near taking the joy out of the heart of foreign
travel. It is one of those trifles which fre-
quently prove a severer test to philosophy than
calamities. In the East this thing is called
bakhshish, in Germany trinkgeld, in Italy bu-
onamano, in France pourboire, in England
I do not know how it is called in England, but
it is called for pretty often. In whatever soft,
insidious syllable it may wrap itself, it is no-
thing but hateful. A piece of money which is
not earned by honest service, but is extracted
from you as a matter of course by any vaga-
bond who may start out of the bowels of the
earth, like a gnome or a kobold, at the sound
of your footfall, is a shameless coin : it debases
him that gives and him that takes.
Everywhere on the Continent the tourist is
looked upon as a bird to be plucked, and pre-
sently the bird himself feebly comes to regard
plucking as his proper destiny, and abjectly
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 23
holds out his wing so long as there is a feather
left on it. I say everywhere on the Conti-
nent ; but, indeed, a man of ordinary agility
might walk over the greater part of Europe on
outstretched palms. Russians and Americans
have the costly reputation of being lavish of
money on their travels the latter are pictured
by the fervid Italian imagination as residing in
gold-mines located in California and various
parts of the State of New York and are con-
sequently favorites. The Frenchman is too
artful and the Briton too brusque to cut up
well as victims. The Italian rarely ventures
far from his accustomed flea, but when he
does, like the German (who, on the other hand,
is fond of travelling), he voyages on a most
economical basis. He carries off the unburnt
candle-end, and his gratuities are homoeopathic.
In spite of his cunning, I have no doubt I
should be sorry to doubt that his own coun-
trymen skin him alive. It is gratifying to be
assured by Mr. Howells, in his Italian Jour-
neys, that " these ingenious people prey upon
their own kind with an avidity as keen as that
with which they devour strangers ; " he is even
"half persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner
fares better among them than a traveller of
their own nation." Nevertheless, I still think
that the privilege of being an American is one
24 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
of the most costly things in Europe. It is
ever a large, though invisible, item in your
account, whether you halt at a Parisian hotel
or a snuffy posada in Catalonia. In neither
place has the landlord the same excuse for
extortion that was offered by the Ostend inn-
keeper to the major-domo of George II., on
one of his trips from England to Hanover.
" Are eggs scarce in Ostend ? ' inquired the
major-domo, with supercilious eyebrows. " No,"
returned the honest landlord, " but kings are."
Americans are not scarce anywhere.
In Italy one is besieged by beggars, morn-
ing, noon, and night ; a small coin generally
suffices, and a modicum of good nature always
goes a great way. There is something inno-
cent in their deepest strategy, and something
very winning in the amiability with which they
accept the situation when their villainy is frus-
trated. Sometimes, however, when the peti-
tioner is not satisfied with your largess as al-
ways happens when you give him more than he
expects he is scarcely polite. I learned this
from a venerable ex-sailor in Genoa. " Go, brig-
and ! ' was the candid advice of that ancient
mariner. He then fell to cursing my relatives,
the family tomb, and everything appertaining
to me with my coin warming in his pocket.
It is fair to observe that the Italian beggar
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 25
usually renders tribute to an abstract idea of
manhood by assuming that he has done you
some sort of service. This service is not gen-
erally visible to the unaided eye, and I fancy
that the magnifying-glass of sufficient power to
enable you always to detect it has yet to be
invented. But it is to his everlasting praise
that he often does try to throw a veil of de-
cency over the naked injustice of his demand,
though he is too apt to be content with the
thinnest of fabrics. I have paid a Neapolitan
gentleman ten sous for leaning against a dead-
wall in front of a hotel window. The unex-
pectedness and the insinuating audacity of the
appeals freqi*ently take away your presence of
mind, and leave you limp. There was an old
son of Naples who dwelt on a curbstone near
the Castell dell' Ovo. Stumbling on his pri-
vate public residence quite unintentionally, one
forenoon, I was immediately assessed. Ever
after he claimed me, and finally brought his
son-in-law to me, and introduced him as a per-
son combining many of the most desirable
qualities of a pensioner. One of his strong
points was that he had been accidentally car-
ried off to America, having fallen asleep one
day in the hold of a fruit vessel.
"But, sir," I said, "why should I give you
anything ? I don't know you."
26 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
"That is the reason, signer."
At bottom it was an excellent reason. If I
paid the father-in-law for the pleasure of know-
ing him, was it not logical and just that I
should pay the son-in-law for the much greater
pleasure I had had in not knowing him ? The
slightest thing will serve, in Italy, for a lien
upon your exchequer. An urchin who turns
himself into a Catherine-wheel at your carriage
side, or stands on his head under the very
hoofs of your horses, approaches you with the
confidence of a prodigal son. A three-day-old
nosegay thrown into your lap gives a small Ital-
ian maiden in one garment the right to cling
to the footboard of your vettura until you reim-
burse her. In driving from Pompeii to Sorrento,
no fewer than fifty of these floral tributes will
be showered upon you. The little witches who
throw the flowers are very often pretty enough
to be caught and sculptured. An inadvertent
glance towards a fellow sleeping by the road-
side places you at once in a false position. I
have known an even less compromising thing
than a turn of the eyelid to establish financial
relations between the Stranger and the native.
I have known a sneeze to do it. One morning,
on the Mole at Venice, an unassuming effort of
my own in this line was attended by a most
unexpected result. Eight or ten young raga-
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 27
muffins, who had been sunning themselves at
a gondola-landing, instantly started up from a
recumbent posture and advanced upon me in a
semicircle, with " Salute, signor, salute ! ' One
of these youths disturbed a preconceived im-
pression of mine by suddenly exclaiming
" I am a boy Americano, dam ! '
As I had not come so far from home to re-
lieve the necessities of my own countrymen,
and as I reflected that possibly this rogue's com-
panions were also profane Americani, I gave
them nothing but a genial smile, which they
divided among them with the resignation that
seems to be a national trait.
The transatlantic impostor, like Mephisto-
pheles, has as many shapes as men have fan-
cies. Sometimes he keeps a shop, and some-
times he turns the crank of a hand-organ.
Now he looks out at you from the cowl of a
mediaeval monk, and now you behold him in a
white choker, pretending to be a verger. You
become at last so habituated to seeing persons
approach in forma pauperis, that your barber
seems to lack originality when he " leaves it to
your generosity," though he has a regular tariff
for his local patrons. He does not dare name a
price in your case, though the price were four or
five times above his usual rate, for he knows that
you would unhesitatingly accept his terms, and
28 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
his existence would be forever blighted by the
reflection that he might have charged you more.
These things, I repeat, cease to amaze one
after a while, though I plead guilty to a new
sensation the day a respectable Viennese phy-
sician left it to my generosity. I attempted to
reason with Herr Doctor Scheister, but quite
futilely. No, it was so he treated princes and
Americans. It was painful to see a member of
a noble profession, not to say the noblest, pla-
cing himself on a level with grooms and barbers
and venders of orange - wood walking - sticks.
But the intelligent Herr Doctor Scheister was
content to do that.
In many cities the street beggar is under the
strict surveillance of the police ; yet there is no
spot in Europe but has its empty palm. It is
only in Italy, however, that pauperism is a regu-
lar branch of industry. There it has been ele-
vated to a fine art. Elsewhere it is a sordid,
clumsy makeshift, with no joy in it. It falls
short of being a gay science in France or Ger-
many, or Austria or Hungary. In Scotland it
is depressing, in Spain humiliating. In Spain
the beggar is loftily condescending ; he is a
caballero, a man of sangre azul, and has his
coat-of-arms, though he may have no arms to
his coat, caramba ! In order to shake him off
you are obliged to concede his quality. He
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 29
will never leave you until his demand is com-
plied with, or until you say, " Brother, for the
love of God, excuse me ! " and then the rogue
departs with a careless " God go with you ! '
He is precisely the person whom you would not
be anxious to meet in a deserted calle after
nightfall, or by daylight in a pass of the Gua-
darrama. The guide-books give disheartening
accounts of mendicancy in Ireland ; but that
must be in the interior. I saw nothing of
it along the coast, at Dublin and Cork. I
encountered only one beggar in Ireland, at
Queenstown, who retired crestfallen when I
informed him in English that I was a French-
man and did n't understand him.
"Thrue for ye," he said; "bad 'cess to me,
what was I thinkin' ov ! '
On the rising and falling inflection of that
brogue I returned to America quite indepen-
dently of a Cunard steamer. I had to call the
man back and pay my passage.
In England you are subjected to a different
kind of extortion. There are beggars enough
and to spare in the larger cities ; but that is
not the class which preys upon you in Merrie
England. It is the middle-aged housekeeper,
the smart chambermaid, the elegiac waiter and
his assistant, the boy in buttons who opens the
hall door, the frowzy subterranean person called
30 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
Boots, the coachman, the hostler, and one or
two other individuals whose precise relevancy
to your affairs will always remain a pleasing
mystery to you, but who nevertheless stand in
a line with the rest in the hall of the wayside
inn, at your departure, and expect a gratuity.
They each look for a fee ranging from two to
ten shillings sterling, according to the length of
your sojourn, though a very magnificent charge
for attendance has already been recorded in your
bill, which appears to have been drawn up by an
amateur mathematician of somewhat uncertain
touch as yet in the intricate art of addition.
The English cousin of the American work-
ingman, who would feel inclined to knock you
down if you offered him money for telling you
the time of day, will very placidly pocket a fee
for that heavy service. In walking the streets
of London you never get over your astonish-
ment at that eminently respectable person in
black your conjecture makes him a small
curate or a tutor in some institution of learn-
ing who, after answering your trivial ques-
tion, takes the breath out of you by suggesting
his willingness to drink your 'ealth.
On the whole, I am not certain that I do not
prefer the graceful, foliage-like, vagabond ways
of Pietro and Giuliana to the icy mendicity of
Jeemes.
IV
WAYS AND MANNERS
I ONCE asked an American friend, who had
spent half his life in foreign travel, to tell me
what one thing most impressed him in his vari-
ous wanderings. I supposed that he was going
to say the Pyramids or the Kremlin at Moscow.
His reply was, " The politeness and considera-
tion I have met with from every one except
travelling Englishmen and Americans."
I was afterwards told by an impolite person
that this politeness was merely a surface polish ;
but it is a singularly agreeable sort of veneer.
Some one says that if any of us were peeled,
a savage would be found at the core. It is a
very great merit, then, to have this savage
wrapped in numerous folds, and rendered as
hard to peel as possible. For the most part,
the pilgrim abroad comes in contact with only
the outside of men and things. The main
point is gained if that outside is pleasant.
The American at home enjoys a hundred
conveniences which he finds wanting in the
32 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
heart of European civilization. Many matters
which we consider as necessities here are re-
garded as luxuries there, or not known at all.
A well-appointed private house in an American
city has perfections in the way of light, heat,
water, ventilation, drainage, etc., that are not
to be obtained even in palaces abroad ; indeed,
a palace is the last place in which they are to
be looked for. The traveller is constantly
amused by the primitive agricultural implements
which he sees employed in some parts of
France, Italy, and Germany, by the ingenuous
devices they have for watering the streets of
their grand capitals, and by the strange disre-
gard of economy in man-power in everything.
A water-cart in Berlin, for illustration, requires
three men to manage it : one to drive, and two
on foot behind to twitch right and left, by
means of ropes, a short hose with a sprinkler
at the end.
" I wondered what they would be at
Under the lindens."
This painful hose, attached to a chubby Teu-
tonic-looking barrel, has the appearance of being
the tail of some wretched nondescript animal,
whose sufferings would in our own land invoke
the swift interposition of the humane. That
this machine is wholly inadequate to the simple
duty of sprinkling the street is a fact not per-
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 33
haps worth mentioning. The culinary utensils
of Central Germany are, I venture to say, of
nearly the same pattern as those usod by Eve
judging by some earthenware and ironmongery
of which I caught a glimpse in the kitchen of
the Rothe Ross in Nuremberg. I saw in Tus-
cany a wheelbarrow that must have been an
infringement of an Egyptian patent of 500 B. c.
I forget in what imperial city it was I beheld a
tin bathtub shamelessly allowing itself to be
borne from door to door and let out by the job.
In several respects the United States are one
or two centuries in advance of the Old World ;
but in that little matter of veneering I have
mentioned, we are very far behind her.
The incivility which greets the American
traveller at every stage in his own domains is
so rare an accomplishment among foreign rail-
road, steamboat, and hotel officials that it is
possible to journey from Dan to Beersheba
certainly from Ponkapog to Pesth without
meeting a single notable instance of it. I
think that the gentlemen of the Dogana at
Ventimiglia were selected expressly on account
of their high breeding to examine luggage at
that point. In France by France I mean
Paris even the drivers of the public carriages
are civil. Civilization can go no farther. If
Darwin is correct in his theory of the survival
34 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
of the fittest, there will ultimately not be a
single specimen of the genus left anywhere in
America. We shall have to import Parisians.
I am not positive but we shall also run short of
railroad conductors and ticket-sellers. We have
persons occupying these posts here who could
not hold similar positions in Europe fifteen
minutes.
The guard who has charge of your carriage
on a Continental railroad, so far from being the
disdainful autocrat who on our own cars too often
snatches your ticket from you and snubs you
at a word, is the most thoughtful and consid-
erate of men; he looks after the welfare and
comfort of your party as if that were the spe-
cialty for which he was created ; he never loses
countenance at your daring French or German,
or the graceful New England accent you throw
upon your Italian ; he is ready with the name
of that ruined castle which stands like a jagged
tooth in the mouth of the mountain gorge ; he
does not neglect to tell you at what station you
may find an excellent buffet ; you cannot weary
him with questions ; he will smilingly answer the
same one a hundred times ; and when he is
killed in a collision with the branch train, you
are not afraid to think where he will go, with
all this kindliness.
I am convinced that it is the same person,
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 35
thinly disguised as the proprietor of a hotel,
who receives you at the foot of the staircase as
you step down from the omnibus, and is again
the attentive and indefatigable chamberlain to
your earthly comfort. It is an old friend who
has been waiting for you these many years.
To be sure, as the proprietor of a hotel the old
friend makes you pay roundly for all this ; but
do you not pay roundly for food and shelter in
taverns on your native heath, and get no civ-
ility whatever, unless the hotel-clerk has lost his
mind ? Your Continental inn-keeper, of what-
ever nationality, keeps a paternal eye on you,
and does not allow you to be imposed upon by
rapacious outsiders. If you are to be imposed
upon, he attends to that trifling formality him-
self, and always graciously. Across three thou-
sand miles of sea and I know not how many
miles of land, I touch my hat at this moment
to the landlord of that snuffy little hostelry at
Wittenberg, who awoke me at midnight to ex-
cuse himself for not having waited upon us in
person when we arrived by the ten o'clock
train. He had had a card-party the Herr
Professor Something-splatz and a few friends
in the coffee-room, and really, etc., etc. He
could n't sleep, and did n't let me, until he had
made his excuses. It was downright charming
in you, mine host of the Goldner Adler; I
36 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
thank you for it, and I 'd thank you not to do
it again.
Every American who has passed a week in
rural England must have carried away, even if
he did not bring with him, a fondness for our
former possessions. The solid hospitality he
has received at the comfortable old inns smoth-
ered in leaves and mosses by the roadside is
sure to figure among his pleasantest reminis-
cences. It lies in his recollection with Strat-
ford and Canterbury and Grasmere ; as he
thinks of it, it takes something of the pictur-
esqueness of those ivy - draped abbeys and
cathedrals which went so far to satisfy his
morbid appetite for everything that is wrinkled
and demolished in the way of architecture. It
was Shenstone who said
" Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round,
Whate'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn."
The foreign traveller will scarcely be inclined
to sigh over that. If he is, he will have cause
to sigh in many an English village and in most
of the leading cities across the Channel. I
know of one party that can think with nothing
but gratitude of their reception at the hotel
, one raw April night, after a stormy pas-
sage from Dover to Calais and a cheerless rail-
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 37
road ride thence to Paris. Rooms had been
bespoken by telegraph, and when the wander-
ers arrived at the Rue de Rivoli they found
such exquisite preparation for their coming as
seemed to have been made by well-known gen-
tle hands reaching across the Atlantic. In a
small salon adjoining the parlor assigned to the
party, the wax candles threw a soft light over
the glass and silver appointments of a table
spread for their repast. A waiter arranging a
dish of fruit at the buffet greeted them with a
good-evening, as if he had been their servitor
for years, instead of now laying eyes upon them
for the first time. In the open chimney-place
of the parlor was a wood-fire blazing cheerfully
on the backs of a couple of brass griffins who
did not seem to mind it. On the mantelpiece
was an antique clock, flanked by bronze candle-
sticks that would have taken your heart in a
bric-a-brac shop. The furniture, the draperies,
and the hundred and one knickknacks lying
around on the tables and etageres, showed the
touch of a tasteful woman's hand. It might
have been a room in a chateau. It was as un-
like as possible to those gaudy barracks fitted
up at so much per yard by a soulless upholsterer
which we call parlors in our own hotels. Be-
yond this were the sleeping apartments, in the
centre of one of which stood the neatest of
33 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
femmes de chambre, with the demurest of dark
eyes, and the pinkest of ribbons on her cap.
She held in her hand a small copper pitcher of
hot water, and looked like Liotard's pretty
painting of the Chocolate Girl come to life.
On a toilet -table under a draped mirror was a
slender vase of Bohemian glass holding two or
three fresh tea-roses. What beau of the old
regime had slipped out of his sculptured tomb
to pay madam that gallantry ?
Outside of the larger cities on the Continent
you can get as wretched accommodations as
you could desire for an enemy. In most of the
German and Italian provinces, aside from the
main routes of travel, the inns are execrable ;
but the people are invariably courteous. I
hardly know how to account for the politeness
which seems to characterize every class abroad.
Possibly it is partly explained by the military
system which in many countries requires of
each man a certain term of service ; the soldier
is disciplined in the severest school of manners ;
he is taught to treat both his superior and
his inferior with deference ; courtesy becomes
second nature. Certainly it is the rule, and
not the exception, among Continental nations.
From the threshold of a broken-down chalet in
some loneliest Alpine pass you will be saluted
graciously. You grow sceptical as to that
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 39
"rude Carinthian boor" who, in Goldsmith's
poem,
" Against the houseless stranger shuts the door."
No French, Italian, or Saxon gentleman, so far
as I have observed, enters or leaves a cafe of
the better class without lifting his hat, espe-
cially if there are ladies present. As he hurries
from the railroad carriage at his station a
station at which the train halts for perhaps only
a few seconds he seldom neglects to turn on
the step and salute his fellow-passengers. It is
true, for the last hour or two he sat staring
over the top of his journal at your wife or sis-
ter ; but to be a breaker of the female heart is
what they all seem to aspire to, over there. It
appears to be recognized as not ill-bred to stare
at a lady so long as there is anything left of
her. It is in that fashion that American ladies
are stared at by Frenchmen and Germans and
Italians and Spaniards, who, aside from this,
are very polite to our countrywomen marvel-
lously polite when we reflect that the generality
of untravelled foreigners, beyond the Straits of
Dover, regard us, down deep in their hearts, as
only a superior race of barbarians.
They would miss us sadly if we were to be-
come an extinct race. Not to mention other
advantages resulting from our existence, our de-
sire to behold their paintings and statuary and
40 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
the marvels of their architecture to which
they themselves are for the most part only half
alive, especially in Italy keeps a thousand of
their lovely, musty old towns from collapsing.
They understand this perfectly, and do what-
ever lies within them to interest us ; they are
even so obliging as to invent tombs and historic
localities for our edification, and come at last
to believe in them themselves. In that same
Wittenberg of which I have spoken, they will
show you the house of Hamlet ! and at Fer-
rara, a high-strung sympathetic valet-de-place,
if properly encouraged, will throw tears into his
voice as he stands with you in a small cellar
where by no chance is it probable that Tasso
was immured for seven years, or even seven
minutes. Prigione di Tasso ! I have as genuine
a prison of Tasso at Ponkapog. Though their
opinion of our intelligence is not always as flat-
tering as we could wish, it shall not prevent me
from saying that these people are the most
charming and courteous people on the globe,
and that I shall forget the Madonna at Dresden,
the Venus in the Louvre, and the Alhambra
as I saw it once by moonlight, before I forget
an interview I witnessed one day in the Rue de
Tficole de Medecine between a fat, red-faced
concierge and a very much battered elderly