“The pyramids were curious things,” she continued. “Some folks never
slid down into 'em at all after traveling all that distance, but
I slid. Since I was a child I have always loved sliding. The most
interesting thing I saw was three baby camels and some Highland soldiers
in Jerusalem with no pants on and funny little skirts that came down
to their knees,” she continued. “In the Holy Land I saw a lot of men in
skirts with baggy pants reaching from their knees down.”
She was apparently much interested in the subject of pants, and hurried
on:
“I found a wonderful old knocker there. By the way, I'm making a
collection of knockers. Have you seen any good ones here in Rome?”
“Not a knocker! But I haven't been looking for them.” And I added, “I
wonder some one doesn't make a collection of pants--pants of every age
and clime.”
“What kind of pants did the ancient Romans wear?” she asked.
“The same as Adam--the style hadn't changed in ages.”
This woman had got a knocker in Jerusalem, and seen some baby camels
and a number of pantless men; she had seen a bull temple and slid into
a pyramid in Egypt; she had “et vittles” everywhere, and suffered from
cramp in sundry places, and languished in a hot, stuffy state-room with
a quarrelsome lady from Connecticut, all for sixteen hundred dollars
and four months of time. Yet far more than half of the great caravan of
American tourists invading Europe and the East get no more than she did.
The poetry and beauty of the Old World and the money of the New are thus
wasted on each other.
“America is a pretty good country,” I suggested. “There are buildings
in New York as wonderful as any you will see here, and our scenery is
excellent.”
“But we have no ruins,” said Mrs. Fraley.
“On the contrary, we have the grandest ruins in the world,” I insisted.
“We have the ruins of slavery and of the old error of unequal, rights;
there all our feudal inheritance has been turned into ruins. Even that
everlasting lake of fire, which is still needed in Europe, is with us
a cold and mossy ruin. Nothing in it but garbage these days. We have
physical ruins, too, and very ancient ones, but we are a working
community, not a show. In our structures, like the Pennsylvania Station,
is the sublimity of hope and promise, not the sublimity of death and
decay.”
My friends looked at me with surprise. They had heard only the lyrical
chorus of their countrymen accompanied by the jingle of francs.
“You're right,” said the lumber king. “I thought that I'd try to live
here a few years because I can't find enough playmates in America; every
one is busy there. So I thought I'd come over here and study and fool
around. It's done me good.”
“Fooling around is better than nothing if done with energy and vigor,”
I suggested. “A capable fool-arounder isn't worth much, but he can keep
his liver busy. Here they have professional fool-arounders with gold
letters on their caps to set the pace. It's all right for a while, but
you'll want to get back to the lumber business.”
“Maybe you're right, but Europe has done me a lot o' good,” said Mr.
Pike. “The cure up at Kissingen fixed my stomach trouble. Cost like Sam
Hill, but it knocked it out.”
“What was the cure?” I asked.
“Made me walk _ten_ miles a day, and take baths and give up pastry, and
go to bed at nine.”
“And you had to travel four thousand miles and give up a lot of good
American money to learn that?” I asked. “Old Doctor Common Sense,
assisted by a little will-power, would have done that for you without
charge right in your own home. Is it possible that the old doctor has
gone out of business in Prairie du Chien?”
“He died long ago,” said the lumber king. “We have to be led to water
like a horse these days.”
“We follow Cook in the trails of Baedeker instead of following the hired
man, and we value everything according to its cost,” I answered. “But
it's good for the Yankee to travel in a pieless world.”
“Travel is such a wonderful thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Fraley, who preferred
to paddle in the heavenly gush-ways. “Don't you _love_ Italy?”