own
President. Of course there is a reason for what would be fearful
ignorance in any other country. The President of Switzerland doesn’t
amount to as much as the Vice-President of the United States, and it
would stagger a good many Americans to tell who was Vice-President
before Roosevelt. Switzerland is a rather loosely bound together
confederation of cantons (states). The cantons are jealous of the
federal government, and give it very little power. Up to a few years
ago there would be tariffs in some cantons against importations from
others. The general government has the power to do the international
business, but Switzerland keeps out of European politics. It would
have little or no power as an offensive nation with its three million
of people, and so it contents itself with furnishing scenery, wine,
watches, music-boxes and good air to the inhabitants of other countries
who are able to buy. The federal government consists of a congress
composed of representatives from the cantons made up like our Senate
and House. This congress elects an executive committee of seven, and
the President of Switzerland is merely the chairman of that executive
committee. Berne is the capital of Switzerland and the congress
meets there, but it can only propose important legislation, which
is then submitted to the people, who usually defeat it. The cantons
of Switzerland have various kinds of republican government. Some
have legislatures, some councils, and in a few of the small ones,
where it is practicable, the government acts by mass meetings of the
people, with an executive or a committee to carry out the legislation.
The small area of the country and of the twenty-two cantons (they
average about the size of Reno county, but some are not bigger than a
commissioner district) makes the government a peculiar proposition.
There is no foreign immigration, no uneducated class, and no one
whose ancestors have not been self-governing for a generation. And
yet as they have remodeled their local and federal constitutions and
charters, they have come closer to the American methods all the time,
the only important difference being the initiative and referendum,
which is after all only a continuance of their ancient “land gemeinde,”
or mass meetings of the people at which measures were considered and
officers elected, the voting now being done by ballot instead of
holding up the hands.

[Illustration]

As I have written before, in some cantons the people use one language
and in some another. Likewise in some everybody is a Protestant and in
others everybody is a Catholic; very seldom both faiths in one canton.
During the Reformation and for a number of years afterward the Swiss
fought and killed each other for the love of God as fiercely as in any
other country. Switzerland and southern Germany, which borders on it,
were the fields in which the great Reformers did their best and worst
work. The Reformation in Switzerland was double-headed. One branch,
led by Calvin, was marked by what we call Puritan austerity, and had
its headquarters at Geneva. From there went John Knox to Scotland and
a host of eminent preachers to England and other countries, forming
what is now called the Presbyterian Church. Zwingli, at Zurich, was
a milder, gentler teacher, and his kind of Protestantism grew most
in Switzerland. Luther, only a little way off, had still another
kind of Protestantism, and each of the three differed considerably
in confession of faith, Calvin standing on the principle of
predestination, Luther holding to transubstantiation, or the doctrine
of the actual presence of the body of our Saviour in communion, Zwingli
insisting that communion was only symbolic. Mutual friends brought
Zwingli and Luther together, and when they could not agree, Zwingli
held out his hand in parting and Luther would not even shake hands.
Zwingli was killed in a battle in a religious war with the Catholics,
but his creed really became the dominant one in Swiss Protestantism.
Calvin had Servetus burned to death because he denied the trinity.

So you see in the good old days in Switzerland there was a hard time
for the plain and honest person trying to do what was right. Those
times are past now, and Protestant and Catholic cantons get along
peaceably; but there is still friction. Each canton in Switzerland
looks after its educational matters and there are good schools
everywhere. In nearly every city is a big university. I suppose that
in proportion to population there are more university graduates in
Switzerland than in any other country on earth. In America the young
men and women too often cut short their education in order to get into
business. In Switzerland, there are no such alluring opportunities,
and the students stay till graduation. A young Swiss will go through
the university and then go to work at the trade of his father. In
America the young man would want to “do better” and really does worse
by becoming a lawyer or an editor. Even good things have their bad
features, and American colleges make mighty poor professional men out
of material which was intended for good mechanics and farmers.

We spent a couple of days in Zurich, the largest city of Switzerland.
Its special industry is silk-making, and the silk and embroidery stores
are beautiful. The main business street of Zurich has two rows of trees
like First avenue in Hutchinson, and the result is a delightful change
from the usual hot, bare main street of a city. And that reminds me
that it is a law in Switzerland or in the forest cantons that no one
can cut down a tree except by official permission, and then another
must be planted to take its place.

In the agricultural and pastoral parts of Switzerland a great deal of
land is held “in common,” that is government land, under the control of
the canton, not for sale at any price, but for the use of the people of
the community under strict regulations. So a Swiss peasant will have a
few acres of land of his own, a few cattle, and a right as a citizen to
pasture on the common ground and a share of the profits of the forest.
Immigration is not invited, although tourists with money are welcomed,
for the more people the less the share of each in the common fund.
There can hardly be any poverty in Switzerland, except, of course, in
the cities. Every Swiss peasant can make a living if he will work.
But neither can he be expected to get rich nor be a bigger man than
his father. He must follow the beaten path marked out by centuries of
custom and more firmly established than the unwritten constitution of
the country.

[Illustration]

I am getting more and more impressed with the fallacy of “cheapness”
in Europe. Comparing prices with those of Hutchinson, I find that the
things which are cheaper here are silks, kid gloves, diamonds, and
the products of labor like embroidery, lace, clocks, wood carvings,
tailor-made clothes and straw hats (poorly made). Cotton goods, linen
goods, shoes, iron and steel, bread and meat, coffee, and most of what
we call necessities of life, are higher in Europe than in America.
It is the people who are cheap and not the things; and when I say
“cheap” I do not mean lacking in energy, ability, or industry, but in
opportunity to make more than a living, to have leisure or the common
luxuries and often necessities.

[Illustration]

This is the last night in Switzerland. To-morrow we cross the line
to Constance, which is in Germany, and which is spelled Konstanz and
abbreviated “Kaz.,” which makes it near to “Kas.” Neuhausen is the
place where the Rhine makes its big leap down the rocks, a fall of
sixty feet, and on account of the volume of water the grandest in
Europe. It is the Niagara Falls of the Alpine country, but it is not
in the same class with Niagara Falls, U. S. A. The Rhine is about as
wide as the Kaw at Topeka, but much deeper, and the falls are about
four times the height of Bowersock’s dam at Lawrence. A beautiful hotel
faces the roaring torrent as it precipitates itself over the rocks amid
clouds of spray. The prices at the hotel are higher than the falls. I
can only call to mind one place where you feel that you are being more
genteelly robbed with your own consent, and that is at Niagara Falls,
New York. But our Niagara Falls are higher to correspond.




GERMANY.




IN THE BLACK FOREST.


  TRIBERG, GERMANY, July 17, 1905.

This is a small town in the middle of the Black Forest. I had read a
good deal of the Black Forest, but really had no idea what it was. The
name sounded as if it might be a part of Arkansas or Louisiana, and I
think I was looking for swamps and waste land covered with underbrush
and impenetrable to travelers except on made roads. But as a matter of
fact it is as delightful and beautiful a country as I have seen since I
left Kansas. The land is mountainous, but it is fertile and the valleys
and hillsides are dotted with thrifty-looking little farms. The name
applies, all right, for the mountains are covered with dense forests
of spruce trees with a dark-green foliage which looks really black.
The farming land has evidently been cleared in the centuries that have
passed since the roving Germans settled into peaceful peasants and
quit their occupation of making Rome howl by raiding and pillaging the
towns of the declining empire. The Black Forest covers a great part
of southwest Germany, mostly in the state or grand duchy of Baden. Up
to a short time ago it had a number of practically independent little
kingdoms about the size of your hat, which were in a perpetual struggle
for existence and recognition. Anthony Hope used the Black Forest
as the scene for his Zenda stories, and to-day we came through the
principality of Fürstenberg, one of his favorite places, in which the
prince of Fürstenberg still holds an honorary position but under the
actual government of Emperor William. I also noticed that the prince
was proprietor of a big brewery.

It is harvest-time in the Black Forest, and men and women are gathering
the crops, small grain and hay, using the hand-sickle and the hand-rake
but doing their work in a thorough manner. When they get through the
raking I don’t suppose there is a waste straw left lying on the ground
or a kernel of grain which is not carefully picked up. The farmer in
Europe would get rich on what an American farmer drops on the way from
the field to the barn. They have fine horses and cattle in the Black
Forest, and look prosperous. When one horse is used in a wagon he is
harnessed alongside the pole and not between shafts. I was told the
reason was that it was to make it easy to add another horse if desired
without changing the pole. That was nearly as strange as the one horse
alongside the pole.

[Illustration]

The time is past when the sight of ladies working in the field excites
any interest, although I still have a little feeling when the woman is
sixty or seventy years old. It is not so bad in Germany, and especially
in the Black Forest, where the air is light and exhilarating; and
then the men work too. In Italy the hauling was done by animals as
follows: Horses, oxen, cows, dogs, women. Sometimes a woman and a
dog were hitched together to small wagons, especially milk carts. In
Switzerland the dogs were still in harness, but the women were out
of it. And in the Black Forest I believe the dogs are freed, as all
the vehicles I have seen have been drawn by horses or oxen. Perhaps
it will be different later. I write now only of the Black Forest. We
drove for twelve miles down one of the valleys and through the little
villages. A number of the old peasant costumes were worn by women and
girls, although most of them were dressed in the same styles as in
Paris or Hutchinson. A very striking head-dress for the feminine is one
of the Black Forest styles, a bonnet with two large wings extending
upward at an angle of about 40 degrees from the head, and with flowing
bands several feet long down the back. Girls and unmarried women have
bright-colored wings and bands, married women must wear black. By the
way, the women of continental Europe wherever we have been have worn
earrings,—France, Italy, and Switzerland. As American women generally
discarded these disfiguring ornaments several years ago, the sight has
been a strange one. Especially in Italy are the earrings large and
imposing, rich and poor vieing with each other in size of the pendants
and rings.

[Illustration]

Aside from agriculture the main industry of the Black Forest is
wood-carving and clock-making. There are some small factories, but as
a rule the work is done at home; and it is very good. We visited one
of these home shops, and the whole family showed us their handiwork.
A beautifully carved wooden hall clock with a cuckoo and a music-box
which played every half-hour was only $4 American money. It must
have taken the man a week to make it, and in our country the price
would have been several times as large. There is a big tariff on this
ware going into America, and it is all right. If it were not so, our
American wood-workers would have to learn another trade or work for $4
or $5 a week. And if they got only $4 or $5 a week they would not eat
much meat, buy much clothing, or pay for many newspapers. See?

The people of the Black Forest are a charming, friendly lot. I suppose
they are as happy as anybody, although one of them was very proud of a
brother who had gone to America and was making “much geld,” and whom
he would follow if he could. All through Europe I meet people who have
relatives in America, and that may account for the friendly treatment
I have everywhere received. These American relatives have all gotten
“rich” according to their European relatives, which shows that the
immigrants to our country all succeed or keep a stiff upper lip when
they write to the folks in the fatherland.

[Illustration]

The architecture of the Black Forest houses is as striking as any I
have seen. Nearly every farmhouse is very large, at least three stories
high, and on one or more sides the roof “gambrels” off from the high
ridge nearly to the ground. The effect is like a tent-covering, and
the roof is often thatched or tiled in two or three colors,—on some
the green grass is growing. Part of the house is the barn. The winter
here is said to be severe, and the Forest peasant evidently believes
in having his family and his horses, cows and chickens where they
can be comfortable and sociable. The houses are extra clean, and the
furniture, dishes and utensils of the kitchen shine with the good
polishing they must receive. The little farms are tilled to the limit,
and are generally irrigated and always fertilized. Just to show how
these people manage to get a living out of the ground and the care they
use to get it all, I saw women and men on the roadside with baskets
cleaning the road of manure and carrying it to their land.

[Illustration]

We have had to learn a new money system in Germany. France, Italy,
Switzerland and Belgium have what is called a “Latin league,”
with interchangeable currency, the unit being the franc (France,
Switzerland, and Belgium), and the lire (Italy). But Germany joins
no Latin leagues. The unit of the German currency is the “mark,”
equivalent to twenty-five cents American. This is divided into
one hundred pfennigs. Prices are carried out to the pfennig, and
one-pfennig coins (in value one-fourth of one cent) are seen more
than our one-cent pieces at home. That illustrates the close, exact,
economical German spirit. The first time I made a small purchase in
Germany I got a pocketful of change. Mrs. Morgan wanted a little money,
and I gave her a couple of handfuls. She said she didn’t want so much,
as she only intended to buy inexpensive things. I had actually given
her about fifty cents. When one hundred copper coins make twenty-five
cents and they are used in most transactions, you can realize what a
heavy load you carry and how you can get that wealthy feeling without
much actual expense.

[Illustration]

Soon after leaving Constance our road turned away from the Rhine, and
going through a tunnel we were in the valley of the Danube. It startled
me a little, as I had always connected the Danube with Austria and
Turkey. But sure enough, we were riding along the banks of the Danube,
which has been made famous by history, poetry and music. If a raindrop
fell on one side of that hill it would go down to the Rhine to the
Baltic, and if the wind blew it over to the other side before it struck
the earth it would start eastward and journey down the Danube to the
Black sea. Rivers are like human beings,—they get their directions
from the place where they start and go onward along the road of least
resistance to the place appointed, unless dammed or taken up by man
or God, in which case they will struggle and work to seep back to the
channel in which it was intended they should make their course.

By the way, the “Beautiful Blue Danube” is not blue at all in this part
of its career, but almost black, seemingly taking its hue from the
forests in which it has its origin.

[Illustration]

The town of Triberg is a quaint little place near the top of the
mountain, and apparently about one hundred miles from Nowhere. I have
had my first experience with what I understand is not infrequent in
old German towns. There is a tax on strangers, thirty pfennigs a day
or one mark a week, and our hotel has to pay and charge in our bill.
Ministers of the gospel, and paupers, are exempt. In America if they
had a fool tax like that they would also exempt newspaper men. The
only way I could get out of paying the tax was to make affidavit that
I was a minister or a pauper, so I reluctantly gave up the offer to
dodge taxation and the town of Triberg is fifteen cents to the good on
account of our stay. However, there is a very fine waterfall, and we
looked fifteen cents’ worth at that and called it even.

STORIES OF STRASSBURG.


  STRASSBURG, GERMANY, July 18, 1905.

To use the American vernacular, Strassburg is a good town. It has
the best-looking stores, the most energetic acting people and the
most thriving appearance of any city since we left Paris. The reason
for this is probably the mingling of the German and the French and
the location of the city as the metropolis of a very rich territory
lying in both countries. Strassburg is a German city in which the
people are at heart French. Thirty years ago the treaty which ended
the Franco-German war gave Strassburg and two of the rich provinces
of eastern France, Alsace and Lorraine, to the German empire. But
it did not give the German emperor a warranty deed to the hearts of
the people, and they long for their old associations. Probably the
new generation is not so much disposed to France, and the influence
of education and environment will gradually change the desire of the
Alsatians to be sometime reunited with their old countrymen, but time
and again to-day in talking with the Strassburgers they have given me
to understand that they were not Germans but French.

Strassburg has a history as a city on its own account. Away back in
1300 the people revolted from the rule of the bishop who was their
sovereign, and gained their independence. For 400 years Strassburg
was what is known as a “free city,” owing some allegiance to the
German empire but governing itself and doing about as it pleased. The
language, the customs and the sympathy of the people were German. In
1681 Louis XIV. of France in a time of peace seized Strassburg, and a
few years later in a general treaty France was confirmed in the title,
and from that time until 1871 it was a French city. During the war
of 1870 Strassburg did not surrender to the overwhelming German army
until its defenses were battered down and the city bombarded. And as I
wrote from Paris, in the galaxy of statues representing the cities of
France in the Parisian Place de la Concorde, the statue of Strassburg
is hung with emblems of mourning, and some day France will fight to
get the city back. Germany knows this, and the city has been strongly
fortified and a garrison of 15,000 German soldiers is kept there. So
many soldiers in a city of 150,000 people give a showy look to the
streets, the promenades and the public places, and doubtless is a good
thing financially for the merchants.

[Illustration]

Since leaving Italy I have sworn off on cathedrals, but I had to go to
the one here because it is a good one and because of the Strassburg
clock. The spire of the Strassburg cathedral is one of the highest
in Europe, 465 feet, beating by a few feet St. Peter’s at Rome and
St. Paul’s in London. The rest of the building is just the ordinary
cathedral except for the clock. The first big clock was constructed
here in 1352 and it lasted two centuries, when another took its place,
to be succeeded sixty years ago by the present one. This clock is about
the size of the front of an ordinary church. It not only tells the hour
and minute of the day, but the day of the week, the month of the year,
the feast days of the church, and is regulated to run for centuries,
automatically making the right figures for leap years and adapting
itself to the revolution of feast and fast days for an almost unlimited
number of years. Every fifteen minutes an angel figure strikes the bell
for the quarter-hour, and figures representing boyhood, youth, manhood
and old age come out for the appropriate quarters. A skeleton strikes
the hour and another reverses an hour-glass. At noon there is a parade
of the twelve apostles before the Saviour, and a big rooster at one
side crows loudly twice before Peter gets to the front and the third
time as he passes. I am getting a great sympathy for Peter because he
has that story thrown up to him in so many cathedrals, churches and
pictures in Europe. It seems to me that Peter did enough after that to
entitle him to a rest on the cock-crow story.

[Illustration]

Next to the cathedral clock the most interesting sight to my mind was
the washerwomen’s boats in the river. About 500 women were in these
canal-shaped boats washing clothes, rinsing them in the river and
having a good gossiping time of it. The emperor of Germany has a
palace in Strassburg where he spends at least three days every year
in the month of May. I did not know this, so when I saw the imperial
palace on the city map I told the driver to take us there. I had never
met Emperor William and he had never met me. I entered the palace door
as directed by the cab-driver and was pleasantly received by a fine,
portly gentleman. Of course I knew he wasn’t the emperor, so I spoke in
a dignified way as becomes an American citizen toying with the effete
monarchies of Europe, and asked the gentleman in my best German if the
emperor was at home, at the same time assuring him that if the emperor
was busy not to bother him, as I could come again after supper when
he would be through his work. The fat gentleman bowed and told me the
emperor was here only in May, and asked me if we would like to go over
the palace. I spoke up abruptly, as if I were used to running around
palaces; that as I had nothing else to do just then, having laid out to
put in a short time with Emperor Bill, I wouldn’t mind if I did. He was
a very nice man, a court chamberlain, he said, and he took Mrs. Morgan
and me all through the palace and the big dining-room and ball-room and
the king’s den, and all that sort of thing. Before we went onto the
polished floors of the big rooms we had to put felt slippers on over
our shoes—a good thing to keep the floors from getting scratched, and
I suppose it is a kind of ground rule that Mrs. Emperor has made to
protect the varnish from the hobnailed boots of William’s friends. I
hope the custom won’t spread to America.

The German emperor has a mighty good house in Strassburg, and it has
been furnished regardless of expense. There was a notice up, “Visitors
not allowed to sit on the chairs,” but I wasn’t very tired anyway. I
looked for a sign not to spit on the floor to go with some of the other
wall decoration, but it must have been overlooked. The house looked
stiff, and I don’t believe Bill has much fun at home and probably his
wife makes him go out on the porch to smoke. I was sorry not to meet
the emperor, as we will not get to Berlin, and I had some things to
tell him. However, I feel that I have done the proper thing by calling
on him and not waiting for him to hunt me up.

[Illustration]

There is not so much American-made stuff in Europe as I expected.
There is a good deal, but in fact these Germans and French are up to
about everything that we are, and sometimes they have us bested. The
Singer sewing-machine is everywhere, even in Italy. American shoes are
the leaders in their lines in every city. American typewriters are
sold ahead of European. Wernicke bookcases and office furniture are
advertised and sold almost as at home. But the list of American goods
is not very long, or else they are sold under other names and brands.
To-day we bought a good picture of a typical German girl to take home
with us as our art collection from Europe. Before we had gone a block
Mrs. Morgan found the tag which proclaimed, “Made in Springfield,
Massachusetts, U. S. A.” We were chagrined that our European purchase
had turned out to be an American importation, sold to us at a higher
price than it would have been at home, but we were proud that here in
Germany they knew the country to send to in order to get good pictures
of fetching Dutch maidens. At Zurich I started to buy a little office
fixture which I thought I had never seen before and which I intended to
take home to surprise the Kansans, when I found out just in time that
it was made by the Globe-Wernicke company of Cincinnati, and I knew we
had the same thing for sale at The News office in Hutchinson. Hereafter
in buying souvenirs of Europe we will look close for the brand.

[Illustration]

This is the place where the “pâté de fois gras” originated. I do not
know how many people in Kansas know what pâté de fois gras is and
whether it is a flower or a dog. I had once seen the words on a bill
of fare in a very swell restaurant, but the figures which followed the
name were so much larger than those after ham and eggs that I stuck
to “ham and.” But when in Rome you must see the Forum, in Venice you
must see St. Mark’s, and in Strassburg you must have some pâté de
fois gras. The food combination which the four French words stand for
is based on goose-liver, and corresponds to about what we would call
“goose-liver smothered in roses.” It is very good, and you never forget
the delicious taste or the price. Strassburg chefs make the stuff, can
it and ship it all over the world to people who like delicate things
to eat and who have sufficient credit to get a good stand-off. Pâté de
fois gras is sweeter than chocolate, more luscious than peaches and
more delicious than lemon pop at a Fourth of July picnic. It is a proof
that Strassburgers have French stomachs as well as French hearts.

[Illustration]

Speaking of eatables, we had the first loaf of bread in Switzerland
that we had seen since we left home. After nearly two months on hard,
stale rolls the sight of a reasonably good loaf of bread at Geneva
made as strong an impression on my mind as Mont Blanc. Anybody who has
traveled in Europe or in Arkansas will appreciate the feelings of a
Kansan when he puts a slice of fairly soft bread between his teeth.
It is better than pâté de fois gras, and it is almost exclusively an
American institution.




IN OLD HEIDELBERG.


  HEIDELBERG, GERMANY, July 22, 1905.

This is the old and famous university town of Germany. It is about two
miles long and 200 yards wide, lying between the river Neckar and the
steep hills which rise 500 feet high and which can only be ascended by
terraced roads or a modern tunnel railway. The town is of comparatively
recent origin, being really started only 850 years ago, when a Rhenish
count who wanted to build a strong and impregnable fortress selected
a spot 400 feet straight up the hill from the river and built the
old castle of Heidelberg. Being thus the capital of a little German
state, the Palatinate of the Rhine, it was an important place during
the Middle Ages, and was fought over every few years for several
centuries. In the fourteenth century the ruling count, whose title
was Elector, developed a literary streak and founded the university,
which became the center of learning and scientific study in Germany,
and has continued so until the present day, although some of the newer
universities like Berlin and Leipsig are now larger. The valley of the
Neckar joins the valley of the Rhine here and makes a fertile territory
and a prosperous city, but the university and the students are the main
features of modern Heidelberg, now that counts, electors and castles
are ruins or relics. There are many students in Heidelberg from
America and other countries, but it is the rollicking German “yunkers”
who make the life of the place.

German universities differ somewhat from American universities in the
character and method of work. There are no recitations—only lectures
and examinations. A student does not have to attend either. He can
attend Heidelberg year in and year out and devote himself exclusively
to the beer-garden and the dueling-ground. Or he can work hard, receive
the ablest instruction and the highest degrees. The discipline of
the common schools in Germany is severe—military in its character.
But at the university the young man or young woman (for women now
attend lectures at Heidelberg) can do as they please and go to Hades
if they desire. The university buildings are plain and ordinary. The
picturesque feature is the students, especially the young men who
belong to the various “corps.” Less than 10 per cent. of the students
are members of these societies, but they color the town, for each corps
has a distinctive cap,—red, yellow, white, etc. These organizations
are the social life of the university, and at all hours of the day
or night they are in evidence, parading with their caps and canes,
occupying the beer-gardens and the promenade, jollying the girl waiters
and having what is called in America a High Old Time.

[Illustration]

Everybody has heard of the duel or sword-fighting. It is as much an
institution at Heidelberg as football is at Princeton or K. U. Not many
students take part in it, only members of the six corps, but it is
the show feature of student life. Each corps has about twenty members.
Each member has to fight at least one duel a term with a member of some
other corps. This morning we went to the dueling-place just outside of
the city and saw the game.

One gets a great deal of misinformation about this student dueling,
but as near as I can find out it is done in a genteel and cold-blooded
manner. When it is the turn of one of the corps members to fight he
makes a face or refuses to salute a member of another corps. That
constitutes cause for the duel, and the preliminaries are then arranged
by the officers of the respective corps according to the rules and
regulations that have come down through generations. The fighting is
done in an inner court of a wine-garden. This morning there were ten
duels on the program, and when we arrived the third was in progress.
A young man of the bright-red-cap corps was trying to slice the face
of a member of the dark-red-cap corps. Each was covered with felt
armor, which protected all of his body, and also had goggles and
nose-pad, a little bit more so than a football player. The seconds,
very similarly attired, stood by the side of the principals and struck
up the swords at the end of each round or when the blood came. The
only unprotected places were the head and face, and the game was to
slash the opponent there, not to stick him. Thrusting is evidently
against the rules. A surgeon with an apron like a butcher attended to
the cuts and the members of both corps stood quietly and calmly by,
giving vent to no expression of feeling whatever. The officers of
each corps saluted, the word was given, the two swords clashed away
for a minute, and each fellow had a nice long cut on his cheek. When
the round was over the seconds sponged the cuts. There is no specified
number of rounds, but whenever the two seconds are satisfied that one
man is cut enough the other is declared the victor and they salute
and retire to get court-plastered or sewed up as is necessary. We saw
four duels and got tired of the fun. In the last fought one of the men
was apparently an experienced swordsman and his opponent apparently a
beginner. (I understand that in order to show his courage a new man
always challenges an expert.) After four rounds the face of the weaker
swordsman was streaming with blood from a half-dozen cuts. I suppose he
looked upon his defeat as a real victory because he showed the fellows
that he could stand up and take punishment and never wince. Some people
have curious ideas of greatness.

They tell me no one is ever killed in these duels, but every member of
every corps would be considered disfigured for life in America. Every
one of them has long sears on his face and head. The restaurant where
we eat is a favorite resort for the corps and we see much of them. It
looks like a shame that every one of those bright young men will have
to go through life with a face like a war map of Manchuria. But they
wouldn’t trade those sears for love nor money. (I am told they are
good for love.) They are the badges of bravery and ability, and are as
highly prized as the bronze button of the Grand Army man. As I have
remarked, some ambitions are very funny, and if the German students
want to be hand-carved in this manner there is no use of a football-,
prize-fight-loving nation making any kick.

[Illustration: THE GERMAN WAY.]

[Illustration]

Heidelberg is a “wet” town. I suppose half the places on the main
street are beer-gardens and some of the others are wine-rooms.
Everybody in Germany drinks beer and wine. There is this difference
between France and Germany: In France the men do most of the drinking
as they sit in the sidewalk cafés watching the women go by. In Germany
the man brings his wife and children and they all sit around the table
in the garden or restaurants and drink beer. They do not seem to get
intoxicated. I haven’t seen anyone drunk, although they drink by the
wholesale. Beer is high in Heidelberg, up to 2½ cents a quart, but
out in the suburbs it is cheaper. I think beer-drinking makes the
Germans have bad forms, for men and women get round and fat. But in
Germany these forms are considered beautiful, so the sylph-like and the
slender are looked down upon. It is an illustration of the fact that it
is a good thing we don’t all think alike about such things as personal
beauty, or some of us would have to always be away back sitting down.

[Illustration]

I have been in Germany a week, and I have not seen a half-dozen men
smoking pipes. I thought Germans were great pipe-smokers, but they
are not in this part. The Heidelberg pipes are mostly made to sell to
Americans and English. The Germans smoke a little the worst cigars I
have ever met. They are cheap in price and the Germans consume them in
large quantities. The kind the high-class Germans use closely resembles
a brand known in our country as “The Pride of the Sewer,” and sells at
about two for 5 cents. An American who is accustomed at home to buying
“a good nickel cigar” can’t find anything that good in Germany, unless
it may be in the big hotels where they cater to American and English
trade. I had always had Germans pictured to me as big fat men with long
pipes in their mouths, sitting around tables on which were large steins
of beer. The beer is here all right, but the men are as bright and
energetic as Americans, and they smoke cigars and not pipes.

Another dream gone up in smoke.

[Illustration]

It is a great country for castles and “legends.” I think the average
yield of legends per acre is larger in Germany than in any other
country on earth, especially in the Black Forest and on the Rhine. That
is one thing our country is short of—legends. Aside from a few old
Indian stories, a tale of woe about the grasshoppers and reminiscences
of the Populists, we haven’t anything that approaches the legends which
hang on almost every tree in the Black Forest and stick out of every
castle-window. And yet Kansas could raise legends as well as Germany,
for a legend is nothing but a lie told so often that nobody knows
where it started; and Kansas has her share of liars. Here is a sample
“legend” from the old castle of Heidelberg which we visited to-day:


A HEIDELBERG LEGEND.

The count of Heidelberg had a beautiful daughter. (They all do—in
legends.) Her reputation for beauty went all over Germany and reached
the shores of Great Britain. The king of England saw the photograph
of the fair lady dressed in her bicycle suit, and instantly fell in
love with her. But he did not want the German beauty to marry him for
his money and title, so he disguised himself as a cook, got a job in
Heidelberg castle and made eyes at the princess. It was a case of
two-hearts-that-beat-as-one, and the princess soon began to make dates
and meet the supposed cook back of the castle and down on the Neckar.
He revealed his real identity to her, but made her promise not to tell.
He then went to the old man and asked him for the hand of his daughter.
The count laughed at the cook, which made the latter mad and so he
blurted out that the maiden loved him. Then the cook skipped out and
the count sent for his daughter. She confessed to being in love with
the cook, but on account of her promise did not tell his right name.
The old count got into an awful rage and ordered his daughter whipped,
and the lash was applied so well that the princess died. Before she
passed away she told her father who the cook really was, and the count
of Heidelberg was truly sorry; but that did no good. A few days later
the king of England with an imposing suite arrived to ask the hand of
the princess, and when he found out what had happened he took the old
man out behind the barn and sliced him up in fine pieces.

There is a song which tells all about this affair, and the music is
about as good as the legend.

WORMS AND OTHER THINGS.


  WORMS, GERMANY, July 23, 1905.

People do not laugh in Germany when you pronounce the name of this
town properly. Say the word as if it were spelled Vorms and give the o
the long sound, and you will admit that it is better than the way you
used to say it. For many years I have heard of Luther and the Diet of
Worms, and being at Heidelberg, only a few miles away, we came here to
see Worms, the “Diet,” and to spend Sunday. Four hundred years ago this
was quite a town, one of the free cities of the Rhine owing allegiance
only to the emperor. It was here that in 1524 Charles V., emperor of
Germany, summoned Luther to appear before a congress of princes and
imperial electors, and wanted him to fix up a compromise. The emperor
of Germany was in a ticklish position. About half of his subjects were
loyal to the pope and about half had bolted with Luther. The princes
and dukes were divided, and were fighting each other to prove that they
were right. The German empire was demoralized with internal dissension
and feuds. So Charles thought it would be a smooth thing to get Luther
before the august assemblage, induce him to concede some and get the
Catholics to concede some, and have a sort of “Missouri compromise.”
Luther went to Worms, although he was warned not to do so. As a matter
of fact, Luther did not want to separate from the Catholic Church, and
his claim was that he wanted to reform it. But after the controversy
had continued a few years he kept getting further away, and Charles
had made his move too late. Luther laid down certain doctrines which
he knew the loyal Catholics could not agree to, and then announced
that he took his stand upon them and would not move. The result of the
emperor’s effort at peace-making was that each side was a little more
infuriated than before, and the war went on.

[Illustration]

A hundred years ago Worms had gone down to be a town of only 5,000
inhabitants, but now it has about 40,000 and is a thriving little
city. But in spite of the growth and progress in the last century
there is still a general air of quaintness and age which makes it
very interesting because it is so different. A magnificent monument
to Luther is the show feature of the place. On a massive platform ten
feet high is the figure of the great reformer, over nine feet high,
surrounded by statues of Huss, Savonarola, Wyckliffe and Waldus,
and of princes who befriended Luther. A number of German cities are
represented by allegorical figures or coats of arms, and the entire
group makes an impressive monument and memorial. The palace where
Luther met the emperor and princes has been destroyed, but another
takes its place and with a right good imagination the tourist can stand
where Luther stood, any day between the hours of 11 and 5 o’clock.
Strange to say, the town to which Catholics and Protestants came is
now controlled by the Jews, who dominate the business interests of
Worms as they do those of many other German cities. Worms is on the
Rhine river, and the valley of the Rhine is the garden-spot of Germany.
Coming over the fertile fields of the Rhine valley is a good deal
like riding in the Arkansas valley between Nickerson and Haven, with
its rich farms, great orchards and prosperous communities. But in
the hundred miles I have traveled along the Rhine I have not seen a
reaper or a mower, a sulky rake or any other kind of machinery except
a hand-sickle and a hand-rake. I think there are more women at work in
the fields than there are men. Perhaps the men are off in the army.
Perhaps they are in town drinking beer and talking politics.

[Illustration]

Coming from Heidelberg to Worms we had to change trains twice in an
hour’s time. Changing trains is no easy job in a foreign country. At
Manheim, where the station is as large and as busy as the Union Depot
in Kansas City, our incoming train was late and when we arrived our
outgoing train was due to leave. With the assistance of a porter I was
handling a half-dozen grips and bundles when Mrs. Morgan discovered our
train at the other side of the depot. She promptly started across the
tracks just as she would at home. I thought there was a revolution or a
fire, as a dozen train porters, as many policemen, the station-master
and a lot of assistants set up a yell that fairly made the air tremble.
The station-master rushed after her, caught up and brought her back,
with at least ten men talking vociferously and gesticulating in German.
The fact was she had broken the law of the empire. It is not merely
violating a railroad rule to cross the track, but it is against the
criminal law and punishable by a jail sentence. Of course they didn’t
do anything to Americans, but if a German should cross the tracks
where it was forbidden they wouldn’t do a thing to him! They actually
held that train five minutes after time while we made a circuit of the
station to the other side, when we could have sensibly and reasonably
have been allowed to cross the track in a half-minute.

[Illustration]

Speaking of railroads and the management makes me think of the
conductors. I have ridden first-class, second-class and third-class in
Germany. When the conductor enters the first-class carriage to see the
tickets, he takes off his cap and says in German: “If you please, will
you me your tickets show?” When he comes into the second-class carriage
he says: “Tickets, if you please,” and when you hand them over he gives
them back with a military salute, but keeps his cap on. When he comes
into the third-class carriage he simply says: “Tickets!”

When the train starts out of the station the station-master (dressed in
a gorgeous uniform) stands on the platform at a salute until the last
car passes him. This is a very pretty custom, and I think the station
agents at Hutchinson ought to be required to put on their uniforms and
salute the trains.

The almost universal custom in Germany is to eat out-of-doors in the
summer-time. The hotels have spacious porches or gardens, and there we
eat breakfast, dinner, and supper. (They have dinner at noon and supper
in the evening in Germany.) There are no flies, and there seems to be
but little wind, so you can eat comfortably in the open air and not
swallow too much that is not on the bill of fare. It is a sensible and
delightful custom. After the evening meal at the hotels or restaurants
everybody stays at the table for an hour or so, and there is music by
the orchestra or band. The only good feature I can see to the German
army is that it provides nearly every city with a fine band which gives
concerts frequently. The cities and towns usually support bands, and
most of them own theatres and opera-houses. I think we have attended a
band concert every evening since we entered Germany, and we could go in
the afternoon if we had time.

By the way, right here in Worms, in the part of the city that looks
about as it did in Luther’s time, we were wandering down a narrow
street when we were stopped by familiar music, the popular two-step,
“Whistling Rufus.” The German bands play a great deal of American
music, mostly Sousa’s marches or our “ragtime,” and it always gets
an encore. At Heidelberg the military band played “Hiawatha.” For
two years it has been almost against the law in the United States to
play “Hiawatha.” But the Germans liked it. I don’t think the German
bands play ragtime properly. They go at it seriously, as they do
the selections from Wagner and such like which make up most of the
program. They add a good deal of noise and they do not get the “swing”
that is given by American musicians.

I have discovered in Germany that Wagner and his kind of composers
wrote a lot of good music that never gets across the water, the kind
that has tune to it,—not so much tune as Sousa’s pieces, but a good
deal more than is ever rendered in the United States. And I suppose
the German bands understand Wagnerian music better than the American
bands, just as Sousa can direct a better two-step or march than a
German conductor. A German municipal band or military band, such
as plays every night in one of the public parks in every city, is
as good a band as Sousa or Innes ever took on the road. I am not a
musical critic, I am thankful to say. I like music whether it is good,
bad, or indifferent. I like grand opera some and light opera a great
deal. I enjoy a fine band or a poor one, a selection from Chopin or
a street piano. I will follow a band, a drum corps or a bagpipe all
over town. I am even fond of the “Blue Bells of Scotland.” Probably my
recommendations will not be accepted by all the musical experts at home
after these admissions, but I can’t keep from saying that German band
music is the best in this world to which I have been introduced.

[Illustration]

I have written of the growing use of the English-American language
on the continent of Europe. Here at Worms we are stopping at a very
Dutch hotel. When the waiter came for the first time I went to work in
German. The construction of a supper bill of fare in German is not
easy for me, but I tackled the job bravely. I know enough German to
order meat and potatoes, but my pronunciation is ragged on the edges
and my verbs are not hitched right and the genders of the nouns are
only likely to be right one guess in three. After I had floundered
along for about three minutes the waiter gravely and politely
interrupted: “Won’t you please give me the order in English?” RICH OLD
FRANKFORT.


  FRANKFORT, GERMANY, July 24, 1905.

This is one of the old and wealthy cities of Germany, with 300,000
people and a fine country around about. It is the place the Rothschilds
came from. A few years ago when the Populists were pretty much the
whole thing in Kansas and to be against them was to be in the pay of
the Rothschilds and the Great Red Dragon, I was on the Rothschilds’
side, and never having received any compensation I thought I would call
and see what was the matter. It was no trouble to find the Rothschild
house, for it is described in every guidebook and is marked by an
inscription on the front. The morning after we reached the city we
went to formally make a call, and found the place to be an old and
unpretentious building. I rang the bell and asked the little girl who
came to the door if Mr. Rothschild was at home. She ran away and I went
on in and part way up the stairs, when a man appeared and said “fifty
pfennig.” I told him I was an old friend and merely wished to pay my
respects—pay nothing else, not even fifty pfennig. I talked English
and he talked German, but I had no difficulty in understanding that
it would cost me 12½ cents American money to go through the house.
This I declined to do, and unless the gentleman who wanted the fifty
pfennig tells Mr. Rothschild I don’t suppose he will ever know I came.
In fact, I was afterward told that none of the present members of the
Rothschild family live in Frankfort, but have their homes in Vienna,
Paris, and London, where they dictate the financial policy of the
world. Only a little over a hundred years ago the law of Frankfort was
that every night at sundown and on Sundays and feast days all Jews must
stay in their own part of town, and the gates inclosing their section
were locked until the following day. As an illustration of how rapidly
the wheel of fortune turns I was told that now, although comprising
but one-tenth of the population, the Jews handle three-fourths of the
business, own over half the real estate, and hold most of the high and
responsible positions in Frankfort, where their great grandfathers had
no more show than a rabbit.

[Illustration]

Goethe, the great German poet, was born in Frankfort, and we visited
the house of his birth and boyhood. His father was a lawyer, but the
poet could not help that. Young Goethe was a bright lad, and took to
writing poetry as readily as he did to going with the girls; and he
kept at both occupations all his life. A petty German prince took
him under his patronage and Goethe never had to work for a living,
so he went on writing poetry and having a good time until he died
at the age of 83 years. The Germans love Goethe as the Americans do
Longfellow, for he was a poet who loved his country, his countrymen
and his country-women, and his works are full of sweet and patriotic
sentiment as well as being beautiful in construction. Goethe and his
friend Schiller and the literary crowd which followed their lead, made
the German language classical and correct, and occupy the same place in
German literature that Shakespeare does in English. The “Goethe house”
here is under the charge of a historical society, and has been put in
the same shape that it was when Goethe was a boy. It is an interesting
place, for it is not only full of mementoes of the poet but of the time
in which he lived.

[Illustration]

The most interesting public buildings I have seen in Germany are here,
the “Roemer,” a name applied to a group of twelve old and picturesque
houses. In one of these the electors of the German empire (certain
hereditary princes) would assemble to elect an emperor whenever there
was a vacancy. After the election they would have a banquet and the
fountain in the public square would run with red and white wine while
the people cheered and drank the health of the new man. This was
calculated to make the emperor very popular at least that night, but
I wonder if the people were so enthusiastic when the headache came
the next morning. These old buildings are well preserved. In fact,
Frankfort is a city which takes good care of itself and is like a
prosperous man. The most beautiful public garden I have seen is here,
the Palm Garden, and a fine military band gives concerts afternoon and
evening. Frankfort is not only well off, but old enough to enjoy the
fact, and everywhere the city is made to look as handsome and be as
comfortable as possible. The best and cheapest eating in Europe is in
Frankfort, and that fact has made a deep and lasting impression on my
heart.

[Illustration]

It is doubtless repeating what has been said before, but I cannot help
wonder at the industry of the German farmers. Of course they were
raised right on the place, and their fathers and forefathers were
farmers. They probably don’t know anything else, and never expect to
sell out and move to town. In this fertile Rhine country, where there
seems to be a model climate, they irrigate the land as if it were arid
and they fertilize and drain and cultivate with the hoe and rake.
I never believed the story, but it is true. The wealth of a German
farmer can be gauged by the size of the manure-pile in his front yard.
No doubt when a German farmer brags on what he has done he does not
refer to the purchase of a quarter-section of pasture land in the next
township, but points with pride to the large and luxuriant heap of
fertilizing substance which he can call his own. Instead of farming
more land, he tries to get more out of what he has than he did, and his
attempt is a success. He does not have a herd of cattle, but he has one
or a half-dozen cows which live in the other end of the house, and are
curried, fed and looked after as carefully as members of the family,
perhaps more so. The cattle are good-looking, smooth and polished,
evidently well bred, and certainly well taken care of. They are much
better in appearance than the average of American cattle, but the care
bestowed upon them easily accounts for the fact.

Frankfort is geographically in Hesse, the old state from which George
III. hired soldiers to fight the Americans. In the good old times a
little over a hundred years ago, a German prince who was hard up for
cash would rent out his soldiers to fight and be shot at. The pay went
to the prince, not to the soldier. It is hard to believe that such
things occurred only a comparatively short time ago, and yet they did.
The Hessians did not understand American tactics and were not much of a
success in our Revolution, but they were always good fighters in German
wars, and the little state was a powerful one. Frankfort was a “free
city,” and not under the active rule of the Hessian princes. For 500
years it kept its independence of any local prince, but in 1866 it was
annexed to Prussia. The time for the independent cities of Europe was
ended.

Besides Rothschild and Goethe, Frankfort is noted for the Frankfurter
sausages. I was pleased to find that this was no legend. In Bologna,
Italy, I was surprised to find no bologna, but Frankfort stood the
test. There is also a house where it is said Luther preached a sermon
while on his way to Worms. It is a tobacco-shop now.

[Illustration]

In every German city there is an old bridge with a history. The old
bridge at Frankfort across the Main river, which is a good big river
and lined with freight boats, is mentioned in a document of 1222. It
is constructed of red sandstone, and looks as if it would easily stand
700 years more. A bridge like that is really worth more than an art
gallery. The legend connected with the bridge is not so bad. It seems
that the architect who drew the plans and supervised the construction
had made a mistake in his calculations. He came to realize that the
span would not hold weight, and he could see the ruin of the bridge
and his own reputation mighty close at hand. Of course he was in a
terrible state of mind, and when he was at his worst the Devil dropped
in to see him. The Devil offered to show him how the defect could be
remedied, the bridge built and his reputation saved, if he would sign
a contract that the first who crossed the bridge should become the
Devil’s property. The poor architect at first nobly refused, as most
men do when tempted, and then fell, as men occasionally do. He signed
the contract, the Devil pointed out the correction in the plan, and
the great bridge was successfully finished. Then the architect had
remorse (they always do afterward), and nearly went wild with thinking
of what he had done. But the day the bridge was formally finished and
turned over, before the mayor and city council could get into their
carriages after the dedicating speeches, a rooster broke loose from a
chicken-house, ran down the road, across the bridge and went to the
Devil. Of course the Devil kicked, but the architect stood on the
letter of the contract, and they all lived happy forever afterward.
This legend is undoubtedly true, for on the middle of the bridge is an
iron cross with a figure of Christ and on top of the cross is a bronze
rooster.

DOWN THE RHINE.


  COLOGNE, GERMANY, July 29, 1905.

The words “Down the Rhine” have a strong significance to everyone who
has read history, poetry, or romance. From the time when Cæsar crossed
the Rhine to punish the warlike tribes for invading Gaul, down to the
Franco-German war of 1870, every European war has been fought more
or less in the valley of the Rhine. And for 2,000 years whenever the
nations of Europe were not marching their armies to the Rhine, the
petty princes, potentates and powers of the valley were fighting one
another. The Rhine is the dividing line in Europe. Those who have read
these letters to The News will appreciate the fact that instead of
going to the large cities of Munich, Berlin and Hanover, we began with
the Rhine as it flowed out of Lake Constance and plunged over the falls
at Neuhausen, and have followed it through the Black Forest and Germany
on its way “down north” to the sea, and will finally watch it mingle
its blue into the great salt water at Rotterdam and The Hague.

The last two days we have traveled by boat from Biebrich to Cologne,
that part of the river which is called the scenic or “the castled
Rhine,” the part of which poets have sung and around which history and
fiction have woven stories and legends in every language. But the Rhine
is not only useful for the poet and the historian; it is also a plain
business proposition. I am told and I believe that the Rhine carries
more traffic than any other river in the world. It flows through a rich
agricultural country, is lined with important cities, and especially
with manufacturing places. Freight rates on the water are cheap.
Products of the farm or vineyard, the shop or mill, placed on the
boats, are carried with only one transfer to all the great markets of
the world.

[Illustration]

And now imagine the beautiful Rhine gliding among high hills, with
every few miles a handsome castle or the picturesque ruins of one, with
a busy railroad running on each bank, passenger and freight trains as
frequent as suburban trains near Chicago, and two endless processions
of steamboats, tugs and barges, one going up and one going down. That
is the Rhine of to-day. The hills and castles reminiscent of the past,
the black smoke of the furnaces and the shrill whistle of the engine
the reminders of the present. You have to shut your eyes to see either
the historic or the beautiful and keep them from “telescoping” into the
practical present. And I will admit that the boats and the boatmen,
the passengers and the freight interested me more than the dead-walls
and the ivy-covered towers. If you think it over you will realize how
castles and ruins pall upon your taste. When we began the trip we
would rush from one side of the boat to the other to see a castle and
hardly went below for lunch for fear we might miss a lofty summit or
a breasted fortress. At the close of the trip a broken-down abbey or
a roofless castle had no charms that would compare with a comfortable
seat and a cigar. I remember well one of the last and largest castles
we passed, one I had read of and looked forward to seeing. A friend
enthusiastically exclaimed: “There is the Drachenfels on the other
side!” And my coarse nature revolted, and I murmured that if the
Drachenfels wanted me to see it, the Drachenfels would have to come
around to my side of the boat. My neck was tired.

[Illustration]

Really a homeopathic dose of Rhine castles would be very interesting. A
thousand years ago some baron would build a big stone fortress high up
on a hill overlooking the Rhine, and up to the discovery of gunpowder
it was practically impregnable. The baron and his followers, according
to the rules of the game, would divide their time between rescuing
lovely maidens from giants and robbing the merchants and traders who
passed by. I never heard of a knight or baron who worked for a living.
History is filled with tales of deeds the old knights did for religion
or for some fair lady, but it is silent or passes over lightly the
fact that they made their money by robbery and murder, disguised under
the name of expeditions, crusades, knight-errantry, and war. But when
the inventive genius of man made a gun that would shoot through armor
and discovered that gunpowder could knock down forts, the days of
chivalry and highway robbery on the Rhine were over. The merchants and
artisans no longer had to hire armies to protect their property and
their families, and the rule of force was followed by the rule of
shrewdness, a change which may not have brought perfection, but has
resulted in a show of decency, fairness and honesty.

[Illustration]

A few old castles transported from the Rhine to Cow creek or the Kaw
would be helpful to the landscape of Kansas. But there would be no use
of stringing them out for a hundred miles. A castle a thousand years
old is interesting, always provided your imagination is good. The best
way to enjoy castles is to believe everything the books and guides
tell you. I am getting fascinated with the legends, although I think
I can unfasten. Now here is a choice legend of the castles of the Two
Brothers, which stand on neighboring hills and which I saw early:


THE TWO BROTHERS.

Once upon a time there were two brothers, both as valiant and noble
knights as ever wore armor or robbed a traveler. Unfortunately they
fell in love with the same girl, and as she couldn’t accept both and
had to say she would “always be a sister” to the other, the tension in
the family circle got very tight. Finally the elder brother saw that
the maiden loved the younger best, so he put his broken heart in his
pocket, gave the pair his blessing and lit out for the crusades. In
those days whenever a man lost out in love or was in danger of being
hung for crime, he went to the crusades. The younger brother was very
happy for a while, but he happened to visit another country and there
he fell in love with another girl, just as much and as eternally in
love with her as with the first one. The second girl was wise or else
she had been warned of the young man’s record, for she announced the
engagement and the marriage followed soon. Girl No. 1 went to a convent
with an aching heart, everybody settled down, and even the neighbors
quit talking. Just at that time the elder brother returned from the
crusades, and when he heard what had happened he thought it was awful.
He went to his brother’s castle and challenged him to fight a duel.
The younger brother was worked up over the interference of the family
in his private affairs and was anxious to fight. The two knights met
in a plum-patch back of the convent and prepared to settle which was
right. Just as they drew their swords the original girl, who had been
informed of what was going on by some busybody, rushed out of the gate,
threw herself between the brothers and begged them not to fight for her
sake. She made such a good talk that they shook hands and took a drink
together as a sign that it was all over. The elder brother offered to
marry the girl in the convent, but she refused. The wife of the younger
brother ran off with another chivalrous knight and the two brothers
were left alone in the world. They built the two castles side by side,
and spent all their days together hunting deer and wealthy travelers,
and died without ever flirting with another woman (so the legend says).
The ruins of the two castles side by side are evidence of the truth of
the story.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: THE LEGEND OF COW CREEK.]

“Fair Bingen on the Rhine” was somewhat of a disappointment. Thousands
and tens of thousands of American girls and boys have stood up in
front of the school on Friday afternoons, scared stiff with the awful
prospect of forgetting the next word, and told their school-mates:

    “A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers,
      There was lack of woman’s nursing,
    There was dearth of woman’s tears.”

And when the same moon shone there that shone on fair Bingen on the
Rhine, those countless American youths have breathed a sigh for the
soldier and several sighs over getting through. Bingen is a good sort
of manufacturing town, and the fact that the poet selected the name
because of its rhythm and not because it fitted the situation accounts
for the success of the poem. After some reflection on the subject among
the storied regions of Europe I have come to the conclusion that it is
the romancer and the singer who make a country great and interesting,
and not any special merit of the place itself. If Cow creek had a few
legend-writers in a few years it would rank with the Rhine, the Black
Forest, and even the fields of old England. How would this do for a Cow
creek legend, _a la_ Europe?


LEGEND OF COW CREEK.

Once upon a time there lived on the creek a wealthy old farmer who
had a beautiful daughter. The fame of her beauty spread all the way
to Sterling and down to Pretty Prairie, and many young men aspired to
the honor of her hand in marriage. Among those who loved her was a
neighbor boy who had nothing to his credit but a good name and a rare
ability to make speeches before the literary society which met every
other Friday night at the school-house. As the good name was no good
on a check, he knew the old farmer would not listen to his suit but
would likely kick him into the middle of next week if he asked him for
his daughter. So all the poor young man could do was to see her home
occasionally after church and talk about the soulfulness of love and
the communion of congenial souls. The young lady really preferred the
aforesaid young man, but as she did not want to undertake the job of
making a living for two or more, and she knew her father would never
consent to taking him to board, she could only sigh and pine and sit in
the shade of a cottonwood tree and dream of love. At last the father
told his beautiful daughter that he had selected a husband for her, a
man from Nickerson, a man who owned two sections of land and a lot of
oil stock, but who could not tell the difference between true love and
a pain in his side. That night the two young people met down by the
creek bank and she told him of the fate in store for her unless he got
a move on himself. Their plan was formed. That night the lover braced
himself with a good “bracer” and met the maiden behind the barn. Away
they went toward the county seat with high hopes and enough cash to
purchase a marriage license. Suddenly they heard the gentle murmur of
the father, who had discovered the elopers and was telling the people
for miles around what he would do to the son of a gun who was running
off with his daughter. It was a race for love and for life, but the old
man was getting the best of it and the lovers could hear him as he was
overtaking them. They came to the creek, which was on its annual flood,
and then they gave themselves up for lost. But the young man happened
to look around and saw an old cow. An idea came into his head. He drove
the cow into the creek and each of them grabbed her tail. She swam
straight to the other side while the old man stood on the bank cursing
a blue streak. Away they went to town and were married by the probate
judge before the flood went down and the old man could get across.

There was nothing for the father to do but to give them his blessing
and eighty acres of sand-hill land, on which they lived happily ever
afterward. The stream which thus saved the lives and loves of those two
young people has been called Cow creek ever since.

[Illustration]

If the people of Kansas will take a few stories like the above, have
them trimmed up and embellished, tell them to visitors and charge
admission to see the relics, they will have as good a collection of
legends as ever grew on the Rhine.

COLOGNE WATER AND OTHERS.


  COLOGNE, GERMANY, July 29, 1905.

This is the place the eau de cologne habit started. There are over
forty manufacturers who advertise themselves as “the original house”
that first made this perfumed water. A few miles below here on the
Rhine is the Apollinaris spring. I always supposed Apollinaris water
came from the drug store, but there really is an original spring. It
got its name from St. Apollinaris, who was a prominent church-worker a
thousand years ago, and had his head chopped off by the heathen. The
head is still preserved in a church and his name goes marching on with
a label on the bottle. The highest cathedral I have seen in Europe is
at Cologne, the top of the spire being 510 feet above the ground. It is
a beautiful cathedral of Gothic architecture. The plans were made and a
good part of the structure completed about eight hundred years before
it was finished, the latter part of the job being done only a few years
ago. The legend of the beginning of the cathedral is very authentic.
The architect had spent several years on the drawings, but was not able
to finish them satisfactorily to himself or the building committee.
One night he had a dream, and in the vision saw just what had been
lacking. But when he awoke he could not remember the design, and as is
usual in such cases he said he would give anything to have it. The
Devil promptly showed up and offered to reveal the wonderful plan if
the architect would sign a contract to give in payment his own soul and
also the soul of the first who should enter the church after it was
completed. The architect tried to beat the Devil down on the price,
but could not, and finally signed. The Devil lived up to his part
of the contract, and the completed plans were so beautiful that the
church authorities and the emperor and the city council were unanimous
in declaring the architect the greatest man in his profession. As
the church neared completion the architect began to worry. He took
to drink, and went around carousing so that his friends thought he
was crazy. Finally he confessed to the archbishop and it got into the
newspapers, so the community was stirred up. No one was willing to be
the first to go into the church, and yet if the great cathedral was to
amount to anything, somebody must enter it. Finally a bad woman who was
confined in jail sent word to the church board that she would be the
victim. After due deliberation, and believing that she would go to the
Devil anyhow, they accepted her offer. The day of dedication came. The
people gathered from far and near. A carriage drove from the police
station and backed up to the church door. Out of the wagon and into the
building dashed a female form and the Devil in great glee grabbed, and
broke its neck. But it was only a pig which the smart bad woman had
fixed up in her clothes. So the Devil was cheated, the cathedral was
dedicated, and all went right except for the architect, who was found
with a broken neck and smelling of sulphur, for the Devil in his rage
didn’t do a thing to him.

[Illustration]

Cologne has over 300,000 inhabitants and is a very busy city. This
morning we went to the market. The grocery stores in Cologne and in
all the German cities I have visited practically never keep green
groceries. Everything of that kind is bought at the public market,
which is a very interesting sight. From all the country around come
the farmers and the farmers’ wives with the produce of the garden, and
from all over the city come the housewives or the maids, each with
a big basket. The trading is brisk, and as it is nearly all done by
women on both sides, there is some talk and the shopping habit is seen
in all its glory. Then there is the fish market, the flower market,
the poultry market, and even the old-clothes market. I am sure that
in the big market-house and on the streets and the square in Cologne
this morning there were two thousand vendors of goods, from potatoes to
second-hand hats and from luscious fruit to old candle-sticks,—nearly
everything conceivable that could be brought to the open-air market and
sold. The market is still retained in a few old American towns, but to
me it is a novelty with a never-fading charm, and in nearly every city
where I have stopped the market has been a sight that I did not miss.

[Illustration]

Next to the market the restaurant or beer- and wine-garden is the place
to see the people. The Germans eat breakfast, dinner at noon, supper
at 6 o’clock, and once more about 10 o’clock. From 7 o’clock to 10
o’clock the whole family sits in the public garden drinking beer or
wine (not much, but long), listening to the music and getting hungry
for the fourth meal of the day. There are restaurants everywhere—in
the public buildings, the art galleries, the churches, on the
sidewalks, and in the parks. I have not been to a German cemetery, but
I would confidently expect to find there a garden with tables where one
could get something to eat and drink.

[Illustration]

The valley of the Rhine for more than a hundred miles is one vast
vineyard, and the word valley includes the hillsides. The hills are
high. The vines begin close to the water’s edge, the vineyards being
sometimes terraced and sometimes on a slope so steep that the men and
women who cultivate them must wear climbers like telegraph linemen.
It is a beautiful sight at this season of the year with the lofty
heights clothed in green and pointing up into the blue sky, with brown
old ruined taverns and castles and white châteaus and villas here and
there among the green. One would wonder what could be done with all
the grapes that must come from such a great vineyard if he did not
look around him and see everybody drinking the juice and evidently
endeavoring to keep pace with the production. At Coblentz the Moselle
river joins the Rhine, and it is another charming valley full of
history, poetry and grapes. Coblentz is old and quaint, with narrow
streets, old-fashioned people, and the appearance of ancient days.
On this trip I have seen a good deal of the German people. The class
distinctions are about all that make them different from Americans. The
poor folks always expect to be poor and do not move around with the
aggressive action that ours do. I suppose I talked with a hundred, and
every one of them wanted to come to America. Mechanics and artisans,
very skillful, are not altogether satisfied with conditions, and they,
too, talk America. But the great middle class of farmers and merchants
are as full of patriotism and conceit as are true American citizens.
They think Germany is the greatest nation on earth, and that all the
countries will eventually admit the fact and take subordinate places.
They don’t like America or England, and they expect sometime to have
war with us unless we give up easier than they anticipate. The typical
German is not slow or easy-going, as he is often painted, but is
energetic, pushing and “chesty.” He thinks Germany can lick the United
States with one hand tied behind, and is ready to have the work begin
any time. In fact, Germans are just as offensively and ignorantly
patriotic as are Americans, which is saying a good deal, for Americans
in Europe nearly always go around with a chip on either shoulder,
daring somebody to knock it off.

[Illustration]

But the Germans are gentlemen. For the first time since I left Paris
I saw men in the street cars give their seats to ladies. In Italy the
rule is for the man to have first consideration. It makes American
women furious when they meet Italian men on the narrow sidewalks to
have to get off into the streets and let the gentlemen pass by. But
they must do it or the men will simply walk over them. In Germany the
women in the country work in the fields and in the cities they are in
the shops and offices more than in the United States, but they are
treated decently and politely. The German is in fact more polite than
the Frenchman. He even tips his hat to his man friends. If I go into
a store to buy a cigar the proprietor or clerk who waits on me will
say “good-morning” and “good-by.” They do this with one another, and
do not keep their company manners for strangers. German hotels are the
best in Europe, and one of the customs is during the meal at hotel or
restaurant for the proprietor to walk around and pleasantly greet his
patrons, whether he knows them or not, on the comfortable theory that
they are his guests. Germans are always willing to guide and advise
strangers and they don’t take “tips,” at least not any more than in
America. Germany is wealthy and prosperous as a nation and the Germans
one meets when traveling are about the best folks you find in Europe.

[Illustration]

In Germany a landlord advertises his hotel as “first-class” or
“second-class.” The second-class hotels are clean and good, but they
have some mighty funny names. I had learned in England not to get
worried over the signs of “The Red Lion,” “The White Bull,” etc. But
German hotel-keepers go still further. They name their places after
animals of all kinds and colors, and often saints and imaginary
creatures. The Golden Calf, The Winged Lion, The House of the Weaned
Calf, The Wild Man, were some of the names, but at Heidelberg one
extreme was reached by the “Hotel Jesus,” and at Worms the other
extreme by the “Hotel of the Two Pairs of Drawers.” I suppose every
name has a story or a legend behind it and the name is a valuable asset
of the property. Speaking of names reminds me that here in Cologne the
street that leads to the market-place is called “Kingdom of Heaven
street,” and not far away is the “Grace of God street.” I can see how
these names might be properly used in Kansas, but they are out of place
in Cologne.

HOLLAND AND BELGIUM.

IN DUTCH LAND.


  AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND, July 31, 1905.

The kingdom of Holland is a little bit of a country, but it has exerted
a great influence in history. In size it is 12,650 square miles, not
as large as the Seventh congressional district of Kansas, but it has
over 5,000,000 inhabitants and is busy from one end to the other. The
greater part lies below the level of the sea, which borders it on the
west and has been literally reclaimed from the water by the energy
and work of the people. The Hollanders are the Dutch, and they have a
saying: “God made the sea, but we made the land.” The water is held
back by immense dikes, and here in Amsterdam I look toward the sea and
the great lot of shipping along the quay is higher than the tops of
many of the houses; that is, the water is higher than the roofs in the
town. The industry which has thus driven back and held back the sea has
made little Holland a wealthy nation and Dutch capital has not only
built up business at home, but it has gone into the farthermost parts
of the earth, even to Missouri and Arkansas, constructed railroads,
started factories and earned dividends or gone into the hands of
receivers in large amounts. The country is covered with canals about as
Kansas is with section-line roads. These canals are used for commerce,
carrying freight cheaply, and for drainage, irrigation, and in place
of fences. Every farm has its little canal leading to a main canal
as a farmer’s road in Kansas goes out to the main traveled road. The
farmer brings his stuff to town in a canal-boat, and a farm-wagon
is almost as rare a sight in Holland as a canal-boat is in Kansas.
In wet seasons the canals are used as drains and in dry seasons as
irrigating-ditches. Canals are built above the level of the land, so
that irrigation is easy, and for drainage the water is collected in
ditches and pumped up into the canals. All of these facts I had read
about, as has everyone else, but to actually see such a country was
like a dream come true.

[Illustration]

There is more sky in Holland than anywhere else. The land is flatter
than a Kansas prairie. The scenery would be absolutely nothing if it
were not for the works of man upon the surface. There are no hills in
Holland, no rushing streams, no picturesque bits of nature. Some of
the land looks lower than the rest, but none looks higher, and the
water from the big rivers that enter Holland on the east simply oozes
through the soil and canals, without a perceptible current and really
without river-beds or water-courses. The Rhine spreads out until it is
fifty miles wide, but it is no longer a river,—merely a network of
canals which it supplies with water, and its old channels are now made
by dikes and drainage into farms and town-sites. The landscape thus
becomes a flat, fertile country, mostly farmed in grass and pastured
with cattle and sheep, a lace-work of canals in shiny streaks running
in every direction, narrow red brick houses with white trimmings,
and windmills which tower above everything else and stand like giant
sentinels over the low and level country. These windmills are big,
fifty to a hundred feet high, the lower part usually used as dwellings,
constructed as strongly and stoutly as government buildings, and
with four immense arms or sails which convert the Dutch zephyrs into
horsepower. The windmills are used for grinding grain, sawing lumber
and in all kinds of manufacturing, as well as to pump water from the
low ground to the canals and into the sea. A Kansas windmill compared
to a Dutch windmill would be like a straw beside an oak tree.

Very often in Europe I have been compelled to draw on my imagination to
make the actual facts come within speaking distance of what had been
written or promised about a country. Not so in Holland. Everything I
have ever read about dikes, canals and windmills is true, and nothing
you have been able to imagine is beyond the real existing condition and
appearance.

[Illustration]

Yes, there is one thing, and I wonder if other people would feel the
same way. In the pictures and on the china the windmills, the cows and
even the people have always been blue. Of course I knew better, but
when I found that a Holland landscape was not blue and white, I felt as
if I had been deceived. The sky is blue, but the windmills are browned
with exposure, the cows are black-and-white, and the people are not
any more blue in Holland than they are in Newton.

[Illustration]

The ride from Cologne, Germany, to Amsterdam, down the valley of
the Rhine, which is no longer picturesque or lined with castles and
legends, gave me my introduction to Holland. Most of it is the kind of
country in which a traveler can enjoy reading a good book. After the
first enthusiastic demonstration over windmills,—and they are more
numerous than telegraph posts along the Santa Fe,—and the excitement
of watching canal-boats having died out, Holland is not a country
that causes thrills. There is a strange effect created on seeing a
canal-boat in a canal a little distance off. You see a sailboat or a
steamboat apparently sailing right through a pasture. You can’t see the
water, and the effect is as if ships were really gliding over the grass
and fields.

The canals are generally at least fifty feet wide and at least six feet
deep. There are many good-sized boats. The power used is of different
kinds: steam, sails, horses, men, women. Steamboats are numerous. Sails
are used on nearly all, at least to help. Very often a man is hitched
to a rope and sometimes a woman, with a regular harness so that the
pull comes on the breast and shoulders. Dogs are not used to haul
canal-boats, but they are the usual motive-power in the towns for small
delivery-wagons, milk-wagons and the like.

[Illustration: CANALLING IN HOLLAND—THE EXTENSION OF WOMAN’S SPHERE.]

The people of Holland, especially outside the cities, stick to their
old peculiar costumes better than do the people of any other country
in Europe that I have seen. The originals of the quaint Dutch pictures
are here and numerous. The women wear the foolish bonnets, funny short
full skirts, woolen stockings and wooden shoes, and the men the odd
hats, clothes that bag between the hips and knees, and the wooden
shoes that turn up like sled-runners. The wooden shoes are not worn
in the house, but shaken off as the person enters and a pair of cloth
shoes substituted. I suppose that is a ground rule made by the Dutch
housewives, whose propensity for scrubbing and cleanliness is well
known. But in spite of the deserved reputation, I do not think that
Holland is as clean a country as it is advertised. The canals are close
to being stagnant water, and as all the dirt and sewage goes into
them there is an odor about Holland that comes near the smell you get
from old cheese. Especially in the towns and cities where the canals
form the principal streets, I can’t escape the idea that they are a
good deal like open sewers. The water is changed by pumping, but not
often, and after it stands a while over the stuff thrown in one would
think from the noticeable odor that it would breed sickness. They say
it is not very bad, but it would cause a big kick in America—the
newspapers would go after the city council a plenty for permitting such
a nuisance.

A good deal has been said and written in the United States of recent
years in regard to the “emancipation of women.” The extension of civil
and legal rights to persons of the female sex has been properly the
subject of general congratulation. The club movement has done a great
work in forcing a recognition of the work of women equally with the
work of men. Prior to coming to Europe I had supposed that the women of
the United States had made more progress along these lines than those
of any other country. But I was mistaken. The women of Europe are far
ahead of the women of America in the equality of the sexes. A women
in continental Europe not only has the right to go out in the field
and labor, but she can work on the roads, and she can engage in any
business that a man can. In Italy I saw women harnessed alongside of
dogs and in Holland I find them harnessed to canal-boats, the same as
men. If there is any kind of work in Europe that a man can do in which
women cannot and do not engage I have not discovered it, except the
occupation of wearing military uniforms. The mercantile and shopkeeping
business is almost entirely given over to women, and the right to carry
trunks, shine shoes, sell papers and act as porters is not denied them.
The men seem to be perfectly willing to let the women do the work, and
the emancipation seems to have been accomplished without trouble of any
kind.

[Illustration]

The Dutch language is more like the English than like the German, with
which it is classed. With my little knowledge of German I can read the
Dutch signs and make a stagger at the newspapers, for there is more
English than German in the written words. But the Dutch as a spoken
language is like neither the German nor English. When two Dutchmen have
a social, quiet chat it sounds like a buzz-saw. I can usually make a
Dutchman understand me, but when it comes to my grasping the meaning of
his talk I had as soon try to interpret the remarks of a file. It is
ridiculous the way you have to change language every few hours’ ride
in Europe. But I quit trying when I came to the Dutch. They will have
to talk English or make signs in order to get my money; and again I am
brought to the conclusion that no matter what is the language of the
country, “money talks.”




THE DAM DUTCH TOWNS.


  THE HAGUE, HOLLAND, Aug. 2, 1905.

Before leaving Amsterdam we took a trip through several little Dutch
villages and to the island of Maarken, where the fisher-people continue
to wear their eighteenth-century costumes in the progressive, stylish
twentieth century. As a very pleasing incident of this journey we
happened to reach Maarken at the same time with Queen Wilhelmina, so we
not only got to see a live queen but in the excitement in the village
escaped the attention usually given to American tourists by a thrifty
people who have curios to sell. Queen Wilhelmina was a disappointment.
I had been prepared to see a charming girlish sovereign, and I guess
I was looking for something like a bright American girl with her hair
hanging down her back. The queen is only 24 years old, but she looks
30. She wore a cheap-looking white suit which probably cost 30 cents
a yard, American money. Her face was faded and so was her hat. She
has large feet, wears coarse shoes, and her stockings wrinkled around
the ankle like a fisherwoman’s. The stolidity of the Dutch was too
much for me. The queen walked through the village, and while everybody
turned out to see her there was not a cheer. When she passed the little
group of a half-dozen Americans we took off our hats and gave a loud
hurrah, just to show our friendship. She didn’t smile or look around,
and we felt as cheap as she looked. In appearance she is sad and
uninteresting. In America a governor or a president would have smiled
and spoken cheerfully. But the queen of Holland does not have to run
for reëlection, and I suppose that has a salutary effect on American
statesmen. I will confess right now that my observations of European
nobility have been made at a distance. I have not been mingling with
the dukes and counts, but have received most of my impressions from
the hotel clerks, the hackmen, the store-keepers and the workingmen.
They are always glad to talk or make signs to Americans, and I have
not met one laboring man who did not say he wanted to come to America.
In the smoking-rooms and around the hotels I have talked some with
the so-called “upper classes.” They don’t like America or England. I
think the rulers of continental Europe and all the lords and valets are
afraid America and England are going to combine with Japan and rule
the world. The leading newspapers are full of that kind of talk, and
while it is laughable to find that they think the American people are
planning an invasion of Europe, it has a satisfactory side in the fact
that it shows they think we could do it if we tried. The ruling classes
are hostile politically to America. On the other hand, the working
people are very friendly. The kings and nobles know that their jobs
would not last long under American ideas. And the workingmen think that
America means a chance to earn more than a mere living. Both classes
have instinctively taken a position on the American question, and I
don’t blame them.

[Illustration]

Amsterdam is the biggest city in Holland and is the capital, but the
queen and court reside at The Hague. Amsterdam is rich in commerce,
but is beneath the level of the sea, rather unsightly, and perhaps
unhealthy. The Hague is about as high as the sea-level and is on
real land, not the drained and reclaimed sort. It has some beautiful
streets and thousands of acres of woods which are kept in comparatively
original condition and used for parks and drives. The two cities are
only an hour’s ride apart, and The Hague is becoming the residence city
for wealthy Dutchmen. Amsterdam is one of the financial centers of
the world. The Hague is one of the political centers of the world. On
account of its size Holland is not considered dangerous, and therefore
presents a convenient meeting-place for international conferences. We
visited the palace known as “The House in the Woods,” where the peace
conference was held in 1899, on the suggestion of the czar of Russia,
and in which twenty-six governments were represented. The actual result
was not much, but an international court at The Hague was provided to
which nations can submit disputed questions if they wish, and probably
after the Japs get through with the czar so he can call another peace
conference, further steps will be taken to prevent or mitigate the
horrors of war. Andrew Carnegie, the same gentleman who put up the
money for the Hutchinson public library, has promised $1,500,000
to erect an international court-house at The Hague which will be a
suitable place for what might be called an international supreme court.
One great weight which every European power has holding down its
progress is the necessity of maintaining a large standing army and thus
withdrawing from active production a big per cent. of its workers. The
governments of Europe know this and talk of “disarming,” but each one
is afraid the others won’t do it. And I also have a guess coming that
some of the kings and queens would worry a little over the future of
their jobs if they did not have the big armies at their command.

The Dutch are a hard-working lot. They get up earlier than the people
of any other country I have seen in Europe. And as the entire family
works, from the grandmother to the dog, they accumulate wealth as a
nation and as individuals. The ordinary dwelling is part of the store,
the shop, the barn or the windmill, so that the women-folks can do
their part of the labor and not lose much time going back and forth.
Whenever the women are not attending to the farm or the shop they are
scrubbing. The smell of good strong soap is one of the real Dutch
landmarks as much as a windmill or a canal.

[Illustration]

From Amsterdam we went to Edam and Monnikendam and Volendam and
Zaandam, and from here we go to Rotterdam and through several other
dams. The affix “dam” means bridge or embankment, and in a country of
canals it is not surprising that nearly all the names of towns end
with dam, Amsterdam being on the bank of the Amsel river, and so on.
When I was a boy I heard the story of the teacher who was having her
class give sentences containing the words they were learning to spell.
One day they came to the word “cofferdam,” and the teacher asked the
bright boy of the class to frame a sentence illustrating the use of the
word. He wrote on the blackboard: “Our old cow thought some sawdust was
bran, and if she don’t look out she will cofferdam head off.” The word
“dam” is not a cuss-word in Dutch. If it were, all the dam towns would
be printed with a dash for the last syllable.

[Illustration]

The history of Holland has about as much trouble in it as that of any
country. It was not much of a nation during the dark and medieval
ages, as there was no such state, but a number of petty vassal lords
and bishops. About 1500 a Holland count got the title of Prince of
Orange by marrying a French heiress. The principal ruler in Holland was
the count of Burgundy, but the Dutch cities developed along business
lines and were to a certain extent independent of kings and emperors,
although nominally a part of the German empire. In the sixteenth
century Philip of Spain inherited the sovereignty of the country, and
by his bigoted and cruel rule started a civil war in 1568 which lasted
eighty years and ended in the independence of Holland. During that war
the Dutch had to have a leader, and so they elected William, prince of
Orange, as stadtholder, or governor. Under his management the war was
fought successfully, and when he was assassinated his son was elected
stadtholder. The Dutch were divided into two parties, the Democratic
and Aristocratic, and when Spain was defeated there was trouble
between them. The so-called Dutch Republic was only an aristocracy,
the privilege of participating in the government being restricted to a
privileged class of small nobles and wealthy families. The office of
stadtholder was elective, but generally went to the Oranges. Holland by
its wise statesmanship and a strong navy was a world-power for a while,
and in alliance with England and Sweden generally defeated the French
and Spanish, and when there was war with England the Dutchmen held
their own. Finally William III. of Orange became king of England, and
the Dutch Republic lost its prestige. In the eighteenth century it was
a tail to the English kite, and in 1806 Napoleon made his brother king
of Holland and five years later annexed the country to France. After
Napoleon’s defeat the European powers created the kingdom of Holland,
joined Belgium to it, and made William of Orange king of the united
country. The Belgians broke away in 1830, and since that time Holland
has been a monarchy, although the power is with the people.

[Illustration]

I was much struck with the apparent lack of loyalty to the queen.
In England everybody is loyal to King Edward because he not only
represents the sovereignty of the nation, but he stands for the English
constitution, rights of parliament and the people, and the king is the
result of centuries of English thought and political action. But the
Dutch have been without a king most of their history and they don’t
feel the reverence for the crown that the English do. Wilhelmina is
not very popular, and her husband, who is a second-rate German prince
that never mixes with the people and is said to be mean to his wife, is
not liked at all. The Dutch cities have practical self-government, and
it would not be surprising if after the death of Wilhelmina or in the
event of some political upheaval the Dutch Republic would be revived on
a broader basis than before.

       *       *       *       *       *

  ROTTERDAM, HOLLAND, Aug. 3, 1905.

To-day we came to Delft, where the Delft china does not come from
any more, and from there to Rotterdam in a canal-boat. Riding in a
canal-boat is a very pleasant way of traveling. If you want to get
off, the boat simply runs up close to the bank and you make it with a
jump—one jump is better than two. You glide along through the pastures
and back yards and see the women scrubbing, the men smoking and the
dogs pulling the carts. When you come to a low bridge everybody lies
down flat until the boat is beyond it. Our canal-boat was propelled by
steam, and we went flying along at the rate of five or six miles an
hour, but still with plenty of time to inspect the country and visit
with the people on the other boats if we could only have talked their
language. As a cure for nervousness or as an antidote for being in a
hurry I recommend a trip on a canal-boat.

Delft is a quaint old town, with old churches and clean canals. Two
hundred years ago the manufacture of porcelain made the town famous,
but for a hundred years the business was suspended and now most of the
Delft china is made in New Jersey. Recently a factory has been started
and real Delft ware can be obtained, but the American kind is just as
good.

The canal-boat brought us through the town of Schiedam, where the
celebrated Dutch “schnapps” is made. They tell me schnapps is closely
related to that brand of American whisky which will make a man climb a
tree. There are 200 distilleries in Schiedam. The Dutch are given to
strong drinks rather than beer. The result is that the Dutch get wildly
and meanly drunk, whereas the Germans merely get fat.

Near Rotterdam we canalled by Delfthaven. This is the place from which
the Pilgrims sailed for North America in 1620. They stopped en route
in England, but their original start was from here. They had come to
Holland from England in order to secure freedom of worship, but they
were still Englishmen and did not want to become Dutch. So they secured
a promise that they would not be disturbed in the New World, and left
their Holland home. If they had stayed in Delfthaven there would have
been no New England, no Bunker Hill, no United States. But they did not
stay. THE KINGDOM OF BELGIUM.


  BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, Aug. 5, 1905.

I do not suppose other people are as ignorant as I was, but I will
admit that in my mind I have always lumped off Holland and Belgium
together as two countries with the same kind of people, the same
language, the same habits and generally the same government. This
is a great mistake. Holland and Belgium are about as unlike as the
United States and Mexico. Holland is Dutch, with a language related
to the German and English, and with Teutonic characteristics. Belgium
is allied to France, the people speaking French or a kind of French,
and with traits of character like the Parisians. Holland and Belgium
have never agreed well politically and have never lived together
harmoniously. When the allies had defeated Napoleon they created the
kingdom of Holland and Belgium and tried to tie the two together.
The combination lasted just fifteen years, and in 1830 the Belgians
revolted, declared their independence and fought successfully to make
it good. This year they are celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary
of Belgian independence. Two hundred years ago the king of Spain
was sovereign over both countries. Holland threw off the yoke and
did business on its own account, while Belgium failed and remained
the property of Spain or Austria down to the time of Napoleon.
The Hollanders drink “schnapps” and the Belgians drink wine. The
Hollanders are Protestant in religion and the Belgians are Catholics.
Except for the fact that they are side by side along the North sea and
are flat and low, the two countries differ in about everything possible.

[Illustration]

The largest city in Belgium is Antwerp, located on the Scheldt river a
little way from the sea, and with one of the largest and best harbors
of Europe. During the Middle Ages Antwerp was a great commercial
city, monopolizing much of the trade with the Orient, and being known
everywhere for its wealth and business. In the eighteenth century,
under Spanish and Austrian rule, the city lost its standing and went
down to about 40,000 population. During the nineteenth century it had
a boom; now there are 355,000 inhabitants and Antwerp looks like a
great American city,—with many wide avenues, beautiful buildings, and
handsome stores. Aside from the fact that the streets are often narrow,
a modern city in Europe looks better than one of the same size and
standing in America. The Europeans have better ideas of architecture,
put up their buildings more substantially and with more regard to their
appearance, and have less of the cheap and shoddy construction than
we do. I suppose we have as good architects in America as in Belgium,
but I know of no city in our country where the business blocks are
so elegant or so well built. Our folks build in a hurry. Over here
they build for centuries, because they have already had centuries and
know that is the way to do. I haven’t seen a frame house except in
Switzerland. When people build with stone they are apt to put the work
there to stay. And these modern European cities, by which I mean cities
which have kept pace with the world’s growth and are not simply living
on history and tourists, have many large squares with monuments and
fountains, parks with gardens and boulevards with drives,—all over the
city, not simply where the rich folks live as in some American cities.
I reckon I am as conceited about my country as anybody, but I get it
taken out of me every now and then, and modern city-building is one of
the places. It would pay our town-builders to take a little more time
and do better, more substantial and more tasteful work.

[Illustration]

Brussels is the capital of Belgium. If all the suburbs were taken in as
in Chicago and New York, it would have a half-million people. It has
the reputation of being one of the handsomest cities of Europe, and is
called “the second Paris.” It has many wide avenues, beautiful shops,
and the people, like those of Paris, are great on having a good time.
Nearly every other store in Brussels is a lace store, and most of the
rest are jewelry stores. There are said to be 150,000 women in Brussels
and vicinity making lace for sale, and they are paid by the shops
for which they work about 20 cents a day. The country round about is
fertile, but the farming is more what we would call market gardening.
The picturesque costumes have disappeared, and the Belgians dress and
act more like French and Americans than any other European people I
have seen. Their farm labor is still crude. There is no machinery, and
there need be none so long as labor is cheap. The dogs pull the carts
to town with the truck for market and the working-people live on fish
and vegetables because they are used to it and because meat is away
beyond their means.

[Illustration]

To-day I went to the battlefield of Waterloo. It has always been a
matter of regret to me that Napoleon did not win that fight. The big
powers of Europe had combined and forced his abdication. They sent
Napoleon to Elba and were quarreling over a division of the spoils when
he escaped and returned to France. The people received him with joy
and his old soldiers rallied to his standards. The allies ran hither
and thither and were scared almost to death—all but the English, who
never know when to quit. Wellington with about 70,000 soldiers was near
Brussels and Napoleon rushed his army of the same size to meet him. If
Napoleon had defeated Wellington the backbone of the alliance against
him would have been broken and the map of Europe would have been very
different from what it is. The battlefield is comparatively small.
The two armies had a front of about two miles and were less than a
mile apart. In those days a cannon could not shoot a mile and a musket
not more than 150 yards. After the first firing the guns had to be
reloaded, so as a matter of fact there would be a few volleys and then
the opposing armies would clinch and go at it with bayonets, clubbed
muskets, and swords. That was the way at Waterloo. Napoleon made the
attack and Wellington’s army had the help of stone walls and position.
In a space of about forty acres around one farmhouse there were 6,000
killed and wounded. Both sides fought like the devil, or rather like
devils, and took few prisoners. The English allies held their ground
all day, beating back the frequent and ferocious French charges. In
the evening the Prussian army under Blucher came slowly up at one side
and the outnumbered Frenchmen had to retreat. It was all over with
Napoleon, for his army was dead or missing; so he again gave up, and
this time his enemies were careful to put him at St. Helena where he
could not get away.

[Illustration]

A great monument was erected on the battlefield by the victorious
nations. It is a mound of earth 150 feet high, pyramid-shaped, and
a half-mile around the base. On top of the mound is a figure of a
colossal lion. The mound is the highest point for many miles, and from
its top the entire battlefield is easily seen. It is a very impressive
sight. When the great mound was constructed the earth was carried in
baskets by women who were paid 8 cents a day. That kind of a price
for labor makes a steam shovel sick. The people who live around the
battlefield have a rich tourist crop. Although they are Belgians I
think some of them are descendants of Napoleon’s soldiers, judging
from the way they charge. Just about the time the visitor gets excited
or interested in the historic spots, he is reminded that there is
“something for the guide,” or that he can buy maps, picture cards,
bullets, buttons from Napoleon’s coat, or get a drink of water from
the well in which the bodies of 150 French soldiers were thrown.

[Illustration]

Belgium is one of the busiest countries in Europe, but labor is really
not better paid than elsewhere. A laboring man gets 30 cents a day,
skilled laborers up to a dollar. A woman works at lace-making for 20
cents a day, or a woman will come at 7 o’clock in the morning and work
until 8 o’clock in the evening, a Belgian working-day, for 20 cents.
The cost of good, decent living is not much if any less than in Kansas,
but of course people who earn only 20 or 30 cents a day don’t live
well. Their home is with the cow or the dog or with people just as
poor, and a beefsteak would probably give them the gout. I have seen
similar conditions in the slums of American cities, and once, when the
tariff bars were thrown down and our factories put to competition with
Belgian and other European factories where labor is paid as I have
stated, there was a temporary paralysis of labor attended by suffering
and want. But these are the normal conditions in Belgium and in Europe
at a time which is considered one of general prosperity. I wonder how
it must be with hard times. The “bugaboo” of “competition with pauper
labor” is not a political imagination, but would be a sad reality if
the American people should vote for a change in the tariff policy. I
have learned this lesson from the mouths and faces of the workingmen of
Europe.

Of course there are American-made goods that come into Europe. They are
all here because the Europeans have nothing near as good. The American
typewriter, the sewing-machine, the Wernicke office supplies and the
American shoe are always advertised boldly and freely. Other American
wares are sold without the American label because of some prejudice,
especially in England. In order to show my patriotism I started lifting
my hat every time I saw the sign or advertisement of American goods.
At first I enjoyed the novelty, but as I learned to look for the marks
I soon had my hat off most of the time. I didn’t mind honoring any
American article, but it grew wearisome to have my hand bobbing up to
my hat whenever I turned around, especially as Carter’s liver pills
and Quaker oats have just covered Europe with their posters and their
catch-lines. When the American does start to do business in Europe
he does it right, and is not afraid to put his name on any place the
police will let him. And it is comforting to a pilgrim in a strange
land to see in big letters on street cars and fences the names that
decorated the old walls and billboards at home.




EUROPEAN ART AND GRUB.


  BRUGES, BELGIUM, Aug. 8, 1905.

In this quaint old town we are spending the last day of our stay on the
continent of Europe. To-morrow we sail from Ostend to Dover, and the
prospect of a return to a land where the English language is spoken is
next to getting home.

Of all the cities of the Netherlands, Bruges has best held on to the
ancient appearance and ways. The fact may be explained by the figures.
During the boom in Belgium a few centuries ago, Bruges had a population
of 200,000, while now there are only 54,000. There was no necessity
to tear down the old buildings to make room for modern structures or
provide wide boulevards and promenades. Consequently the old buildings
stand, only modified in appearance by the wear and tear of weather
and years. The sole business of the town as near as I could see is
lace-making, and as the women do that there is little left for the men,
except to drive cabs and hold the offices. We walked down a little
narrow street, perhaps twelve feet wide, lined from one end to the
other on this pleasant day with women sitting on stools making lace.
The advent of a few Americans almost caused a riot in the desire to
see and be seen, and the little street seemed to swarm with women and
with children. Working over the pillow these women make lace to be
sold at 15 or 20 cents for their day’s labor. Girls hardly into their
teens and grandmothers up in the 80’s were laboring side by side. One
old lady with whom we had a most delightful visit, although neither
could understand the other’s language, and from whom Mrs. Morgan bought
some of the handiwork, is 86 years old, and yet she cheerfully and
ably manipulates the hand-shuttles that make the lace as if she were
not half that age. There is a special provision of Providence that
nearly always applies. These women of all ages who have to make lace
or starve, work in abominable light and yet have excellent eyesight
and never wear spectacles or glasses. In America, where the lace is
bought and where such work is a delicate, eye-trying task, the women
have trouble with their eyesight and must have artificial help to see
the lace that the Belgian women make. The wind is tempered to the shorn
lamb.

[Illustration]

Bruges is also the depository of the earliest specimens of Dutch and
Flemish art, for here nearly 500 years ago lived Jan Van Eyck, and he
and his brother were the pioneers in the style of painting which is
generally known as “Dutch.” They were followed a few years later by
Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, De Crayer, Jordaens, and their crowd, who
went to Italy and learned a good deal, but who were really followers
of the Van Eycks. I have spent some time in the art galleries at
Amsterdam, The Hague, Antwerp and Brussels, and have picked up a
smattering of knowledge of Dutch and Flemish art which I would like
to unload. The “whole shooting-match,” as the Germans would say,
is generally called Dutch, but there is a perceptible difference
between the work in Holland and Belgium, although the artists lived
so close together that they naturally formed one great school. Peter
Paul Rubens, who generally gets first place, was a Belgian, although
he was born out of that country when his parents were politically
exiled. He lived at Antwerp and was brought up in a Jesuit school in a
Catholic country. Rembrandt was a Dutchman, born at Leyden, Holland,
and a politician as well as an artist in a Protestant country. If
one will reflect upon the religious situation in Europe in the early
seventeenth century, he will see that no matter if both used the
same colors and the same rules for drawing, they were bound to treat
different subjects, or have different conceptions of the same subject.
Van Dyck, the third of the celebrated trio, was born in Antwerp, but
went to London, and there did most of his work in portrait-painting,
his specialty, because he was better paid by Englishmen. The Catholic
Rubens and his followers painted for the churches and cathedrals, and
for a Catholic constituency, and usually portrayed religious subjects,
while Rembrandt and his pupils painted for the Dutch burghers, and
their best pictures are of men, grouped in military companies or
trade guilds. Rubens is more ideal and spiritual, Rembrandt more
material and human. Therefore it is that people who like one often
do not appreciate the other. I really like the Dutch art better than
the Italian, although it is a good deal like a boy trying to decide
whether he will have cherry pie or custard pie, and wanting both. The
influence of environment and education is clearly seen in the fat
Madonnas and the pictures of public-houses and drinking-bouts which
are favorite subjects. The Dutch artists also lean to “realism,” and
about nine times in ten a picture of the realist school is unpleasant
and therefore to my mind inartistic. For example, one of Rubens’s
great masterpieces represents the martyrdom of a saint who had his
tongue torn out, and in the picture the executioner is handing the
red, bleeding tongue to a dog. Another picture shows an execution, the
axeman holding up the head, and the body with the stump of a neck the
main feature of the foreground. Some people like this sort of thing,
but I don’t. For a hundred years after Rubens and Rembrandt, the
Netherlands produced no art, at the time the countries themselves were
demoralized and the prey of the larger powers. Recently Dutch art has
revived in the portraying of Dutch landscapes, windmills, canals and
such, and to my mind it is the pleasantest and most effective art now
alive in Europe, away ahead of the Italians, who persist in imitating
the old masters and tackling subjects which have been thoroughly
covered so much that there is hardly a chance for a new impression.

Every town of any size in Belgium and Holland has a public art gallery,
and the people ought to be artists merely from association. But as a
matter of fact three-fourths of the visitors to the galleries when I
was there were Americans and English.

Speaking of art reminds me of hotels. Before leaving Europe I want
to pay a tribute to the hotel-keepers of the continent. I must have
been wrongly impressed by what I had read and heard, for I had looked
forward with dread to the queer ways and the strange dishes I was
to go against on the trip. As a matter of fact the hotels in Europe
are better and cheaper than those of America. The management is more
courteous, the service better, and the eating far surpasses the
equivalent in the United States. The “tipping system” is not bad at all
and the effort of the landlord to get at your money is concealed by a
show of cordiality and hospitality which I have never experienced in
a strange hostelry in my own country. I am overcharged and worked ten
times more in Kansas City, Chicago and New York than in Rome, Cologne,
Brussels, or any other European city.

When a traveler arrives at a continental hotel he is greeted at the
entrance by the hall porter or clerk, and instead of being bulldozed
over a counter by a gentleman with a diamond stud into paying twice the
ordinary price for a room, he is quietly and pleasantly told what rooms
are vacant, what are their rates, and allowed to make a selection. He
does not have to tip a porter or a bell-boy for every little favor.
From the proprietor to the “boots” everyone in the hotel is at your
service and nothing to pay—not then. Of course you expect to do the
right thing when you leave, but for the time this cordial service seems
to be spontaneous and animated with a sincere desire for your comfort.
In Germany the proprietor of the hotel keeps up the pretense that you
are his guest, and every day he inquires after your welfare. In the
German restaurants the proprietor walks around and speaks pleasantly
to everyone and you feel that he is really glad to see you without
associating that sensation with the payment of the bill. Everything
and everybody in the hotel is at your service. There is always a
reading-room with newspapers, often American papers, smoking-rooms,
lounging-rooms, and comfortable parlors where it is a pleasure to spend
the time. In nearly every hotel there is a free library, mostly books
of the country, but always some in English. At the Parker House in
Boston, my last stopping-place in America, I had been surprised and
delighted to find a well-selected library for the use of the guests of
the hotel. I supposed that was a Boston innovation and was prepared
to brag about it, but I have found a similar library in nearly every
hotel at which I have stayed in Europe. An American hotel does not give
half the space to the general use and comfort of guests that a European
hotel does, and what it does offer is usually only a big office and
stiff parlors in which people stay only when they can find nowhere else
to go.

European cooking is far ahead of American cooking. A cook in this
country is not an accident, not a man or woman who is cooking until a
better job offers. A cook is something between a professional man and
a skilled mechanic, and young men learn the business as thoroughly as
they do engineering or banking. Labor is cheap, so that in the kitchen
as well as in the front rooms there is always plenty of service, and
it is by people who are brought up to it and not by boys or men who
are down on their luck. I expected to be “fussy” over the cooking and
cookery, but I have hardly had a poor meal in Europe and not a bad one
at all. There is not much difference in the stuff used or in the way of
serving, but the work is better done, and all the good American dishes
like beefsteak and eggs are found in Europe looking as natural as life.
The Europeans do more with mutton, veal and fish and less with beef
than our cooks, and the small farms raise vegetables that are delicious.

When one leaves the hotel the proprietor or manager always comes to
see him off and say good-by. There isn’t such a crowd of servants
waiting for tips as is generally alleged. Your porter, who has polished
your shoes and carried your baggage, is on hand, and the chambermaid
casually meets you on the stairs. The head waiter expects a tip and
so does the hall porter, and there are usually a couple of other
attendants ready to receive, but not obnoxiously so. I learned that
the best way to do was to be as polite as the Europeans. A few minutes
before time to leave I would say good-by to the head waiter, the
smoking-room attendant, and any other who had rendered special service,
giving each a small tip which he always took with many expressions of
good-will and appreciation. That prevented any assemblage at the door
when we left, and the last good-bys and tips were only expected by
the man who brought the baggage and the hall porter who put us in the
carriage and gave me full information as regards the coming journey and
the next stop.

The rates at European hotels are much less than in ours. The prices
for rooms are about half what they would be in America for similar
accommodations in the same-sized places. The restaurant prices are a
little less than ours. I should say that in Europe you pay about $2 to
$3 a day for what would cost $3 to $4 in America. In small hotels and
boarding-houses the same ratio is maintained, and there is no doubt
in my mind that “room and board” on a European trip for an American
is little more than half what it would be for a European in America.
In these prices I include tips. The ordinary American will greatly
enjoy life on the continent, provided, of course, he does not always
eat at the “table d’hôte,” or regular meal-table, which is monotonous
everywhere. And also he must not want a room with a bath, or an
elevator. Very few buildings in Europe have elevators, and the natives
do not use them. It is an inconvenience to walk up two or three flights
of stairs to your room, but in the hotels that do not have “lifts”
you must remember that is the way the nobility and everybody does in
Europe, and quit kicking. You can get a bath in the bathroom or you
can scrub yourself with the contents of the washbowl, after you have
had some experience. That is the custom of the country, and the thing
to do is not to be telling about the rooms with baths in America, but
accept the situation, look pleasant, and you will get along all right.
It is the same way in Europe that it is everywhere else in this vale
of tears: if you look for trouble you easily find it, and if you are
constantly talking and thinking of the conveniences which American
customs have provided and which are not used in Europe, you can make
yourself miserable and unpopular. But if you accept the ways of the
country, enjoy the novelties even if they seem old-fashioned and
strange, you will have a grand old time and will make yourself solid
with the people.

[Illustration]

In Europe the name “United States” is rarely used. We are “Americans.”
The people of Canada are Canadians and the people of the United
States have the sole use of the title of Americans. They consider us
the whole thing, and we always admit it without argument. There is
a general impression in the Old World that all Americans are rich.
There is a general impression that sometime we will fight the rest
of the world, and I think there is an impression that we will lick.
So far as I can see, Americans are treated about as well as dukes,
and the ways of traveling are greased for them by everybody along the
line. (Grease to be paid for, of course.) In two months’ travel on the
continent, usually not knowing the language, we have never missed a
train or connection, been mistreated or imposed upon, allowed to suffer
inconvenience or annoyance. That is a record it would be hard to equal
in America.




ENGLAND.




IN OLD, OLD ENGLAND.


  WARWICK, ENGLAND, June 12, 1905.

When the American tourist reaches old England he has a large and
well-selected stock of emotions which he can feel, in addition to
the thanks in his heart that the short but “nahsty” trip across the
Irish sea is at an end. No matter where an individual’s ancestors may
have come from, the mother country of America is England. Up to 1776
our history was only English history, our customs English customs,
our laws English laws, and when the Continental army began shooting
at the British soldiers, the Continental Congress accompanied every
volley with a resolution declaring that the colonists had no desire
to separate from England, but were only fighting in self-defense.
Our laws, our language, our literature are English. The fight of the
parliament against the crown has reached practically the same result in
England that the revolution of Congress against King George did by a
short cut.

This is the land of Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens, who are just
as much American as English, except for the accident of birthplace.
This is the home of our heroes of medieval times, of Ivanhoe, Richard
the Lion-hearted, and the Black Prince. This is the country which is
familiar to us by name and history through Scott and Thackeray, Dickens
and Lytton, and a hundred other authors whose works are read in the
American homes. We are not strangers to such names as Kenilworth,
York, Shrewsbury, Chester, Stratford, Oxford, Cambridge, and in fact
nearly every town on the map of England. This is more like the visit to
a long-absent friend and not an entrance into a foreign land. We are
now going among places of which we have read and among the monuments
and works of men whom we have held close to our hearts through the
pictures painted for us by our authors. We are going to actually see
the things we have so often read about and which we have so much
dreamed about.

[Illustration]

Instead of beginning at London, the great center of trade, we are going
to begin here at Warwick, the center of the oldest Old England left on
earth. In Warwick we are five miles from Kenilworth, the castle Scott
made famous, seven miles from Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare was
born, and surrounded by beautiful rural England, with a fine old castle
only five minutes walk away, and churches and buildings which were old
when Columbus discovered America.

The first stop in England was at Chester, which was a town of
importance when Julius Cæsar was doing business. The walls the Romans
built were demolished by the Saxons but rebuilt, and Chester was the
last place in England to surrender to William the Conqueror. During the
Middle Ages it was the scene of more fights and sieges and the walls
then completed are the same walls which we walked on this week. The
walls are from ten to twenty feet wide at the top, twenty to thirty
feet high, and little towers occupy the angles and corners. From the
wall of Chester Charles the First saw the parliamentary army defeat
his soldiers, and when Chester surrendered, Cromwell’s men had all of
England.

There are two main streets in Chester, crossing each other at the
center of the town and terminating in the four city gates. All the
other streets of the old town are alleys from six to ten feet wide. But
the curious part of Chester is “the Rows.” Along a good part of the
main streets there is a second floor, or rather a stone roof over the
sidewalks. On this upstairs street are stores and shops, and business
is going on as briskly along the second story as on the ground floor.
As there were originally but the two streets in Chester, the people
simply doubled the street capacity,—a thousand years ago and they
haven’t changed. In fact, I suppose a great many people in Chester who
have never been out of the neighborhood, think that is the proper and
usual way of arranging business streets in all towns.

[Illustration]

The greatest place in England is Stratford-on-Avon, because Shakespeare
was born there. A great many English towns have ancient cathedrals and
are the birthplaces or the deathplaces of kings and queens, dukes and
ministers, but Stratford is the only place where Shakespeare was born
and there has been but one Shakespeare. Many great men have several
birthplaces, or perhaps I should say, several towns claim to be the
only birthplace. But Stratford-on-Avon is a thousand years old or
more, and has never done anything for the world except to provide
William Shakespeare, and the world says that is enough to last another
thousand. I stood in the church and saw the slab which covers the
dust of the great poet and man-knower. By his side are the graves of
his wife and daughter. Around the chancel are the inscriptions and
memorials which tell of the admiration and affection of the world.

[Illustration]

The house where the poet was born is now owned by a public association,
and great pains have been taken to gather all the relics of his
lifetime that have been spared. The rooms are arranged just as they
were when his father, a highly respected tradesman who reached the
dignity of a justice of the peace, was running his little shop and
William was poaching in the neighboring fields and streams and sparking
Anne Hathaway, whose home was a mile away. The Hathaway cottage is
kept in the same way as the Shakespeare house, and we wandered through
the low rooms and up the narrow stairs just as they were nearly four
centuries ago. In talking with an Englishman at Warwick he said he
believed the Americans thought more of Shakespeare than the English
did, for more of them went to Stratford. Of course that is hardly
correct, for the English all love Shakespeare, but they probably do
not visit his birthplace so much as American travelers do. Practically
every American goes to Stratford, some of them perhaps just because
the others do. Coming over on the ship I was being enlightened by an
aggressive American on just what was what. “Going to Stratford?” he
said. I assented. “Yes, you’ll go there and look around and wonder
what in hell you went there for.” But that is not the sentiment which
fills the hearts of most of the cousins from across the ocean, as is
evidenced by the reverential awe and the thorough appreciation of every
nook and corner shown by them when they are in the historic village.

The river Avon is about the size of Cow creek, and looks a good deal
like it. The banks are low and the meadows and fields come right to
them, without the timber that borders most American streams. The town
of Stratford is old-fashioned and quaint. Just as in Warwick, the
hotels or inns bear such names as “The Red Dog,” “The Bull and Cow,”
“The Golden Lion,” a style of nomenclature which I had always half-way
thought was imaginary with the great authors who have made such names
familiar. Large, stately trees line the roads and stone walls and
hedges conceal the fields and farms, revealing just enough to enhance
the beauty of the landscape. One can dreamily think as he rides in the
coach from Stratford to Warwick that he is back in the days of Queen
Elizabeth and half expect ye knights and ladies to appear before the
gate of Kenilworth, but as he does so there is a sudden whir-r-r, a
cloud of dust and a smell, and the automobile of the twentieth century
has rudely broken the dream.

[Illustration]

We visited the castle of the earl of Warwick. The earl evidently did
not know we were coming, for he was away, but a shilling admitted us
through the big gate in the massive stone walls which surround the
castle and inclose probably twenty acres of ground. It was originally
built by a daughter of Alfred, about 915, and has been more or less
knocked down and built up since. It is said to be one of the finest
old castles in England. A regiment of soldiers could easily parade
in the large court within the walls and be quartered in the building
and towers. Many a time such a garrison has occupied the place,
for the earls of Warwick have been fighters from the beginning and
Shakespeare’s Warwick was a regular Cy Leland or a Stubbs in his day,
and was known as the king-maker. The castle is about twice as large
as the Hutchinson Reformatory, and the earl has to keep a good deal
of hired help in these times of peace. Many of the great rooms are
kept just as in the old days of chivalry and are filled with armor and
weapons. The banquet-room is maintained as it was in the great earl’s
time, and much of the castle is really a museum and gallery full of the
pictures, portraits, furniture and tapestries of the long ago.

Kings and queens, earls and earlesses, have walked the halls and had
their brief time upon the stage of life. The noble of to-day does not
have the armor or the power he did then. His band of armed retainers
has changed to a crowd of peaceful laborers. He does not lead his men
to war, but presides at country fairs and acts as dignified as the
spirit of the twentieth century will permit. He no longer fears a
midnight assault from a neighboring baron, but only dreads the ravages
of the American tourists and sensibly compromises by letting them
ravage at a quarter apiece. The times of chivalry are gone.

    “Their swords are rust;
    The knights are dust;
    Their souls are with the saints, we trust.”

Here in Warwick and at Kenilworth we take a long dream backward, and
by working our imagination and our sentiment we see the England of
Shakespeare, of Warwick, of Ivanhoe. It is a good dream, but it is a
past that will never return, a past that is more nearly connected with
the present in Warwick than at any other place. It is old England,
which first learned to rule herself and then began to rule most of
the rest of the world, and with the assistance of the American child
will undoubtedly do the business in the future. We are going to London
and Liverpool, the castles of commerce and industry which now command
the trade of the globe. In the England of to-day the castles of the
business man and the banker rule in the place of the castles of the
baron and the earl, and old England has given place to a new England.
But it will be this old England of Shakespeare, Warwick and Kenilworth
that will live in the hearts of the English people, and will be the
object of pilgrimage for Americans abroad.




THE GREATEST OF CITIES.


  LONDON, Aug. 11, 1905.

We are “out of season” in London. “Everybody is out of town.” I suppose
there are only about 7,000,000 people left within the limits of the
city as laid out for police purposes. With only 7,000,000 people in
this district twenty miles square, one naturally feels lonesome. I
suppose it will strike me that way after I get used to it. But if as
many of the inhabitants of London as there are people in the State of
Kansas should go away, it is probable that I would not notice it at
first. It is curious what funny first impressions one gets of things.
My first of London was that it looked like a great big ant-heap with
the ants excited over something and swarming in every direction. The
long processions or streams of people which wind in and out, up and
down, make the individual feel mightily insignificant. In comparison
my memory of Chicago is that it looks like a deserted country town on
Sunday afternoon, and New York a fairly large and busy village.

[Illustration]

The streets of London are laid out with no regard for plan or
regularity. None of them are straight, and in the course of a few
blocks they will be intersected at every angle and possible curve by
other streets, which in turn are cut into by more streets. Every now
and then there is a “square,” or a “circus,” either meaning a place
where different streets meet head-on and usually stop. A “circus” is a
curved square and not a show. A map of London looks like a chicken-yard
in which the hens have been very busy scratching. The stranger loses
all idea of direction. When the sun shines, which is not often, I have
seen it in the north, south, east and west on the same day.

There are no “sky-scrapers.” The height of buildings is regulated,
and I think the limit is usually six stories. This is a rule which
our American cities ought to have but they won’t. The climate has the
effect of making a new house soon look old, and London is neither
bright nor shining in its appearance. But it is the greatest city
in the world, and that fact is impressed on the traveler in every
direction. There are more Irishmen in London than in Dublin, more
Scotchmen than in Edinburgh, more Jews than in Palestine, and in its
population are large colonies of people from every country on the
earth. Name any article you want or have ever heard of, and it is in
London. No business and no trade in any civilized land but has its
representative in this city. No great work is done and no enterprise
attempted but the fact is known to some one in London. In spite of
the great growth and wealth of America, the industry and success of
Germany, the thrift and saving of France, the financial center of the
world is in London, and other bourses and boards of trade follow the
lead or are in fact only branches of the English concern. Every active
financial institution in the United States or elsewhere has its London
connection through which it draws when it engages in international
business or when it goes out of the local sphere of influence. London
is the whirlpool to which all the world contributes and from which all
the world gets something thrown out.

[Illustration]

London is not only the center of business but of literary, artistic
and political activity. Especially is this true for Americans. All of
our history prior to 1776 is English, and in the annals of the world
1776 is only the day before yesterday. Our writers, as soon as they get
their feet on the ground at home, look to London, this clearing-house
of literature as of money. London writers, from the time of Shakespeare
to Dickens, Thackeray and Kipling, are ours just as much as they are
England’s. Not an American but recognizes the names of Piccadilly,
Hyde Park, Westminster, Temple Bar, Ludgate, the Tower, Tooley street,
London Bridge, Charing Cross, Drury Lane, Whitechapel, Billingsgate,
and other streets and places in London as familiarly as he does those
of places in the nearest city to which he lives. A common history
for more than a thousand years, a common literature which cannot be
divided, and a common trend of religious and political thought make
Great Britain and the United States one people although divided by
an ocean and by arbitrary political lines. I think that up to a few
years ago there was much prejudice in each country against the other.
That has now practically disappeared. Englishmen on the continent and
at home have fraternized with us Americans at every opportunity, and
no place in London that I have gone but I have been received with
unmistakable heartfelt kindness.

[Illustration]

After getting comfortably settled the question comes to the tourist,
“What first?” And there is so much in London we want to see, that it
was a question. I suppose we answered it as every American would,
Westminster Abbey. There we spent our first afternoon. I had been
afraid of disappointment. I may say I am getting used to finding
things which sounded and seemed big when viewed from Kansas, actually
getting small and ordinary when right before us. But it was not so
with Westminster. The present building was put up by Henry III., in
the thirteenth century to take the place of the structure on the same
spot erected by the Saxons soon after the year 1000. A few towers and
façades were added a century later, but for practically 400 years this
grand church has been the national memorial hall of the English people.
Although tombs and monuments are on every side, the spacious church is
used for service every day, and it is an agreeable memory now that we
joined in the afternoon service that day in the hall where kings are
crowned and where they are buried, and where men greater than kings
have been laid away after their work was done.

The church is very large, the form of a Latin cross, beautifully
proportioned, rather gloomily lighted, but impressive in appearance.
Of course it was originally Catholic, but being the state church it
went Protestant when Henry VIII. turned against the pope, partly
because the pope would not recognize his divorce machine. There are
not many statues of saints, but up one side and down the other of the
double aisles and the little chapels are monuments, usually statues, of
the men whose names are England’s greatness. I do not mean the kings
and queens, for most of them would not by their own merit deserve
the honor, but such as these: The Pitts, father and son, who ruled
in England a hundred years ago; Fox, Peel, Cobden, statesmen of the
world; Beaconsfield and Gladstone, not far apart now; Wilberforce,
the philanthropist; Darwin, Newton and Herschel, the scientists;
Livingstone, the African explorer, and Gordon, the general; André, who
was shot as a spy in America; John and Charles Wesley, the Methodists;
Watts, the hymn-writer; Händel, the composer, and Jenny Lind, the
sweet singer of a generation ago; Addison, Macaulay, Thackeray, and
Dickens; Chaucer, Ben Jonson, and Tennyson, poets laureate; Booth and
Garrick, the actors; Spenser and Dryden, and many other poets;—a great
aristocracy of learning, and now in the democratic, barrier-razing
grave. Then there are nearly all the great English generals of
the last four centuries, with heroes whose names are familiar to
American school-boys as to English. And in the chapels are the tombs
of England’s rulers from Edward the Confessor, some great kings and
some little kings, some good and some bad, surrounded by the graves
of queens and lords and ladies with the familiar names of English
nobility. Near the tomb of the great Queen Elizabeth is that of her
rival whom she executed, Mary Queen of Scots, the remains of the
latter placed there by her son, King James, who by the irony of fate
succeeded his mother’s enemy. I could go on with the list, but it would
be with the reader as with the visitor, only the general effect, with
here and there some great name singled out from the rest because of
special interest or connection with some great event. And a fact which
impressed me was that many men and women were executed by one monarch
and their remains brought to Westminster and monuments erected to them
by the next.

In Westminster Abbey the kings and queens of England have been crowned
since the time of its building. A sovereign may inherit or receive
from the representatives of the people the royal power, but he is not
fully authorized and empowered to perform the duties of the job, or, to
paraphrase a slang expression, his crown is not on straight until he
receives it here. There are times when the great church is brilliant
with light and resonant with music, when gay uniforms and gowns fill
the galleries and aisles, when bells peal merrily and the banners wave
from choir and column, concealing for the day the monuments and tombs
of the past with their lesson of the end to earthly greatness and the
fate of human pomp and grandeur.

[Illustration]

The way to see London is from the top of an omnibus. There are
no electric or cable lines or any other above-ground means of
transportation in London except cabs and ’buses. The underground
railroad, called “the tube,” is useful for quick traveling from
one part of the city to the other, but the ’bus is the ordinary
conveyance. It has regular seats on top, and they are always occupied
except when the rain comes in torrents. An ordinary drizzle rain does
not bother a Londoner. The sight of the long line of omnibuses with
people filling the tops of every one of them is in itself a show. I
am told there is not an hour in the day when there are not 100,000
people on top of the London ’buses. We have found that we can learn
and see more of London sitting next to the driver of a ’bus in an hour
than we could in a day with a carriage and guide. The driver is always
glad to trade you all the news about the street for a sixpence, and a
London ’bus-driver is a man of intelligence and learning; he has to
be in order to drive through the jam of traffic and not get lost in
the crooked streets. It was like reading a story when we rode down the
Strand past St. Paul’s and the Bank of England to the Whitechapel, as
the driver pointed out the house where Peter the Great lived when in
England; William Penn’s old home; Somerset House, where queens have
lived; the theatre in which the great actors of to-day appear, Covent
Garden; Garrick’s house; the rooms which Dickens described as David
Copperfield’s at Miss Trotwood’s; the Temple, England’s great lawyer
factory; the grave of Goldsmith; the inn where Johnson and congenial
sports dined and drank; and all kinds of places mentioned or described
by Dickens and Thackeray, or connected with the history of England. I
am not writing a guidebook, but I can make affidavit that a ride on a
London omnibus is the quickest and easiest way I know to fill one’s
head with a jumble of literature and history, as well as to test the
elastic qualities of the neck. If I were to advise a tourist coming to
Europe I would not only tell him to read in advance and bring plenty of
money, but he should have all the rubber possible between his head and
his body.




AT KING EDWARD’S HOUSE.


  LONDON, Aug. 14, 1905.

We have spent the day at Windsor Castle, the favorite home of Queen
Victoria, and indeed of British monarchs for several centuries. King
Edward and Queen Alexandra were not at home. We had not advised them
in advance of our intention to visit them, and Edward had gone off
to a hot-springs resort to recuperate from the festivities of last
week, when he was entertaining the French navy. The queen is visiting
her folks in Copenhagen, and none of the royal family were at the
depot. However, we went direct to the castle, and, opening it with the
usual key (a shilling), we wandered around in the big and beautiful
rooms, tramped through the stables and saw the horses, and enjoyed the
beautiful view of the valley of the Thames from the terrace on which
Queen Elizabeth used to stand and shoot deer which her gamekeeper
drove in front of her. King Edward and Queen Alexandra have a right
pretty place at Windsor, but it takes a lot of help to keep it up.
There are fifty men employed in the stables alone. The queen is a good
housekeeper, as can be told from the well-polished floors, the shining
brass and the absence of dirt and dust from the walls and furniture.
Windsor Castle is about three times as big as the Reformatory. Part
of it was built over 800 years ago by William the Conqueror, and it
has been added to by nearly every sovereign. It was a favorite place
with Henry VIII., and one of his wives, Anne Boleyn, was confined and
executed in Windsor. At the time, Henry was over in the next county
waiting until Anne was dead so he could marry another, which he did
within forty-eight hours. The kings and queens in those days were often
tough bats and acted scandalous. They couldn’t do it now, at least in
England. A few years ago the people of England were worked up over a
gambling scandal in which the present king, then Prince of Wales, was
implicated. But King Edward has shown himself to be a model monarch,
and he and the queen are both popular.

A king does not have an easy job. He has to attend state banquets,
preside at the laying of corner-stones, and ride in state on great
occasions, always look pleasant when he is in public, and eternally
be entertaining somebody from somewhere that he does not care about.
This does not sound so bad, but when you read, as you do in the English
papers, just what the king does every day and realize what a grind it
must be after the novelty is worn off, you begin to feel sorry for
Edward. No wonder he has to go to the hot springs for his health. I
don’t suppose that since he has been king he has had a whole week off,
and he is getting old. Kings and queens have to do everything, from
marrying to visiting, because it is best for their countries and not
because they want to. Even an independent American citizen knows how
tiresome it is to do “what is best” rather than what you really like,
and poor Edward never gets a rest. Of course, if the king really had
power there would be some recompense to a man. But the king of England
has little or no power. He is not allowed to have any views on public
questions. When the Conservative party is in power it speaks for the
king and when the Liberal party is in power it voices the sentiment
of the king. This fiction is a part of the British constitution, with
the further inconsistent proposition that the king can do no wrong.
If the people disapprove of the public policy they blame the dominant
ministry, and properly so, for the king has no more to say on political
questions in England than a Republican has in Texas. Edward would no
more dare to take a decided position or make a stand on a government
policy than he would get out in the street with nothing on but his
crown. The people run the government in Great Britain nearly as much
as they do in the United States, and the monarchical customs and the
restrictions and regulations which seem absurd to us would be dumped
out in the next session of parliament if the people wished it. But they
don’t, for they are English and they cling to the old ways. They want
the king and nobles and are willing to pay the bills.

[Illustration]

But I am getting away from Windsor. It is the biggest and best castle
I have seen in Europe. There are towers and turrets and moats enough
to remind you that once upon a time a castle was a fort, and there are
gardens and terraces and beautiful pictures which show that the kings
have spent their money, or the people’s money, with good taste. There
are several other royal residences in England, but Windsor is conceded
to be the best. It is in a beautiful country, and yet it is close to
London, so that the king could spend a quiet night and in the morning
hop on the train and in thirty minutes be at his office in the city.
And the king has a train of special cars nearly as handsome as those of
a division superintendent on the Santa Fe.

Our guide pointed out to us a neighboring estate which belonged to
William Penn, the first owner of Pennsylvania, long before Quay’s time.
Penn got the English sovereign to let him have all of Pennsylvania at a
nominal rent. He then settled with the Indians on a friendly basis, and
the result was his Quaker colony prospered from the start. The contract
was that he and his successors and assigns should pay to the king of
England so many beaver-skins annually. There have been no payments, so
the guide said, since July 4, 1776.

[Illustration]

On our way to Windsor we stopped at Stoke Poges, or rather at the
church near there, in the graveyard of which Gray wrote his great
“Elegy.” The little church stands just as it did when Gray was there
about 150 years ago. The yew tree, to which he refers, is a veritable
monarch, and the woman who shows strangers around said it was 900 years
old. In the church are the graves of Gray and his mother, to whom he
owed his intelligence and his opportunity. The ivy-covered tower looks
down over the crumbling gravestones of those—

    “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
      Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
    Along the cool, sequestered vale of life
      They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.”

Gray wrote a great poem. He never wrote another in the same class.
His reputation is based on the Elegy, and that is enough. It made him
famous, and he was offered the position of poet laureate to the king
and declined it. A man who will decline a good job like that is almost
as rare as a great poet.

We read the poem aloud out in the graveyard underneath the yew tree.
It fitted exactly. Gray had touched the springs of sublimity by seeing
through nature and telling just what he saw, no more.

[Illustration]

In a field near Windsor I saw a mowing-machine, the first I have
noticed in Europe. Everywhere else the hay and grass has been cut by
hand. I mentioned this fact to the driver, and he was very bitter over
the introduction of machinery because it kept men out of an opportunity
to work. He told me he was going to America just as soon as he could
“raise the funds.” The women do not work in the field in England, at
least not much. But they are busy in the dairy, at the stores and
behind the bar in the saloons. In every way I found England ahead of
the continent in its ways of doing things, but there is still enough
difference from our ways to make them seem queer. I also have a kick
coming on another matter. A great many English people do not speak the
English language. They think they do, but they not only drop their h’s
when they should be on and put them on where they do not belong, but
they pronounce the vowels and some of the consonants in a manner that
would make a dictionary turn pale. It is often very difficult for me
to understand them, and they are all at sea over my Kansas brogue. Of
course this does not apply to the educated English people, who only
speak differently from us in using a broad and pleasant accent.

Coming down the street on the way home I saw in a grocery-store window
these signs: “Breakfast eggs, ten for a shilling;” “Recommended eggs,
twelve for a shilling;” “Select eggs, fourteen for a shilling;”
“Cooking-eggs, sixteen for a shilling.” The frankness of the signs
surprised me. I suppose we have the same varieties of eggs in Kansas,
but we don’t describe them so exactly and they all go at the same
price. As eggs are a staple item on the bill of fare, I am wondering
to-night whether my landlord buys “breakfast eggs” or “cooking-eggs,”
or just plain “eggs.”

[Illustration]

The English money is the hardest to understand in Europe. It is based
on the shilling, worth about a quarter in our money. Four farthings
make a penny, 12 pennies make a shilling, and 20 shillings make a
pound ($4.80). The usual coins are the ½ penny, pronounced “ha-penny,”
penny, “tuppence,” the 3-penny, pronounced “trippence,” the sixpence,
the shilling, the 10-shilling, the pound, called a sovereign; the
5-shilling piece, called a crown, and the half-crown. You add 8 pence
to 10 pence and it doesn’t make 18, it makes “one and six.” Add one and
six to one and eight and it makes three and two—yes, it does! Figuring
with English money for an American beginner is like turning handsprings.

The paper currency is issued by the Bank of England, and is made of
white-fiber paper. In some way I got possession of a ten-pound note
and took it into a bank to have it changed. The cashier had me sign my
name on the back. I demurred at first, but as I wanted the change I
finally did it, remarking to him that I was pleased to know that the
bank considered my indorsement necessary to a bank note of the Bank of
England. The cashier did not see the joke, for he took pains to tell me
that it was not to make the note better and that a Bank of England note
was worth its face in gold anywhere. I have had a hard time with my
alleged jokes. I had a letter of introduction to a London banker from
a New York banker, and presented it in order to get the opportunity of
looking through an English bank. Wanting to be pleasant and friendly,
I remarked as he finished reading the letter that I had gotten it so
that if I had trouble with the police I might call on him for help. He
gravely assured me that he did not think I would have any difficulty
with the police. He did not see my little joke. Perhaps he has seen it
by this time, for that was two days ago.




THE TOWER AND OTHER THINGS.


  LONDON, ENGLAND, Aug. 17, 1905.

After Westminster Abbey I went to looking for the Tower of London.
Since I was a boy and read the story of the two little princes who
were said to have been murdered in the Tower by order of their royal
uncle, I had pictured the Tower as something awful and gloomy. As a
matter of fact the Tower is rather imposing in appearance, and with the
improvements that have been made in recent years is a fairly decent
sort of castle right in the city of London. Built for a fortress by
William the Conqueror soon after his capture of England from the
Saxons, it was added to and used as a royal residence and state prison,
mostly the latter. Kings and queens have been confined within its walls
and nobles have been imprisoned by the hundreds, many of them only
finding it a step toward execution. It is now a government arsenal, and
contains a number of soldiers and a lot of military supplies as well
as a historical museum. The Tower consists of a dozen towers inclosed
by a wall and moat, and covers thirteen acres. It is really very
interesting, and anyone who remembers his English history or who has
read English stories of a few centuries ago can feel delightful thrills
as he goes up and down the dark corridors and stairways, sees the rooms
in which so many of the great men of England, good and bad, spent
the time preliminary to their death, or passed years in confinement.
Kings of England, Scotland and France, princes, archbishops and
ministers of state have carved or scratched their names on the walls
and window-frames while sojourning here at the expense of the state.
As a usual thing the executions were held outside the walls so that
the public could enjoy the amusement, but a few of the noble ladies
and some men who were very popular with the people were decapitated in
the little square in the middle of the inclosure, and the spot is now
marked by an iron tablet. The Tower has not been used as a prison since
1820, and since then it has been cleaned and renovated so that the only
evidence of the dark old days is contained in the placards which the
government has put up for the benefit of the public. Henry VIII., who
was a bad husband but an able monarch, had a fad for the collection
of old armor, and a great part of the White Tower, the largest of
the towers in the Tower, is taken up by a splendid exhibition of the
fighting-clothes and weapons of England and Europe during the Middle
Ages. In another tower, Wakefield Tower, is kept a part of the royal
regalia, including the crown worn by the king when he is formally
inducted into office at Westminster Abbey. This crown contains 2,818
diamonds, 300 pearls and other precious stones “too numerous to
mention.” The government charges a sixpence to get into this exhibit,
which is said by the official guidebook to be worth $15,000,000. You
pay another sixpence to see the rest of the buildings, including the
old armor, the place where the bones of the little princes are said
to have been found, the tower where the Duke of Clarence was drowned
in a large cask of wine, and all the other beautiful horrors that go
with the Tower. I never fail to appreciate the thrift of these European
governments. They always charge admissions to the castles, palaces
and public buildings. What a howl there would be in America if the
Government should exact a fee of 10 cents to visit the White House, or
the State of Kansas should charge admission to the Governor’s residence
at Topeka.

When we went into the Tower the officers at the gate made everybody
leave packages or boxes outside. Mrs. Morgan even had to dispose of her
chatelaine bag, and when she wanted to know the reason why, learned
that it was to prevent her carrying dynamite into the Tower and blowing
it to pieces. The powers of the Old World are always looking for
dynamiters.

[Illustration]

During our stay in London the French fleet has been visiting the
British fleet at Portsmouth, and a large number of the officers and men
have been brought to London and entertained. International politics is
a subject of general interest in Europe. Emperor William of Germany has
most of the rest of Europe so nervous that even the English and French,
foes for centuries, are making up to each other. Just as in Germany I
found a feeling that eventually Germany would have a war with America
and England, I found the same impression here, and as France hates
Germany more than it does England, the French, with the same thing in
mind, would line up with the Anglo-American combine. The London papers
have had numerous articles showing that the combined fleets, armies and
financial powers of the three countries and Japan could lick the rest
of the earth to a standstill. The most ordinary Englishman is posted
on international matters as well as the ordinary American is on local
State affairs. To illustrate the public feeling, at a theatre when the
ballet-girls were carrying banners of the various nations the climax
came with the English representatives and the French representatives
clasping hands and the American dancers waving the stars and stripes
over them. The audience cheered enthusiastically.

[Illustration]

Speaking of theatres reminds me that London has the best in the world.
The English people are great play-goers, and the city has such a large
population that a play often runs here for a year. Prices are higher
for the best seats and cheaper for the cheap seats than in America. A
parquet seat is called a “stall,” and is usually $2.50. The “pit” is
back of the parquet, and is about 50 cents. First balcony is called
the dress circle, and is about $2. Second gallery is about 25 or 50
cents. I think the class distinctions account for the great difference
in prices. An imposition in London theatres is that a charge of 12
cents is made for a program, filled with advertising, and no better
than those given free in America. When the orchestra plays “God Save
the King” the audience rises. Americans get up, too, and as the tune is
the same as “America” the Yankees I know sing “Sweet Land of Liberty”
while the English are saving the king.

[Illustration]

I saw the procession of the local officials when the Frenchmen were
here. The sheriff of the county rode in a beautiful old-style yellow
coach, wore a three-cornered hat and a uniform of 200 years ago, with
powdered wig and sword. The lord mayor of London was dressed the same
way, with his hair down his back in a queue. If the sheriff of Reno
county and the mayor of Hutchinson had any style about them they would
not let these English officials outshine them. I am told it costs the
mayor about a half-million a year to hold the office, as his principal
duty is to entertain the city’s guests at his own expense. The lord
mayor is more ornamental than useful. The local government is more like
our State organization, with one legislative body, consisting of 118
county councillors elected by the boroughs, and another of nineteen
aldermen appointed by the council. As London has about five times as
many people as Kansas and much harder problems of administration to be
solved, the government is a big thing. And London is well governed,
better, I think, than American cities. The only thing that would grate
on us is the great amount of regulation. You can’t build a house or go
into business without permission, and then everything must be just so.
The English people are law-abiding, more patient with regulations and
rules than ours, and public opinion stands for the strict enforcement
not only of laws but of what seem like absurd red-tape rules. Hardly
any stores are open or business commenced until 9 o’clock. Nearly
everybody takes one to two hours for lunch. Stores close at 6 o’clock
and dinner is in the evening. Saturday afternoons all business houses
are shut up, and there are a great number of holidays. An American gets
nervous over the easy-going way of doing business. He is always in
trouble because he has forgotten it is Saturday afternoon or a “bank
holiday,” or because he can’t transact important business between 12
and 2 o’clock. In fact, if he wants to, an American can find a lot
of things in London to make him miserable and cause him to abuse the
country. But if he is patient and learns a little of the English ways
he finds that he may live a little slower but he will live just as
happily, and probably longer if he does as the English do. The American
way of rushing things is well known and generally discountenanced in
England. They think we are fools for working so hard, and resent the
rather offensive criticisms by the Yankees of their slowness. Perhaps
they are right. They tell me that on his first visit an American always
tries to reform English business methods. After that first attempt he
tackles the easier job of sweeping back the ocean with a broom.




IN RURAL ENGLAND.


  LONDON, ENGLAND, August 21, 1905.

We have just finished a trip of a couple of hundred miles through
southern England in a motor car. In France and the United States it is
an automobile, but in Great Britain it is a motor car. This is a better
way to see the country than from a railroad train, and not so good as
walking. If you have a motor car or have a friend who has one, that is
the best way to travel. If you have none and no prospect, a motor car
is a delusion and a mistake. I happened to have a friend with a motor
car and am therefore on the side of the motorists.

We left London at 10 o’clock in the morning, and by night had ridden a
hundred miles and taken in Hampton Court, Windsor, Reading, Maidenhead,
Alton, and Winchester, besides a lot of little places and the country
along the way. The English roads are just about perfection. The main
roads are made of stone or gravel with clay on top, rolled until they
are as smooth as asphalt, and kept free from holes and bumps. Every
bridge and culvert is of stone. There is no need to slow up except for
people and other vehicles. I doubt if America ever has such roads.
Perhaps in a thousand years, when our country is about as old as
England, we will have equally as good thoroughfares, but it will be
fully a thousand years. These English roads were good stone roads
before the days of railways. They were constructed as business and
military necessities by the order of the English government. I don’t
think Kansas farmers will ever build graveled roads on which motorists
can make high speed and kill the chickens and dogs that don’t get
out of the way when the horn blows. However, Kansas farmers could,
profitably to themselves, improve their roads so that one horse could
haul a wagon-load in place of two horses, and so that the wagon could
be hauled in muddy times. Such roads would be good enough for Kansas
automobiles, and by that time they will be cheap and every farmer will
have one. The Romans who conquered and held possession of England
from the time of Julius Cæsar to several centuries later, were great
road-builders, and fragments of their old military roads still exist.
Good roads are a sign of civilization. Fortunately, they are not the
only sign, for if they were, parts of Kansas would be uncivilized. We
can beat the Old World on a good many propositions, but when it comes
to roads and highways the old country has us skinned a good many blocks.

[Illustration]

This is August, but the woods and meadows of England are as green and
fresh as with us in May. An English summer as I see it is warm and
moist. It is not near so warm as in the Mississippi valley, and the
rain comes nearly every day. Rain does not often fall in sheets and
inches, but drizzle-drazzles down and soaks in so as to do the most
good. The English people don’t mind the rain at all. It is this moist
climate which covers the walls with ivy and the trees with moss, and
keeps the verdure fresh and green until the fall. Harvest is just
now being finished. There is no corn in England—although they call
barley, wheat and small grain generally, “corn.” The principal crop
is hay and oats and barley, a little wheat, and vegetables in great
quantities. England has 50,000 square miles, so it is over half as
large as Kansas, but it has 30,000,000 people, and therefore much of
the farming is for market truck. As a matter of fact there is very
little actual “rural life.” The villages are so close together that
it is often hard to tell where one town ends and another begins, and
a country road is as nearly well settled as a city suburb in America.
Here and there are vast estates, the beautiful show places and curse of
England. With millions of people wanting work and thousands of tenant
farmers who can get no title to the soil they till, it looks to me like
a howling outrage for a lord, a duke or a brewer to fence up several
thousand acres as a shooting-place, and remove from production a large
per cent. of the land which ought to be doing good and providing some
Englishman a chance to make a living and a home. The English people do
not seem to mind it at all, and I suppose there is no call for me to
get excited, but I can’t help it. We have gone by some beautiful parks,
with great stately trees, deer grazing in herds and pheasants and quail
flying at the side of the road. These belong to somebody who is off
for the summer and who got them from his father, who received them
from the king, who originally stole them from the actual owners. For
quiet beauty the lanes and meadows of England, lined with fine trees
and fenced with hedge or stone wall, cannot be beaten. The Arkansas
valley is just as beautiful in June, but in August the Kansas sun can
be depended on to do business and spoil the freshness of the trees
and grass. When the wayside is not inclosed between high hedgerows,
the fence is stone, but over the stone grow ivy and moss, out of the
cracks come grass and flowers, so the coldness and bleakness of the
rock is concealed. Every English farm seems to have a flock of sheep.
I always heard the national meat of old England was roast beef, but
that is a mistake. It is mutton-chops, and every English family has
them at least once a day if it has the price. Along the main roads are
little inns every mile or so with the peculiar names and signs that are
characteristic. During the day I counted four called “The Red Lion.”
One was “The Headless Woman,” and over the sign-post was the picture of
a woman with her head chopped off below the chin. These inns are hotels
and public-houses, and generally look interesting and clean. I am told
their prices are reasonable to Englishmen, but they charge Americans in
an automobile about all the law would allow.

[Illustration]

To-day we came from Southampton to Brighton, fifty miles along the
southern coast. The beach is fine, and is the summer resort of England.
Years ago royalty and nobility made Brighton their favorite sea-shore
place, but the great plain people have gotten into the habit of
going there in numbers, so the aristocracy has gone farther, to the
continent and to Wales. Nearly every one of these old English towns
has a cathedral and a Roman wall. The Romans were town-builders as
well as road-makers, and they never even camped for the night without
fortifying. The cathedrals were mostly built in the Middle Ages, when
the church was a wealthy business organization with lands and revenues.
They look old and quaint and are generally in good taste. When you read
about a cathedral or castle being a thousand years old you may depend
on it that if it is still in use it has been “restored.” Some of these
very old cathedrals remind me of the boy’s jackknife. The blades wore
out and he got new blades. The handle wore out and he got a new handle.
But he still had the old jackknife. A cathedral built in the year 1000
may have new walls, new roof, new interior and new spire, but it is
still the old cathedral, “restored.”

[Illustration]

In a little old English inn on the bank of the river Thames we ate our
lunch and watched the endless procession of boats that passes up and
down the stream. The ocean reaches up the river as far as London, so
that it is really an inlet, with a tide that rises and falls, and a
deep channel for ships. Ten miles above London the Thames is about the
size of the Little Arkansas, and all the way past Windsor, Henley and
Oxford, historic for the boat-races, it is very little wider than Cow
creek. By a system of dams and locks the Thames above London is really
only a canal. There is a path alongside, and we saw several young men
taking their sisters, or somebody’s sisters, for a boat-ride, the man
walking the bank, pulling the boat with a rope, and the lady sitting in
the boat. In some countries I have been in this summer the woman would
have been pulling on the rope and the man would have been reared back
in the seat, comfortably smoking a long cigar. As a river the Thames
above London is not much, but as a pretty winding stream, carrying
little steamboats and row-boats, filled with gaily dressed people, it
is a success.

[Illustration]

The place we stopped for lunch was at Runnymede, just about the
greatest spot on earth for English and Americans. It was here in 1215
that King John met the rebellious barons and signed the Magna Charta.
Up to that time the king of England had done as he pleased, regardless
of law. King John levied taxes so heavily that the people could not
stand it, and the big nobles suffered worst of all. So the barons
combined, and when the king started out to lick them, his supporters
nearly all went over to the rebels. In order to save his neck and his
kingdom, John met the barons at Runnymede and signed the agreement
which is at the basis of the English and American constitutions. He
agreed not to levy any further unusual taxes except by consent of the
Great Council of the nobles (origin of the English parliament), nor to
deny or sell justice, and confirmed the right of an accused person to a
trial by jury.

It did not make any difference if King John repudiated the Magna Charta
as soon as he could. The principle was established, and while some
English rulers after that tried to evade and escape its provisions,
the English people held to it as their rock of refuge. England has no
written constitution like ours. The English constitution is a growth of
custom, laws, grants and statutes, and the Magna Charta is the basis on
which it rests.

When John met the barons at Runnymede the people had no rights that
king or baron was bound to respect. But John put a provision in the
Magna Charta that the barons must treat their tenants as fairly as the
barons wanted to be treated by the king. I suppose John was trying
to get even with his powerful nobles by thus recognizing the common
people, and deserves no credit for the article. But in a few centuries
the development of this idea and the discovery that a musket in the
hands of an ordinary man could shoot a hole through a knight, broadened
the Magna Charta so that it protects every Englishman.

[Illustration]

One of the things that strike Americans as odd is the rule of the
road, “turn to the left.” This rule is rigidly observed everywhere in
England. But when your motor car, running at 30 or 40 miles an hour,
meets another coming at a like speed, and your driver turns to the
left, the American on the rear seat shuts his eyes so as not to see
the collision, while a cold chill travels down his backbone. Of course
there is no accident, for the other fellow also turns to the left, but
it is hard on the nerves. However, a Kansas man in Europe takes plenty
of nerve with him and he is all right so long as his money lasts.




RAILROADS IN EUROPE.


  LIVERPOOL, Aug. 24, 1905.

A railroad is a railroad anywhere in the world, only it is sometimes
different. Every country has its own peculiarity in railroads as
well as in everything else. The first European train we saw was at
Queenstown, Ireland, and we laughed. It looked like a toy, small
engine, small coaches and strange in appearance. I decided to wait
until I had more observations on the subject before putting my ideas
into a letter, and since then have gone from one country to another
in Europe, traveling first, second and third class, on main lines and
branch roads, on through trains and accommodation trains, and gaining
all the knowledge possible for an American traveler who gets his
information from experience. While each country has its peculiarities,
there are certain ways in common.

In the first place the European idea of a passenger car is taken
directly from the old stage-coach. It is composed of from three to
six compartments, like that many stages fastened together. In each
compartment there are two seats running across the car, facing each
other, and holding eight or ten passengers. As a rule there is no
communication between the compartments. You get in the little room, the
door is shut and locked, and there you stay until you get to the next
stop, when the door is opened if anyone wants to come in or go out.
There is no toilet-room, and no way to go to the smoking compartment
unless you are in one, and no way to get out if you are in. I think
all third-class cars are of this pattern. On the main lines, on a
few trains and in some cars, there is a corridor running along the
side, making it possible to go from one compartment to another, and
sometimes there is a toilet-room. This pattern of cars is often called
“American,” and usually there are extra charges. The cars are short
and light, with two wheels under each end like wagon-wheels, and not
the double trucks of our cars. There is very seldom any ventilation
at the top, and as the rule is that the passenger next to the window
can regulate its opening, the other passengers can freeze or roast as
the case may be. In Germany the cars have appliances for steam heat,
but they do not seem to usually have them in England or elsewhere on
the continent. Travelers carry rugs, blankets and footstones in cold
weather.

And right here let me explain a difference in traveling that accounts
for much of the seeming shortcomings of European cars. The people in
Europe hardly ever take long journeys. Sleeping-cars are rarities
and only carried on a few trains. A European who takes a twenty-mile
railroad trip thinks he is a “traveler.” They do not have our
magnificent distances and long journeys, and therefore do not expect
the comforts and luxuries which we consider necessities. Almost the
only people who make what are called “long trips” in Europe, that is,
ten or twelve hours, are American and English tourists, and they are
given a shadow of American comfort on certain first-class trains, for
which they pay right well. For example, Mrs. Morgan and I wanted to
take the night train from Paris to Marseilles, twelve hours’ ride. One
train carried a sleeping-car. It left Paris at 9 o’clock at night and
reached Marseilles at 9 o’clock the next morning. Only passengers with
first-class tickets can ride on it. I bought my first-class tickets
(nearly twice the second-class, which is the usual way), and then asked
how much the sleeper would be. “Twenty dollars!” In America we would
have paid $2.50. And this in a land where we were told everything was
cheap! I have often been heard to rail at the high rates charged by Mr.
Pullman, but I will be slow to do so again. I lifted up my voice to
the French agent on the extortion of charging twenty dollars for one
night, and he shrugged his shoulders and said we could go on the day
train,—that Frenchmen never used the sleeping-cars, and that if the
rich Americans wanted them they could pay the price. We did not buy
that sleeping-car, but a few days later, when it became very important
to hurry to Rome, we gave up eight dollars for a sleeper from Genoa to
the city of the Cæsars. A berth in a European sleeping-car is a little
compartment with two beds, one above the other, about the size of
pantry shelves. Two people cannot comfortably stand in the compartment,
and when one is dressing the other has to stay on his shelf or go out
in the corridor which runs along the side. There is no ventilation, and
the toilet-room, about as big as a barrel, is for both sexes. As some
American said, there is one good thing about a European sleeping-car,
and only one: you do not mind having to get off at an early hour.

The railroad language is different in England. When I bought a ticket
in London I went to the “booking office,” and “booked for Liverpool.”
There is no conductor, but a “guard,” who is conductor, brakeman and
porter combined. Freight trains are “goods trains.” The engineer is a
“driver.” Baggage is “luggage.” A grip is a “bag,” a trunk is a “box,”
and anything is a “parcel.” Nobody calls the stations. When you reach
your destination you get off, and if you are a stranger you are always
in trouble wondering whether or not you have gone past. I have never
learned the theory of their tickets. When I “book” I get a ticket about
like ours. Often no one looks at it or takes it up until I leave the
station at the end of the trip. We rode one day in Italy nearly all day
before anybody looked at our tickets, although usually it is necessary
to show them to get on the station platform. It would seem as if such
carelessness would be taken advantage of, but it does not seem to be.
One reason probably is that in every country it is a crime to ride on
a railroad train without a ticket. In America if the conductor catches
you riding without a ticket he collects the fare. In Europe he can
send you to jail, and I don’t doubt but he would. In America it is not
considered even bad morals to beat a railroad. In Europe it is a felony.

I had been told that railroad traveling is cheaper in Europe than in
America, but it is not. To understand railroad rates you must remember
that population is very dense and traffic heavy, much like suburban
travel around New York or Chicago. England is not near as large as
Kansas, but it has twenty times our population. Practically all of the
travel is short-distance. The same conditions prevail on the continent.
You can ride third-class, second-class, or first-class. In most
countries third-class is a good deal like riding in American box-cars
fitted up with seats. That costs about two cents a mile. Second-class
means cars such as I have described with upholstered seats, and the
price is close to three cents a mile. First-class means plush or
leather and a guarantee that your traveling companions will be nobility
or Americans or fools. The first-class rate is about four cents. In
most European countries no baggage is carried free. You pay extra for
fast trains, “corridor trains,” and for the use of toilet-rooms. In
order to travel in clean company and in ordinary decent style, after
you count in your “extras,” the railroad fare is just about the same
in Europe as in America, and not as cheap as it is on similar trains
in the populous sections of our country. In the stations there are
separate waiting-rooms and separate lunch-counters for first, second
and third-class passengers. The high-class European can eat his lunch
with the happy thought that no rude third-class citizen is on the next
stool.

[Illustration]

But if the European railroads do not do much for the comfort and
pleasure of the passengers, they are away ahead of our railroads when
it comes to providing for their safety. Accidents are not unknown,
but they are rare, especially in comparison with the frightful wrecks
which take place in the United States. Nearly every railroad is
double-tracked or has three or four tracks. The roadbeds are near to
perfection. Bridges are of stone. Rails are not so heavy, but are
stronger when the light cars are considered. And every mile of European
track is patrolled day and night. They use a half-dozen section-men
and track-walkers where we would have one or two, and they pay the
half-dozen wages that aggregate about as much as the one or two. In
Italy the track-walkers are usually women, and it was a funny sight
to see the Dago lady stand with a red flag at “present arms” when the
train passed. Most crossings are overhead or under, very rarely on
grade. Embankments are built of stone instead of mud, and the roadbeds
are constructed for centuries, instead of being just sufficient to
“earn the bonds.” I was in England when an accident occurred on a
railroad, and the next day the matter was brought up in parliament and
the government was asked what it was doing to prevent a recurrence
of such a thing. Just as the government protects the railroads from
beats it regulates their conduct for the safety of the traveler. In
some European countries, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy,
the government owns the important railroads, but in all of them it
exercises a strong control. If a European railroad would attempt to
operate a line like some of the jerkwater branches in Kansas, the
directors would be in jail. The result is that many of the conveniences
are sacrificed to rigid rules and the lives and limbs of the passengers
are not in near as much danger as in the United States, where
competition has gone in for comfortable cars and often neglected the
track. While the Europeans might copy some of our methods, our railroad
officials could get some information in the Old World that would save
them lots of wrecks and make their passengers more secure in their life
and health while traveling in the palatial cars.

[Illustration]

As the European does not travel long distances and has to pay extra for
his baggage, he rarely takes anything but hand-luggage. All through
Europe we have journeyed for three months, carrying all of our baggage
in the car with us. When we reached a station where we were to stop
there was always a porter on hand to carry our half-dozen grips and
bags, and for five or ten cents put them safely in the carriage that
would take us to the hotel to the hotel for a quarter. During the three
months I don’t think I carried my grip three times. There is always a
man standing around ready to do such work so cheaply that nobody thinks
of carrying his own grips even across a station platform. If you have
a trunk it is put in a box-car on the end of the train, and at your
destination you go and get it at once. There are no baggage-checks, and
you wonder the trunks do not get lost. But they don’t.

[Illustration]

The station-master always wears a fine uniform, and in most countries
he is a sort of military officer. When the time for departure arrives
he rings a bell or blows a whistle. The guards close the car-doors.
Then the station-master whistles again and the train starts, the
station-master saluting. The engine does not whistle or ring a bell.
The conductor does not yell “All aboard!” The station-master is the
whole thing. He is an autocrat and has entire control of the train in
station.

Trains are rarely late in Europe. The schedule is maintained regardless
of connections, and therefore connections are usually made. The
railroad rules have the same weight as laws and are observed as such.
Railroad employés are polite. When a porter starts down a platform with
a barrow of luggage he does not try to run over people, or yell “Get
out of the way!” as in America. He goes slowly and calls out “Make way,
if you please.” Baggagemen do not try to break the trunks, and will
answer civilly when you ask questions. Some of these European ways are
not so bad.

Summed up, these are my impressions of European railroads: Cars small,
uncomfortable, unsanitary; road-bed fine and management good; prices
about the same as in America, and chance of getting to your destination
much better.

A passenger train with the long line of little light coaches is put
over the rails very rapidly in Europe if they wish. Many regular trains
make fifty and sixty miles an hour. The ordinary trains which stop
frequently and carry the third-class cars principally, are slow. A
freight car, called a “goods van,” is about the size of a dray. There
are not many box-cars, but the goods are packed on the open drays and
covered with tarpaulins. The effect is about like a thresher engine
pulling a lot of four-wheel wagons and drays. It looks “dinky” and is a
cause of merriment for Americans. But the Englishman retorts with some
reference to an American railroad wreck and we shut up. I have learned
this summer that while the United States is the greatest country on
earth, it can still learn lessons from the slow-but-sure-going English,
the sturdy Germans and the energetic French. One of these lessons
is that fast trains and fine cars ought to be supplemented by solid
roadbeds and careful watching.

A New York clothing merchant was showing a customer some suits. The
man tried on a coat and vest, and when the merchant turned his back
he bolted out of the door. The store-keeper yelled “Stop thief!” and
called the police. All joined in the pursuit. The policeman drew his
revolver and began to fire at the fugitive. “Shoot him in the pants!”
screamed the merchant, “shoot him in the pants: the coat and vest are
mine.”

So when we begin to fire at the defects of railroading in the various
countries I have to beg the shootist to shoot at the pants, the coat
and vest and some of the faults are our own.




THE TIME TO QUIT.


  LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND, Aug. 24, 1905.

To-morrow we will finish the job of seeing Europe and sail for home.
Just to be sure that we would not miss the boat, we came to Liverpool
two days in advance. When an American is on his first long stay in a
foreign country and the time grows near when he is to return once more
to the land and the people he loves, he knows now that he loved them
if never before. Strange scenes are no longer interesting, castles,
cathedrals and curious costumes are tiresome, and the only thoughts
are of the folks at home. Even a man who is ordinarily cynical and
unsentimental finds his heart beating faster as the hours drag slowly
by waiting for the time of departure. It would be a great relief if
one could walk ahead and be overtaken, but the walking is not good in
the Atlantic this season, so we are painfully killing time and going
through the motions of sight-seeing while “waiting for the train,”
or rather for the boat, which happens to be the White Star steamship
Republic.

[Illustration]

On the way here we spent a day in the town of Oxford. Everybody has
read more or less of the great university and its student life. Of
course this is vacation-time and the colleges are practically deserted,
but we wandered through the buildings and quadrangles and enjoyed
the walks and quaint streets. The phrase “classic shades” might well
have originated here, for the great trees hundreds of years old, the
ivy-covered walls and towers, the inclosed courts and the low-ceiled
halls and rooms, all make for a peaceful repose that forms a charming
setting for the intellectual life which ordinarily fills the place.
There are twenty-one colleges in Oxford, each large in size and
impressive in architecture. The style is a quadrangle with a large
court or “quad” within, on which the students’ rooms face, and usually
covered with grass and filled with stately trees. Each college has from
100 to 300 students, and the attendance at the whole university is over
3,000. The “young gentlemen,” as Oxford students are called, reside in
the college buildings, and each has a bedroom and sitting-room. Meals
are either served in the rooms or in the large dining-hall. There are
no recitations, and not many lectures. Much of the studying is done
with tutors. The intellectual effort of the student is to acquire
sufficient knowledge from lectures, tutors and books to pass the
examinations. The chief courses of study are the ancient languages,
philosophy, mathematics, history, and either theology, law, medicine,
or natural science. The range is not near so large as in America and
they do not go so much on what we call “practical studies.” On the
side the men do good work in rowing and cricket, and have all the fun
of American students, even if they are supposed to be in and with the
gates locked every night at 9 o’clock.

The history of Oxford University dates back to Alfred the Great, but
the first authentic accounts of the work are of the twelfth century.
All learning was then in the hands of the church, and the first
colleges were primarily for the education of priests. Kings, queens
and bishops, interested in learning, established first one college and
then another, so that by the thirteenth century Oxford ranked with the
most important universities in Europe; and then, as education extended
to other professions, the colleges widened their courses of study,
and the government, while still ecclesiastical in form, became broad
and liberal. The colleges have large endowments, plenty of money, and
Oxford and Cambridge have educated most of the great men of England in
the last 500 years.

[Illustration]

Liverpool is a good deal like a big American city. A hundred years ago
it was a small town, but by taking the lead in American trade it has
become the most important port of Great Britain, and, counting suburbs,
has nearly a million population. Its harbor is a deep river, the
Mersey, and the banks are solid walls of wharves, docks and wholesale
buildings. It is a relief to strike a town where you go to see bridges
and factories instead of churches and art galleries. Liverpool is a
good place in which to taper off from the old and the curious to the
useful and the active. In our hotel here we have electric lights,
bathrooms, and an elevator that works. Hotels where you go to bed by
candlelight, bathe in a little tub, and walk up four flights of narrow
stairs, are interesting and comfortable, but they are better for a
three months’ stay than for a steady diet. Nearly every guest at this,
the biggest hotel in Liverpool, is an American who is getting anxious.

[Illustration]

One of the subjects in which I have taken an interest on this trip has
been that of the prices of products and labor, comparing them with
those at home. I have referred to it frequently, but perhaps a summary
will interest the practical American who wants to know “what it costs.”
In the beginning I want to say I have not yet found a place where
“things are cheap,” according to the American standard. The ordinary
people in Europe get along with things that are cheaper than in America
and they do without others, so their cost of living is not so high. The
ordinary artisan or mechanic in Europe will live with his family in
two or three rooms poorly lighted, ventilated and uninviting. His rent
is therefore cheaper than the American mechanic who occupies a little
house of his own and has a front yard or a porch. The European mechanic
will have meat to eat once a week or once a day, and he and his family
will live on what a great many Americans waste—they have to. Therefore
he lives more cheaply, and so can an American who puts himself and his
family on a diet of soup, potatoes, carrots and turnips. The ordinary
European mechanic is assisted in earning a living by his wife and all
of his children, while the ordinary American mechanic only expects
his wife to do the housework and look after the little ones, and
his children are at school until they are nearly ready to work for
themselves. The American mechanic will make from $2 to $5 a day, while
the European will get from 50 cents to $1.50.

Clothing is cheaper in Europe, and there is none ready made. The family
either is wealthy enough to have tailors and dressmakers or makes
its own. A tailor will get $1 a day wages, a seamstress 25 cents a
day. A “hired girl” gets from a dollar a month to a dollar a week, so
if a European has money enough he can have servants—but he doesn’t
have them, and his wife and children work out. They don’t do this
spasmodically, or in hard times, but customarily and ordinarily, just
as their parents did before them and their children will do after them.
Shoes are more expensive in Europe, and not so good. Cotton goods, such
as shirts, underwear, etc., are as high or higher. Silk goods, kid
gloves and perfumery are much cheaper than in America. The grades of
clothing, etc., are different. In Europe the people use ugly and coarse
stuff such as our people never use. Groceries are at least as high in
Europe as in America. Meat is higher. You can get a “square meal” in
the ordinary American small town for a quarter. You can’t do it in
Europe, but you can get some soup and bread and carrots for ten cents.

The ordinary American workingman figures that by working hard, being
economical and having a careful family, he can save enough to be
comfortable, educate his children and give them as good a chance as
anybody in town. The ordinary European workingman figures that by
working hard, being economical and having all his family at work he
can escape the poor-house, and his children can have the same chance he
has had.

Of course the best prices are paid in the big cities, as in our
country, and I will illustrate by some of my own experiences.

In London at one of the finest shops I had my hair cut and shampooed.
It cost me 12 cents American money, and in Hutchinson would have cost
me 50 cents, in New York at least 65 cents. The barber told me that
most English workingmen could not afford to pay 6 cents (or 4 cents in
a plain shop) and therefore cut their own hair.

I could have had a tailor make a suit in London for $12 or $15 that
would cost me $30 in Hutchinson or $40 in Kansas City. The American
tailor can figure out how it is done. But here is a thing that
pleased me: The swell shops in London advertise “American tailoring.”
A European tailor sews beautifully, but he can’t fit. The wealthy
Englishmen wear clothes that would make a tasteful American have fits.
Americans are the best dressed people in the world, and American
tailors are considered the best everywhere.

I could live in a hotel cheaper in Europe. The hotel-keeper here pays
his men from $6 to $10 a month and his chambermaids and female help
from $1 to $3 a month. His meat and groceries cost as much or more than
they would in America, but he works them more economically. The main
difference is in the “help.”

[Illustration: EUROPEAN CLASS DISTINCTION.

    “_Big fleas have little fleas
      Upon their backs to bite ’em,
    And the little fleas have other fleas,
      And so on, ad infinitum._”
]

In women’s wares, silks, embroideries, laces and sewing are cheaper
in Europe. Cotton goods, shoes and ordinary clothes are higher.

“Things” are just as high in Europe, people and their labor are cheaper.

[Illustration]

England is the natural friend and business competitor of America. There
is a marked difference in methods and ways. An Englishman will hold
fast to the old and only accept improvements and changes when he is
forced to or when he has fully decided they are best. In America we
usually think a change is a good thing, and will prefer something new
to the old just because it is new, when it may actually not be as good.
These are differences in temperament which have their advantages and
disadvantages. We could learn from the English and they from us, and a
half-way compromise would undoubtedly work best.

[Illustration]

The class distinctions are the most unpleasant feature of English life.
An American friend was telling me of an incident which illustrates it.
He was visiting a wealthy English family, and during his stay had a
long and pleasant talk with the gardener. He went away, and afterward
came back for another visit. He told his host that he wanted to see the
gardener and ask about some shrubs. “Very well,” said the host; “but
you won’t mind if I suggest one thing to you. Don’t call the gardener
‘Mr. Johnson.’ Just call him Johnson. We never speak to a servant
as ‘Mr.’” That was not snobbery in England. The host was a kind and
intelligent Englishman. It is the custom of the country. The custom
goes on down the line. The butler would not associate on equal terms
with the footman or the footman with the porter. And the host of my
friend would take off his hat to the good-for-nothing son of an earl,
who in turn would not presume to approach a prince unless requested. It
reminds me of the poem:

    “Big fleas have little fleas
      Upon their backs to bite ’em,
    And the little fleas have other fleas,
      And so on, ad infinitum.”

It is funny, but it is sickening to an American who knows that in his
country the son of the gardener may be President and the son of the
President may be a gardener and either of them may be a gentleman if he
is honest and straight and decent.

[Illustration]

A thought which comes to me very strongly is that a little visiting in
other countries not only makes a man a better American, but it gives
him the knowledge that there are other bright, smart and able people
besides those in the United States. The competition in this world is
keen, and every country has its advantages and its disadvantages, its
weak points and its strong points. There is no profit in belittling the
other fellow. If I have dwelt most upon the differences between America
and England, it is because they are the interesting things. There is no
interest in what is the same at home and here. The English are a great
people. A little country not as big as Kansas really dominates the
financial and political world. Out of the false notions of medieval
times they have built up constitutional liberty and have conferred its
blessings upon others. England is the greatest commercial power on
earth, and it is so because of Englishmen and not because of natural
advantages or favored position. It is old and interesting, wealthy and
powerful. It is good to look upon and pleasant to visit. But as for me,
I am with the Kansan who wrote:

    “I’ve been off on a journey—just got home to-day.
    I’ve traveled north, and south, and east, and every other way.
    I’ve seen a heap of country, and cities on the boom,
    But I want to be in Kansas, where the sunflowers bloom.”

[Illustration]




Transcriber’s Notes

Page 67 — insured changed to ensured.
Page 107 — ’lAmerica changed to l’America.
Page 139 — passed changed to past.
Page 152 — metroplis changed to metropolis.
Page 152 — taking changed to talking.
Page 168 — sursounded changed to surrounded.
Page 191 — vinevards changed to vineyards.
Page 201 — removed the extra word ‘one’.
Page 240 — Britian changed to Britain.
Page 277 — jaye changed to have.