PONKAPOG TO I 
 
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 UMIY. i>F CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELEir 
 
 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
 
 '
 
 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 
 
 FROM 
 
 PONKAPOG TO PESTH 
 
 ELEVENTH EDITION 
 
 'BOSTON 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 
 
 1898
 
 Copyright, 1883, 
 By T. B. ALDBICH. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge* Mats., IT. S. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 I. 
 
 PROLOGUE 7 
 
 n. 
 
 DATS WITH THE DEAD 13 
 
 in. 
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR .... 37 
 
 IV. 
 WATS AND MANNERS 53 
 
 V. 
 
 A VISIT TO A CERTAIN OLD GENTLEMAN .... 71 
 
 VI. 
 ON A BALCONY 117 
 
 vn. 
 
 SMITH 163 
 
 VIIL 
 A DAT IN AFRICA 195 
 
 IX. 
 ON GETTING BACK AGAIN 261 
 
 2125842
 
 As for thefe Obferuations which I now exhibite vnto 
 thy gentle cenfure, take them I pray thee in good part 
 till I prefent better vnto thee after my next trauels. 
 
 CORYAT'S CRUDITIES. 1611.
 
 I. 
 
 PROLOGUE.
 
 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 PROLOGUE. 
 
 THE reader will probably not find Ponk- 
 apog set down in any but the very latest 
 gazetteer. It is the Indian name of a little 
 New England village, from which the wri- 
 ter sallied forth, a while ago, on a pilgrim- 
 age beyond the sea. Ponkapog scarcely 
 merits a description, and Pesth the far- 
 thest point east to which his wanderings 
 led him has been too often described. 
 He is thus happily relieved of the onus of 
 making strictly good the title of these 
 papers, whose chief merit, indeed, is that 
 they treat of neither Pesth nor Ponkapog. 
 
 It was a roundabout road the writer took 
 to reach the Hungarian capital a road
 
 10 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 that carried him as far north as Inverness, 
 as far south as Naples, and left him free to 
 saunter leisurely through Spain and spend 
 a day in Africa. But the ground he passed 
 over had been worn smooth by the feet of 
 millions of tourists and paved three deep 
 with books of travel. He was too wise to 
 let anything creep into his note-book be- 
 yond a strip of landscape here and there, a 
 street scene in sepia, or an outline sketch 
 of some custom or peculiarity that chanced 
 to strike his fancy and these he offers 
 modestly to the reader. 
 
 What is newest to one in foreign coun- 
 tries is not always the people, but their 
 surroundings, and those same little details 
 of life and circumstance which make no 
 impression on a man in his own land untili 
 he returns to it after a prolonged absence, 
 and then they stand out very sharply for a 
 while. Neither an Italian, nor a French- 
 man, nor a Saxon is worth travelling three 
 thousand miles by sea to look upon. It is
 
 PROLOGUE. 11 
 
 Naples, and not the Neapolitan, that lin- 
 gers in your memory. If your memory ac- 
 cepts the Neapolitan, it is always with a 
 bit of Renaissance architecture adhering to 
 him, with a stretch of background that 
 shall include his pathetic donkey, the blue 
 bay, the sullen peak of Vesuvius, and gray 
 Capri in the distance. If you could trans- 
 port the man bodily to New York, the only 
 thing left to do would be to drop him into 
 the Hudson. He would be like Emerson's 
 sparrow, that no longer pleased when he 
 was removed from the context of sky and 
 river. It is the details that attract or repel 
 more than we are aware. How sensitive to 
 details is the eye, unconsciously taking their 
 stamp on its retina and retaining the im- 
 pl^ssion forever ! It is many a day since 
 the writer was hi the old walled town of 
 Chester ; he does not recall a single feature 
 of the hundreds of men and women he met 
 in those quiet, gable-shadowed streets ; but 
 on the door of a house there, in a narrow
 
 12 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 court, was a grotesque bronze knocker 
 which caught his eye for an instant in pass- 
 ing : that knocker somehow screwed itself 
 to his mind without his cognizance, and 
 now at intervals, even after all these nights 
 and days, it raps very distinctly on his 
 memory.
 
 n. 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD
 
 IL 
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 
 I. 
 
 THEY have a fashion across the water, 
 particularly on the Continent, of making 
 much of their dead. A fifteenth or a six- 
 teenth century celebrity is a revenue to the 
 church or town in which the distinguished 
 ashes may chance to repose. It would be 
 an interesting operation, if it were prac- 
 ticable, to draw a line between the local 
 reverence for the virtues of the deceased 
 and that strictly mundane spirit which re- 
 gards him as assets. The two are so nicely 
 dovetailed that I fancy it would be quite 
 impossible, in most instances, to say where 
 the one ends and the other begins. 
 
 In the case of the good Cardinal Borro- 
 meo, for example. The good cardinal died
 
 16 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 in 1584. He is one of the loveliest figures 
 in history. Nobly born, rich, and learned, 
 he devoted himself and his riches to holy 
 deeds. The story of his life is a record of 
 beautiful sacrifices and unselfish charities. 
 Though his revenue was princely, his quick 
 sympathies often left him as destitute as 
 a Franciscan friar. His vast possessions 
 finally dwindled to a meagre patrimony. 
 During the great plague at Milan, in 1576, 
 he sold what was left of his plate and fur- 
 niture to buy bread for the famishing peo- 
 ple. When he died, all Italy wept for 
 him like one pair of eyes. He lies in the 
 crypt of the cathedral at Milan. It is 
 dark down in the crypt; but above him 
 are carvings and gildings and paintings, 
 basking in the mellow light sifted through 
 the immense choir windows 
 
 " Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes 
 As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings." 
 
 Above the fretted roof the countless " stat- 
 ued pinnacles " lift themselves into the blue
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 17 
 
 air. How magical all that delicate needle- 
 work of architecture looks, by moonlight 
 or sunlight I 
 
 "0 Milan, the chanting quires, 
 The giant windows' blazoned fires, 
 The height, the space, the gloom, the glory ! 
 A mount of marble, a hundred spires ! " 
 
 When they show you the embalmed 
 body of Borromeo for it is really the 
 body and not merely the sarcophagus they 
 show you the custode, a priest, lights the 
 high candles on either side of the silver- 
 encrusted altar. The cardinal's remains 
 are kept in an hermetically-sealed case of 
 rock crystal set within a massive oak coffin, 
 one side of which is lowered by a windlass. 
 There he lies in his jeweled robes, with 
 his gloved hands crossed on his bosom and 
 his costly crosier at his side, just as they 
 laid him away in 1584. The features are 
 wonderfully preserved, and have not lost 
 the placid expression they wore when he 
 fell asleep, that look of dreamy serenity
 
 18 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 peculiar to the faces of dead persons. The 
 head is bald, and as black as ebony. There 
 were services going on, the day we visited 
 the cathedral. Above us the crowds came 
 and went on the mosaic pavements, but no 
 sound of the outside world penetrated to 
 the dim, begemmed chapel where Carlo 
 Borromeo, count, cardinal, and saint, takes 
 what rest he can. We stood silent in the 
 unflaring candlelight, gazing on the figure 
 which had been so beloved in Milan three 
 centuries ago. Presently the black-robed 
 custode turned the noiseless crank, and the 
 coffin side slowly ascended to its place. It 
 was all very solemn and impressive too 
 impressive and too solemn altogether for so 
 small a sum as five francs. 
 
 I am but an intermittent worshiper of 
 saints ; yet I have an ineradicable belief in 
 good men like Carlo Borromeo, and, as he 
 has long since finished his earthly tasks, 
 I think it would be showing the cardinal 
 greater respect to bury him than to exhibit
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 19 
 
 him. He nearly spoiled my visit to Milan. 
 I resolved to have no further commerce 
 with the dead, directly or indirectly. But 
 the dead play a very prominent part in the 
 experience of the wanderer abroad. The 
 houses in which they were born, the tombs 
 in which they lie, the localities they made 
 famous by their good or evil deeds, and the 
 works their genius left behind them are 
 necessarily the chief shrines of his pilgrim- 
 age. You leave London with a distincter 
 memory of the monuments in Westminster 
 Abbey and St. Paul's than of the turbu- 
 lent streams of life that surge through the 
 Strand. Mr. Blank, to whom you bore a 
 letter of introduction, is not so real a per- 
 son to you as John Milton, whose grave 
 you saw at St. Giles's, Cripplegate or De 
 Foe, who sleeps in the melancholy Bunhill 
 Fields Burial Ground. You catch yourself 
 assisting, with strange relish, at the burn- 
 ing of heretics at Smithfield. Ridley and 
 Latimer stand before you in flesh and bone
 
 20 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 and flame at Oxford. Thomas a Becket 
 falls stabbed at your feet on the stone flag- 
 ging in Canterbury Cathedral. At Holy- 
 rood, are not Darnley and pallid Ruthven 
 in his steel corselet forever creeping up 
 that narrow spiral staircase leading to the 
 small cabinet where Rizzio is supping with 
 the luckless queen? You cannot escape 
 these things if you would. Your railway 
 carriage takes you up at one famous grave 
 and sets you down at another. Madrid is 
 but a stepping-stone to the gloomy Escorial, 
 with its underground library of gilded cof- 
 fins a library of royal octavos, one might 
 say, for none but Spanish kings and queens 
 are shelved there. 1 In Paris, where the 
 very atmosphere thrills with intense life, 
 
 1 Spanish post-mortem etiquette excludes the late Queen 
 Mercedes from this apartment, as none but queens who have 
 been mothers of kings are allowed sanctuary here. On a 
 shelf at the left of the entrance to the tomb, an empty sar- 
 cophagus, of the same ornate pattern as the others, awaits 
 Alfonso XII. It would probably not wait long for him if 
 Spanish republicanism had its will.
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 21 
 
 you are brought at each step face to face 
 with the dead. JVhat people are these 
 that flit in groups up and down the bril- 
 liant boulevards? They are not sipping 
 absinthe and taking their ease the poor 
 ghosts, old and new! Can you stand in 
 the Place de la Concorde and not think 
 of the twenty-eight hundred persons who 
 were guillotined there between 1793 and 
 1795? A few minutes' walk from the 
 crowded cafes leads you to the morgue, 
 "the little Doric morgue," as Browning 
 calls it. The golden dome of the Invalides 
 keeps perpetually in your mind "the ter- 
 ror of Europe," held down by sixty tons 
 of porphyry, in the rotunda. The neatly- 
 swept asphalt under your feet ran blood 
 but yesterday. Here it was, near the Tui- 
 leries, the insurgents threw up a barricade. 
 Those white spots which you observe on 
 the faqade of yonder building, the Made- 
 leine, are bits of new stone set into the 
 sacrilegious shot-holes. On the verge of
 
 22 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 the city, and within sound of its feverish 
 heart-throb, stretch Pere la Chaise and 
 Montmartre and Mont Parnasse, pathetic 
 with renowned names. 
 
 I suppose that a taste for churchyards 
 and cemeteries is a cultivated taste. At 
 home they were entirely disconnected in 
 my mind with any thought of enjoyment ; 
 but after a month on the other side I pre- 
 ferred a metropolitan graveyard to almost 
 any object of interest that could be pre- 
 sented to me. A cemetery at home sug- 
 gests awkward possibilities ; but nothing of 
 the kind occurs to you in rambling through 
 a foreign burial-ground. As our gamins 
 would say, it is not your funeral. You 
 wander along the serpentine walk as you 
 would stroll through a picture gallery. 
 You as little think of adding a mound to 
 the one as you would of contributing a 
 painting to the other. You survey the 
 monoliths and the bas-reliefs and the urns 
 and the miniature Athenian temples from
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 23 
 
 the stand-point of an unbiased spectator 
 who has paid his admittance fee and ex- 
 pects entertainment or instruction. Some 
 of the pleasantest hours I passed in sight- 
 seeing were spent in graveyards. Among 
 the most notable things we saw were the 
 Jewish cemetery at Prague, with its smoky 
 Gothic synagogue of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury (the Altneuschule), and the ancient 
 churchyard of St. John at Nuremberg, 
 where Hans Sachs and many another wor- 
 thy of his day lie at rest, and where the 
 remains of Albrecht Diirer once rested 
 painter, poet, architect, and engraver, the 
 master of almost everything except Mrs. 
 Diirer. The engraved brass plates the 
 P. P. C. cards, so to speak, of the departed 
 aristocracy of Nuremberg on the horizon- 
 tal slabs of St. John's are very quaint, with 
 their crests, and coats-of-arms, and sym- 
 bols of gentility. At Prague the stones 
 are marked with pitchers and hands, to 
 designate the descendants of the tribes of
 
 24 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 Levi and Aaron. They claim to have one 
 stone that dates as far back as A. D. 606. 
 Some of the graves are held in great vener- 
 ation; that of Rabbi Abignor Kara, who 
 died in 1439, is often made the point of 
 pilgrimage by Jews living in distant lands, 
 Within the yard is a building where the 
 funeral rites are performed, and grave- 
 clothes are kept for all comers. The dead 
 millionaire and the dead pauper are arrayed 
 in the same humble garb, and alike given 
 to earth in a rough board coffin. The Jew- 
 ish custom, like death itself, is no respecter 
 of persons. There is a fine austerity in this.
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 25 
 
 n. 
 
 It was always more or less of a satisfac- 
 tion to observe that the mortuary sculp- 
 tures of the Old World were every whit 
 as hideous as our own. The sepulchral de- 
 signs in churches abroad are generally in 
 the worst style of Middle Age realism. A 
 half-draped skeleton of Death, plunging his 
 dart into the bosom of some emaciated 
 marble girl, seems to have been a consol- 
 ing symbol to the survivors a few centu- 
 ries ago. This ghastly fancy is constantly 
 under your eyes. If I call it ghastly I give 
 expression to the effect it produced on me 
 at first. It would not be honest for me to 
 affirm that I did not like it at last. I be- 
 came so accustomed to this skeleton and 
 his brother monstrosities that when we 
 visited those three grim chambers under 
 the Churcli of the Capuchins at Rome,
 
 26 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 and saw the carefully polished skulls of 
 hundreds of monks wrought into pillars 
 and arches and set upon shelves, I looked 
 at them as complacently as if they had 
 been a lot of exploded percussion-caps. 
 "It is a pity they can't be used again," 
 I thought ; and that was all. I began to 
 believe the beautiful economy of nature 
 to be greatly overrated. 
 
 This is the burial-place of the Cappuc- 
 cini, who esteem it a blissful privilege to 
 lie here for a few years in consecrated 
 earth brought from Jerusalem, and then, 
 when their graves are wanted for fresher 
 brothers, to be taken up and transformed 
 into architectural decorations. The walls 
 and recesses and arched ceilings of these 
 chapels (which are beneath the church 
 but not under ground) are thus orna- 
 mented with the brotherhood skillfully ar- 
 ranged in fanciful devices, the finger-joints 
 and the fragile links of the vertebral col- 
 umn being wrought into friezes and light
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 27 
 
 cornices, and the larger bones arranged in 
 diamonds and hearts and rounds, like the 
 sabres and bayonets in an armory. Here 
 and there on the ceiling is a complete 
 skeleton set into the plaster, quite sug- 
 gestive of a cool outline by Flaxman or 
 Retzsch. The poor monks! they were not 
 very ornamental in life ; but time is full of 
 compensations. Death seems to have re- 
 lieved them of one unhappy characteristic. 
 " There is no disagreeable scent," says the 
 author of The Marble Faun, describing 
 this place, " such as might have been ex- 
 pected from the decay of so many holy 
 persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they 
 may have taken their departure. The same 
 number of living monks would not smell 
 half so unexceptionably." The Capuchin 
 golgotha is more striking than the Roman 
 or the Parisian catacombs, for the reason 
 that its contracted limits do not allow you 
 to escape from the least of its horrible 
 grotesqueness. In the catacombs you aro
 
 28 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH, 
 
 impressed by their extent rather than by 
 anything else. 
 
 Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There 
 the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. 
 There is no to-day or to-morrow in Rome ; 
 it is perpetual yesterday. One might lift 
 up a handful of dust anywhere and say, 
 with the Persian poet, " This was once 
 man." Where everything has been so long 
 dead, a death of to-day seems almost an im- 
 pertinence. How quickly and with what 
 serene irony the new grave is absorbed by 
 the universal antiquity of the place ! The 
 block of marble over Keats does not appear 
 a day fresher than the neighboring Pyr- 
 amid of Caius Cestius. Oddly enough, we 
 saw no funeral in Rome. In almost every 
 other large city it was our fate, either as 
 we entered or departed, to meet a funeral 
 cortege. Every one stands uncovered as 
 the train crawls by, the vehicles come to a 
 halt at the curbstone, the children stop 
 their play, heads are bowed, golden locks
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 29 
 
 and gray, on every side. As I have said, 
 though in a different sense, they make 
 much of their dead abroad. I was struck 
 by the contrast the day we reached home. 
 Driving from the steamer, we encountered 
 a hearse straggling down Broadway. It 
 attracted as much reverential regard as 
 would be paid to an ice-cart. 
 
 I happened to witness a picturesque 
 funeral in Venice. It was that of a cho- 
 rus-boy, in a church on one of the smaller 
 canals somewhere west of the Rialto. I 
 stumbled on the church accidentally that 
 forenoon, and was not able to find it again 
 the next day a circumstance to which 
 the incident perhaps owes the illusory at- 
 mosphere that envelops it for me. The 
 building had disappeared, like Aladdin's 
 palace, in the night. 
 
 They were performing a mass as I en- 
 tered. The great rose window behind the 
 organ and the chancel windows were dark- 
 ened with draperies, and the colossal candles
 
 30 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 were burning. The coffin, covered with a 
 heavily embroidered pall, stood on an ele- 
 vated platform in front of the magnificent 
 altar. The inlaid columns glistening in the 
 candle-light, the smoke of the incense curl- 
 ing lazily up past the baldachino to the 
 frescoed dome, the priests in elaborate stoles 
 and chasubles kneeling around the bier 
 it was like a masterly composed picture. 
 When the ceremonies were concluded, the 
 coffin was lifted from the platform by six 
 young friars and borne to a gondola in 
 waiting at the steps near the portals. The 
 priests, carrying a huge golden crucifix 
 and several tall gilt torches, unlighted, 
 crowded into the bow and stern of the 
 floating hearse, which was attached by a 
 long rope to another gondola occupied by 
 oarsmen. Following these were two or 
 three covered gondolas whose connection 
 with the obsequies was not clear to me, as 
 they appeared to be empty. Slowly down 
 the narrow canal, in that dead stillness
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 31 
 
 which reigns in Venice, swept the sombre 
 flotilla, bearing its unconscious burden to 
 the Campo Santo. The air was full of va- 
 grant spring scents, and the sky that arched 
 over all was carved of one vast, unclouded 
 sapphire. In the deserted church were two 
 old crones scraping up the drippings of the 
 wax candles from the tessellated pavement. 
 Nothing except time is wasted in Italy. 
 
 I saw a more picturesque though not so 
 agreeable a funeral in Florence. The night 
 of our arrival was one of those unearthly 
 moonlight nights which belong to Italy. 
 The Arno, changed to a stream of quick- 
 silver, flowed swiftly through the stone 
 arches of the Ponte Vecchio under our 
 windows, and lured me with its beauty out- 
 of-doors, though a great clock somewhere 
 near by had just clanged eleven. By an 
 engraving I had seen in boyhood I recog- 
 nized the bridge of Taddeo Gaddi, -with its 
 goldsmith shops on either side. They were 
 closed now, of course. I strolled across
 
 32 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 the bridge and back again, once or twice, 
 and then wandered off into a network of 
 dingy streets, traversed by one street so 
 very narrow that you saw only a hand's 
 breadth of amethystine sky between the 
 tops of the tall buildings. Standing in the 
 middle of the thoroughfare, I could al- 
 most touch the shutters of the shops right 
 and left. At the upper end of the street, 
 which was at least three quarters of a 
 mile in length, the overhanging fronts of 
 the lofty houses seemed to meet and shut 
 out the dense moonlight. In the desper- 
 ate struggle which took place there be- 
 tween the moon and the gloom, a hun- 
 dred fantastic shadows slipped from coigne 
 and cornice and fell into the street below, 
 like besiegers flung from the ramparts of 
 some old castle. Not a human being nor a 
 light was anywhere visible. Suddenly I 
 saw what, for an instant, I took to be a 
 falling star in the extreme distance. It 
 approached in a zigzag course. It broke
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 33 
 
 into several stars ; these grew larger ; then 
 I discovered they were torches. A low mo- 
 notonous chant, like the distant chorus of 
 demons in an opera, reached my ear. The 
 chant momently increased in distinctness, 
 and as the torches drew nearer I saw that 
 they were carried by fifteen or twenty per- 
 sons marching in a square, in the middle of 
 which was a bier supported by a number of 
 ghostly figures. The procession was sweep- 
 ing down on me at the rate of six miles an 
 hour ; the training pall flapped in the wind 
 caused by the velocity of the march. When 
 the cortege was within twenty or thirty 
 yards of me, I noticed that the trestle- 
 bearers and the persons who held the flam- 
 beaux were shrouded from forehead to foot 
 in white sheets with holes pierced for the 
 eyes. I never beheld anything more devil- 
 ish. On they came, occupying the whole 
 width of the narrow street. I had barely 
 time to crowd myself into a projecting 
 doorway, when they swept by with a rhyth-
 
 34 FROM PONKAPOG TO PEST II. 
 
 mical swinging gait, to the measure of their 
 awful threnody. I waited until the muffled 
 chant melted into the distance and then 
 I made a bee-line for the hotel. 
 
 In Italy the hour of interment is grad- 
 uated by the worldly position of the de- 
 ceased. The poor are buried in the day- 
 time ; thus the expense of torches is avoid- 
 ed. Illuminated night-funerals are reserved 
 for the wealthy and persons of rank. At 
 least, I believe that such is the regulation, 
 though the reverse of this order may be the 
 case. At Naples, I know, the interments 
 in the Campo Santo Vecchio take place a 
 little before sunset. Shelley said of the 
 Protestant Burying Ground at Rome that 
 the spot was lovely enough to make one in 
 love with death. Nobody would dream of 
 saying that about the Campo Santo at Na- 
 ples a parallelogram of several hundred 
 feet in length, inclosed on three sides by a 
 high wall and on the fourth by an arcade. 
 In this dreary space, approached through a
 
 DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 35 
 
 dismal avenue of cypresses, are three hun- 
 dred and sixty-six deep pits, one of which 
 is opened each evening to receive the dead 
 of that day, and then sealed up one pit 
 for each day of the year. I conjecture that 
 the extra pit must be for leap-year. Only 
 the poorest persons, paupers and waifs, are 
 buried here, if it can be called buried. The 
 body is usually left unattended at the ar- 
 cade, to await its turn. 
 
 There is a curious burial custom at Mu- 
 nich. The law requires that every man, 
 woman, and child who dies within city lim- 
 its shall lie in state for three days in the 
 Leichenhaus (dead house) of the Gottes- 
 acker, the southern cemetery, outside the 
 Sendling Gate. This is to prevent any 
 chance of premature burial, an instance 
 of which, many years ago, gave rise to the 
 present provision. The Leichenhaus is com- 
 prised of three large chambers or salons, 
 in which the dead are placed upon raised 
 couches and surrounded by flowers. A
 
 36 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 series of wide windows giving upon the ar- 
 cade affords the public an unobstructed 
 view of the interior. The spectacle is not 
 so repellant as one might anticipate. The 
 neatly-kept, well-lighted rooms, the profu- 
 sion of flowers, and the scrupulous propri- 
 ety which prevails in all the arrangements 
 make the thing as little terrible as possible. 
 On the Sunday of our visit to the Gottes- 
 acker, the place was unusually full of bodies 
 awaiting interment old men and women, 
 young girls and infants. Some were like 
 exquisite statues, others like wax-figures, 
 and all piteous. Attached to the hand of 
 each adult was a string or wire connected 
 with a bell in the custodian's apartment. 
 It would be difficult to imagine a more 
 startling sound than would be the sudden 
 kling-kling of one of those same bells ! 
 
 But I have been playing too long what 
 Balzac calls a solo de corbillard.
 
 m. 
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND 
 AMATEUR.
 
 in. 
 
 BEGGAKS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 
 
 THERE is one thing that sometimes 
 comes near taking the joy out of the heart 
 of foreign travel. It is one of those trifles 
 which frequently prove a severer test to 
 philosophy than calamities. In the East 
 this thing is called bakhshish, in Germany 
 trinkgeld, in Italy buonamano, 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 nothing 
 but hateful. A piece of money which is 
 not earned by honest service, but is ex- 
 tracted from you as a matter of course by 
 any vagabond who may start out of the 
 bowels of the earth, like a gnome or a 
 kobold, at the sound of your footfall, is a
 
 40 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 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 
 presently the bird himself feebly comes to 
 regard plucking as his proper destiny, and 
 abjectly holds out his wing so long as there 
 is a feather left on it. I say everywhere 
 on the Continent ; but, indeed, a man of or- 
 dinary agility might walk over the greater 
 part of Europe on outstretched palms. Rus- 
 sians and Americans have the costly repu- 
 tation 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 
 consequently 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 travel-
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 41 
 
 ling), 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 
 countrymen skin him alive. It is gratify- 
 ing to be assured by Mr. Howells, in his 
 Italian Journeys, 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 per- 
 suaded 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 of the most costly things in Europe. 
 It is ever a large, though invisible, item in 
 your account, whether you halt at a Pa- 
 risian hStel or a snuffy posada in Catalo- 
 nia. 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
 
 42 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 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, 
 morning, noon, and night; a small coin 
 generally suffices, and a modicum of good 
 nature always goes a great way. There is 
 something innocent in their deepest strat- 
 egy, and something very winning in the 
 amiability with which they accept the sit- 
 uation when their villainy is frustrated. 
 Sometimes, however, when the petitioner 
 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, brigand ! " 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.
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 43 
 
 It is fair to observe that the Italian beg- 
 gar usually renders tribute to an abstract 
 idea of manhood by assuming that he has 
 done you some sort of service. This ser- 
 vice is not generally 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 decency 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 gen- 
 tleman ten sous for leaning against a dead- 
 wall in front of a hotel window. The un- 
 expectedness and the insinuating audacity 
 of the appeals frequently take away your 
 presence of mind, and leave you limp. 
 There was an old son of Naples who dwelt 
 on a curb-stone near the Castell dell' Ovo. 
 Stumbling on his private public residence 
 quite unintentionally, one forenoon, I 
 was immediately assessed. Ever after he
 
 44 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 claimed me, and finally brought his son-in- 
 law to me, and introduced him as a person 
 combining many of the most desirable qual- 
 ities of a pensioner. One of his strong 
 points was that he had been accidentally 
 carried 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." 
 
 " That is the reason, signor." 
 
 At bottom it was an excellent reason. 
 If I paid the father-in-law for the pleasure 
 of knowing 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 Cath- 
 erine-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 nose- 
 gay thrown into your lap gives a small
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 45 
 
 Italian maiden in one garment the right to 
 cling to the footboard of your vettura until 
 you reimburse her. In driving from Pom- 
 peii 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 
 roadside places you at once in a false posi- 
 tion. I have known an even less compro- 
 mising 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 unex- 
 pected result. Eight or ten young raga- 
 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^ 
 vignor, salute ! " One of these youths dis-
 
 46 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTII. 
 
 turbed a preconceived impression of mine 
 by suddenly exclaiming, 
 
 '' I am a boy Americano, dam ! " 
 As I had not come so far from home to 
 relieve the necessities of my own country- 
 men, and as I reflected that possibly this 
 rogue's companions were also profane Amer- 
 icani, I gave them nothing but a genial 
 smile, which they divided among them with 
 the resignation that seems to be a na- 
 tional trait. 
 
 The transatlantic impostor, like Meph- 
 istopheles, has as many shapes as men have 
 fancies. Sometimes he keeps a shop, and 
 sometimes he turns a hand-organ. Now he 
 looks out at you from the cowl of a medi- 
 aeval 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 formd 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.
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 47 
 
 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 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 Vien- 
 nese physician 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 pro- 
 fession, not to say the noblest, placing him- 
 self 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
 
 48 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTff. 
 
 empty palm. It is only in Italy, however, 
 that pauperism is a regular branch of in- 
 dustry. There it has been elevated to a 
 fine art. Elsewhere it is a sordid, clumsy 
 make-shift, with no joy in it. It falls 
 short of being a gay science in France or 
 Germany, or Austria or Hungary. In Scot- 
 land it is depressing, in Spain humiliating. 
 In Spain the beggar is loftily condescend- 
 ing ; 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 will never leave 
 you until his demand is complied with, or 
 until you say, "Brother, for the love of 
 God, excuse me ! " and then the rogue de- 
 parts 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 Guadarrama. The guide-books give 
 disheartening accounts of mendicancy in 
 
 '
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 49 
 
 Ireland ; but that must be in the interior. 
 I saw nothing of it along the coast, at Dub- 
 lin and Cork. I encountered only one beg- 
 gar in Ireland, at Queenstown, who retired 
 crest-fallen when I informed him in Eng- 
 lish that I was a Frenchman and didn'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 
 independently of a Cunard steamer. I 
 had to call the man back and pay my 
 passage. 
 
 In England you are subjected to a dif- 
 ferent kind of extortion. There are beg- 
 gars 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 cham- 
 bermaid, the elegiac waiter and his assist- 
 ant, the boy in buttons who opens the hall 
 door, the frowzy subterranean person called
 
 50 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 Boots, the coachman, the ostler, and one or 
 two other individuals whose precise rele- 
 vancy to your affairs will always remain 
 a pleasing mystery to you, but who never- 
 theless 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 in- 
 tricate art of addition. 
 
 The English cousin of the American 
 workingman, 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 astonishment at that 
 eminently respectable person in black
 
 BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 51 
 
 your conjecture makes him a small curate 
 or a tutor in some institution of learning 
 who, after answering your trivial question, 
 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.
 
 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 various wanderings. I supposed that 
 he was going to say the Pyramids or the 
 Kremlin at Moscow. His reply was, " The 
 politeness and consideration I have met 
 with from every one except travelling Eng- 
 lishmen and Americans." 
 
 I was afterwards told by an impolite per- 
 son that this politeness was merely a sur- 
 face 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 possi- 
 ble. For the most part, the pilgrim abroad
 
 56 FROM rONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 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 
 heart of European civilization. Many mat- 
 ters which we consider as necessities here 
 are regarded 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, drain- 
 age, 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 de- 
 vices they have for watering the streets of 
 their grand capitals, and by the strange dis- 
 regard of economy in man-power in every- 
 thing. A water-cart in Berlin, for illustra- 
 tion, requires three men to manage it : one
 
 U'AYS A\D .BANNERS. 57 
 
 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 
 Teutonic-looking barrel, has the appearance 
 of being the tail of some wretched nonde- 
 script 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 perhaps worth men- 
 tioning. The culinary utensils of Central 
 Germany are, I venture to say, of nearly 
 the same pattern as those used by Eve 
 judging by some earthenware and iron- 
 mongery of which I caught a glimpse in 
 the kitchen of the Rothe Ross at Nurem- 
 berg. I saw in Tuscany 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
 
 58 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 bath-tub 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 ve- 
 neering I have mentioned, we are very far 
 behind her. 
 
 The incivility which greets the Amer- 
 ican traveller at every stage in his own 
 domains is so rare an accomplishment 
 among foreign railway, steamboat, and ho- 
 tel 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 Ventimi- 
 glia 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 car- 
 riages are civil. Civilization can go no 
 further. If Darwin is correct in his theory 
 of the survival of the fittest, there will
 
 WAYS AND MANNERS. 59 
 
 ultimately not be a single specimen of the 
 genus left anywhere in America. We shall 
 have to import Parisians. I am not posi- 
 tive but we shall also run short of railway 
 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 car- 
 riage on a Continental railway, 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 considerate of men; 
 he looks after the welfare and comfort of 
 your party as if that were the specialty for 
 which he was created ; he never loses coun- 
 tenance 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
 
 60 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 you at what station you may find an excel- 
 lent 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 per- 
 son, thinly disguised as the proprietor of a 
 hotel, who receives you at the foot of the 
 staircase as you step down from the omni- 
 bus, and is again the attentive and indefati- 
 gable 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 tav- 
 erns on your native heath, and get no civil- 
 ity whatever, unless the hotel-clerk has lost 
 his mind? Your Continental inn-keeper, 
 of whatever nationality, keeps a paternal 
 eye on you, and does not allow you to be
 
 WAYS AND MANNERS. 61 
 
 imposed upon by rapacious outsiders. If 
 you are to be imposed upon, he attends to 
 that trifling formality himself, and always 
 graciously. Across three thousand 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 
 excuse 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 ex- 
 cuses. It was downright charming in you, 
 mine host of the Goldner Adler ; I 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 fond- 
 ness for our former possessions. The solid
 
 62 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 hospitality he has received at the comfort- 
 able old inns smothered in leaves and 
 mosses by the roadside is sure to figure 
 among his pleasantest reminiscences. It lies 
 in his recollection with Stratford and Can- 
 terbury and Grasmere ; as he thinks of it, 
 it takes something of the picturesqueness 
 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 in- 
 clined to sigh over that. If he is, he will 
 have cause to sigh in many an English vil- 
 lage 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
 
 WAYS AND MANNERS. 63 
 
 night, after a stormy passage from Dover to 
 Calais and a cheerless railway ride thence 
 to Paris. Rooms had been bespoken by tel- 
 egraph, and when the wanderers arrived at 
 the Rue de Rivoli they found such exquisite 
 preparation for their coming as seemed to 
 have been made by well-known gentle 
 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 appoint- 
 ments 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 mantel-piece was an antique clock, 
 flanked by bronze candlesticks that would 
 have taken your heart in a bric-a-brac shop.
 
 64 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 The furniture, the draperies, and the hun- 
 dred and one nicknacks lying around on 
 tables and etageres, showed the touch of a 
 tasteful woman's hand. It might have been 
 a room in a chateau. It was as unlike as 
 possible to those gaudy barracks fitted 
 up at so much per yard by a soulless up- 
 holsterer which we call parlors in our 
 own hotels. Beyond this were the sleeping 
 apartments, in the centre of one of which 
 stood the neatest of femmes de charnbre, 
 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 toilette-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 Con<
 
 WATS AND MANNERS. 65 
 
 tinent you can get as wretched accommoda- 
 tions 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 in- 
 variably 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 sys- 
 tem 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 skeptical as to that *' rude Carin- 
 thian boor " who, in Goldsmith's poem, 
 
 " Against the houseless stranger shuts the door. " 
 
 No French, Italian, or Saxon gentleman, 
 
 5
 
 66 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 BO far as I have observed, enters or leaves 
 a caf of the better class without lifting his 
 hat, especially if there are ladies present. 
 As he hurries from the railway 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 sa- 
 lute 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 sister; 
 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 any- 
 thing left of her. It is in that fashion that 
 American ladies are stared at by French- 
 men and Germans and Italians and Span- 
 iards, who, aside from this, are very polite 
 to our countrywomen marvellously polite 
 when we reflect that the generality of im- 
 travelled foreigners, beyond the Straits of 
 Dover, regard us, down deep in their hearts, 
 &s only a superior race of barbarians.
 
 WAYS AND MANNERS. 67 
 
 They would miss us sadly if we were to 
 become an extinct race. Not to mention 
 other advantages resulting from our exist- 
 ence, our desire to behold their paintings 
 and statuary and the marvels of their archi- 
 tecture 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 whatever 
 lies within them to interest us ; they are 
 even so obliging as to invent tombs and his- 
 toric 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 Ferrara, a high-strung sym- 
 pathetic valet-de-place, if properly encour- 
 aged, 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
 
 68 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 genuine a prison of Tasso at Ponkapog. 
 Though their opinion of our intelligence is 
 not always as flattering 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 for- 
 get an interview I witnessed one day in 
 the Rue de 1'llcole de Medecine, between 
 a fat, red-faced concierge and a very much 
 battered elderly French gentleman, whose 
 redingote, buttoned closely up to his chin, 
 threw vague but still damaging suspicions 
 on his supply of linen. 
 
 " Pardon, madame," said the decayed old 
 gentleman, lifting his threadbare silk hat 
 by its curled brim with indescribable grace 
 as he approached, " is M. . . . within ? " 
 
 " I think not, but I will see." 
 
 " I am pained " (Je suis desole~) " to give 
 you the trouble."
 
 WAYS AND MANNERS. 69 
 
 " It is no trouble, monsieur." 
 
 " Merci, madame." 
 
 The concierge disappeared. Presently 
 ehe returned, loaded to the muzzle with the 
 information that M. . . . was unfortunately 
 not at home. 
 
 " A thousand pardons, madame, but will 
 you have the amiability to give him this " 
 (presenting a card that had seen better 
 days) " as soon as he returns ? " 
 
 " Certainly, monsieur." 
 
 "Madame, I am sensible of your kind- 
 ness." 
 
 " Do not speak of it." 
 
 " Bonjour, madame." 
 
 " Bonjour, monsieur." 
 
 This poor gentleman's costume was very 
 far on its way to a paper-mill ; but adver- 
 sity had left his manners intact, and they 
 were fit for palaces.
 
 v. 
 
 A VISIT TO A CERTAIN OLD 
 GENTLEMAN.
 
 V. 
 
 A VISIT TO A CEETAIN OLD GENTLEMAN. 
 L 
 
 IT was only after the gravest considera- 
 tion that we decided to visit a Certain Old 
 Gentleman. There were so many points 
 to be considered. It was by no means cer- 
 tain that a Certain Old Gentleman wanted 
 us to visit him. Though we knew him, in 
 a vague way, to be sure through friends 
 of ours who were friends of his he did 
 not know us at all. Then he was, accord- 
 ing to report, a very particular old gentle- 
 man, standing squarely on his dignity, and 
 so hedged about by conventional ideas of 
 social etiquette, so difficult of approach, and 
 so nearly impossible to become acquainted 
 with when approached, that it was an au- 
 dacious thing seriously to contemplate drop-
 
 74 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 ping in on him familiarly. What impelled 
 us to wish to do so ? Certainly we had no 
 desire to pay court to him. He had for- 
 merly occupied a high official position, but 
 now he was retired, in a manner, into pri- 
 vate life a sufficient reason in itself why 
 he should be let alone. In brief, there 
 were a hundred reasons why we should not 
 visit him, and there was not one why we 
 should. It was that that decided us, I 
 think. 
 
 It comes back to me like the reminis- 
 cence of a dream, rather than as the mem- 
 ory of an actual experience, that May after- 
 noon when the purpose first unfolded itself 
 to us. We were sitting in the fading glow 
 of the day on the last of the four marble 
 steps which linked our parlor to the fairy- 
 like garden of the Albergo di Russia in 
 the Via Babuino. Our rooms were on the 
 ground-floor, and this garden, shut in on 
 three sides by the main building and the 
 wings of the hotel, and closed at the rear
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 75 
 
 by the Pincian Hill, up which the garden 
 clambered half-way in three or four luxu- 
 riant terraces, seemed naturally to belong 
 to our suite of apartments. All night we 
 could hear the drip of the fountain among 
 the cactus leaves, and catch at intervals the 
 fragrance of orange-blooms, blown in at the 
 one window we dared leave open. It was 
 here we took the morning air a few min- 
 utes before breakfast ; it was on these steps 
 we smoked our cigar after the wonders of 
 the day were done. We had the garden 
 quite to ourselves, for the cautious tourist 
 had long since taken wing from Rome, 
 frightened by the early advance of sum- 
 mer. The great caravansary was nearly 
 empty. Aside from the lizards, I do not 
 recollect seeing any living creature in that 
 garden during our stay, except a little 
 frowsy wad of a dog, which dashed into our 
 premises one morning, and seizing on a 
 large piece of sponge made off with it up 
 the Pincian Hill. If that sponge fell to
 
 76 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 the lot of some time-encrusted Romanese, 
 and Providence was merciful enough to in- 
 spire him with a conception of its proper 
 use, it cannot be said of the little Skye ter- 
 rier that he lived in vain. 
 
 If no other feet than ours invaded those 
 neatly-gravelled walks, causing the shy, sil- 
 very lizards to retreat swiftly to the bor- 
 ders of the flower-beds or behind the cor- 
 pulent green tubs holding the fan-palms, 
 we were keenly conscious now and then of 
 being overlooked. On pleasant afternoons 
 lines of carriages and groups of gayly- 
 dressed people went winding up the steep 
 road which, skirted with ilexes and pines 
 and mimosa bushes, leads to the popular 
 promenade of the Pincio. There, if any- 
 where, you get a breath of fresh air in the 
 lieated term, and always the most magnifi- 
 cent view of the city and its environs. 
 There, of old, were the gardens of Lucul- 
 lus ; there Messalina, with sinful good taste, 
 had her pleasure-house, and held her Satur-
 
 'A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 77 
 
 nalia ; and there, to-day, the band of Vic- 
 tor Emmanuel plays twice a week in the 
 sunset, luring thither all the sunny belles 
 and beaux of Rome. Monte Pincio, as I 
 have said, sloped down on one side to our 
 garden. On the crest of the hill command- 
 ing our demesne was a low wall of masonry. 
 From time to time a killing Roman fop 
 would come and lean in an elegant attitude 
 against this wall, nursing himself on the 
 ivory ball of his cane, and staring unblush- 
 ingly at the blonde-haired lady sitting un- 
 der her own hired fig-tree in the hotel gar- 
 den. What a fascinating creature he was, 
 with his little black mustache, almost as 
 heavy as a pencil mark, his olive skin, his 
 wide, effeminate eyes, his slender rattan 
 figure, and his cameo sleeve-studs ! What 
 a sad dog he was, to melt into those lan- 
 guishing postures up there, and let loose 
 all those facile blandishments, careless of 
 the heart-break he must inevitably cause 
 the simple American signora in the gar-
 
 78 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTR 
 
 den below ! We used to glance up at this 
 gilded youth from time to time, and it was 
 a satisfaction to reflect what an ineffable 
 idiot he was, like all his kind in every land 
 under the sun. 
 
 This was our second sojourn in Rome, 
 and we had spent two industrious weeks, 
 picking up the threads of the Past, dropped 
 temporarily in April in order to run down 
 and explore Naples before Southern Italy 
 became too hot to hold us : two busy weeks, 
 into which were crowded visits to the cata- 
 combs and the Baths of Caracalla, and ex- 
 cursions on the Campagna at this time 
 of year a vast red sea of poppies strewn 
 with the wrecks of ancient tombs ; we had 
 humiliated our nostrils in strolling through 
 the Ghetto, and gladdened our eyes daily 
 with the bronze equestrian statue of Mar- 
 cus Aurelius in the Piazza del Campido- 
 glio ; we had made a pilgrimage to the Ab- 
 bey alle Tre Fontane, and regarded with 
 a proper sense of awe the three fountains
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 79 
 
 which had gushed forth at the points where 
 the head of the Apostle Paul landed, in 
 those three eccentric leaps it accomplished 
 after his execution ; we had breathed the 
 musky air of Santa Maria Maggiore and the 
 Basilica San Paolo, and once, by chance, 
 on a minor fete day, lighted on a pretty 
 pageant in St. John Lateran ; we had 
 looked our fill of statuary and painting, 
 and jasper and lapis-lazuli ; we had bur- 
 rowed under the Eternal City in crypt and 
 dungeon, and gazed down upon it from the 
 dizzy Lantern of St. Peter's. The blight- 
 ing summer was at hand ; the phantasmal 
 malaria was stalking the Campagna at 
 night : it was time to go. There was noth- 
 ing more to be done in Rome unless we did 
 the Roman fever nothing but that, in^ 
 deed, if we were not inclined to pay a visit 
 to a Certain Old Gentleman. This alter- 
 native appeared to have so many advan- 
 tages over the Roman fever that it at once 
 took the shape of an irresistible temptation.
 
 80 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 At least it did to Madama and me, but the 
 other pilgrim of the party was of a more 
 reflective mind, and was disposed to look at 
 the question judicially. He was not going 
 to call on a Certain Old Gentleman as if 
 he were a frescoed panel in the Sistine 
 Chapel ; it was not fair to put a human be- 
 ing on the same footing as a nameless 
 heathen statue dug out of the cinders of 
 Pompeii ; the statue could not complain, 
 and would be quite in the wrong if it did 
 complain, at being treated as a curiosity; 
 but the human being might, and had a per- 
 fect right to protest. H 's objections to 
 
 the visit were so numerous and so warmly 
 put, that Madama and I were satisfied that 
 he had made up his mind to go. 
 
 " However, the gentleman is not adverse 
 to receiving strangers, as I understand it," 
 said H , imperceptibly weakening. 
 
 " On the contrary," I said, " it is one of 
 the relaxations of his old age, and he is es* 
 pecially hospitable to our countrymen. A 
 great many Americans "
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 81 
 
 " Then let us go, by all means," inter- 
 rupted Madama. "Among the Romans 
 one should do as Americans do." 
 
 "Only much better," I suggested. "I 
 have sometimes been not proud of my coun- 
 trymen on this side of the water. The De- 
 laneys in the Borghese Gallery, the other 
 day ! I almost longed for the intervention 
 of the Inquisition. If it had been in Ven- 
 ice and in the fifteenth century, I 'd have 
 dropped an anonymous communication into 
 the letter-box of the Palace of the Doges, 
 and had the Council of Ten down on Miss 
 Fanny Delaney in no time." 
 
 " The chances are he is out of town," 
 said Madama, ignoring my vindictiveness. 
 
 " He has a summer residence near Al- 
 
 bano," said H , "but he never goes 
 
 there now ; at least he has not occupied the 
 villa for the last few years, in fact, not 
 since 18YO." 
 
 "Where does he pass his summers, 
 
 then?" asked Madama. 
 6
 
 82 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 " In Rome." 
 
 " How eccentric ! " 
 
 " I suppose he has his weak points, like 
 the rest of us," said H , charitably. 
 
 " He ought to have his strong points, to 
 endure the summer in Rome, with the ma- 
 laria, and the sirocco, and the typhoon, and 
 all the dreadful things that befall." 
 
 " The typhoon, my dear " 
 
 Though the discussion did not end here 
 that May evening on the steps of the hotel- 
 garden, it ends here in my record ; it being 
 sufficient for the reader to know that we 
 then and there resolved to undertake the 
 visit in question. The scribe of the party 
 dispatched a note to Signer V express- 
 ing a desire to pay our respects to his ven- 
 erable friend before we left town, and beg. 
 ging that an early day, if any, be appointed 
 
 for the interview. Signor V was an 
 
 Italian acquaintance of ours who carried a 
 diplomatic key that fitted almost any lock. 
 
 We breakfasted betimes, the next morn-
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 83 
 
 ing, and sat lingering over our coffee, await- 
 ing Signer V 's reply to our note. The 
 
 reply had so impressive an air of not com- 
 ing, that we fell to planning an excursion 
 to Tivoli, and had ordered a carriage to 
 that end, when Stefano appeared, bearing 
 an envelope on his silver-plated waiter. (I 
 think Stefano was born with that waiter in 
 his hand ; he never laid it down for a mo- 
 ment ; if any duty obliged him to use both 
 hands, he clapped the waiter under his arm 
 or between his knees ; I used to fancy that 
 it was attached to his body by some myste- 
 rious, invisible ligament, the severing of 
 which would have caused his instant disso- 
 lution.) Signer V advised us that his 
 
 venerable friend would be gracious enough 
 to receive us that very day at one half-hour 
 after noon. In a postscript the signer in- 
 timated that the gentlemen would be ex- 
 pected to wear evening dress, minus gloves, 
 and that it was imperative on the part of 
 Madama to be costumed completely in
 
 84 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTB. 
 
 black and to wear only a black veil on her 
 hair. Such was one of the whims of a Cer- 
 tain Old Gentleman. 
 
 Here a dilemma arose. Among Ma- 
 dama's wardrobe there was no costume of 
 this lugubrious description. The nearest 
 approach to it was a statuesque black robe, 
 elaborately looped and covered with agree- 
 able arabesques of turquoise -blue silk. 
 There was nothing to do but to rip off 
 these celestial trimmings, and they were 
 ripped off, though it went against the wo- 
 man-heart. Poor, vain little silk dress, 
 that had never been worn, what swift ret- 
 ribution overtook you for being nothing 
 but artistic, and graceful, and lovely, and 
 Parisian, which includes all blessed ad- 
 jectives ! 
 
 From the bottom of a trunk in which 
 
 they had lain since we left London, H 
 
 and I exhumed our dress-coats. Though 
 perfectly new (like their amiable sister, the 
 black silk gown), they came out looking
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 85 
 
 remarkably aged. They had inexplicable 
 bulges in the back, as if they had been 
 worn by somebody with six or eight shoul- 
 der-blades, and were covered all over in 
 front with minute wrinkles, recalling the 
 famous portrait of the late Mr. Parr in his 
 
 hundred and fiftieth year. H and I 
 
 got into our creased elegance with not 
 more intemperate comment than might be 
 pardoned, and repaired to the parlor, where 
 we found Madama arranging a voluminous 
 veil of inky crape over her hair, and re- 
 garding herself in a full-length mirror with 
 gloomy satisfaction. The carriage was at 
 the porte cochere, and we departed, stealing 
 silently through the deserted hotel corridor, 
 and looking for all the world, I imagine, 
 like a couple of rascally undertakers mak- 
 ing off with a nun.
 
 86 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 n. 
 
 WE had been so expeditious in our prep- 
 arations that on seating ourselves in the 
 carriage we found much superfluous time 
 on our hands ; so we went around Robin 
 Hood's barn to our destination a delight- 
 ful method in Rome taking the Cenci 
 Palace and the Hilda's Tower of Haw- 
 thorne's romance in our impartial sweep, 
 and stopping at a shop in the Piazza di 
 Spagna, where Madama purchased an am- 
 ber rosary for only about three times as 
 many lire as she need have paid for it any- 
 where else on the globe. If an Italian shop- 
 keeper should be submitted to a chemical 
 analysis, and his rascality carefully sepa- 
 rated from the other ingredients and thrown 
 away, there would be nothing left of him. 
 I think it is Dumas fih who remarks that
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 87 
 
 the ancients had but one god for shop- 
 keepers and thieves. 
 
 There were not many persons to be seen 
 in the streets. It was nearing the hour 
 when Rome keeps in-doors and takes its 
 ease ; besides, it was out of season, as I 
 have stated, and the Gaul and the Briton, 
 and the American savage with his bowie- 
 knife and revolver, had struck a trail north- 
 ward. At the church portals, to be sure, 
 was the usual percentage of distressing beg- 
 gars the old hag out of Macbeth, who 
 insists on lifting the padded leather door- 
 screen, for you, the one-eyed man, the one- 
 armed man, the one-legged man, and other 
 fragments. The poor you have always with 
 you, in Italy. They lash themselves, meta- 
 phorically, to the spokes of your carriage- 
 wheel, and go round with you. 
 
 Ever since our second arrival in Rome 
 the population seemed to have been under- 
 going a process of evaporation. From the 
 carriage-window we now and then caught
 
 88 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 sight of a sandalled monk flitting by in the 
 shadow of a tall building the sole human 
 thing that appears to be in a hurry in this 
 stagnant city. His furtive air betrays his 
 consciousness that he is only tolerated where 
 he once ruled nearly supreme. It is an evil 
 time for him ; his tenure is brief. Now 
 that the government has unearthed him, he 
 is fading out like a Pompeian fresco. As 
 he glides by, there in the shade, with the 
 aspect of a man belated on some errand of 
 vital import, I have an idea he is not going 
 anywhere in particular. Before these dole- 
 ful days had befallen the Church of Rome, 
 every third figure you met was a gray- 
 cowled friar, or a white-robed Dominican, 
 or a shovel-hatted reverend father looking 
 like a sharp raven; but they all are rare 
 birds now, and, for the most part, the few 
 that are left stick to their perches in the 
 stricken, mouldy old monasteries and con- 
 vents, shedding their feathers and wasting 
 away hour by hour, the last of the brood !
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 89 
 
 In the vicinity of Trajan's Column we 
 encountered a bewildered-looking goat-herd, 
 who had strayed in from the Campagna, 
 perhaps with some misty anticipation that 
 the Emperor Nero had a fresh lot of choice 
 Christians to be served up that day in the 
 arena of the Coliseum. I wondered if this 
 rustic wore those pieces of hairy goatskin 
 laced to his calves in July and August. It 
 threw one into a perspiration to look at 
 him. But I forgave him on inspection, for 
 with his pointed hat, through an aperture 
 of which his hair had run to seed, and his 
 scarlet sash, and his many-colored tattered 
 habiliments, he was the only bit of pic- 
 turesque costume we saw in Rome. Pic- 
 turesque costume is a thing of the past 
 there, except those fraudulent remains of 
 it that hang about the studios in the Via 
 Margutta, or at the steps of the Trinita de' 
 Monti, on the shoulders of professional 
 models. 
 
 Even the Corso was nearly deserted and
 
 90 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 quite dull this day, and it is scarcely gay 
 when it is thronged, as we saw it early 
 in the spring. Possibly it is lively during 
 the Carnival. It would need masking and 
 music and illumination to lift its gloom, in 
 spite of its thousand balconies. The sense 
 of antiquity and the heavy, uncompromis- 
 ing architecture of Rome oppress one pain- 
 fully until one comes to love her. My im- 
 pression of Rome is something so solid and 
 tangible that I have felt at times as if I 
 could pack it in a box, like a bas-relief, or 
 a statue, or a segment of a column, and 
 send it home by the Cunard line. Com- 
 pared with the airiness and grace and color 
 of other Continental cities, Rome is dull. 
 The arcades of Bologna and the dingy 
 streets of Verona and Padua are not duller. 
 If I linger by the way, and seem in no 
 haste to get to a Certain Old Gentleman, 
 it is because the Roman atmosphere has in 
 it some medicinal property that induces 
 reverie and procrastination, and relaxes the
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 91 
 
 sinews of effort. I wonder where Caligula 
 found the enterprise to torture his victims, 
 and Brutus the vivacity to stab Csesar. 
 
 Our zigzag route brought us back to the 
 Piazza del Popolo, from which we turned 
 into the Via Ripetta on the left, and rat- 
 tled over the stone pavement past the Cas- 
 tle of St. Angelo, towards St. Peter's. It 
 was not until the horses slackened their 
 speed, and finally stood still in a spacious 
 cortile at the foot of a wide flight of stone 
 steps, that our purpose dropped a certain 
 fantastic aspect it had worn, and became a 
 serious if not a solemn business. Notwith- 
 standing our deliberations over the matter 
 at the hotel, I think I had not fully real- 
 ized that in proposing to visit a Certain 
 Old Gentleman we were proposing to visit 
 the Pope of Rome. 1 The proposition had 
 seemed all along like a piece of mild pleas- 
 
 1 Since this paper was written, Pius IX., Cardinal Anto- 
 nelli, and King Victor Emmanuel have laid down the burden 
 of life. These distinguished personages seem to have con- 
 spired to render my note-book obsolete.
 
 92 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 antry, as if one should say, "I think I'll 
 drop round on Titus Flavins in the course 
 of the forenoon," or " I Ve half a mind to 
 look in on Cicero and Pompey, and see 
 how they feel this morning after their little 
 dissipation last night at the villa of Lucul- 
 lus." The Pope of Rome not the Pope 
 regnant, but the Pope of Rome in the ab- 
 stract had up to that hour presented 
 himself to my mental eye as an august 
 spectacular figure-head, belonging to no 
 particular period, who might turn out after 
 all to be an ingenious historical fiction per- 
 petrated by the same humorist that in- 
 vented Pocahontas. The Pope of Rome ! 
 he had been as vague to me as Adam 
 and as improbable as Noah. 
 
 But there stood Signer V at the car- 
 riage-step, waiting to conduct us into the 
 Vatican, and there, on either side of the 
 portals at the head of the massive stair- 
 ease, lounged two of the papal guard in that 
 jack - of - diamonds costume which Michael
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 93 
 
 Angelo designed for them in the way of 
 a practical joke, I fancy. They held hal- 
 berds in their hands, these mediaeval gentle- 
 men, and it was a mercy they did n't chop 
 us to pieces as we passed between them. 
 What an absurd uniform for a man-at-arms 
 of the nineteenth century ! These fellows, 
 clad in rainbow, suggested a pair of harle- 
 quins out of a Christmas pantomime. Far- 
 ther on we came to more stone staircase, 
 and more stupid papal guard with melodra- 
 matic battle-axes, and were finally ushered 
 into a vast, high -studded chamber at the 
 end of a much-stuccoed corridor. 
 
 Coming as we did out of the blinding 
 sunshine, this chamber seemed to us at first 
 but a gloomy cavern. It was so poorly 
 lighted by numerous large windows on the 
 western side that several seconds elapsed 
 before we could see anything distinctly. 
 One or two additional windows would have 
 made it quite dark. At the end of the 
 apartment, near the door at which we had
 
 94 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 entered, was a dais with three tawdry ro- 
 coco gilt arm-chairs, having for background 
 an enormous painting of the Virgin, but 
 by what master I was unable to make out. 
 The draperies of the room were of some 
 heavy dark stuff, a green rep, if I remem- 
 ber, and the floor was covered with a thick 
 carpet through which the solid stone flag- 
 ging beneath repelled the pressure of your 
 foot. There was a singular absence of 
 color everywhere, of that mosaic work and 
 Renaissance gilding with which the eyes 
 soon become good friends in Italy. The 
 frescoes of the ceiling, if there were any 
 frescoes, were in some shy neutral tint, and 
 did not introduce themselves to us. On 
 the right, at the other extremity of the 
 room, was a double door, which led, as we 
 were correct in supposing, to the private 
 apartments of the Pope. 
 
 Presently our eyes grew reconciled to the 
 semi-twilight, which seemed to have been 
 transported hither with a faint spicy odor
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 95 
 
 of incense from some ancient basilica a 
 proper enough light for an audience-chain^ 
 ber in the Vatican. Fixed against the wall 
 on either side, and extending nearly the 
 entire length of the room, was a broad set- 
 tee, the greater part of which was already 
 occupied when we entered. Formerly wo- 
 men were not allowed a public audience 
 with the Pope. Madame Junot, in giving 
 in her Me'moires an account of her inter- 
 view with Pius VII., says : " Whenever a 
 woman is presented to the Pope, it must be 
 so managed as to have the appearance of 
 accident. Women are not admitted into 
 the Vatican, but his Holiness permits them 
 to be presented to him in the Sistine 
 Chapel, or in his promenades. But the 
 meeting must always appear to be the ef- 
 fect of chance." I do not know when this 
 custom fell into desuetude; possibly long 
 before the reign of Pius IX. The major- 
 ity of the persons now present were wo- 
 men.
 
 96 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 Signer V stationed himself at our 
 
 side, and began a conversation with H 
 
 on the troubles that had overtaken and the 
 perils that still menaced the True Church. 
 The disintegration of nunneries and monas- 
 teries and the closing up of religious houses 
 had been fraught with much individual 
 suffering. Hundreds of simple, learned 
 men had been suddenly thrust out into a 
 world of which they had no knowledge and 
 where they were as helpless as so many in- 
 fants. In some instances the government 
 had laid hands on strictly private proper- 
 ties, on funds contributed by private per- 
 sons to establish asylums for women of 
 noble birth in reduced circumstances 
 portionless daughters and cousins desirous 
 of leading a life of pious meditation and 
 seclusion. Many of these institutions pos- 
 sessed enormous revenues, and were strong 
 temptations to the Italian government, 
 whose money-chest gave out a pathetically 
 hollow sound when tapped against in 1870.
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 97 
 
 One does not need to be a Catholic to per- 
 ceive the injustice of this kind of seizure ; 
 one's sympathy may go forth with the un- 
 housed nuns : as to the monks it does 
 not hurt any man to earn his own living. 
 The right and the necessity to work ought 
 to be regarded as a direct blessing from 
 God by men who, for these many centuries, 
 have had their stomachs " with good capon 
 lined," chiefly at the expense of the poor. 
 
 Conversation had become general ; every 
 one spoke in a subdued tone, and a bee-like 
 hum rose and fell on the air. With the 
 exception of a neat little body, with her 
 husband, at our right, the thirty or forty 
 persons present were either French, Ger- 
 man, English, Russian, or Italian. 
 
 I remarked to Signor V on the ab- 
 sence of the American element, and attrib- 
 uted it to the lateness of the season. 
 
 " That does not wholly explain it," said 
 
 Signor V . "There were numberless 
 
 applications from Americans to attend this 
 7
 
 98 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 reception, but his Holiness just at present 
 is not inclined to receive many Ameri- 
 cans." 
 
 "Why not?'* 
 
 " A few weeks ago, his Holiness was 
 treated with great disrespect by an Ameri- 
 can, a lawyer from one of your Western 
 States, I believe, who did not rise from his 
 seat or kneel when the Pope entered the 
 room." 
 
 " He ought to have risen, certainly ; but 
 is it imperative that one should kneel ? " 
 
 " It is ; but then, it is not imperative on 
 any one to be presented to his Holiness. 
 If the gentleman did not wish to conform 
 to the custom, he ought to have stayed 
 away." 
 
 "He might have been ignorant of that 
 phase of the ceremony," said I, with a sud- 
 den poignant sense of sympathy with my 
 unhappy countryman. " What befell him ? " 
 
 " He was courteously escorted from the 
 chamber by the gentleman in waiting,"
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 99 
 
 said Signer V , glancing at an official 
 
 near the door, who looked as if he were a 
 cross between a divinity student and a po- 
 liceman. 
 
 It occurred to me that few things would 
 be less entertaining than to be led out of 
 this audience-chamber in the face and eyes 
 of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy 
 in the face and eyes of the civilized world, , 
 in fact ; for would not the next number of 
 Galignani's Messenger have a paragraph 
 about it ? I had supposed that Catholics 
 knelt to the Pope, as a matter of course, 
 but that Protestants were exempt from pay- 
 ing this homage, on the same ground that 
 Quakers are not expected to remove their 
 hats like other folk. I wondered what 
 Friend Eli would do, if destiny dropped 
 him into the midst of one of the receptions 
 of Pius IX. However, it was somewhat 
 late to go to the bottom of the matter, so I 
 dismissed it from my mind, and began an 
 examination of my neighbors.
 
 100 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 A cynic has observed that all cats are 
 gray in the twilight. He said cats, but 
 meant women. I am convinced that all 
 women are not alike in a black silk dress, 
 very simply trimmed and with no color 
 about it except a white rose at the corsage. 
 There are women perhaps not too many 
 whose beauty is heightened by an aus- 
 tere toilette. Such a one was the lady op- 
 posite me, with her veil twisted under her 
 chin and falling negligently over the left 
 shoulder. The beauty of her face flashed 
 out like a diamond from its sombre setting. 
 She had the brightest of dark eyes, with 
 such a thick, long fringe of dark eyelashes 
 that her whole countenance turned into 
 night when she drooped her eyelids ; when 
 she lifted them, it was morning again. As 
 if to show us what might be done in the 
 manner of contrasts, nature had given this 
 lady some newly coined Roman gold for 
 hair. I think Eve was that way both 
 blonde and brunette. My vis-d-vis would
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 101 
 
 have been gracious in any costume,, but I 
 am positive that nothing would have gone 
 so well with her as the black silk dress, fit- 
 ting closely to the pliant bust and not los- 
 ing a single line or curve. As she sat, 
 turned three quarters face, the window be- 
 hind her threw the outlines of her slender 
 figure into sharp relief. The lady herself 
 was perfectly well aware of it. 
 
 Next to this charming person was a sub- 
 stantial English matron, who wore her hair 
 done up in a kind of turret, and looked like 
 a lithograph of a distant view of Windsor 
 Castle. She sat bolt upright, and formed, 
 if I may say so, the initial letter of a long 
 line of fascinatingly ugly women. Imagine 
 a row of Sphinxes in deep mourning. It 
 would have been an unbroken line of femi- 
 nine severity, but for a handsome young 
 priest with a strikingly spiritual face, who 
 came in, like a happy word in parenthesis, 
 half-way down the row. I soon exhausted 
 the resources of this part of the room ; my
 
 102 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTS. 
 
 eyes went back to the Italian lady so pret- 
 tily framed in the embrasure of the window, 
 and would have lingered there had I not 
 got interested in an old gentleman seated 
 on my left. When he came into the room, 
 blinking his kindly blue eyes and rubbing 
 his hands noiselessly together and beaming 
 benevolently on everybody, just as if he 
 were expected, I fell in love with him. 
 His fragile, aristocratic hands appeared to 
 have been done up by the same blanchis- 
 seuse who did his linen, which was as white 
 and crisp as an Alpine snow-drift, as were 
 also two wintry strands of hair artfully 
 trained over either ear. Otherwise he was 
 as bald and shiny as a glacier. He seated 
 himself with an old-fashioned, courteous 
 bow to the company assembled, and a pro- 
 testing wave of the hand, as if to say, 
 " Good people, I pray you, do not disturb 
 yourselves," and made all that side of the 
 room bright with his smiling. He looked 
 so clean and sweet, just such a wholesome
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 103 
 
 figure as one would like to have at one's 
 fireside as grandfather, that I began formu- 
 lating the wish that I might, thirty or forty- 
 years hence, be taken for his twin brother ; 
 when a neighbor of his created a distur- 
 bance. 
 
 This neighbor was a young Italian lady 
 or gentleman I cannot affirm which of 
 perhaps ten months' existence, who up to 
 the present time had been asleep in the 
 arms of its bonne. Awaking suddenly, the 
 bambino had given vent to the shrillest 
 shrieks, impelled thereto by the strange- 
 ness of the surrounding features, or perhaps 
 by some conscientious scruples about being 
 in the Vatican. I picked out the mother 
 at once by the worried expression that flew 
 to the countenance of a lady near me, and 
 in a gentleman who instantly assumed an 
 air of having no connection whatever with 
 the baleful infant, I detected the father. I 
 do not remember to have seen a stronger 
 instance of youthful depravity and dupli-
 
 104 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 city than that lemon-colored child afforded. 
 The moment the nurse walked with it, it 
 sunk into the sweetest of slumber, and 
 peace settled upon its little nose like a 
 drowsy bee upon the petal of a flower ; but 
 the instant the bonne made a motion to sit 
 down, it broke forth again. I do not know 
 what ultimately befell the vocal goblin ; 
 possibly it was collared by the lieutenant 
 of the guard outside, and thrown into the 
 deepest dungeon of the palace ; at all events 
 it disappeared after the announcement that 
 his Holiness would be with us shortly. 
 Whatever virtues Pius IX. possessed, punc- 
 tuality was not one of them, for he had 
 kept us waiting three quarters of an hour, 
 and we had still another fifteen minutes to 
 wait. 
 
 The monotonous hum of conversation 
 hushed itself abruptly, the two sections of 
 the wide door I have mentioned were 
 thrown open, and the Pope, surrounded by 
 his cardinals and a number of foreign
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 105 
 
 princes, entered. The occupants of the 
 two long settees rose, and then, as if they 
 were automata worked by the same tyran- 
 nical wire, sunk simultaneously into an at- 
 titude of devotion. For an instant I was 
 seized with a desperate desire not to kneel. 
 There is something in an American knee, 
 when it is rightly constructed, that makes 
 it an awkward thing to kneel with before 
 any man born of woman. Perhaps, if the 
 choice were left one, either to prostrate 
 one's self before a certain person or be shot, 
 one might make a point of it and be shot. 
 But that was not the alternative in the 
 present case. If I had failed to follow the 
 immemorial custom I should not have had 
 the honor of a fusilade, but would have 
 been ignominiously led away by one of 
 those highly-colored Swiss guards, and, in 
 my dress suit, would have presented to the 
 general stare the appearance of a preten- 
 tious ace of spades being wiped out by a gay 
 right-bower. Such humiliation was not to
 
 106 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 be thought of ! So, wishing myself safely 
 back amid the cruder civilization of the 
 New World, and with a mental protest ac- 
 companied by a lofty compassion for the 
 weakness and cowardice of human-kind, I 
 slid softly down with the rest of the miser- 
 able sinners. I was in the very act, when 
 I was chilled to the marrow by catching a 
 sidelong glimpse of my benign old gentle- 
 man placidly leaning back in his seat, with 
 his hands folded over his well-filled waist- 
 coat and that same benevolent smile pet- 
 rified on his countenance. He was fast 
 asleep. 
 
 Immediately a tall, cadaverous person in 
 a scant, funereal garment emerged from 
 somewhere, and touched the sleeper on the 
 shoulder. The old gentleman unclosed his 
 eyes slowly and with difficulty, and was 
 so far from taking in the situation that he 
 made a gesture as if to shake hands with 
 the tall, cadaverous person. Then it all 
 flashed upon the dear old boy, and he
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 107 
 
 dropped to his knees with so comical and 
 despairing an air of contrition that the 
 presence of forty thousand popes would not 
 have prevented me from laughing. 
 
 Another discomposing incident occurred 
 at this juncture. Two removes below me 
 was a smooth-faced German of gigantic 
 stature ; he must have been six or seven 
 inches over six feet in height, but so ab- 
 surdly short between the knee-cap and 
 ankle that as he knelt he towered head 
 and shoulders above us all, resembling a 
 great, overgrown school-boy, standing up 
 as straight as he could. It was so he im- 
 pressed one of the ghostly attendants, who 
 advanced quickly towards him with the 
 evident purpose of requesting him to kneel. 
 Discovering his error just in time, the rev- 
 erend father retreated, much abashed. 
 
 All eyes were now turned toward the 
 Pope and his suite, and this trifling episode 
 passed unnoticed save by two or three in- 
 dividuals hi the immediate neighborhood,
 
 108 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTff. 
 
 who succeeded in swallowing their smiles, 
 but did not dare glance at each other after- 
 wards. The Pope advanced to the centre 
 of the upper end of the room, leaning heav- 
 ily on his ivory-handled cane, the princes 
 in black and the cardinals in scarlet stand- 
 ing behind him in picturesque groups, like 
 the chorus in an opera. Indeed, it was all 
 like a scene on the stage. There was 
 something premeditated and spectacular 
 about it, as if these persons had been en- 
 gaged for the occasion. Several of the 
 princes were Russian, with names quite 
 well adapted to not being remembered. 
 Among the Italian gentlemen was Cardi- 
 nal Nobli Vatteleschi he was not a car- 
 dinal then, by the way who died not 
 long ago. 
 
 Within whispering distance of the Pope 
 stood Cardinal Antonelli a man who 
 would not escape observation in any assem- 
 bly of notable personages. If the Inquisi- 
 tion should be revived in its early genial
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 109 
 
 form, and the reader should fall into its 
 hands as would very likely be the case, 
 if a branch office were established in this 
 country he would feel scarcely comfort- 
 able if his chief inquisitor had so cold and 
 subtle a countenance as Giacome Anto- 
 nelli's. 
 
 We occasionally meet in political or in 
 social life a man whose presence seems to 
 be an anachronism a man belonging to a 
 type we fancied extinct ; he affects us as a 
 living dodo would the naturalist, though 
 perhaps not with so great an enthusiasm. 
 Cardinal Antonelli, in his bearing and the 
 cast of his countenance, had that air of re- 
 moteness which impresses us in the works 
 of the old masters. I had seen somewhere 
 a head of Velasquez for which the cardinal 
 might have posed. With the subdued af- 
 ternoon light falling upon him through the 
 deep-set lunette, he seemed like some cruel 
 prelate escaped from one of the earlier vol- 
 umes of Froude's History of England
 
 110 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 subtle, haughty, intolerant. I did not 
 mean to allow so sinister an impression to 
 remain on my mind ; but all I have since 
 read and heard of Cardinal Antonelli has 
 not obliterated it. 
 
 It was a pleasure to turn from the im- 
 passible prime minister to the gentle and 
 altogether interesting figure of his august 
 master, with his small, sparkling eyes, re- 
 markably piercing when he looked at you 
 point-blank, and a smile none the less win- 
 some that it lighted up a mouth denoting 
 unusual force of will. His face was not at 
 all the face of a man who had passed nearly 
 half a century in arduous diplomatic and 
 ecclesiastical labors ; it was certainly the 
 face of a man who had led a temperate, 
 blameless private life, in noble contrast to 
 many of his profligate predecessors, whom 
 the world was only too glad to have snugly 
 stowed away in their gorgeous porphyry 
 coffins with a marble mistress carved atop. 
 
 Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti was born
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. Ill 
 
 in Sinigaglia on the 13th of May, 1792 ; 
 the week previous to this reception he had 
 celebrated his eighty-third birthday ; but 
 he did not look over sixty-five or seventy, 
 as he stood there in his skull-cap of cream- 
 white broadcloth and his long pontifical 
 robes of the same material a costume 
 that lent an appearance of height to an un- 
 dersized, stoutly built figure. With his sil- 
 very hair straggling from beneath the skull- 
 cap, and his smoothly-shaven pale face, a 
 trifle heavy, perhaps because of the double 
 chin, he was a very beautiful old man. 
 After pausing a moment or two in the mid- 
 dle of the chamber, and taking a bird's-eye 
 glance at his guests, the Pope began his 
 rounds. Assigned to each group of five or 
 ten persons was an official who presented 
 the visitors by name, indicating their na- 
 tionality, station, etc. So far as the nation- 
 ality was involved, that portion of the in- 
 troduction was obviously superfluous, for 
 the Pope singled out his countrymen at a
 
 112 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 glance, and at once addressed them in Ital- 
 ian, scarcely waiting for the master of cere- 
 monies to perform his duties. To foreign- 
 ers his Holiness spoke in French. After a 
 few words of salutation he gave his hand 
 to each person, who touched it with his 
 lips or his forehead, or simply retained it 
 an instant. It was a deathly cold hand, 
 on the forefinger of which was a great seal 
 ring bearing a mottled gray stone that 
 seemed frozen. As the Pope moved slowly 
 along, devotees caught at the hem of his 
 robe and pressed it to their lips, and in 
 most instances bowed down and kissed his 
 feet. I suppose it was only by years of 
 practice that his Holiness was able to avoid 
 stepping on a nose here and there. 
 
 It came our turn at last. As he ap- 
 proached us he said, with a smile, " Ah, I 
 
 see you are Americans." Signer V 
 
 then presented us formally, and the Pope 
 was kind enough to say to us what he had 
 probably said to twenty thousand other
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 113 
 
 Americans in the course of several hundred 
 similar occasions. After he had passed on, 
 the party that had paid their respects to 
 him resumed their normal position I am 
 not sure this was not the most enjoyable 
 feature of the affair and gave themselves 
 up to watching the other presentations. 
 When these were concluded, the Pope re- 
 turned to the point of his departure, and 
 proceeded to bless the rosaries and crosses 
 and souvenirs that had been brought, in 
 greater or lesser numbers, by every one. 
 There were salvers piled with rosaries, 
 arms strung from wrist to shoulder with 
 rosaries so many carven amulets, and 
 circlets of beads and crucifixes, indeed, that 
 it would have been the labor of weeks to 
 bless them separately; so his Holiness 
 blessed them in bulk. 
 
 It was then that the neat little Ameri- 
 can lady who sat next us confirmed my 
 suspicions as to her brideship by slyly slip- 
 ping from her wedding finger a plain gold
 
 114 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 ring, which she attached to her rosary with 
 a thread from her veil. Seeing herself de- 
 tected in the act, she turned to Madama, 
 and, making up the most piquant little 
 face in the world, whispered confidentially, 
 " Of course I 'm not a Roman Catholic, you 
 know ; but if there 's anything efficacious 
 in the blessing, I don't want to lose it. I 
 want to take all the chances." For my 
 part, I hope and believe the Pope's bless- 
 ing will cling to that diminutive wedding 
 ring for many and many a year. 
 
 This ceremony finished, his Holiness ad- 
 dressed to his guests the neatest of fare- 
 wells, delivered in enviable French, in 
 which he wished a prosperous voyage to 
 those pilgrims whose homes lay beyond the 
 sea, and a happy return to all. When he 
 touched, as he did briefly, on the misfor- 
 tunes of the church, an adorable fire came 
 into his eyes ; fifty of his eighty-three win- 
 ters slipped from him as if by enchantment, 
 and for a few seconds he stood forth in the
 
 A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 115 
 
 prime of life. He spoke some five or seven 
 minutes, and nothing could have been more 
 dignified and graceful than the matter and 
 the manner of his words. The benediction 
 was followed by a general rustle and move- 
 ment among the princes and eminenze at the 
 farther end of the room ; the double door 
 opened softly, and closed and that was 
 the last the Pope saw of us.
 
 VI. 
 ON A BALCONY.
 
 VL 
 
 ON A BALCONY. 
 
 A BALCONY, as we northerns know it, 
 is a humiliating architectural link between 
 in-doors and out-of-doors. To be on a bal- 
 cony is to be nowhere in particular : you 
 are not exactly at home, and yet cannot be 
 described as out; your privacy and your 
 freedom are alike sacrificed. The approach- 
 ing bore has you at his mercy ; he can draw 
 a bead on you with his rifled eye at a hun- 
 dred paces. You may gaze abstractedly at 
 a cloud, or turn your back, but you cannot 
 escape him, though the chance is always 
 open to you to drop a bureau on him as he 
 lifts his hand to the bell-knob. One could 
 fill a volume with a condensed catalogue of
 
 120 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTff. 
 
 the inconveniences of an average balcony. 
 But when the balcony hangs from the 
 third-story window of an Old World palace, 
 and when the facade of that Old World 
 palace looks upon the Bay of Naples, you 
 had better think twice before you speak 
 depreciatingly of balconies. With that 
 sheet of mysteriously blue water in front 
 of you; with Mount Vesuvius moodily 
 smoking his perpetual calumet on your 
 left ; with the indented shore sweeping to- 
 wards Pozzuoli and Baise on your right ; 
 with Capri and Ischia notching the ashen 
 gray line of the horizon ; with the tender 
 heaven of May bending over all with 
 these accessories, I say, it must be con- 
 ceded that one might be very much worse 
 off in this world than on a balcony. 
 
 I know that I came to esteem the narrow 
 iron-grilled shelf suspended from my bed- 
 room window in the hotel on the Strada 
 Chiatamone as the choicest spot in all Na< 
 pies. After a ramble through the unsavory
 
 ON A BALCONY. 121 
 
 streets it was always a pleasure to get back 
 to it, and I think I" never in my life did a 
 more sensible thing in the department of 
 pure idleness than when I resolved to spend 
 an entire day on that balcony. One morn- 
 ing, after an early breakfast, I established 
 myself there in an arm-chair placed beside 
 a small table holding a couple of books, a 
 paper of cigarettes, and a field-glass. My 
 companions had gone to explore the pic- 
 ture-galleries ; but I had my picture-gallery 
 chez moi in the busy strada below, in the 
 villa-fringed bay, in the cluster of yellow- 
 roofed little towns clinging to the purple 
 slopes of Mount Vesuvius and patiently 
 awaiting annihilation. The beauty of Na- 
 ples lies along its water-front, and from my 
 coigne of vantage I had nothing to desire. 
 
 If the Bay of Naples had not been de- 
 scribed a million times during the present 
 century, I should still not attempt to de- 
 scribe it : I have made a discovery which 
 no other traveller seems to have made
 
 122 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 that its loveliness is untranslatable. More- 
 over, enthusiasm is not permitted to the 
 modern tourist. He may be aesthetic, or 
 historic, or scientific, or analytic, or didac- 
 tic, or any kind of ic, except enthusiastic. 
 He may be Meissonier-like in his detail; 
 he may give you the very tint and texture 
 of a honeycombed frieze over a Byzantine 
 gateway, or lay bare the yet faintly palpi- 
 tating heart of some old-time tragedy, but 
 he must do it in a nonchalant, pulseless 
 manner, with a semi-supercilious elevation 
 of nostril. He would lose his self-respect 
 if he were to be deeply moved by anything, 
 or really interested in anything. 
 
 " All that he sees in Bagdad 
 Is the Tigris to float him away." 
 
 He is the very antipode of his elder brother 
 of fifty years syne, who used to go about 
 filling his note-book with Thoughts on 
 Standing at the Tomb of Marcus Antoni- 
 nus, Emotions on Finding a Flea on my 
 Shirt Collar in the Val d'Arno, and the
 
 ON A BALCONY. 123 
 
 like. The latter-day tourist is a great deal 
 less innocent, but is he more amusing than 
 those old-fashioned sentimental travellers 
 who had at least freshness of sympathies 
 and never dreamed of trying to pass them- 
 selves off as cynics ? Dear, ingenuous, im- 
 pressible souls peace to your books of 
 travel ! May they line none but trunks 
 destined to prolonged foreign tours, or those 
 thrice happy trunks which go on bridal 
 journeys ! 
 
 At the risk of being relegated to the 
 footing of those emotional ancients, I am 
 going to confess to an unrequited passion 
 for Mount Vesuvius. Never was passion 
 less regarded by its object. I did not as- 
 pire to be received with the warmth of 
 manner that characterized its reception of 
 the elder Pliny in the year 79, but I did 
 want Mount Vesuvius to pay me a little at- 
 tention, which it might easily have done 
 without putting itself out. On arriving 
 in town I had called on Mount Vesuvius.
 
 124 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 The acquaintance rested there. Every 
 night, after my candle was extinguished, 
 I stood a while at the open window and 
 glanced half-expectantly across the bay ; 
 but the sullen monster made no sign. That 
 slender spiral column of smoke, spreading 
 out like a toad-stool on attaining a certain 
 height, but neither increasing nor diminish- 
 ing in volume, lifted itself into the star- 
 light. Sometimes I fancied that the smoke 
 had taken a deeper lurid tinge ; but it was 
 only fancy. How I longed for a sudden 
 burst of flame and scoriae from those yawn- 
 ing jaws ! for one awful instant's illumi- 
 nation of the bay and the shipping and the 
 picturesque villages asleep at the foot of 
 the mountain ! I did not care to have the 
 spectacle last more than four or five heart- 
 beats at the longest ; but it was a thing 
 worth wishing for. 
 
 I do not believe that even the most hard- 
 ened traveller is able wholly to throw off 
 the grim fascination of Mount Vesuvius so
 
 ON A BALCONY. 125 
 
 long as he is near it; and I quite under- 
 stand the potency of the spell which has 
 led the poor people of Resina to set up 
 their Lares and Penates on cinder-buried 
 Herculaneum. Bide your time, O Resina, 
 and Portici, and Torre del Greco ! The 
 doom of Pompeii and Herculaneum shall 
 yet be yours. "If it be now, 'tis not to 
 come ; if it be not to come, it will be now ; 
 if it be not now, yet it will come." 
 
 Indeed, these villages have suffered re- 
 peatedly in ancient and modern times. In 
 the eruption of 1631 seven torrents of lava 
 swept down the mountain, taking in their 
 course Bosco, Torre dell' Annunziata, Torre 
 del Greco, Resina, and Portici, and destroy- 
 ing three thousand lives. That calamity 
 and later though not so terrible catastro- 
 phes have not prevented the people from 
 rebuilding on the old sites. The singular 
 fertility of the soil around the base of the 
 volcanic pile lures them back or is it 
 that they are under the influence of that
 
 126 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 nameless glamour I have hinted at ? Per- 
 haps those half-indistinguishable shapes of 
 petrified gnome and satyr and glyptodon 
 which lie tumbled in heaps all about this 
 region have something to do with it. It 
 would be easy to believe that some of the 
 nightmare figures and landscapes in Dora's 
 illustrations of The Wandering Jew were 
 suggested to the artist by the fantastic 
 forms in which the lava streams have cooled 
 along the flanks of Vesuvius. 
 
 A man might spend a busy life in study- 
 ing the phenomena of this terrible moun- 
 tain. It is undergoing constant changes. 
 The paths to the crater have to be varied 
 from month to month, so it is never safe to 
 make the ascent without a guide. There 
 is a notable sympathy existing between the 
 volcanoes of Vesuvius and ^Etna, although 
 seventy miles apart ; when one is in a pe- 
 riod of unusual activity, the other, as a 
 rule, remains quiescent. May be the im- 
 prisoned giant Enceladus works both forges.
 
 ON A BALCONY. 127 
 
 I never think of either mountain without 
 recalling Longfellow's poem : 
 
 " Under Mount ^Etna he lies, 
 
 It is slumber, it is not death ; 
 For he struggles at times to arise, 
 And above him the lurid skies 
 
 Are hot with his fiery breath. 
 
 " The crags are piled on his breast, 
 
 The earth is heaped on his head ; 
 But the groans of his wild unrest, 
 Though smothered and half suppressed, 
 Are heard, and he is not dead. 
 
 " And the nations far away 
 
 Are watching with eager eyes; 
 They talk together and say, 
 ' To-morrow, perhaps to-day, 
 Enceladus will arise ! ' 
 
 "And the old gods, the austere 
 
 Oppressors in their strength, 
 Stand aghast and white with fear 
 At the ominous sounds they hear, 
 And tremble, and mutter, ' At length I 
 
 14 Ah me ! for the land that is sown 
 
 With the harvest of despair ! 
 Where the burning cinders, blown
 
 128 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTS. 
 
 From the lips of the overthrown 
 Enceladus, fill the air. 
 
 " Where ashes are heaped in drifts 
 
 Over vineyard and field and town, 
 Whenever he starts and lifts 
 His head through the blackened rifts 
 Of the crags that keep him down. 
 
 " See, see ! the red light shines ! 
 
 'T is the glare of his awful eyes ! 
 And the storm-wind shouts through the pines, 
 Of Alps and of Apennines, 
 ' Enceladus, arise ! ' ' 
 
 For the first half hour after I had sta- 
 tioned myself on the balcony, that morning, 
 I kept my glass turned pretty constantly 
 in the direction of Mount Vesuvius, trying 
 to make out the osteria at the Hermitage, 
 where we had halted one noon to drink 
 some doubtful Lachryma Christi and eat a 
 mysterious sort of ragout, composed as 
 one of our party suggested of missing- 
 link. Whether or not the small inn had 
 shifted its position over night, I was unable 
 to get a focus upon it. In the mean while
 
 ON A BALCONY. 129 
 
 I myself, in my oriole nest overhanging the 
 strada, had become an object of burning in- 
 terest to sundry persons congregated below. 
 I was suddenly aware that three human 
 beings were standing in the middle of the 
 carriage-way with their faces turned up to 
 the balcony. The first was a slender, hid- 
 eous girl, with large eyes and little cloth- 
 ing, who held out a tambourine, the rattle- 
 snake-like clatter of which had attracted 
 my attention; next to her stood a fellow 
 with canes and palm-leaf fans ; then came 
 a youth loaded down with diminutive osier 
 baskets of Naples strawberries, which look, 
 and as for that matter taste, like tufts of 
 red worsted. This select trio was speedily 
 turned into a quartette by the arrival of a 
 sea-faring gentleman, who bore on his head 
 a tray of boiled crabs, sea-urchins, and 
 small fried fish frutti di mare. As a 
 fifth personage approached, with possibly 
 the arithmetical intention of adding him- 
 self to the line, I sent the whole party off 
 9
 
 130 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 with a wave of the hand ; that is to say, 
 I waved to them to go, but they merely 
 retired to the curb-stone opposite the hotel, 
 and sat down. 
 
 The last comer, perhaps disdaining to as- 
 sociate himself too closely with vulgar per- 
 sons engaged in trade, leaned indolently 
 against the sea-wall behind them, and 
 stared at me in a vacant, dreamy fashion. 
 He was a handsome wretch, physically. 
 Praxiteles might have carved him. I have 
 no doubt that his red Phrygian cap con- 
 cealed a pair of pointed furry ears ; but his 
 tattered habiliments and the strips of gay 
 cloth wound, brigand-like, about his calves 
 were not able to hide the ungyved grace of 
 his limbs. The upturned face was for the 
 moment as empty of expression as a cipher, 
 but I felt that it was capable, on occasion, 
 of expressing almost any depth of cunning 
 and dare-devil ferocity. I dismissed the 
 idea of the Dancing Faun. It was Masa- 
 niello Masaniello ruined by good govern- 
 ment and the dearth of despots.
 
 ON A BALCONY. 131 
 
 The girl with the tambourine was not in 
 business by herself ; she was the familiar 
 of a dark -browed organ -man, who now 
 made his appearance, holding in one hand 
 a long fishing-line baited with monkey. 
 On observing that this line was too short 
 to reach me, the glance of despair and re- 
 proach which the pirate cast up at the 
 balcony was comical. Nevertheless he pro- 
 ceeded to turn the crank of his music-mill, 
 while the girl whose age I estimated at 
 anywhere between sixteen and sixty ex- 
 ecuted the tarantella in a disinterested 
 manner on the sidewalk. I had always 
 wished to see the tarantella danced, and 
 now I had seen it I wished never to see it 
 more. I was so well satisfied that I has- 
 tened to drop a few soldi into the out- 
 stretched tambourine ; one of the coins re- 
 bounded and fell into the girl's parchment 
 bosom, which would not have made a bad 
 tambourine itself. 
 
 My gratuity had the anticipated effect ;
 
 132 FROM rONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 the musician took himself off instantly. 
 But he was only the avant coureur of his 
 detestable tribe. To dispose at once of this 
 feature of Neapolitan street life, I will state 
 that in the course of that morning and af- 
 ternoon one hundred and seven organ-men 
 and zambognari (bagpipe players) paid 
 their respects to me. It is odd, or not, as 
 you choose to look at it, that the city which 
 has the eminence of being the first school 
 of music in the world should be a city of 
 hand-organs. I think it explains the con- 
 stant irritability and the occasional out- 
 breaks of wrath on the part of Mount Ve- 
 suvius. 
 
 The youth with strawberries, and his 
 two companions, the fan-man and the seller 
 of sea fruit, remained on the curb-stone for 
 an hour or more, waiting for me to relent. 
 In most lands, when you inform a trafficker 
 in nicknacks of your indisposition to pur- 
 chase his wares, he departs with more or 
 less philosophy ; but in Naples he some-
 
 ON A BALCONY. 133 
 
 times attaches himself to you for the day. 
 
 One morning our friend J , who is 
 
 almost morbidly diffident, returned to the 
 hotel attended by an individual with a gui- 
 tar, two venders of lava carvings, a leper 
 in the final stages of decomposition, and 
 a young lady costumed en nSgligS with a 
 
 bunch of violets. J had picked up 
 
 these charming acquaintances in one of the 
 principal streets at the remote end of the 
 town. The perspiration stood nearly an 
 
 inch deep on J 's forehead. He had 
 
 vainly done everything to get rid of them : 
 he had heaped gifts of money on the leper, 
 bought wildly of cameos and violets, and 
 even offered to purchase the guitar. But 
 no : they clung to him. An American of 
 this complexion was not caught every day 
 on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. 
 
 I was so secure from annoyance up there 
 on my balcony that I did not allow the 
 three merchants arranged on the curb-stone 
 to distract me. Occupied with the lively,
 
 134 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 many-colored life of the street and the 
 shore, I failed even to notice when they 
 went away. Glancing in their direction 
 somewhat later, I saw that they had gone. 
 But Masaniello remained, resting the hol- 
 low of his back and his two elbows on the 
 coping of the wall, and becoming a part of 
 the gracious landscape. He remained there 
 all day. Why, I shall never know. He 
 made no demand on my purse, or any over- 
 ture towards my acquaintance, but stood 
 there, statuesque, hour after hour, scarcely 
 changing his attitude insouciant, imper- 
 turbable, never for an instant relapsing 
 from that indolent reserve which had 
 marked him at first, except once, when he 
 smiled (rather sarcastically, I thought) as 
 I fell victim to an aged beggar whose band- 
 aged legs gave me the fancy that they had 
 died early and been embalmed, and were 
 only waiting for the rest of the man to die 
 in order to be buried. Then Masaniello 
 smiled at my softness ? I shall never be 
 able to explain the man.
 
 ON A BALCONY. 135 
 
 Though the Chiataraone is a quiet street 
 for Naples, it would be considered a bus- 
 tling thoroughfare anywhere else. As the 
 morning wore on, I found entertainment 
 enough in the constantly increasing stream 
 of foot-passengers soldiers, sailors, monks, 
 peddlers, paupers, and donkeys. Now and 
 then a couple of acrobats in soiled tights 
 and tarnished spangles would spread out 
 their square of carpet in front of the hotel, 
 and go through some innocent feats ; or it 
 was a juggler who came along with a sword 
 trick, or a man with fantoccini, among 
 which Signor Punchinello was a prominent 
 character, as he invariably is in Italian pup- 
 pet-shows. This, with the soft Neapolitan 
 laugh and chatter, the cry of orange-girls, 
 the braying of donkeys, and the strident 
 strain of the hand-organ, which interposed 
 itself ever and anon, like a Greek chorus, 
 was doing very well for a quiet little street 
 of no pretensions whatever. 
 
 For a din to test the tympanum of your
 
 136 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 ear, and a restless swarming of life to turn 
 you dizzy, you should go to the Strada 
 Santa Lucia of a pleasant morning. The 
 houses in this quarter of the city are nar- 
 row and tall, many of them seven or eight 
 stories high, and packed like bee-hives, 
 which they further resemble in point of 
 gloominess and stickiness. Here the lower 
 classes live, and if they live chiefly on the 
 sidewalks it is not to be wondered at. In 
 front of the dingy door-ways and arches the 
 women make their soups and their toilets 
 with equal naivete of disregard to passing 
 criticism. The baby is washed, dressed, 
 nursed, and put to sleep, and all the domes- 
 tic duties performed, al fresco. Glancing 
 up the sunny street at some particularly 
 fretful moment of the day, you may chance 
 to catch an instantaneous glimpse of the 
 whole neighborhood spanking its child. 
 
 In the Strada Santa Lucia, the clattering 
 donkey cart has solved the problem of per- 
 petual motion. Not less noisy and crowded
 
 ON A BALCONY. 137 
 
 are those contiguous hill-side lanes and al- 
 leys (gradoni) where you go up and down 
 stone steps, and can almost touch the build- 
 ings on both sides. No wheeled vehicle 
 ever makes its way here, though sometimes 
 a donkey, with panniers stuffed full of veg- 
 etables, may be seen gravely mounting or 
 descending the slippery staircase, directed 
 by the yells and ingenious blasphemies of 
 his driver, who is always assisted in this 
 matter by sympathetic compatriots stand- 
 ing in door-ways, or leaning perilously out 
 of seventh story windows. Some of the 
 streets in this section are entirely given 
 over to the manufacture of macaroni. On 
 interminable clothes-lines, stretched along 
 the sidewalks at the height of a man's head, 
 the flabby threads of paste are hung to dry, 
 forming a continuous sheet, which sways 
 like heavy satin drapery and nearly trails 
 on the ground ; but the dogs run in and out 
 through the dripping fringe without the 
 least inconvenience to themselves. Now
 
 138 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 and then one will thoughtfully turn back 
 and lap it. Macaroni was formerly a fa- 
 vorite plat of mine. Day and night the 
 hum of human voices rises from these 
 shabby streets. As to the smells which in- 
 fest them " Give me an ounce of civet, 
 good apothecary, to sweeten my imagina- 
 tion." Here Squalor reigns, seated on his 
 throne of mud. But it is happy squalor. 
 In Naples misery laughs and sings, and 
 plays the Pandean pipe, and enjoys itself. 
 Poverty gayly throws its bit of rag over 
 the left shoulder, and does not seem to per- 
 ceive the difference between that and a 
 cloak of Genoese velvet. Neither the cruel 
 past nor the fateful present has crushed the 
 joyousness out of Naples. It is the very 
 Mark Tapley of cities and that, perhaps, 
 is what makes it the most pathetic. But 
 to get back to our balcony. 
 
 I am told that the lower classes al- 
 ways excepting the sixty or seventy thou- 
 sand lazzaroni, who have ceased to exist as
 
 ON A BALCONY. 139 
 
 a body, but continue, as individuals, very 
 effectively to prey upon the stranger are 
 remarkable for their frugal and industrious 
 habits. I suppose this is so, though the 
 visible results which elsewhere usually fol- 
 low the thriftiness of a population are ab- 
 sent from Naples. However, my personal 
 observation of the workingman was limited 
 to watching some masons employed on 
 a building in process of erection a little 
 higher up on the opposite side of the 
 strada. I was first attracted by the fact 
 that the men were planning the blocks of 
 fawn -colored stone, and readily shaping 
 them with knives, as if the stone had been 
 cheese or soap. It was, in effect, a kind of 
 calcareous tufa, which is soft when newly 
 quarried, and gradually hardens on expo- 
 sure. It was not a difficult material to work 
 in, but the masons set to the task with that 
 deliberate care not to strain themselves 
 which I had admired in the horny-handed 
 laboring man in various parts of Italy. At
 
 140 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 intervals of two or three minutes the stone- 
 cutters there were seven of them 
 would suddenly suspend operations, and 
 without any visible cause fall into a violent 
 dispute. It looked as if they were coming 
 to blows ; but they were only engaged in 
 amicable gossip. Perhaps it was a ques- 
 tion of the weather, or of the price of mac- 
 aroni, or of that heartless trick which Cat- 
 tarina played upon poor Giuseppe night 
 before last. There was something very 
 cheerful in their chatter, of which I caught 
 only the eye-flashes and the vivacious south' 
 ern gestures that accompanied it. It wa& 
 pleasant to see them standing there with 
 crossed legs, in the midst of their honorable 
 toil, leisurely indulging in graceful banter 
 at Heaven only knows how many francs 
 per day. At about half past ten o'clock 
 they abruptly knocked off work altogether 
 (I knew it was coming to that), and, 
 stretching themselves out comfortably un 
 der an adjacent shed, went to sleep. Pres
 
 ON A BALCONY, 141 
 
 ently a person presumably the foreman 
 appeared on the scene, and proceeded 
 energetically to kick the seven sleepers, 
 who arose and returned to their tools. Af- 
 ter straightening out this matter the fore- 
 man departed, and the masons, dropping 
 saw, chisel, and fore-plane, crawled in un- 
 der the shed again. I smiled, and a glow 
 came over me as I reflected that perhaps 
 I had discovered the identical branch of 
 the Latin race from which the American 
 plumber has descended to us. 
 
 There is one class, forming a very large 
 portion of the seedy population of Naples, 
 and the most estimable portion, to whose 
 industry, integrity, and intelligence I can 
 unreservedly testify. This class, which, so 
 far as I saw, does all the hard work that is 
 done and receives nothing but persecution 
 in return, is to be met everywhere in Italy, 
 but nowhere in so great force as in Naples. 
 I mean those patient, wise little donkeys, 
 which are as barbarously used by their
 
 142 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 masters as ever their masters were by the 
 Bourbons. In witnessing the senseless cru- 
 elty with which a Neapolitan treats his in- 
 articulate superior, one is almost disposed 
 to condone the outrages of Spanish rule. 
 I have frequently seen a fellow beat one of 
 the poor animals with a club nearly as 
 large round as the little creature's body. 
 As a donkey is generally its owner's sole 
 source of income, it seems a rather near- 
 sighted policy to knock the breath out of it. 
 But, mercifully, the wind is tempered to the 
 shorn lamb, and the donkey is pachyderma- 
 tous. A blow that would kill a horse likely 
 enough merely impresses a donkey with 
 the idea that somebody is going to hit him. 
 Under the old order of things in Naples his 
 insensibility was sometimes outflanked by 
 removing a strip of his hide, thus laying 
 bare a responsive spot for the whip-lash ; 
 but that stratagem is now prohibited by 
 law, I believe. A donkey with a particu- 
 larly sensitive place on him anywhere nat- 
 urally fetches a high price at present.
 
 ON A BALCONY. 143 
 
 The disproportionate burdens which are 
 imposed upon and stoically accepted by the 
 Neapolitan donkey constantly excite one's 
 wonder and pity. As I sat there on the 
 balcony a tiny cart went by so piled with 
 furniture that the pigmy which drew it was 
 entirely hidden from sight. The cumber- 
 some mass had the appearance of being 
 propelled by some piece of internal machin- 
 ery. This was followed by another cart, 
 containing the family, I suppose five or 
 six stupid persons drawn by a creature no 
 larger than a St. Bernard dog. I fell into 
 a train of serious reflection on donkeys in 
 general, chiefly suggested, I rather fancy, 
 by Masaniello, who was still standing with 
 his back against the sea-wall and his eyes 
 fixed on my balcony as I went in to lunch.
 
 144 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 n. 
 
 WHEN I returned to my post of observa- 
 tion, half an hour later, I found the street 
 nearly deserted. Naples was taking its si- 
 esta. A fierce, hot light quivered on the 
 bay and beat down on the silent villas along 
 shore, making the mellow-tinted pilasters 
 and porticoes gleam like snow against the 
 dull green of the olive-trees. The two 
 cones of Mount Vesuvius, now wrapped in 
 a transparent violet haze, which brought 
 them strangely near, had for background a 
 fathomless sky of unclouded azure. Here 
 and there, upon a hill-side in the distance, 
 small white houses, with verandas and bal- 
 conies 
 
 "Close latticed to the brooding heat," 
 
 seemed scorching among their dusty vines. 
 The reflection of the water was almost in- 
 tolerable.
 
 ON A BALCONY. 145 
 
 As I reached up to lower the awning 
 overhead, I had a clairvoyant consciousness 
 that some one was watching me from be- 
 low. Whether Masaniello had brought his 
 noonday meal of roasted chestnuts with 
 him, or, during my absence, had stolen to 
 some low trattoria in the vicinity to refresh 
 himself, I could not tell ; but there he was, 
 in the act now of lighting one of those long 
 pipe-stem cigars called Garibaldis. 
 
 Since he wanted neither my purse nor 
 my person, what was his design in hanging 
 about the hotel ? Perhaps it was my person 
 he wanted ; perhaps he was an emissary of 
 the police ; but no, the lowest government 
 official in Italy always wears enough gold- 
 lace for a Yankee major-general. Besides, 
 I was innocent ; I had n't done it, whatever 
 it was. Possibly Masaniello mistook me for 
 somebody else, and was meditating a neat 
 stiletto stroke or two if I ventured out after 
 night-fall. Indeed, I intended to go to the 
 theatre of San Carlo that night. A rush 
 10
 
 146 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 a flash of steel in the moonlight, an echo- 
 ing foot-fall and all would be over before 
 one could explain anything. Masaniello 
 was becoming monotonous. 
 
 I turned away from him to look at the 
 Castel dell' Ovo, within rifle range at my 
 left, on a small island connected by an 
 arched breakwater with the main-land at 
 the foot of the Pizzofalcone. I tried to 
 take in the fact that this wrinkled pile was 
 begun by William I. in 1154, and com- 
 pleted a century later by Frederick II. ; 
 that here, in the reign of Robert the Wise, 
 came the witty Giotto to decorate the 
 chapel with those frescoes of which only 
 the tradition remains ; that here Charles 
 III. of Durazzo held Queen Joanna a pris- 
 oner, and was here besieged by Louis of 
 Anjou ; that, finally, in 1495, Charles VIII. 
 of France knocked over the old castle, and 
 Pedro de Toledo set it up on its legs again 
 in 1532. I tried, but rather unsuccessfully, 
 to take in all this, for though the castle
 
 ON A BALCONY. 147 
 
 boasts of bastions and outworks, it lacks 
 the heroic aspect. In fact, it is now used 
 as a prison, and has the right hang-dog 
 look of prisons. However, I put my fancy 
 to work restoring the castle to the strength 
 and dignity it wore in chronicler Froissart's 
 day, and was about to attack the place 
 with the assistance of the aforesaid Charles 
 VIII., when the heavy tramp of feet and 
 the measured tap of a drum chimed in very 
 prettily with my hostile intention. A reg- 
 iment of infantry was coming down the 
 strada. 
 
 If I do not describe this regiment as the 
 very poorest regiment in the world, it is 
 because it was precisely like every other 
 body of Italian soldiery that I have seen. 
 The men were small, spindle-legged, and 
 slouchy. One might have taken them for 
 raw recruits if their badly-fitting white- 
 duck uniforms had not shown signs of vet- 
 eran service. As they wheeled into the 
 Chiatamone, each man trudging along at
 
 148 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 his own gait, they looked like a flock of 
 sheep. The bobbing mass recalled to my 
 mind by that law of contraries which 
 makes one thing suggest another totally 
 different the compact, grand swing of the 
 New York Seventh Regiment as it swept 
 up Broadway the morning it returned from 
 Pennsylvania at the close of the draft riots 
 in '63. If the National Guard had shuffled 
 by in the loose Garibaldian fashion, I do 
 not believe New York would have slept 
 with so keen a sense of security as it did 
 that July night. 
 
 The room directly under mine was oc- 
 cupied by a young English lady, who, at- 
 tracted by the roll of the drums, stepped 
 out on her balcony just as the head of the 
 column reached the hotel. In her innocent 
 desire to witness a military display she 
 probably had no anticipation of the tender 
 fusillade she would have to undergo. That 
 the colonel should give the fair stranger a 
 half-furtive salute, in which he cut nothing
 
 ON A BALCONY. 149 
 
 in two with his sabre, was well enough ; 
 but that was no reason why every mother's 
 son in each platoon should look up at the 
 balcony as he passed, and then turn and 
 glance back at her over his musket. Yet 
 this singular military evolution, which I 
 cannot find set down anywhere in Hardee's 
 Tactics, was performed by every man in 
 the regiment. That these ten or twelve 
 hundred warriors refrained from kissing 
 their hands to the blonde lady shows the 
 severe discipline which prevails in the Ital- 
 ian army. Possibly there was not a man of 
 them, from the colonel's valet down to the 
 colonel himself, who did not march off with 
 the conviction that he had pierced that 
 blue muslin wrapper somewhere in the re- 
 gion of the left breast. I must relate that 
 the modest young Englishwoman stood this 
 enfilading fire admirably, though it made 
 white and red roses of her complexion. 
 
 The rear of the column was brought up, 
 and emphasized, if I may say it, by an ex-
 
 150 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTK. 
 
 clamation point in the shape of a personage 
 so richly gilded and of such gorgeous plu- 
 mage that I should instantly have accepted 
 him as the King of Italy if I had not long 
 ago discovered that fine feathers do not al- 
 ways make fine birds. It was only the reg- 
 imental physician. Of course he tossed up 
 a couple of pill-like eyes to the balcony as 
 he strutted by, with his plume standing out 
 horizontally like that thin line of black 
 smoke which just then caught my attention 
 in the offing. 
 
 This was the smoke from the pipe of 
 the funny little steamer which runs from 
 Naples to Sorrento, and thence to Capri, 
 where it drops anchor for so brief a space 
 that you are obliged to choose between a 
 scramble up the rocks to the villa of Tibe- 
 rius and a visit in a small boat to the Blue 
 Grotto, that " sapphire shell of the Siren of 
 Naples," as Quinet neatly calls it. The 
 steamer is supposed to leave the Chiaia at 
 Naples every morning at a stated hour;
 
 ON A BALCONY. 151 
 
 but you need not set your heart on going 
 to Capri by that steamer on any particular 
 day. It goes or not just as the captain hap- 
 pens to feel about it when the time comes. 
 A cinder in his eye, a cold in his head, a 
 conjugal tiff over his polenta in fine, any 
 insignificant thing is apparently sufficient 
 to cause him to give up the trip. It is only 
 moderate satisfaction you get out of him on 
 these occasions. He throws his arms de- 
 spairingly in the air, and making forked 
 lightning with his fingers cries, " Ah, mer- 
 cy of God ! no we sail not this day ! " 
 Then wildly beating his forehead with his 
 knuckles, " To-morrow, yes ! " There is 
 ever a pleasing repose of manner hi an ex- 
 cited Italian. 
 
 I suspect the truth is that some of the 
 directors of the steamboat company are me- 
 diaeval saints, and that the anniversaries of 
 their birthdays or their deathdays interfere 
 with business. The captain is an excellent 
 fellow of his sort, and extremely devout,
 
 152 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 though that does not prevent him from now 
 and then playing a very scurvy trick upon 
 his passengers. Of course one's main ob- 
 ject in going to Capri is to see the Blue 
 Grotto, the entrance to which is through a 
 small arch scarcely three feet high in the 
 face of the rock. With the sea perfectly 
 tranquil, you are obliged to bow your head 
 or lie down in the wherry while passing in ; 
 but with a north or west wind breathing, it 
 is impossible to enter at all. When this 
 chances to be the case the captain is care- 
 ful not to allude to the matter, but smil- 
 ingly allows you to walk aboard, and piti- 
 lessly takes you out under a scorching sky 
 to certain disappointment and a clam-bake, 
 in which you perform the r81e of the clam. 
 Through my glass I could see the little 
 egg-shell of a steamer, which for some rea- 
 son had come to a stop in the middle of the 
 bay, with a thread of smoke issuing from 
 her funnel and embroidering itself in fan- 
 ciful patterns on the sunny atmosphere. I
 
 ON A BALCONY. 153 
 
 knew how hot it was over there, and I 
 knew that the light westerly breeze which 
 crisped the water and became a suffocating 
 breath before it reached shore had sealed 
 up the Grotta Azzurra for that day. I pic- 
 tured the pleasure-seekers scattered about 
 the heated deck, each dejectedly munch- 
 ing his Dead Sea apple of disappointment. 
 The steamer was evidently getting under 
 way again, for the thread of smoke had 
 swollen into a black, knotted cable. Pres- 
 ently a faint whistle came across the water 
 as if a ghost were whistling somewhere 
 in the distance and the vessel went puff- 
 ing away towards Castellamare. If the 
 Emperor Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar 
 could have looked down just then from the 
 cloudy battlements of Capri, what would 
 he have thought of that ! 
 
 The great squares of shadow cast upon 
 the street by the hotel and the adjoining 
 buildings were deepening by degrees. Fit- 
 ful puffs of air came up from the bay the
 
 154 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 early precursors of that refreshing breeze 
 which the Mediterranean sends to make 
 the summer twilights of Naples delicious. 
 Now and then a perfume was wafted to the 
 balcony, as if the wind had stolen a hand- 
 ful of scents from some high-walled inclo- 
 sure of orange-trees and acacias, and flung 
 it at me. The white villas, set in their 
 mosaic of vines on the distant hill-side, had 
 a cooler look than they wore earlier in the 
 day. The heat was now no longer oppres^ 
 sive, but it made one drowsy that and 
 the sea air. An hour or more slipped away 
 from me unawares. Meanwhile, the tide of 
 existence had risen so imperceptibly at my 
 feet that I was surprised, on looking down, 
 suddenly to find the strada flooded with 
 streams of carriages and horsemen and pe- 
 destrians. All the gay life of Naples, that 
 had lain dormant through the heavy noon, 
 had awakened, like the princess in the en- 
 chanted palace, to take up the laugh where 
 it left off and order fresh ices at the cafe's.
 
 ON A BALCONY. 155 
 
 I had a feeling that Masaniello he was 
 still there was somehow at the bottom of 
 all this ; that by some diablerie of his, may 
 be with the narcotic fumes of that black 
 cigar, he had thrown the city into the leth- 
 argy from which it was now recovering. 
 
 The crowd, which flowed in two oppos- 
 ing currents past the hotel, was a gayer and 
 more smartly dressed throng than that of 
 the morning. Certain shabby aspects, how- 
 ever, were not wanting, for donkey carts 
 mingled themselves jauntily with the more 
 haughty equipages on their way to the Riv- 
 iera di Chiaia, the popular drive. There 
 were beautiful brown women, with heavy- 
 fringed eyes, in these carriages, and now 
 and then a Neapolitan dandy a creature 
 sui generis rode along-side on horseback. 
 Every human thing that can scrape a ve- 
 hicle together goes to the Riviera di Chiaia 
 of a fine afternoon. It is a magnificent 
 wide avenue, open on one side to the bay, 
 and lined on the other with palaces and
 
 156 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 villas and hotels. The road leads to the 
 Grotto of Posilippo, and to endless marvels 
 beyond the tomb of Virgil, Lake Aver- 
 nus, Baise, CumsB, a Hellenic region among 
 whose ruins wander the sorrowful shades of 
 the gods. But the afternoon idler is not 
 likely to get so far ; after a turn or two on 
 the promenade, he is content to sit under 
 the trees in the garden of the Villa Nazio- 
 nale, sipping his sherbet dashed with snow, 
 and listening to the band. 
 
 I saw more monks this day than I met in 
 a week at Rome, their natural headquar- 
 ters ; but in Naples, as in the Eternal City, 
 they are generally not partial to busy thor- 
 oughfares. I think some religious festival 
 must have been going on in a church near 
 the Chiatamone. A solemn, dark-robed fig- 
 ure gliding in and out among the merry 
 crowd had a queer, pictorial effect, and 
 gave me an incongruous twelfth-century 
 sort of sensation. Once a file of monks 
 I do not remember ever seeing so many to-
 
 ON A BALCONY. 157 
 
 gether outside a convent passed swiftly 
 under the balcony. I was near tumbling 
 into the Middle Ages, when their tonsured 
 heads reminded me of that row of venera- 
 ble elderly gentlemen one always sees in 
 the front orchestra chairs at the ballet, and 
 I was thus happily dragged back into my 
 own cycle. 
 
 It was a noisy, light-hearted, holiday peo- 
 ple that streamed through the strada in the 
 waning sunshine ; they required no police- 
 man, as a similar crowd in England or 
 America would have done ; their merri- 
 ment was as harmless as that of so many 
 birds, though no doubt there was in these 
 laughing throngs plenty of the dangerous 
 stuff out of which graceful brigands and 
 picturesque assassins are made. But it was 
 easier and pleasanter to discover here and 
 there a face or a form such as the old mas- 
 ters loved to paint. I amused myself in se- 
 lecting models for new pictures by Titian 
 and Raphael and Carlo Dolci and Doineni-
 
 158 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 chino, to take the places of those madonnas 
 and long-tressed mistresses of which noth- 
 ing will remain in a few centuries. What 
 will Italy be when she has lost her master- 
 pieces, as she has lost the art that pro- 
 duced them ? To-day she is the land of 
 paintings, without any painters, the empty 
 cradle of poets. 
 
 I do not know that anything in the 
 lively street entertained me more than the 
 drivers of the public carriages. Like all 
 the common Neapolitans, the Jehus have a 
 wonderful gift of telegraphing with their 
 fingers. It is not a question of words la- 
 boriously spelled out, but of a detailed 
 statement in a flash. They seem to be able 
 to do half an hour's talking in a couple of 
 seconds. A fillip of the finger-joint, and 
 there's a sentence for you as long as one of 
 Mr. Carlyle's. At least, that is my idea of 
 it ; it is merely conjecture on my part, for 
 though I have frequently formed the topic 
 of a conversation carried on in this style
 
 ON A BALCONY. 159 
 
 under my very nose, I never succeeded in 
 overhearing anything. I have undoubtedly 
 been anathematized, and barely probable, 
 been complimented ; but in those instances, 
 like Horatio, I took fortune's buffets and 
 rewards with equal thanks. It is diverting 
 to see two of these fellows meeting at a 
 breakneck pace and exchanging verdicts on 
 their respective passengers. May be one, 
 with a gesture like lightning, says : " I 've 
 a rich English milor ; he has n't asked for 
 my tariff ; I shall bleed him beautifully, 
 per Bacco ! " At the same instant the 
 other possibly hurls back : " No such luck ! 
 A pair of foolish American!, but they 've a 
 pig of a courier who pockets all the buo- 
 namano himself, the devil fly away with 
 him ! " Thus they meet, and indulge in 
 their simple prattle, and are out of each 
 other's sight, all in the twinkling of an eye.
 
 160 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 m. 
 
 THE twilights in Southern Italy fall sud- 
 denly, and are of brief duration. While I 
 was watching the darkening shadow of the 
 hotel on the opposite sea-wall, the dusk 
 closed in, and the street began rapidly to 
 empty itself. A curtain of mist was al- 
 ready stretched from headland to headland, 
 shutting out the distant objects. Here and 
 there on a jutting point a light blossomed, 
 its duplicate glassed in the water, as if the 
 fiery flower had dropped a petal. Presently 
 there were a hundred lights, and then a 
 thousand, fringing the crescented shore. 
 
 On our leaving Rome, the landlord had 
 pathetically warned us of the fatal effects 
 of the night air in Naples, just as our Nea- 
 politan host, at a later date, let fall some 
 disagreeable hints about the Roman mala-
 
 ON A BALCONY. 161 
 
 ria. They both were right. In this deli- 
 cious land Death shrouds himself in the dew 
 and lurks in all gentle things. The breeze 
 from the bay had a sudden chill in it now ; 
 the dampness of the atmosphere was as 
 heavy as a fine rain. I pushed back my 
 chair on the balcony, and then I lingered a 
 moment to see the moon rising over Capri. 
 Then I saw how that bay, with its dread- 
 ful mountain, was lovelier than anything 
 on earth. I turned from it reluctantly, and 
 as I glanced into the silent street beneath, 
 there was Masaniello, a black silhouette 
 against the silvery moonlight. 
 11
 
 vn. 
 SMITH.
 
 vn. 
 
 SMITH. 
 
 AN old acquaintance of mine, who has 
 gone away into the dark with all his mirth- 
 ful sayings, once described an English ser- 
 vant as " the valet of the Shadow of Death." 
 The mot was said not to be original with 
 my friend, but I have heard so many bril- 
 liant things from those same lips that I do 
 not care to go further in search of an owner 
 for what is sufficiently characteristic of him 
 to be his. Whoever first said it gave us 
 in a single phrase the most perfect croquis 
 that ever was made of the English serving- 
 man. We all know him in the English 
 novel of the period, and some of us know 
 him in the flesh. I chance myself to be 
 familiar with a mild form of him. I speak 
 of him as if he were a disease : in his most
 
 166 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 aggravated type I should say he might be 
 considered as an affliction. Thackeray 
 the satirist and biographer, the Pope and 
 Plutarch, of Jeemes frankly admitted he 
 was afraid of the creature. That kindly 
 keen blue eye, which saw through the 
 shams and follies of Mayfair, was wont to 
 droop under the stony stare of his host's 
 butler. I hasten to confess to only a lim- 
 ited personal knowledge of the august be- 
 ing in plush small-clothes and pink silk 
 stockings who presides over the grand 
 houses in England, for I carried my pil- 
 grim's wallet into few grand houses there ; 
 but I have had more or less to do with 
 certain humble brothers of his, who are 
 leading lives of highly respectable gloom 
 in sundry English taverns and hotels. 
 
 It is one of these less dazzling brothers 
 who furnishes me with the motif of this 
 brief study. More fortunate than that Ro- 
 man emperor who vainly longed to have all 
 his enemies consolidated into a single neck,
 
 SMITH. 167 
 
 I have secured in a person named Smith 
 the epitome of an entire class not, in- 
 deed, with the cruel intent of dispatching 
 him, but of photographing him. I should 
 decline to take Smith's head by any less 
 gentle method. 
 
 In London there is a kind of hotel of 
 which we have no counterpart in the 
 United States. This hotel is usually lo- 
 cated in some^ semi-aristocratic side street, 
 and wears no badge of its servitude beyond 
 a large, well-kept brass door-plate, bearing 
 the legend " Jones's Hotel " or " Brown's 
 Hotel," as the ease may be; but be it 
 Brown or Jones, he has been dead at least 
 fifty years, and the establishment is con- 
 ducted by Robinson. There is no coffee- 
 room or public dining-room, or even office, 
 in this hotel ; the commercial traveller is 
 an unknown quantity there ; your meals 
 are served in your apartments ; the furni- 
 ture is solid and comfortable, the attend- 
 ance admirable, the cuisine unexception-
 
 168 FROM PONKAPOG TO PE8TH. 
 
 able, and the bill abominable. But for 
 ease, quietness, and a sort of 1812 odor of 
 respectability, this hotel has nothing to 
 compare with it in the wide world. It is 
 here that the intermittent homesickness 
 you contracted on the Continent will be 
 lifted out of your bosom ; it is here will be 
 unfolded to you alluring vistas of the sub- 
 stantial comforts that surround the private 
 lives of prosperous Britons ; it is here, 
 above all, that you will be brought in con- 
 tact with Smith. 
 
 It was on our arrival in London, one 
 April afternoon, that the door of what 
 
 looked like a private mansion, in D 
 
 Street, was thrown open to us by a boy 
 broken out all over with buttons. Behind 
 this boy stood Smith. I call him simply 
 Smith for two reasons : in the first place 
 because it is convenient to do so, and in the 
 second place because that is what he called 
 himself. I wish it were as facile a matter 
 to explain how this seemingly unobtrusive
 
 SMITH. 169 
 
 person instantly took possession of us, bul- 
 lied us with his usefulness, and knocked us 
 down with his urbanity. From the mo- 
 ment he stepped forward to relieve us of 
 our hand-luggage, we were his and re- 
 mained his until that other moment, some 
 weeks later, when he handed us our parcels 
 again, and stood statuesque on the door- 
 step, with one finger lifted to his forehead 
 in decorous salute, as we drove away. Ah, 
 what soft despotism was that which was 
 exercised for no other end than to antici- 
 pate our requirements to invent new 
 wants for us only to satisfy them ! If I 
 anywhere speak lightly of Smith, if I take 
 exception to his preternatural gravity (of 
 which I would not have him moult a 
 feather), if I allude invidiously to his life- 
 long struggle with certain rebellious letters 
 of the alphabet, it is out of sheer envy and 
 regret that we have nothing like him in 
 America. We have Niagara, and the Yo- 
 semite, and Edison's Electric Light (or shall
 
 170 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 have it, when we get it), but we have no 
 trained serving-men like Smith. He is the 
 result of older and vastly more complex 
 social conditions than ours. His training 
 began in the feudal ages. An atmosphere 
 charged with machicolated battlements and 
 cathedral spires was necessary to his per- 
 fect development, that, and generation 
 after generation of lords and princes and 
 wealthy country-gentlemen for him to prac- 
 tice on. He is not possible in New Eng- 
 land. The very cut of his features is un- 
 known among us. It has been remarked 
 that each trade and profession has its phys- 
 iognomy, its own proper face. If you look 
 closely you will detect a family likeness 
 running through the portraits of Garrick 
 and Kean and Booth and Irving. There 's 
 the self-same sabre-like flash in the eye of 
 Maryborough and Bonaparte the same 
 resolute labial expression. Every lackey 
 in London might be the son or brother of 
 any other lackey. Smith's father, and his
 
 SMITH. 171 
 
 father's father, and so on back to the gray 
 dawn of England, were serving-men, and 
 each in turn has been stamped with the im- 
 mutable trade-mark of his class. Waiters 
 (like poets) are born, not made ; and they 
 have not had time to be born in America. 
 
 As a shell that has the care of inclosing 
 a pearl like Smith, Jones's Hotel demands 
 a word or two of more particular descrip- 
 tion. The narrow little street in which it 
 is situated branches off from a turbulent 
 thoroughfare, and is quite packed with his- 
 torical, social, and literary traditions. Here, 
 at the close of his days, dwelt the learned 
 and sweet-minded philosopher, John Eve- 
 lyn, the contemporary and friend of every- 
 body's friend, Mr. Samuel Pepys, of the 
 admiralty. I like to think of Evelyn turn- 
 ing out of busy Piccadilly into this more 
 quiet precinct, accompanied, perhaps, by 
 the obsequious Samuel himself. According 
 to Jesse, the witty Dr. Arburthnot also re- 
 sided here, after the death of his royal pa-
 
 172 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 troness, Queen Anne, had driven him from 
 his snug quarters in St. James's Palace. 
 Hither came Pope, Swift, Gray, Parnell, 
 Prior, and a flock of other singing-birds and 
 brilliant wits to visit the worthy doctor. 
 As I sit of an evening in our parlor, which 
 is on a level with the sidewalk, the ghostly 
 echo of those long-silent footfalls is more 
 distinct to my ear than the tread of the liv- 
 ing passers-by. The earthly abiding places 
 of obsolete notabilities are very thick in 
 this neighborhood. A few minutes' walk 
 takes you to the ugly walled mansion that 
 once held the beauty, but could not hold 
 all the radiance, of Georgiana Duchess of 
 Devonshire, and a little further on is Ap- 
 sley House. 
 
 But we need not wander. D Street 
 
 still has high pretensions of its own. I 
 take it that several families whose conse- 
 quence is to be found in Debrett's Peerage 
 have their town-houses here. Over the 
 sculptured door-way of a sombre edifice
 
 SMITH. 173 
 
 which sets somewhat back behind a tower- 
 ing iron grille with gilded spear-heads, I 
 have noticed a recently hung hatchment 
 an intimation that death is no respecter of 
 English nobility. At the curb-stone of a 
 spacious, much-curtained mansion directly 
 opposite the hotel, there is a constant ar- 
 rival and departure of broughams and lan- 
 daus, with armorial blazons and powdered 
 footmen. From these carriages descend 
 bewitching slips of English maidenhood 
 with peach-bloom complexions, and richly- 
 dressed, portly dowagers shod with per- 
 fectly flat-soled shoes. But I confess that 
 the periodical rattling by of a little glazed 
 cart lettered " Scarlet the Butcher " inter- 
 ests me more ; for no mortal reason, I sup- 
 pose, except that Scarlet seems a phenom- 
 enally appropriate name for a gentleman 
 in his line of business. 
 
 I am afraid my description of Jones's 
 Hotel is very like one of those old Spanish 
 comedies,
 
 174 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 " In which you see, 
 
 As Lope says, the history of the world, 
 Brought down from Genesis to the Day of Judgment." 
 
 The building itself, arguing from the thick- 
 ness of the walls and the antiquated style of 
 the interior wood-work, must have stood its 
 ground a great many years. I do not know 
 how long it has been a hotel ; perhaps for 
 the better part of a century. In the first 
 instance it was doubtless the home of some 
 titled family. I indulge the fancy that 
 there was a lot of lovely, high-bred daugh- 
 ters, who drew gay company here. The 
 large, lofty-studded rooms were meant for 
 an opulent, hospitable kind of life to in- 
 habit them. Opening on the wide hall 
 where Buttons is always sitting, a perfect 
 young Cerberus, waiting for the door-bell 
 to ring is a small dressing-cabinet, in 
 which, I make no question, his lordship 
 has many a time sworn like a pirate over 
 the extravagance of the girls. I know he 
 has discharged the butler there. A fitful,
 
 SMITH. 175 
 
 evasive odor, as of faded rose-leaves in a 
 forgotten drawer, seems to linger in these 
 chambers, and I think there are hints in 
 the air of old-time laughter and of sobs 
 that have long since hushed themselves into 
 silence. The parlor is full of suggestions 
 to me, especially at twilight, before the 
 candles are brought in. Sometimes I can 
 almost hear a muffled, agitated voice mur- 
 muring out of the Past, " Leave me, Bel- 
 lamore ! " and I have an impression that 
 he did n't leave her. How could he, with 
 those neat diamond buckles glistening at 
 her instep, and her pretty brown hair 
 frosted with silver powder, and that dis- 
 tracting dot of court-plaster stuck near the 
 left corner of her rosy mouth ! The old 
 walls are very discreet, not to say incom- 
 municative, on this subject ; it is not for 
 them to betray the joys and sorrows and 
 sins of yesterday, and I have to evolve 
 these matters out of my own synthetic im- 
 agination. But I am certain that Bella- 
 more did n't leave her !
 
 176 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 Overhead there are suites of apartments 
 identical with our own, and I believe they 
 are occupied by serious-minded families 
 of phantoms ; they come and go so softly. 
 There is no loud talking on the staircase, 
 no slamming of doors, no levity of any 
 description among the inmates of this hos- 
 telry. Whoever comes here finds his na- 
 ture subdued to the color of his surround- 
 ings, like the dyer's hand. The wildest 
 guest shortly succumbs to the soothing in- 
 fluence of Smith. He pervades the place 
 like an atmosphere, and fits it so perfectly 
 that, without jarring on the present, he 
 seems a figure projected out of that dusky 
 past which has lured me too long, and will 
 catch me again before we get through. 
 
 Smith is a man of about forty, but so 
 unassuming that I do not think he would 
 assume to be so old or so young as that : 
 tall and straight, with scant, faded brown 
 hair parted in the middle, and a deferential 
 cough ; clammy blue eyes, thin lips, a sed-
 
 SMITH. 177 
 
 entary complexion, and careful side-whis- 
 kers. He is always in evening dress, and 
 wears white cotton gloves, which set your 
 teeth on edge, during dinner service. He 
 is a person whose gravity of deportment is 
 such as to lend seriousness to the coal-scut- 
 tle when he replenishes the parlor fire a 
 ceremony which the English April makes 
 imperative, the English April being as raw 
 as an American February. 
 
 Smith's respect for you, at least its out- 
 ward manifestation, is accompanied by a 
 deep, unexpressed respect for himself. He 
 not only knows his own place, but he 
 knows yours, and holds you to it. He is 
 incapable of venturing on a familiarity, or 
 of submitting to one. He can wrap up 
 more pitying disapprobation in a scarcely 
 perceptible curl of his nether lip than an- 
 other man could express in a torrent of 
 words. I have gone about London a whole 
 forenoon with one of Smith's thin smiles 
 clinging like a blister to my consciousness. 
 12
 
 178 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 He is not taciturn, but lie gives you the im- 
 pression of unconquerable reserve. Though 
 he seldom speaks, except to answer an in- 
 quiry, he has managed in some occult fash- 
 ion to permeate us with a knowledge of his 
 domestic environment. For the soul of me, 
 I cannot say how I came by the informa- 
 tion that Smith married Lady Hadelaide 
 Scarborough's first maid twelve years ago, 
 nor in what manner I got hold of the idea 
 that Lady Hadelaide Scarborough's first 
 maid" rather stooped from her social status 
 when she formed a matrimonial alliance 
 with him. Yet these facts are undeniably 
 in my possession. I also understand that 
 Smith regards Mrs. Smith who quitted 
 service at the time of this mesalliance 
 as a sort of fragment (a little finger-joint, 
 if that will help convey my meaning) of 
 Lady Hadelaide herself. There 's an air 
 of very good society about Smith. He evi- 
 dently has connecting tendrils with beings 
 who, if they are not roses themselves, have
 
 SMITH. 179 
 
 the privilege of constituting the dust at the 
 roses' feet. If Smith were to make any 
 statement to me concerning the movements 
 of Royalty, I should believe him. If he 
 were to confide to me that Her Majesty, 
 accompanied by the Princess Beatrice, 
 walked for a few seconds yesterday after- 
 noon on the terrace at Windsor, I should 
 know it was so, even if I failed to see the 
 event recorded in The Tunes. 
 
 Smith has been very near to Royalty. 
 To be sure, it was fallen royalty, so I shall 
 waste no capital letters on it. It fell at 
 Sedan, and picked itself up in a manner, 
 and came over to London, where Smith 
 had the bliss of waiting upon it. " The 
 Hemperor was a very civil-spoken gentle- 
 man," observed Smith, detailing the cir- 
 cumstances with an air of respectful pa- 
 tronage, and showing that he had a nice 
 sense of the difference between an English 
 sovereign and an uncurrent Napoleon. 
 
 The plain truth is that Smith is an ar-
 
 180 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 rant gossip about himself without in the 
 least having the appearance of it. He so 
 ingeniously embroiders bits of his autobiog- 
 raphy on alien textures that one is apt to 
 get a detail or two quite unawares. I do 
 not know how or when six little Smiths 
 glided into my intelligence (they cost me 
 a shilling a head), but I think it was in 
 connection with an inquiry on my part as 
 to what hour the morning train left Pad- 
 dington Station for Stratford-upon-Avon. 
 Two nights out of the week Smith retires 
 to his domestic domicile ; situated, I infer, 
 in some remote suburb of London, for he 
 always takes a bag with him a respect- 
 able, drab-colored hand-bag, with a mono- 
 gram on it. At a little distance the twisted 
 initials, in raised worsted, resemble a re- 
 duced copy of the Laocoon, the prominent 
 serpentine S having, I suspect, no small 
 share in producing that effect. I somehow 
 pose and mix up the six little Smiths in 
 this monogram.
 
 SMITH. 181 
 
 I have said that Smith took possession of 
 our party immediately on its arrival at 
 Jones's Hotel, but we were not at once 
 conscious of the fact. We had arrived 
 there in high spirits, glad to have left a te- 
 dious sea-voyage behind us, and rejoiced to 
 find ourselves in London the London we 
 had dreamed of these ten or twenty years. 
 But presently we felt there was something 
 in the temperature that chilled our vivac- 
 ity. We were a thousand miles from sus- 
 pecting what it was. Our purpose in Lon- 
 don was to see the sights, to visit all those 
 historic buildings and monuments and gal- 
 leries which were wrested from us by the 
 war of 1776. Our wanderings through the 
 day were often long and always fatiguing ; 
 we returned jaded to the hotel, frequently 
 after the dinner hour, and in no mood to 
 undertake radical changes in our costume. 
 There stood Smith in his crisp neck-tie and 
 claw-hammer coat and immaculate gloves. 
 The dinner was elegant in its appoint-
 
 182 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 ments, and exquisitely served. The dress- 
 ing of the salad was rivalled only by the 
 dressing of Smith. Yet something was 
 wrong. We were somehow repressed, and 
 for three days we did not know what it was 
 that repressed us. On the fourth day I re- 
 solved to give our party a little surprise by 
 appearing at dinner in conventional broad- 
 cloth and white breastplate. Each of the 
 other two members of the coterie insen- 
 sibly under the magnetism of Smith had 
 planned a like surprise. When we met at 
 table and surveyed each other, we laughed 
 aloud for the first time in three days in 
 Smith's presence. It was plain to see that 
 Smith approved of an elaborate dinner 
 toilette, and henceforth we adopted it. 
 
 Presently we were struck, and then be- 
 gan to be appalled, by the accuracy, mi- 
 nuteness, and comprehensiveness of Smith's 
 knowledge of London. It was encyclopse- 
 dic. He was a vitalized time-table of rail- 
 ways and coaches and steamboats, a walk-
 
 SMITH. 183 
 
 ing, breathing directory to all the shops, 
 parks, churches, museums, and theatres of 
 the bewildering Babylon. He had, stamped 
 on his brain, a map of all the tangled omni- 
 bus routes ; he knew the best seats in every 
 place of amusement, the exact moment the 
 performance began in each, and could put 
 his finger without hesitating a second on 
 the very virtuoso's collection you wanted 
 to examine. This is not the half of his ac- 
 complishments. I despair of stating them. 
 I do not see how he ever had the leisure to 
 collect such a mass of detail. It seems to 
 substantiate a theory I have that Smith 
 has existed, with periodic renewals of his 
 superficial structure, from the time of the 
 Norman Conquest. Before we discovered 
 his almost wicked amplitude of informa- 
 tion, we used to consult him touching in- 
 tended pilgrimages, but shortly gave it up, 
 finding that' our provincial plans generally 
 fell cold upon him. He was almost amused, 
 one day, at our desire to ascertain the
 
 184 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 whereabouts of that insignificant house in 
 Cheapside it is No. 17, if I remember 
 in which Keats wrote his sonnet on Chap- 
 man's Homer. Our New World curiosity 
 as to certain localities which possess no in- 
 terest whatever to the Londoner must often 
 have struck Smith as puerile. His protest 
 or his disapproval I do not know how to 
 name it was always so evanescent and 
 shadowy that he cannot be said to have ex- 
 pressed it ; it was something in his man- 
 ner, and not in his words, something as 
 vague as a fleeting breath on a window- 
 glass ; but it dampened us. 
 
 There is a singular puissance in a grave, 
 chilling demeanor, though it may be backed 
 by no solid quality whatever. Nothing so 
 imposes on the world. I have known per- 
 sons to attain very high social and pub- 
 lic distinction by no other means than a 
 guarded solemnity of manner. Even when 
 we see through its shallowness, we are still 
 impressed by it, just as children are para-
 
 SMITH. 185 
 
 lyzed by a sheeted comrade, though they 
 know all the while it is only one of them- 
 selves playing ghost. 
 
 I suppose it was in the course of nature 
 that we should have fallen under the dom- 
 ination of Smith, and have come to accept 
 him with a degree of seriousness which 
 seems rather abject to me in retrospect. 
 Without acknowledging it to ourselves, we 
 were affected by his intangible criticism. 
 I would not have had it come to his ears 
 for a five-pound note that I had a habit of 
 eating a chop in a certain snuffy old coffee- 
 house near Temple Bar, whenever lunch- 
 time chanced to catch me in that vicinity. 
 
 "O plump head-waiter at The Cock," 
 
 to which I most resorted, I should have 
 been ashamed to have Smith know that I 
 had the slightest acquaintance with you, 
 though Tennyson himself has sung your 
 praises ! Nor would I have had Smith get 
 wind of the low-bred excursion I made, one 
 day, up the Thames, in a squalid steamer
 
 186 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 crowded with grimy workingmen and their 
 frouzy wives and their children. I hid in 
 my heart the guilty joy I took in two dam- 
 aged musicians aboard a violin and a 
 flageolet. The flageolet I am speaking 
 of the performer had such a delightfully 
 disreputable patch over his right eye ! By 
 the way, I wonder why it is that vagrant 
 players of wind-instruments in England us- 
 ually have a patch over one eye. Are they 
 combative as a class, or is it that they now 
 and then blow out a visual organ with too 
 assiduous practice in early youth? The 
 violin-man, on the other hand perhaps I 
 ought to say on the other leg was lame. 
 Altogether the pair looked like the remains 
 of a band that had been blown up by a 
 steam-boiler explosion on some previous 
 trip on the river. They played a very dole- 
 ful tune ; full of unaccountable gruffnesses 
 and shrillnesses, which it was my mood to 
 accept as the ghostly replication of the 
 cries and complaints of their late comrades
 
 SMITH. 187 
 
 on the occasion suggested. There was a 
 rough crowd on board, with a sprinkling of 
 small shop-keepers, and here and there a 
 group of gaudily-dressed young women, not 
 to be set down in the category of doubtful 
 characters. These people were off on a hol- 
 iday, and it was curious to observe the 
 heavy, brutal way they took their pleasure, 
 turning it into a hardship. I got a near 
 view of a phase of English life not to be 
 met with in the rarefied atmosphere of 
 
 D Street, and I regret to admit that I 
 
 have many a time enjoyed myself less in 
 better company. When I returned to the 
 hotel that night, Smith stood rebukefully 
 drying The Pall Mall Gazette for me be- 
 fore the parlor fire. 
 
 A year or two of Smith would make it 
 difficult for a man to dispense with him. 
 With Smith for a valet, one would have no 
 distinct wants to perplex one, for Smith's 
 intuition would head them off and supply 
 them before they were formulated. He
 
 188 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 was, as I have more than hinted, an inval- 
 uable servant. Sometimes, as I have looked 
 at him, and reflected on his unmurmuring 
 acceptance of a life of servitude, and the 
 kind of sober grace he threw about its in- 
 dignity, I used to call to mind that disgrun- 
 tled, truculent waiter described by John 
 Hay in his charming Castilian Days. " I 
 know a gentleman in the West," says Mr. 
 Hay, " whose circumstances had forced him 
 to become a waiter in a backwoods restau- 
 rant. He bore a deadly grudge at the pro- 
 fession that kept him from starving, and 
 asserted his unconquered nobility of soul by 
 scowling at his customers and swearing at 
 the viands he dispensed. I remember the 
 deep sense of wrong with which he would 
 growl, ' Two buckwheats, be gawd ! ' 
 
 As to Smith's chronic gloom, it really 
 had nothing of moroseness in it only an 
 habitual melancholy, a crystallized patience. 
 We doubtless put it to some crucial tests 
 with our American ideas and idioms. The
 
 SMITH. 189 
 
 earlier part of our acquaintanceship was 
 fraught with mutual perplexities. It was 
 the longest time before we discovered that 
 ay ill meant Hay Hill Street, Smith mak- 
 ing a single mouthful of it, thus ay ill. 
 One morning he staggered us by asking if 
 we would like " a hapricot freeze " for des- 
 sert. We assented, and would have as- 
 sented if he had proposed iced hippopota- 
 mus ; but the nature of the dish was a mys- 
 tery to us, and perhaps never, since the 
 world took shape out of chaos, was there 
 a simple mould of apricot jelly looked for- 
 ward to in such poignant suspense. It is 
 scarcely permissible in so light a sketch as 
 this to touch on anything so heavy as phi- 
 lology ; but I cannot forbear wondering 
 what malign spirit has bewitched the vow- 
 els of the lower-class Englishman. When 
 he finds it impossible to elide the vowel at 
 the beginning of a word, he invariably cov- 
 ers it with an h the very letter that 
 plays the deuce with him under ordinary
 
 190 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 circumstances. An Oxford scholar once in- 
 formed me that this peculiarity was the re- 
 sult of imperfect education, and left me to 
 settle it for myself why the peculiarity was 
 confined to England. Illiterate Americans 
 if there are any do not drop their A's. 
 But as I have said, this is too heavy a text. 
 It seems almost an Irish bull to say that 
 one can be in London only once for the first 
 time. In other places you may renew first 
 impressions. A city on the Continent al- 
 ways remains a foreign city to you, no mat- 
 ter how often you visit it; but that first 
 time in London is an experience which can 
 never be made to repeat itself. Whatever 
 is alien to you fades away under your earli- 
 est glances ; the place suddenly takes home- 
 like aspects ; certain streets and courts 
 where you never set foot before strike you 
 familiarly. It is a place where you might 
 have lived this great seething metropo- 
 lis where perhaps you once did live, in 
 hose and doublet or knightly harness, in
 
 SMITH. 191 
 
 some immemorial century. I doubt if an 
 American ever visited England without feel- 
 ing in his bosom the vibration, more or less 
 distinct, of these invisible threads of at- 
 tachment. Everywhere in the lucid prose 
 of Hawthorne's English Note-Books and 
 Our Old Home this sentiment lies imbed- 
 ded, like a spray of fossilized fern. 
 
 The architecture, the language, and the 
 customs are yours, or must have been yours 
 long ago. Smith himself dawns upon you 
 as a former acquaintance. Possibly he was 
 one of your retainers in the time of Henry 
 VIII. (You like to picture yourself with 
 retainers; for to be an Englishman, and 
 not a duke or an earl, is to miss four 
 fifths of the good luck.) Your imagination 
 gives you a long lease of existence when 
 you fall into reveries of this nature ; you 
 fancy yourself extant at various interesting 
 periods of English history ; it costs you no 
 effort, while you are about it, to have a 
 hand in a dozen different reigns. What a
 
 192 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 picturesque, highly decorative, household- 
 art sort of life you may lead from the era 
 of the Black Prince down to the Victorian 
 age ! How lightly you assume the respon- 
 sibility of prolonging Smith through all 
 this ! He holds the bridle of an extra 
 horse for you at Poitiers, and also at that 
 other bloody field of Agincourt ; and then, 
 somewhat later, sits on the box of your 
 glass coach (which Mr. Samuel Pepys, sur- 
 veying it from his chamber window, pro- 
 nounces " mightily fine ") as you drive 
 through the shrewish winter morning to 
 the Palace of Whitehall to witness the re- 
 moval of Charles the First's head. 
 
 It is easy to shape any kind of chimera 
 out of that yellowish London fog. Imme- 
 diately after this epoch, however, your im- 
 pressions of having been personally asso- 
 ciated with the events of English history 
 become dimmer, if not altogether confused ; 
 possibly your spirit was about that time 
 undergoing certain organic changes, neces-
 
 SMITH. 193 
 
 sary to the metempsychosis which befel 
 you later. 
 
 You break from your abstraction to the 
 "consciousness that you are a stranger in 
 your native land. The genius loci does not 
 recognize you ; you are an altered man. 
 You are an American. Yet a little while 
 ago the past of England was as much your 
 past as it is Smith's, or that of any Briton 
 of them all. But you have altered, and 
 forfeited it. Smith has not altered : he is 
 the same tall, efficient serving-man he was 
 in the time of the Plantagenets. He has 
 that air of having been carefully handed 
 down which stamps so many things in 
 England. (If this has been said before, I 
 beg somebody's pardon ; I am treading on 
 much-walked-over ground.) There, indeed, 
 Nature seems careful of the type. The 
 wretched woman who murders Kathleen 
 Mavourneen in the street under your win- 
 dow shares this quality of permanency with 
 Smith. She, or one precisely like her, has 
 
 13
 
 194 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 been singing ballads for ages, and will go 
 on doing it. Endless generations of Amer- 
 ican tourists, lodging temporarily at Jones's 
 perpetual Hotel, will give her inexhausti- 
 ble shillings, and Smith will carry them 
 out to her on his indestructible waiter. 
 The individual Smith may occasionally die, 
 but not the type, not the essence. My 
 mind can take in Macaulay's picture of the 
 New Zealander sitting on a broken buttress 
 of London Bridge, and cynically contem- 
 plating the debris "a landscape with fig- 
 ure," as the catalogues would put it but 
 I am unable to grasp the idea of the anni- 
 hilation of anything so firmly established 
 by precedent as Smith. I fancy that even 
 out of the splintered masonry his respect- 
 ful, well-modulated chest voice would be 
 heard saying (through sheer force of habit), 
 " Will you 'ave a look at the hevening pa- 
 per, sir ? " or, " If you please, sir, the 'an- 
 som is at the door ! "
 
 VIII. 
 A DAY IN AFRICA.
 
 vm. 
 
 A DAY IN AFKICA. 
 I. 
 
 I AM not immodest enough to assume to 
 speak for other readers, but for my own 
 part I have become rather tired of African 
 travellers. One always knows beforehand 
 what they have in their pack, and pre- 
 cisely the way in which they will spread 
 out their wares. The victorious struggle 
 with the lion and the hairbreadth escape 
 from death at the hands of the native chiefs 
 are matters easily anticipated ; and that ro- 
 mantic young savage who attaches himself 
 body and soul to the person of the adven- 
 turer, and invariably returns with him to 
 civilization what a threadbare figure that 
 is ! How well we know him under his
 
 198 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 various guttural aliases ! Yet what would 
 six months in Africa amount to without 
 this lineal descendant of Robinson Crusoe's 
 man Friday ? 
 
 I may seem to display a want of tact in 
 disparaging African travellers, being, in a 
 humble fashion, an African traveller my- 
 self, but I have a rare advantage over 
 everybody who has ever visited that coun- 
 try, and written about it I remained 
 there only one day. The standpoint from 
 which I view the Dark Continent is thus 
 unique. If I had remained a year, or even 
 a fortnight, I should have ceased to be 
 original. I should naturally have killed 
 my lion, tempted the appetite of the an- 
 thropophagite, and brought home a little 
 negro boy. I did none of these things, and 
 instead of obscurely falling in at the tail 
 end of a long line of African explorers, I 
 claim to stand quite alone, and in an atti- 
 tude so wholly unconventional as to entitle 
 it to copyright. So far as I am aware, the
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 199 
 
 idea never before entered the head of any 
 man to travel five thousand miles to Africa, 
 and then to stay there only twenty-four 
 hours ! 
 
 I must admit, however, that this idea did 
 not take quite that definite form in my 
 mind in the first instance. A visit to Tan- 
 gier was not down in my itinerary at all, 
 but on reaching Gibraltar, after prolonged 
 wandering through the interior of Spain, 
 Africa threw itself in my way, so to speak. 
 There, just across the narrow straits, lay 
 the tawny barbaric shore. Standing at an 
 embrasure of one of those marvellous sub- 
 terranean batteries which render Gibraltar 
 impregnable long galleries tunnelled in 
 the solid rock, and winding up to the very 
 summit of the vast pile I almost fancied 
 I could make out the lion-colored line of 
 the Barbary coast. A magical sea-haze 
 that morning, together with a strip of dun 
 cloud lying low against the horizon, encour- 
 aged the illusion. It was purely an illu-
 
 200 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 sion, for it is three good hours and a half 
 by steamer from the boat-landing at the 
 foot of Waterport Street to the dismantled, 
 God-forsaken mole at Tangier-
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 201 
 
 n. 
 
 I DO not believe there is a dirtier little 
 steamer in the world than the one that 
 plies between Gibraltar and Morocco, and 
 I am positive that since Noah's ark no ves- 
 sel ever put to sea with a more variegated 
 and incongruous lot of passengers than sa- 
 luted my eyes as I stepped on board the 
 Jackal one April afternoon. The instant 
 I set foot on deck I had passed out of Eu- 
 rope. Here were the squalor and the glit- 
 ter of the Orient the solemn dusky faces 
 that look out on the reader from the pages 
 of the Arabian Nights, and the thousand 
 and one disagreeable odors of which that 
 fascinating chronicle makes no mention. 
 Such a chattering in Spanish, Portuguese, 
 Hebrew, and Arabic ! Such queer brown- 
 legged figures in pointed hoods and yellow 
 slippers ! Though there were first and sec-
 
 202 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 ond class fares, there appeared to be no dis- 
 tinction in the matter of accommodation. 
 From stem to stern the long narrow deck 
 was crowded with Moors, Arabs, negroes, 
 Jews, and half-breeds, inextricably mixing 
 themselves up with empty fruit crates, 
 bamboo baskets, and bales of merchandise. 
 I speculated as to what would become of 
 all that loose luggage if we were to encoun- 
 ter a blow outside ; for this placid-looking 
 summer sea has a way of lashing itself into 
 an ungovernable rage without any percepti- 
 ble provocation. In case of wet weather 
 there was no shelter except a stifling cabin 
 between-decks, where the thirsty were 
 waited upon by a fez-crowned man carved 
 out of ebony, who dispensed a thin sour 
 wine from a goat-skin, which he carried un- 
 der his arm like a bagpipe. Not liking the 
 look of the water tank 'midships, I tested 
 this wine early in the voyage, and came to 
 the conclusion that death by thirst was not 
 without its advantages.
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 203 
 
 The steamer had slipped her moorings 
 and was gliding out of the bay before I no- 
 ticed the movement, so absorbed had I been 
 in studying the costumes and manners of 
 my fellow-voyagers. What a gayly colored, 
 shabby, picturesque crowd ! It was as if 
 some mad masquerade party had burst the 
 bounds of a ball-room and run away to sea. 
 Here was a Tangier merchant in sky-blue 
 gaberdine, with a Persian shawl twisted 
 around his waist, and a black velvet cap 
 set on the back of his head ; there a Moor, 
 in snowy turban and fleecy caftan, with a 
 jewel-hilted, crescent-bladed knife at his 
 girdle. Tall slim Arabs, in dingy white 
 robes like those worn by Dominicans, 
 stalked up and down between the heaps of 
 luggage, or leaned over the taffrail in the 
 pitiless sunshine, gazing listlessly into the 
 distance. Others stowed themselves among 
 the freight, and went to sleep. If you 
 seated yourself by chance on what appeared 
 to be a bit of old sail, something stirred
 
 204 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 protestingly under you, and a bronze vis- 
 age slowly unshelled itself from the hood 
 of a burnoose. Everywhere was some 
 strange shape. In the bow of the vessel a 
 fat negro from the Soudan sat cross-legged, 
 counting his money, which he arranged in 
 piles on a rug in front of him, the silver on 
 one side and the copper on the other. He 
 looked like a Hindoo idol, with his heavy- 
 lidded orbs and baggy cheeks, the latter 
 sagging almost down to the folds of flesh 
 that marked his triple chin, those rings of 
 the human oak. Near him, but not watch- 
 ing him, and evidently not caring for any- 
 thing, stood a bareheaded, emaciated old 
 man. His cranium, as polished and yellow 
 as ancient ivory, was covered with a deli- 
 cate tracery of blue veins, and resembled a 
 geographical globe. At his girdle hung a 
 leather pouch, apparently containing a few 
 coins. Both this person and the negro, as 
 well as the majority of their companions, 
 were returning from a commercial visit to
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 205 
 
 Gibraltar. The chief trade of Tangier and 
 the outlying districts consists in supplying 
 the English garrison and the cities of Cadiz 
 and Lisbon with cattle, fowls, fruits, and 
 green stuff. I saw none of these people on 
 the streets of Gibraltar, however. They 
 probably hugged the water-front, where the 
 markets are, and did not venture into the 
 upper town. With their graceful dress 
 they would not have been out of place 
 among the Highland kilts and scarlet coats 
 that light up the alameda of a pleasant 
 afternoon. 
 
 Already the huge rock of Gibraltar, 
 which is looked upon with such envious 
 and hopeless eyes by the Spaniards, had 
 shrunk to half its proportions. It lay 
 there, gray, grim, and fantastic, like some 
 necromancer's castle on the edge of the sea. 
 Before us was nothing but twinkling sun- 
 shine and salt-water. At our right were 
 vague purple peaks and capes, beyond the 
 point of one of which stood the Trafalgar
 
 206 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 light-house, invisible to us ; but who can 
 pass within twenty leagues of it and not 
 think of England's great admiral? The 
 sea was crisped by a refreshing westerly 
 breeze ; over us the sky sprung its pale 
 cerulean arch, festooned here and there 
 with shapeless silvery clouds like cobwebs. 
 Fitful odors blown from unseen groves of 
 palm and orange sweetened the air. 
 
 " happy ship, 
 
 To rise and dip, 
 With the blue crystal at your lip ! " 
 
 The heat of the sun was no longer intoler- 
 able. The man at the wheel had thrown 
 back his capote, and was smoking a cigar- 
 ette. The noisy group of Arabs huddled 
 together round the capstan had ceased their 
 chatter. The fat negro, his pitiful coins 
 counted and laid away, was leaning his 
 head against a coil of rope, and staring 
 with glazed eyeballs at nothing. A hush, 
 a calm, that was not lethargy for it par- 
 took of the nature of a dream seemed to 
 have fallen upon all.
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 207 
 
 There were several Europeans aboard 
 besides myself, if I may pass for a Euro- 
 pean a Marseillaise gentleman about to 
 join his wife, the guest of her brother, the 
 French consul at Tangier ; an Italian gen- 
 tleman travelling for pleasure (not that the 
 other was not) ; a Dutch painter from 
 Antwerp, with an amazing porcelain pipe ; 
 and last, but not least, a Briton, among 
 whose luggage was a circular tin bath-tub, 
 concerning which the Mohammedan mind 
 had swamped itself in vain conjecture. 
 Was it a piece of defensive armor a 
 shield, for example or was it a gigantic 
 frying-pan? These Christian dogs, they 
 have such outlandish fashions ! No Arab 
 passed it without a curious glance, and at 
 intervals quite a little crowd would gather 
 about it. Now and then a Jew, who knew 
 what the article was, though he had never 
 used it, smiled superciliously. 
 
 We had been under way an hour or 
 more, when I observed the Englishman in
 
 208 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 deep converse with a personage who had 
 greatly impressed me as I caught a glimpse 
 of him on the gangway at Gibraltar before 
 the boat started. I had lost him a moment 
 afterward, and reluctantly concluded that 
 he had gone ashore again. But there he 
 was, wherever he came from. By the gra- 
 cious dignity of his manner and the rich- 
 ness of his dress, he might have been Ha- 
 roun-al-Raschid himself. He was Moorish, 
 but clearly of finer material than the rest. 
 His burnoose, of some soft indigo stuff, was 
 edged with gold, liquid threads of which 
 also ran through the gossamer caic bound 
 about his turban. The two ends of this 
 scarf flowed over his shoulders, and crossed 
 themselves on his breast, forming an effec- 
 tive frame for his handsome features. His 
 legs were bare, but the half-slippers cover- 
 ing his feet were of costly make. If he 
 was not a person of consequence, he looked 
 it. I was wondering whether he was a 
 cadi or a pasha, and what he was doing 
 without attendants, when he quitted the
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 209 
 
 Englishman and went to the water-tank, 
 where the loungers respectfully made room 
 for him. He then performed an act which 
 suggested unutterable things touching that 
 water tank. Instead of helping himself 
 brutally, as the others had done, he grace- 
 fully covered his mouth with one of the 
 ends of his caic, and drank through that. 
 I had been drinking this water unfiltered, 
 making an aquarium of myself. 
 
 A few minutes later I was surprised to 
 see the man approaching the rear deck, 
 where I occupied a camp-stool, captured 
 and retained after unheard-of struggles. It 
 was plainly his intention to address me. I 
 rose from my seat to receive the card which 
 he held out politely. I here print it in 
 full, for the benefit of future explorers, to 
 whom I heartily commend the Hadji Cad- 
 dor Sahta, 1 dragoman, king's courier, and 
 gentleman at large : 
 
 1 The title of Hadji indicates that the bearer has made the 
 pilgrimage to Mecca. 
 14
 
 210 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 HADJI CADDOR SAHTA. 
 
 GUIDE AND INTERPRETER. 
 Fully conversant with the French, English, Italian, Spanish, 
 
 and Arabic languages. 
 Is likewise disposed to accompany travellers to the interior 
 
 of 
 
 MOROCCO. 
 FULLY SECURITY OFFERED. 
 
 TANGIER. 
 
 The Hadji Caddor who was better 
 than his prospectus, for he spoke unexcep- 
 tionable English was organizing a party 
 to visit the ancient city of Fez, and begged 
 the honor of my company. 
 
 " The senor doubtless knows," he said, 
 " that a caravan leaves for Fez in the 
 course of a few days. But to travel with 
 a caravan is to travel with cattle. It is not 
 so with me ; we have our own tents and 
 slaves and armed escort, and go as gentle- 
 men and princes, thanks be to God and my 
 personal supervision ! " 
 
 I explained to the Hadji that my modest 
 purpose was simply to spend a day in
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 211 
 
 Africa, and that Tangier was the limit of 
 my desire. Upon this he remarked that 
 his preparations would detain him in the 
 town until the end of the week, and that 
 he laid his services at my feet. I metaphor- 
 ically picked them up on the spot, and en- 
 gaged him to show me the sights in Tangier. 
 
 While this brief dialogue was passing, 
 an ill-begotten Moor in a dirty turban made 
 off with my camp-stool. He was sitting 
 upon it stolidly a few paces distant. I ad- 
 vanced a step to assert my claims, when the 
 Hadji checked me. 
 
 " It is useless," he said, laying one finger 
 softly on the back of my hand. " He 's a 
 bad man Ayoub, the tailor. I know him. 
 Leave him alone. Our Spanish friends 
 have a good proverb, ' It is a waste of lath- 
 er to shave an ass.' I will get you another 
 seat, senor." 
 
 The Hadji Caddor was a philosopher ; 
 but, like a great many philosophers, he was 
 philosophical chiefly for other people. If
 
 212 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 the case had been his, I am sure he would 
 not have borne it patiently. After all, one 
 can not ask more of a stoic than not to cry 
 out at another man's toothache. The Hadji 
 was really a character, and if I were paint- 
 ing a figure-piece instead of a landscape, I 
 would draw him life-size. He had travelled 
 far and wide, even to the steppes of Tarta- 
 ry. He spoke several Continental tongues 
 with singular fluency ; Arabic and half a 
 dozen polyglot dialects were, of course, his 
 by nature. He was very wise, and, as the 
 Orientals have it, he had plucked his wis- 
 dom from the stem of experience. I never 
 met a more intelligent man, black or white. 
 His remarks had often a pith of great orig- 
 inality, as when, for instance, in describing 
 a certain Jew of Algesiras, who had played 
 him a scurvy trick, he observed, "But he 's 
 nothing, sefior, less than nothing a ci- 
 pher with the rim removed ! " 
 
 We fell to talking on the condition of 
 Morocco. Was the young Sultan, Muley
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 213 
 
 el Hassen, popular? Though the Hadji 
 was somewhat guarded in his comments on 
 the imperial government, he gave me a 
 clear idea of the degradation and wretched- 
 ness of the people. The territory known as 
 Morocco is inclosed by the Mediterranean, 
 Algeria, the desert of Sahara, and the At- 
 lantic, and is inhabited by a mongrel popu- 
 lation of about 800,000 souls. The agri- 
 culturists are mostly Arabs and Shelloohs, 
 dwelling on the rich plains ; they are poor 
 cultivators, and are taxed to death. The 
 wild Berber tribes, in a chronic state of re- 
 volt, occupy the perilous heights and passes 
 of the Atlas chain. The Moors, the Jews, 
 and the blacks crowd themselves into the 
 towns and villages. From the blacks the 
 bulk of the emperor's army is recruited. 
 The Moors, descended principally from the 
 Moors driven out of Spain by Ferdinand 
 and Isabella, are a degenerate race, contam- 
 inated by intermarriages with the Arabs. 
 The Jews are precisely what they were in
 
 214 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 Europe in the Middle Ages thrifty, craf- 
 ty, persecuted, uncomplaining, taking it out 
 of their oppressors in the way of profits ; 
 neither their lot nor their nature has been 
 changed by exile. The notable towns are 
 Morocco, the capital, El-Araish, Tafilet, 
 Agadir, Mogadore, Fez, and Tangier. They 
 are all ground into dust under the heel of 
 the emperor. Tangier, the outer breached 
 wall of Islamism, is regarded with particu- 
 lar disfavor, her commerce harassed and 
 her trade strangled by whimsical restric- 
 tions. No man there dares own himself 
 rich ; if suspected of secreted wealth, he is 
 tortured until he reveals the hiding-place ; 
 then both his head and his money are re- 
 moved. The emperor's idea of taxation is 
 the simplest possible: he takes what he 
 wants. There is no appeal. He alters 
 weights, measures, and prices at will ; the 
 multiplication table goes down before him. 
 The sword, the cord, the bastinado, and the 
 branding-iron are ever ready to enforce his
 
 A DAT JN AFRICA. 215 
 
 caprice. It is no hyperbole when the court 
 poet assures this monster that he holds life 
 and death in the hollow of his hand. He is 
 the only full-blown despot whose dominions 
 lie contiguous to civilization. The Czar of 
 all the Russias is not so much his own mas- 
 ter ; the Sultan at Constantinople is not so 
 absolute. The great despot breeds a host 
 of lesser ones, and it is these that bleed 
 Morocco unmercifully. The nomadic tribes 
 have their sheik, the cities their cadi, the 
 provinces their pasha and the head devil 
 at Fez has them all. " But there is no 
 God but God," said the Hadji Caddor, re- 
 signedly. 
 
 Just then there was a hubbub in the for- 
 ward part of the ship. Three or four mu- 
 latto sailors were dragging a slightly built 
 young man aft, and the slightly built young 
 man was stoutly resisting. I forgot to state 
 that shortly after leaving port a person of 
 insinuating amiability and politeness dis- 
 tributed himself among the passengers and
 
 216 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 collected their tickets. It now appeared 
 that this person was merely an intoxicated 
 passenger, with no authority whatever to 
 act in the matter, and they were dragging 
 him before the captain. This episode cre- 
 ated great merriment. I do not know what 
 became of the amateur ticket-gatherer 
 he was a born humorist, and I trust no 
 harm befell him for the cry of " Land ! " 
 lured me to the bows of the vessel. The 
 chalky fortress and town of Ceuta the 
 Spanish convict station were fading out 
 on our left. Presently we rounded Cape 
 Malabar, and, yes, there was Tangier an 
 indistinguishable mass of white that mo- 
 mentarily shaped itself into crenellated bat- 
 tlements and mosques and huddled house- 
 tops. 
 
 As we dropped anchor within gunshot of 
 the white-walled town, it lay in the golden 
 mist of the approaching sunset. Here and 
 there a projecting piece of snowy stone- 
 work took a transient rosy tinge, and here
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 217 
 
 and there a patch of black shadow etched 
 itself against some indentation. At one or 
 two points along the zigzag wall a number 
 of heavy cannon thrust their noses over the 
 parapet, and seemed irresolutely holding 
 their sullen breath as they stared seaward. 
 At the right, the flat-roofed houses stretched 
 like a gigantic marble staircase up the flank 
 of a hill crowned with a citadel (the Kasba, 
 or castle) that commanded the whole of the 
 lower town, the most prominent feature of 
 which was a slender square tower set with 
 richly glazed tiles. These bits of porcelain 
 sparkled like jewels as the lingering sun- 
 light touched them one by one. Behind all 
 this rose a bleak, arid mountain, draped 
 now in delicate violet tints. If Tangier 
 had nothing more to offer than that exqui- 
 site view of herself, I should still have been 
 paid for my pilgrimage. 
 
 Our anchor had scarcely taken its plunge 
 when a fleet of barqmllos put out from a 
 strip of beach that fringed the base of the
 
 218 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 sea-wall; in the shelter of which lay several 
 larger craft drying their canvas after yes- 
 terday's rain. I was noting the good effect 
 of the cinnamon-colored lateen-sails against 
 the dazzling white masonry, when the small 
 boats came dashing alongside like pande- 
 monium broken loose. Each of these boats 
 was manned by two or three vociferating, 
 half-naked maniacs, who stood ready to dis- 
 member a passenger rather than not get 
 him at all. One could imagine a lot of Al- 
 gerine pirates about to attack a helpless 
 merchantman. As soon as the quarantine 
 officer gave the signal of permission, the 
 yelling horde clambered up the ship's side 
 and sprang among their victims. It would 
 require a Dantean pen to describe the tu- 
 mult and confusion that followed. I will 
 only state that I and my impedimenta 
 which consisted of a hand-bag and an over- 
 coat went ashore in three boats. That 
 the whole of me went in a single convey- 
 ance was owing to the coolness and energy
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 219 
 
 of the Hadji Caddor, who made his way 
 through the crowd to my side by quietly 
 and systematically strangling everybody 
 that opposed him. 
 
 As we pushed off from the steamer, the 
 babel of voices rose higher and higher, and 
 above it all I caught the deep ringing into- 
 nations of the Englishman " Come, now, 
 you black rascal, you cawn't be knocking 
 that tub abaut, don't you know I " My 
 Arab captor, a magnificent animal, with 
 the biceps of a gladiator, disdainfully tossed 
 his head, and taking a long oarsweep, re- 
 marked, " Aha ! Mister Goddam, he have 
 plenty trouble with him dam tub ! " 
 
 The Hadji smiled gravely on the young 
 barbarian airing his English. 
 
 To run a little ahead of my narrative, a 
 Moorish armorer, with three assistants, was 
 summoned to the hotel the next morning 
 to straighten out the Briton's bath-tub, 
 which had been bent almost double, and 
 otherwise banged beyond recognition. The
 
 220 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTU. 
 
 rough, boatmen of Malaga and Cadiz are 
 insipid angels compared with those fellows 
 at Tangier. 
 
 " A peseta for you if you get in first ! " 
 cried the Hadji.
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 221 
 
 m. 
 
 Two other boats reached the landing 
 simultaneously with our own, and a pair of 
 salaming rascals, who appeared to consider 
 me as deeply in their debt as if they had 
 saved my life, approached with my missing 
 personal effects. The Hadji unceremoni- 
 ously snatched coat and bag from their 
 hands, and led the way up to the city gate, 
 the fellows following on, gesticulating and 
 tearing their hair in despair. We were 
 about to pass under a massive horseshoe 
 archway, when the great cedar-wood doors 
 were suddenly closed on our noses a 
 stratagem of the guards to wrest a bribe 
 from the unlucky seafarer. The Hadji 
 glanced quickly at the sun, and saw that it 
 yet lacked a few minutes of the lawful hour 
 for closing the gates ; then, receiving no re-
 
 222 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 sponse to his summons, he picked up a big 
 fragment of rock, and began to hammer 
 on the iron-damped portals, accompanying 
 himself with some very vigorous Arabic, 
 which my ignorance of the language did 
 not prevent me from recognizing as oaths 
 of the first magnitude. After considerable 
 hesitation, the bolts were reluctantly drawn, 
 the doors thrown open, and we passed in on 
 the double-quick, taking our way through a 
 dismal walled alley to the hotel. I call it 
 an alley, but it was, in fact, the principal 
 street. It extended from the sea-front to 
 the gate of the Soc-de-Barra, or outside 
 market, and bisected in its course the only 
 public square in Tangier. I learned to 
 know the street very well afterward, for it 
 was the street of the bazars. 
 
 The exterior architecture and the inte- 
 rior topography of the hotel to which the 
 Hadji shortly conducted me rather defy de- 
 scription. It was a large rambling building, 
 which somehow included a part of the city
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 223 
 
 fortifications. You stepped directly from 
 the cobble-stoned footway into a spacious 
 chamber, or hall, paved with blood-red tiles 
 in the Moorish fashion ; variegated tiles 
 and plaques were set in the walls ; a lamp 
 of cut brass hung from the ceiling ; in one 
 corner stood three or four slim-barrelled 
 Moorish rifles, with stocks curiously carved 
 and inlaid. There were two doors hung 
 with bright tapestry, one leading into a 
 kitchen, and the other into a dining-hall. 
 The rez-de-chaussee was at least compre- 
 hensible ; the rest was mystery. I do not 
 know now whether the sleeping apartment 
 assigned me was on the second or the fifth 
 floor, or if there were any fifth floor. I 
 mounted a steep staircase, traversed several 
 corridors, descended a flight of stone steps, 
 and found myself out-of-doors. Passing 
 along a rampart originally pierced for can- 
 non, I turned two or three sharp angles, 
 climbed up some more stone steps, and 
 stood in a square, whitewashed room. From
 
 224 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 the window I had a lovely view of sea and 
 town, and close by the minaret of the Mo- 
 hammedan mosque lifted itself into the 
 warm evening sky. At a small opening 
 high up in the minaret the muezzin, with 
 outspread arms, was calling the faithful to 
 prayer, and casting the names of Allah and 
 Mohammed to the four points of the com- 
 pass. I would fain have lingered a while to 
 look on a scene which, realizing some old 
 and half-forgotten dreams of mine, now 
 seemed itself a dream, but the Hadji was 
 waiting outside on the battlements to pilot 
 me down to dinner. 
 
 I pass over the tedious ceremony of the 
 table d'hdte. I did not go to Tangier to 
 eat ; and perhaps it was well I did not, for 
 neither the favorite national dish called cfis- 
 ctissfi nor the small coppery oyster that has 
 the assurance to propagate itself on this 
 coast was much to my taste. The guests 
 at table, at the head of which sat the 
 French consul, were all Europeans, and all
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 225 
 
 in evening dress, except my acquaintance 
 the Dutch painter, who performed miracles 
 with some red mullet. After dinner I be- 
 took myself to the hotel entrance to finish 
 a cigarette. Several Moors, muffled in 
 white mantles, and carrying long guns, 
 lounged in the doorway. Outside, crouched 
 on the cobble-stones, were three musicians, 
 with theorbo, mandolin, and triangle, mak- 
 ing music like that of the piper of Bujal- 
 ance, who charged a maravedi for playing, 
 and ten for leaving off. 
 
 The Hadji had planned to take me to an 
 Arab caf 6 not the cafe in the square, us- 
 ually visited by strangers, but an unadul- 
 terated Arab place of entertainment, sel- 
 dom profaned by the presence of giaours. 
 The Antwerp artist and the Englishman 
 were to accompany us. Just as the edge 
 of a new moon had begun to cut the dark, 
 the Hadji appeared with a lantern fastened 
 to the end of a staff, and we sallied forth. 
 
 Save for this lantern and that moon 
 
 15
 
 226 FROM PONKAPOG TO PEBTH. 
 
 which did not seem half so good a moon as 
 we have at home we should have been in 
 Stygian darkness as we stumbled along the 
 unlighted streets. On either hand stretched 
 a high wall, pierced at intervals with a 
 door shaped like a clover leaf, or with a 
 barred casement, divided in the centre by a 
 slender pillar, like the windows in the Al- 
 cazar at Seville. There were few persons 
 stirring. Now and then a sheeted figure 
 flitted past us and vanished through an 
 inky archway possibly some belated slave 
 bearing a scented missive to Fatima or 
 Noureddin. Once we came upon a tall 
 Rifan, with the red cloth case of his gun- 
 barrel twisted round his brows for a tur- 
 ban ; and once the Hadji's lantern lighted 
 up the fierce outlines of a man with a na- 
 ked scymetar in his hand pursuing some 
 one in the distance. Now and then a fugi- 
 tive perfume told us we were near a gar- 
 den, and a stiff palm-tree shot up from be- 
 hind a wall, and nicked the blue-blackness
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 227 
 
 of the sky. On we pressed through the 
 shadows, ourselves shadowy and spectral 
 and silent. The Hadji, haughty and grave, 
 with his scabbard clinking along the stones, 
 seemed like the caliph in the old story- 
 book, and we his attendants, on some noc- 
 turnal ramble through the streets of Bag- 
 dad.. 
 
 Suddenly our guide halted at a low mean 
 door. Above it was a dimly lighted lattice, 
 from which came a murmuring, melancholy 
 sourid of voices, accented by the twanging 
 of guitar strings. The flame of the lantern 
 showed us a black hand painted on the 
 masonry at the left of the entrance. That 
 hand appears at the door-side of many of 
 the houses in Tangier, and is a charm to 
 keep off the evil spirits. 
 
 Passing up a flight of well-worn stone 
 steps, we entered the caf 6 a long narrow 
 chamber, divided in the centre by the 
 ever-recurring horseshoe arch. The white- 
 washed walls were bare of ornament, save
 
 228 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 a scarlet vine running round the room just 
 above the mopboard. In the first compart- 
 ment a negro was making coffee at a shelf 
 suspended from the ceiling. In the other 
 section were the guests, who saluted us 
 with various kinds of stares curious, in- 
 solent, or indifferent, as the mood prompted 
 after which they ignored our presence as 
 effectively as a group of ill-bred Christians 
 could have done. Sharp-faced Arab youths 
 and full-bearded, vicious-looking old men 
 squatted on the matting. There was not a 
 piece of furniture anywhere, not even one 
 of those dwarf tables frequently to be seen 
 in Moorish houses. From a bronze tripod 
 on which some aloes were burning a blu- 
 ish thread of smoke lifted itself up spirally, 
 like a rattlesnake ready to spring. 
 
 We took our places on the floor like the 
 others, and after a few words from the 
 Hadji, the negro served us with coffee. 
 Each cup was prepared separately, and you 
 were supposed to drink the grounds, which
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 229 
 
 constituted a third of the allowance. Nev- 
 ertheless, it was a delicious beverage up 
 to the point where it became a solid. Then 
 four small metal pipes, charged with Turk- 
 ish tobacco and a grain or two of mild 
 opium, were brought to us. Meanwhile the 
 musicians, seated at the upper end of the 
 room, never ceased their monotonous, whin- 
 ing strains. Nobody spoke. The younger 
 fellows lolled back against the wall, motion- 
 less, with half-shut eyes ; the blue smoke 
 slowly floated up from the pipe-bowls, and 
 curled itself into arabesque patterns over 
 the solemn, turbaned heads of the old Mus- 
 sulmans 
 
 " Viziers nodding together 
 In some Arabian night." 
 
 After a while a man of fabulous leanness 
 arose, and began a kind of dance. He 
 danced only from the hips upward, sway- 
 ing his arms in the air as he contorted his 
 body, and accompanying himself with a 
 crooning chant. By-and-by his eyes closed
 
 230 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 ecstatically, his head leaned far back, an 
 epileptic foam came to his lips. From time 
 to time one of the spectators jerked out a 
 sharp " Jaleo ! " to encourage him, others 
 of the audience beat the measure on the 
 palms of their hands, and the tambourines 
 kept up a dull thud. It was in every re- 
 spect the same dance which the gitanos ex- 
 ecute less passionately in Granada. The 
 man ended his performance abruptly, and 
 sat down, and all was silent again, except 
 that the doleful, strident music went on and 
 on, with pitiless reiteration of the same 
 notes. 
 
 Looking at it carelessly, it struck me 
 that Moorish enjoyment was composed of 
 very simple ingredients ; but looking closer, 
 I suspected there were depths and qualities 
 in this profound and nearly austere repose, 
 in this smouldering passion, with its ca- 
 pricious fiery gleams, which I had not pen- 
 etrated. Perhaps it was the drug in the 
 tobacco, or perhaps it was a pungent prop-
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 231 
 
 erty in the coffee, that sharpened my sense, 
 but presently I began to detect in the mu- 
 sic, which had rather irritated me at first, 
 an under-current of meaning, vague and 
 perplexing. The slow dragging andante 
 and the sudden wailing falsetto seemed half 
 to assist and half to baffle some inarticulate 
 spirit that strove to distill its secret into 
 the ear. Something that was not the music 
 itself was struggling to find expression 
 through it the pride, the rage, the iner- 
 tia, the unutterable despair of an ancient 
 and once mighty people passing away.
 
 232 FROM PONKAPOG TO PERTH. 
 
 IV. 
 
 IT was Sunday. I do not know whose 
 Sunday it was, for there are three to the 
 week in Tangier, the Mohammedan, the 
 Jew, and the Christian having each his 
 own. It was Sunday ; but what was more 
 to the purpose, it was also a market-day. I 
 had caught the town in one of its spasms of 
 business. Between these spasms, and when 
 the Aissawa 'are not overrunning it, or no 
 fete is going on, the place is said to be as 
 dull and silent as a plague-smitten city. 
 
 It being my last as well as my first day 
 in Africa, I did not wait for the Hadji to 
 call me that morning. I was an early bird, 
 astir even before the slightest worm of a 
 breakfast was practicable. Having com- 
 pleted my toilet, I wandered out on the 
 platform in front of my bedroom to kill the
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 233 
 
 intervening hour. Discovering a stone stair- 
 case leading still higher, I mounted the 
 steps, and found myself on the roof of the 
 hotel. 
 
 The Kasba on the height had all its win- 
 dows illuminated by the daybreak, but the 
 rest of the town lay in cool shadow. At 
 my feet stretched a confused mass of square- 
 cut white houses, reaching to the sea's edge 
 on one side, and ending in drifts on the 
 slant of a hill at my left a town of snow 
 that had seemingly dropped flake by flake 
 from the clouds during the night. 
 
 There were figures moving on several of 
 the neighboring house-tops. All the roofs 
 were flat, and most of them surrounded by 
 low battlements. Yonder was a young ne- 
 gress in a sulphur-hued caftan and green 
 girdle, shaking a striped rug over a para- 
 pet, and looking consciously picturesque. 
 On a terrace farther off a Mooiish washer- 
 woman and a little girl were spreading out 
 their harcks and embroidered napkins on
 
 234 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 the flag-stones : the sun would reach them 
 by-and-by. At my right was a man indo- 
 lently lifting himself off a piece of carpet 
 laid dangerously near the unprotected roof 
 edge possibly a summer boarder who had 
 chosen that airy bed-chamber. He was rub- 
 bing his eyes, and had evidently slept there 
 over night. In this temperate climate, 
 where the thermometer seldom rises above 
 90, and rarely falls below 40, the house- 
 top would be preferable to an inside room 
 to a summer boarder. On many of the 
 roofs was evidence of pretty attempts at 
 gardening, oleanders, acacias, palms, and 
 dwarf almond-trees being set out in orna- 
 mental jars and tubs. There, no doubt, was 
 the family resort after night-fall, the scene 
 of ceremonious or social visits, and, I imag- 
 ine, of much starry love-making. 
 
 Behind the hotel, in a desolate vacant 
 lot checkered by small vats half filled with 
 dye-stuffs, was an Arab tanner at work. 
 Standing in the midst of his colored squares
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 235 
 
 he resembled a solitary chessman. I could 
 look directly down on his smooth bare 
 skull, which seemed cast of gilt-bronze or 
 bell-metal. He wore nothing but a breech- 
 cloth. The Moorish tanners are very ex- 
 pert, and employ arts not known to the 
 trade elsewhere. They have a process by 
 which lion and panther skins are rendered 
 as pliable as satin, and of creamy whiteness. 
 The green leather of Tafilet, the red of Fez, 
 and the yellow of Morocco are highly es- 
 teemed. 
 
 I was still on the roof-top when the 
 Hadji summoned me to breakfast, immedi- 
 ately after which we set forth on a stroll 
 through the city. The streets of Tangier 
 lose a little on close inspection by daylight ; 
 they are very dirty and very narrow, form- 
 ing a labyrinth from which a stranger could 
 scarcely extricate himself without the grace 
 of God. I was constantly imagining that 
 we had come back to our starting-point, the 
 houses being unnumbered, and without any
 
 236 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 feature to distinguish one from the other. 
 It was like walking through endless ave- 
 nues of tombs. Each building presented 
 to the contracted footway an inhospitable, 
 massive wall, set with a door of the exact 
 pattern of its neighbor. This monotony is 
 a characteristic of Oriental street architec- 
 ture. No wonder the robber chief, in The 
 Forty Thieves, put a chalk-mark on the 
 door of Ali Baba's house in order to find 
 it again ; and no wonder the slave-girl 
 Morgiana completely frustrated the device 
 by marking half a dozen doors in a similar 
 manner. 
 
 Whatever of elegance there may be in- 
 side the Moorish houses, the outside is care- 
 ful to give no hint of it. I believe that 
 some of the interiors are lavishly decorated. 
 Once or twice, in passing a half-open gate, 
 I caught sight of a tessellated patio, with a 
 fountain set in the midst of flowers and 
 broad-leaved shrubbery, reminding me of 
 the Andalusian court-yards. But the do-
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 237 
 
 mestic life of the Mussulman goes veiled 
 like his women. 
 
 For a city with so many Sundays, Tan- 
 gier makes a rather poor exhibit in the line 
 of sacred architecture. The foreign lega- 
 tions have a secluded chapel somewhere, 
 and there are several mosques and Jewish 
 synagogues, but none of note, except the Mo- 
 hammedan mosque, whose porcelain-plated 
 tower is the best part of it. In my quality 
 of Christian dog I was not admitted to the 
 edifice. The Hadji described the interior 
 as being barren of interest. When the 
 faithful go in to devotions they leave their 
 foot-covering in the vestibule. As we went 
 by that morning there were thirty or forty 
 empty slippers of all sizes and colors ar- 
 ranged in a row on the stone pavement. 
 They suggested the remnants of a row of 
 soldiers that had been blown away by some 
 phenomenal volley. 
 
 The Moors are handsome men, haughty 
 of feature, and with great dignity of car-
 
 238 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 riage. The Arab women, of whom we met 
 not so many, left their charms to the imag- 
 ination. Though they were muffled up to 
 the eyelids, showing only a strip of buff 
 forehead, they generally turned aside their 
 faces as we approached them. Their street 
 costume was not elaborate a voluminous 
 linen mantle, apparently covering nothing 
 but a wide-sleeved chemise reaching to the 
 instep and caught at the waist. Their bare 
 feet were thrust into half-slippers, and their 
 finger-tips stained with henna. Some had 
 only one eye visible. In the younger wo- 
 men, that one pensive black eye peering 
 out from the snowy coif was very piquant. 
 The Hebrew maidens were not so avari- 
 cious of themselves, but let their beauty 
 frankly blossom in doorways and at upper 
 casements. Many of the girls were as slen- 
 der and graceful as vines. In their apparel 
 they appeared to affect solid colors blues, 
 ochres, carmines, and olive greens. They 
 have a beautiful national dress, which is
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 239 
 
 worn only in private. The Jewesses of 
 Tangier are famous for their eyes, teeth, 
 and complexions, and for their figures in 
 early maidenhood. At thirty-five they are 
 shapeless old women, 
 
 " Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." 
 
 The increasing number of passers-by, and 
 a confused buzz of voices that grew every 
 moment more audible, indicated that we 
 were nearing some centre of traffic or pleas- 
 ure. Leaving a fearful alley behind us 
 an alley where heaps of refuse were piled 
 in the middle of the footpath, and the 
 body of a collapsed cat or dog was continu- 
 ally blocking the way we issued upon 
 the place of the bazars a narrow winding 
 hillside thoroughfare, paved with cobble- 
 stones, and lined on either hand by a series 
 of small alcoves scooped in the masonry. 
 
 In each of these recesses a Jew or an 
 Arab merchant sat cross-legged upon a lit- 
 tle counter, with his goods piled within con- 
 venient reach on shelves at his side and
 
 240 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 over his head. The counter, which rose to 
 the height of the customer's breast, was 
 really the floor of the shop. In one booth 
 nothing was sold but steel-work Damas- 
 cus blades (manufactured round the corner) 
 with richly wrought hilts; slim Moorish 
 guns with a profusion of mother-of-pearl 
 and tortoise-shell inlay on the breeches; 
 shields, chains, spurs, bits, and the like. 
 In an angle of the wall, near this booth, 
 was a half-naked sword-grinder serving a 
 Bedouin, who leaned on a spear-handle, 
 and with critical eye watched the progress 
 of the workman. Here was a tobacconist, 
 with fragrant Latakia to dispose - of, and 
 snake-stemmed nargilehs in which to burn 
 it; there, a fruiterer, buried in figs and 
 dates and sweetmeat confections; farther 
 on, a jeweller, or a dealer in nicknacks, or 
 a saddle-maker. The smartest shops were 
 those of the cloth merchants. At their 
 doors were displayed rose-colored caftans, 
 rivulets of scarfs shot with silver thread,
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 241 
 
 broidered towels, Daghestan rugs, bright 
 fabrics from Rabatt and Tetuan. 
 
 There was no lack of color or animation 
 in the crowd ; no lack of customers beating 
 their bosoms and exploding with incredu- 
 lity at the prices demanded (I saw an old 
 Berber in front of one bazar tear off his 
 turban and trample on it, to show he would 
 give no such price) ; no lack of peripatetic 
 venders interf ering with legitimate trade ; 
 no lack of noisy water-sellers, each with his 
 sprig of scented shrub laid over his water- 
 skin; there was, in brief, no lack of any- 
 thing proper to the scene and the moment ; 
 yet I had a sense of disappointment, and 
 probably expressed it in my face. 
 
 " Then you would be disappointed in the 
 bazars at Damascus," said the Hadji, sadly, 
 for he had the honor of Tangier at heart. 
 " This is Damascus, or any Eastern city, in 
 small. In the great capitals you would see 
 more, but nothing different. The bazars at 
 Constantinople are gay, yes ; of European 
 
 16
 
 242 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTB. 
 
 gayety, you understand only half na- 
 tional. These are the shops of the people 
 such as you will see through the East. 
 But there are other establishments of richer 
 merchants, to which the wise go. I will 
 take you to one. It is not far." 
 
 Before quitting the mart, I entered into 
 a slight mercantile transaction with the' 
 fruiterer, which resulted in filling both my 
 pockets to the top with copper coins the 
 surprising change due me out of a two- 
 franc piece. These coins are worth about a 
 dollar a bushel. The five-pointed star, or 
 Solomon's ring, stamped on one side, is sup- 
 posed to be a talisman against the evil eye ; 
 but it can scarcely reconcile the Moors to 
 the fact that the government pays its debts 
 in this wretched currency, called flu, and 
 will receive nothing for imposts and taxes 
 but silver or gold. I was glad, later on, to 
 deposit that copper with a necromancer in 
 the Soc-de-Barra, to see what he could do 
 with it.
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 243 
 
 The shop of one of the richer merchants 
 to which the wise go, and where the Hadji 
 incontinently took me, was located on the 
 second floor of a private house in an adja- 
 cent side street. As it was the sole house 
 that was likely to show me its penetralia, 
 I noted that it had a square court in the 
 centre open to the sky, and that all the 
 apartments in the second story gave upon a 
 gallery overlooking this court-yard. Here 
 were three large rooms packed from floor 
 to cornice with a little of everything on 
 earth arms, jewelry, costumes, bronzes, 
 Moorish faience, sandal-wood boxes, amber 
 beads, old brass lamps (for which any 
 Aladdin would have been glad to exchange 
 new ones), and bale upon bale of silks and 
 fairy textures from looms of Samarcand 
 and Bokhara. Here, also, was a merchant 
 who pulled a face as smooth as a mirror 
 while he demanded four times the value of 
 his merchandise. Nevertheless, I purchased, 
 on reasonable enough terms, a chiselled
 
 244 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 brass cresset and an ancient Moorish scent- 
 bottle in silver. But the possession of these 
 did not console me for all the tantalizing 
 drapery and golden bric-a-brac I was un- 
 able to purchase. 
 
 " Not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more 
 Than to walk all day like the Sultan of old in a garden of 
 spice." 
 
 The truly wise would n't go to the shop of 
 Selam-Ben-Rhaman ! 
 
 Passing out into the open air again, we 
 threaded several tortuous lanes, which 
 clearly had not been visited by a scaven- 
 ger's cart within the present century, and 
 struck the main street at a point near the 
 double gates leading to the Soc-de-Barra. 
 Speaking of carts, there is not one of any 
 description in Tangier. If the pedestrian 
 gets himself run over there, it must be by 
 a donkey pure and simple. 
 
 A dozen steps brought us outside the 
 turreted wall of the town to the foot of the 
 hill called Soc-de-Barra, upon a slope of
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 245 
 
 which was the market-place a barren 
 stretch of sun-scorched earth, broken here 
 and there by dunes of reddish-gray sand. 
 In the middle foreground was the caved-in 
 mausoleum of some forgotten saint, and on 
 the ridge of the slope an old cemetery, so 
 dreary with its few hopeless fig-trees and 
 aloes that it made the heart ache to look at 
 it. Nothing ever gave me such a poignant 
 sense of death and dusty oblivion as those 
 crumbling tombs overshadowing the clam- 
 orous and turbulent life on the hill-side. 
 
 At first the spectacle was bewildering, 
 and it was only by concentrating my atten- 
 tion on detached groups and figures that I 
 was able to form any distinct impression of 
 it. One's eyes were dazzled by the innu- 
 merable purple caftans and red fezes and 
 snowy turbans, mingling and separating, 
 and melting every instant into some gro- 
 tesque and harmonious combination, like 
 the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. 
 The usual hurly-burly of a market-day had
 
 246 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTff. 
 
 been added to by the unexpected arrival of 
 a caravan from Fez. 
 
 The unloading of the packs was now go- 
 ing on amid the incessant angry disputes of 
 the Arab porters and occasional remonstra- 
 tive groans from the gaunt camels kneeling 
 in the hot sand. Near by, on a lean horse, 
 sat a Bedouin, with his gun slung over the 
 pommel. He was dirty and ragged, but 
 his crimson saddle-cloth was worked with 
 gold braid, and metal ornaments dangled 
 from his bridle. Bending a trifle forward 
 in the saddle, the son of the desert seemed 
 to be intently observing the porters, but in 
 reality he was half listening to an elderly 
 Arab who sat on the ground a few paces 
 distant, surrounded by a wholly absorbed 
 circle of listeners. It was curious to watch 
 their mobile faces reflecting, like so many 
 mirrors, the various changes in the expres- 
 sion of the speaker. He was telling a story 
 a story that required much pressing of 
 the hand against the heart and many swift
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 247 
 
 transitions from joy to despair, and finally 
 involved a pantomime of a person on horse- 
 back carrying off somebody. A love-story ! 
 Perhaps one of Scheherezade's. The spirit, 
 though not the letter, of it reached me. I 
 noticed, with proper professional pride, that 
 neither the mountebank near the saint's 
 tomb, nor the snake-charmer farther up the 
 slope, had so large an audience as the story- 
 teller. 
 
 The snake -tamer, however, honestly 
 earned his hire by letting an ugly cobra de 
 capello draw blood from his cheek to the 
 slow music of a reed pipe and a tambourine 
 played by a couple of assistants. After 
 wondering at the man, I began to wonder 
 at the serpent for biting so hideous an ob- 
 ject. Only less hideous was his neighbor, 
 the necromancer, who did some really 
 clever feats of fire-eating, and became the 
 recipient at my hands of about two pounds 
 of copper flu. The gratuity seemed to have 
 the effect of putting an end to his perform-
 
 248 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 ance, for lie abruptly disappeared after this 
 accession of wealth. 
 
 Both these men, as well as the several 
 mendacious "saints" who were collecting 
 tribute of the crowd, belonged to that fa- 
 natical sect known as the Aissawa, whose 
 periodic incursions in force into Tangier 
 must be more picturesque than agreeable, 
 if the Hadji gave me a true account of 
 them. His description did not materially 
 differ from that which I find in an admira- 
 ble work on Morocco by Edmondo de Ami- 
 cis, from which I quote : " The Aissawa 
 are one of the principal religious confra- 
 ternities of Morocco, founded, like the oth- 
 ers, under the inspiration of God, by a 
 saint called Sidi-Mohammed-ben-Aissa, born 
 at Mekinez two centuries ago. . . . They 
 have a great mosque at Fez, which is the 
 central house of the order, and from thence 
 they spread themselves every year over the 
 provinces of the empire, gathering together 
 as they go those members of the brother-
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 249 
 
 hood who are in towns and villages. Their 
 rites, similar to those of the howling and 
 whirling dervishes of the East, consist in a 
 species of frantic dances, interspersed with 
 leaps, yells, and contortions, in the prac- 
 tice of which they grow ever more furious 
 and ferocious, until, losing the light of rea- 
 son, they crush wood and iron with their 
 teeth, burn their flesh with glowing coals, 
 wound themselves with knives, swallow 
 mud and stones, brain animals and devour 
 them alive and dripping with blood, and 
 finally fall to the ground insensible." 
 
 If I had chosen my day in Africa a week 
 earlier, I should have witnessed one of 
 those edifying festivals ; but I missed that, 
 as well as the fete of the birth of Moham- 
 med, on which occasion the Soc-de-Barra is 
 a very gay spot. At all times, I fancy, it 
 is little more than a barbaric play-ground. 
 
 So far as I could observe, its special 
 claims as a market were sustained this day 
 only by four or five isolated clusters of aged
 
 250 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 crones, who squatted under striped awnings, 
 and sold bread, pottery, and a kind of grain 
 called durra, which forms the staple food 
 of the lower classes. I have seen few speci- 
 mens of Tangier pottery in collections. It 
 is very rude, and utterly wanting in most 
 of the qualities usually prized ; but its bril- 
 liant glaze and the barbaric fancy of some 
 of its designs entitle it to consideration. I 
 am speaking of the ware used by the com- 
 mon people. The only lively trade I saw 
 carried on in the market was done in those 
 gaudily tinted jars and vases. 
 
 The majority of the crowd seemed to 
 have no purpose whatever beyond wander- 
 ing from point to point and indulging in 
 as many gesticulations as possible. Now 
 and then a mysterious hush fell upon the 
 throng, a breathless silence broken an 
 instant afterward by universal chatter. 
 Neither the sudden silence nor the sudden 
 clamor explained itself. Underlying it all 
 was a profound melancholy. Here, three
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 251 
 
 or four half-grown Soudan negroes lay on 
 their backs, blinking at the sky ; there, a 
 squad of venerable Rifans leaned apathet- 
 ically against a whitewashed wall in the 
 strong sunshine meagre, dry old men, 
 looking like mummies, that had warmed 
 into a semblance of life, and had partially 
 thrown aside their cerements. The mo- 
 ment a person ceased speaking and moving, 
 he became a statue of weariness. It was a 
 relief to watch a score or two of comical 
 little Arab boys the exact pattern of 
 Tanagra figurines darting in and out 
 among the confusion of legs, and making 
 up impertinent faces under their peaked 
 hoods, as some irate by-stander from time 
 to time gave one of them an impromptu 
 taste of a lance-handle. 
 
 Suddenly I caught a glimpse of my fel- 
 low-voyager the Dutch artist, with his easel 
 planted in a shadow of the wrinkled wall, 
 sketching away like mad. I envied him, 
 for to a painter this Soc-de-Barra should be
 
 252 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 a mine of wealth. Indeed, all Tangier is 
 that. Fortuny and Henri Regnault have 
 taught us how rich it is. The latter, after 
 receiving the Prix de Rome, resided a long 
 time in Tangier. It was here he painted 
 his magnificent " Execution sans Jugement 
 sous les Rois maures de Grenade " ; and it 
 was from his Arabian dreams in the old 
 Moorish town that he awoke at the fall of 
 Sedan, and hurried to give his life, as free- 
 ly as he had given his genius, to France. 
 Regnault met his death, futilely, in almost 
 the last engagement of the war if it is 
 futile to be a hero. 
 
 He was still in my thought as I turned 
 back to the city gate, for my next excur- 
 sion was to the hill of the Kasba a spot 
 associated with his memory. The treasury 
 building in the Kasba furnished him with 
 the background of his " Sortie du Pacha " 
 one of Regnault's masterpieces. 
 
 Without this fact the citadel itself would 
 poorly have rewarded me for the hot climb
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 253 
 
 up the hill-side. The governor, or bashaw, 
 has his residence in the castle, which is 
 garrisoned. I believe there was a horrible 
 prison hidden somewhere in its depths, but 
 I did not attempt to visit it. Doubtless 
 the stucco-work of the innumerable apart- 
 ments I looked into was once as gorgeous 
 with gold-leaf and pigment as the mezquita 
 at Cordova, or the Hall of the Abencer- 
 rages in the Alharnbra ; but nothing of the 
 past richness remained. Here and there 
 on a moulding or at the base of a column a 
 line in Cufic characters or an embossed sen- 
 tence from the Koran tamely wriggled out 
 from the whitewash. That was all. The 
 sacrilegious brush of man had done as much 
 damage there as the hand of time. 
 
 The architecture did not pay me for my 
 pains, but I was amply paid by being al- 
 lowed to assist at a Moorish court of jus- 
 tice, upon which the Hadji and I stumbled 
 by chance. The judge, or cadi I am not 
 positive as to the cadiship was seated on
 
 254 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 a Persian rug in the middle of a room small 
 enough and gloomy enough to be a cell. 
 Behind him was ranged a row of barefooted 
 soldiers ; in front of him stood plaintiff and 
 defendant, alike abject. Each in turn de- 
 livered himself of a long speech containing 
 frequent allusions to Allah, and relapsed 
 into silence. When the pair had finished, 
 the flabby judge sat awhile, ruminative, 
 with his chin buried in his beard ; then he 
 lifted his face and pronounced sentence. 
 Without more ado, one of the men the 
 plaintiff, likely enough was hauled into 
 the court-yard, just outside, and prepara- 
 tions were making to give him a dozen 
 lashes with a cat-o'- nine -tails, when we 
 hastened our departure. I expected noth- 
 ing but to see his head snipped off before 
 we could get out of the place. A vision of 
 that splash of blood on the white marble 
 stairs in Regnault's picture danced in front 
 of iny eyes. 
 
 The Hadji laughingly remarked that the
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 255 
 
 fellow had met with no more than his de- 
 serts. The laws of Morocco are extremely 
 severe ; it is seldom that either the guilty 
 or the innocent escape. The penalty for 
 petty larceny is so rigorous that the offense 
 is comparatively unknown, except in the 
 interior, where robbery and murder are rec- 
 ognized professions. The nomads and the 
 people of the duars live by plundering car- 
 avans and straggling travellers. But at 
 Tangier, under the flags of the legations, a 
 stranger's life and property are more secure 
 than in one of our American cities. In a 
 community where a man loses his right 
 hand if he helps himself to somebody else's 
 hen, the love of poultry, for example, be- 
 comes discreet and chastened. The door of 
 my bedroom at the hotel had no fastening 
 on it, and needed none. 
 
 It was now three o'clock, and time for 
 me to return to the inn. My twenty-four 
 hours of Africa were drawing to a close. 
 The little steamer that was to take me
 
 256 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 back to Gibraltar, immediately after an 
 early dinner, was already spreading some 
 coquettish sooty curls over her smoke-stack. 
 Before descending to level ground, and 
 plunging once more into the intricacies of 
 the lower town, I lingered a few minutes 
 on the heights of the Kasba to take a fare- 
 well look. 
 
 It is a very ancient city, the oldest city 
 but one in the world. The Moors of Spain 
 in the time of Aboo-Abdallah made pilgrim- 
 ages to it on account of its antiquity. The 
 cloth-merchants, and the swarthy money- 
 changers, and the shrill water-carriers were 
 plying their trade, and all the indolent, fe- 
 verish life we witness to-day was seething, 
 in these narrow streets when Christ was a 
 little child in Nazareth. 
 
 Founded in some unknown period, by 
 the Carthaginians it is supposed, Tangier 
 the Tingis of the Romans has always 
 been a bone of bloody contention among
 
 A DAY IN AFRICA. 257 
 
 the nations. In the reign of Claudius it 
 became the capital of the province Mauri- 
 tania Tingitana, and was an important city. 
 Wrested from the Romans, it passed suc- 
 cessively under the rule of the Vandals, 
 Greeks, Saracens, and Arabs. In 1471, 
 Tangier fell into the possession of the Por- 
 tuguese, who, in 1662, ceded it to England 
 as a portion of the dower of the Infanta 
 Catherine of Braganza, queen of Charles 
 II. The English, finding that the occupa- 
 tion was not worth the cost, abandoned the 
 place in 1684, after demolishing the mole. 
 Here a quaint and incongruous figure ap- 
 pears for an instant on the scene the fig- 
 ure of Mr. Samuel Pepys. I think it was 
 a conception of high humor on the part of 
 Charles II. to send Mr. Pepys among the 
 Moors, for it was by the king's order 
 that he accompanied Lord Dartmouth with 
 the fleet dispatched to destroy the sea-wall. 
 This precautionary piece of engineering left 
 the bay of Tangier in such plight as to ren- 
 17
 
 258 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 der the town impossible of approach by 
 large vessels, except in the rarest weather. 
 The ruins of the old mole are still visible 
 at low tide, ragged, honeycombed blocks 
 of masonry, looking, when seen through the 
 transparent emerald of the Mediterranean, 
 like ledges of silver. 
 
 The water in the harbor is so shallow 
 that until the present emperor projected a 
 landing for small boats, the visitor arriving 
 there by sea was forced to go ashore on the 
 back of a native. This has been the em- 
 peror's sole concession to the spirit of mod- 
 ern progress. During the last hundred 
 years But my strong interest in the his- 
 toric part of Tangier ends with Mr. Pepys. 
 
 From any point of view the hoary little 
 town is vastly interesting : the remoteness 
 and obscurity of its origin, the sieges, pesti- 
 lences, and massacres it has undergone, and 
 the tenacity with which it clings to prim- 
 itive customs and beliefs, are so many 
 charms. To walk its streets is to breathe
 
 A DAT IN AFRICA. 259 
 
 the air of Scriptural times. There, to-day, 
 fishermen costumed like Peter are dragging 
 their nets on the sandy shingle outside the 
 gates ; at the fountain stands Rebekah 
 with her water-jar poised on her head, and 
 a hand's-breadth of brown bosom lying bare 
 between the green and yellow folds of her 
 robe. To-day, as eighteen hundred years 
 ago, a pallid, hook-nosed man shuffles by 
 counting some coins in his palm the veri- 
 table thirty pieces of silver, perhaps. If it 
 be not Judas Iscariot himself, then it is a 
 descendant, and a striking family likeness. 
 In brief, Tangier is a colossal piece of bric- 
 a-brac which one would like to own. 
 
 A countryman of ours, a New Yorker if 
 I remember, once proposed to purchase 
 Shakespeare's house at Stratford, and trans- 
 port it bodily to Central Park. I had a 
 like impulse touching Tangier. Perhaps I 
 may be permitted to say that in a certain 
 sense I have brought it home with me, and 
 set it up on the edge of Ponkapog Pond.
 
 IX. 
 ON GETTING BACK AGAIN.
 
 IX. 
 ON GETTING BACK AGAIN. 
 
 THIS page will be wafted possibly through 
 a snow-storm to the reader's hand; but it is 
 written while a few red leaves are still 
 clinging to the maple bough, and the last 
 steamer of the year from across the ocean 
 has not yet discharged on our shores the 
 final cargo of returning summer tourists. 
 How glad they will be, like those who 
 came over hi previous ships, to sight that 
 phantomish, white strip of Yankee land 
 called Sandy Hook ! It is thinking of them 
 that I write. 
 
 Some one that anonymous person who 
 is always saying the wisest and most de- 
 lightful things just as you are on the point 
 of saying them yourself has remarked 
 that one of the greatest pleasures of foreign
 
 264 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 travel is to get home again. But no one 
 that irresponsible person forever to blame 
 in railway accidents, but whom, on the 
 whole, I vastly prefer to his garrulous rela- 
 tive quoted above no one, I repeat, has 
 pointed out the composite nature of this 
 pleasure, or named the ingredient in it 
 which gives the chief charm to this getting 
 back. It is pleasant to feel the pressure of 
 friendly hands once more ; it is pleasant to 
 pick up the threads of occupation which 
 you dropped abruptly, or perhaps neatly 
 knotted together and carefully laid away, 
 just before you stepped on board the steam- 
 er; it is very pleasant, when the summer 
 experience has been softened and subli- 
 mated by time, to sit of a winter night by 
 the cheery wood fire, or even at the regis- 
 ter, since one must make one's self comfort- 
 able in so humiliating a fashion, and let 
 your fancy wander back in the old foot- 
 prints ; to form your thoughts into happy 
 summer pilgrims, and dispatch them to
 
 ON GETTING BACK AGAIN. 265 
 
 Aries or Nuremberg, or up the vine-clad 
 heights of Monte Cassino, or embark them 
 at Vienna for a cruise down the swift Dan- 
 ube to Buda-Pesth. But in none of these 
 things lies the subtile charm I wish to indi- 
 cate. It lies in the refreshing, short-lived 
 pleasure of being able to look at your own 
 land with the eyes of an alien ; to see nov- 
 elty blossoming on the most commonplace 
 and familiar stems ; to have the old man- 
 ner and the threadbare old custom present 
 themselves to you as absolutely new or 
 if not new, at least strange. After you 
 have escaped from the claws of the custom- 
 house officers who are not nearly as af- 
 fable birds as you once thought them 
 and are rattling in an oddly familiar hack 
 through well-known but half-unrecogniza- 
 ble streets, you are struck by something 
 comical in the names on the shop signs, 
 are American names comical, as English- 
 men seem to think ? by the strange fash- 
 ion of the iron lamp-post at the corner, by
 
 266 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 
 
 peculiarities in the architecture, which you 
 ought to have noticed, but never did notice 
 until now. The candid incivility of the 
 coachman, who does not touch his hat to 
 you, but swears at you, has the vague 
 charm of reminiscence. You regard him as 
 the guests regarded the poor relation at 
 table, in Lamb's essay; you have an im- 
 pression that you have seen him somewhere 
 before. The truth is, for the first time in 
 your existence, you have a full, unpreju- 
 diced look at the shell of the civilization 
 from which you emerged when you went 
 abroad. Is it a pretty shell ? Is it a satis- 
 factory shell ? Not entirely. It has strange 
 excrescences and blotches on it. But it is 
 a shell worth examining ; it is the best you 
 can ever have ; and it is expedient to study 
 it very carefully the two or three weeks im- 
 mediately following your return to it, for 
 your privilege of doing so is of the briefest 
 tenure. Some precious things you do not 
 lose, but your newly acquired vision fails
 
 ON GETTING BACK AGAIN. 267 
 
 you shortly. Suddenly, while you are com- 
 paring, valuing, and criticising, the old 
 scales fall over your eyes, you insensibly 
 slip back into the well-worn grooves, and 
 behold all outward and most inward things 
 in nearly the same light as your untra veiled 
 neighbor, who has never known 
 
 " The glory that was Greece 
 
 And the grandeur that was Rome." 
 
 You will have to go abroad again to renew 
 those magical spectacles which enabled you 
 for a few weeks to see your native land.