His English Box Coat Doesn't
Fit Him Any Better Than Any Other Box Would.
His French waistcoats develop an unexpected garishness on being
displayed away from their native habitat and the writing outfit
which he picked up in Vienna turns out to be faulty and treacherous
and inkily tearful.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to
have a fountain pen - that weeps! And why, when a fountain pen makes
up its mind to cry a spell, does it crawl clear across a steamer
trunk and bury its sobbing countenance in the bosom of a dress
shirt?
Likewise the first few days at sea provide opportunity for sorting
out the large and variegated crop of impressions a fellow has been
acquiring during all these crowded months. The way the homeward-bound
one feels now, he would swap any Old Master he ever saw for one
peep at a set of sanitary bath fixtures. Sight unseen, he stands
ready to trade two cathedrals and a royal palace for a union depot.
He will never forget the thrill that shook his soul as he paused
beneath the dome of the Pantheon; but he feels that, not only his
soul but all the rest of him, could rally and be mighty cheerful
in the presence of a dozen deep-sea oysters on the half shell
- regular honest-to-goodness North American oysters, so beautifully
long, so gracefully pendulous of shape that the short-waisted
person who undertakes to swallow one whole does so at his own peril.
The picture of the Coliseum bathed in the Italian moonlight will
ever abide in his mind; but he would give a good deal for a large
double sirloin suffocated Samuel J. Tilden style, with fried onions.
Beefsteak! Ah, what sweet images come thronging at the very mention
of the word! The sea vanishes magically and before his entranced
vision he sees The One Town, full of regular fellows and real
people. Somebody is going to have fried ham for supper - five
thousand miles away he sniffs the delectable perfume of that fried
ham as it seeps through a crack in the kitchen window and wafts
out into the street - and the word passes round that there is going
to be a social session down at the lodge to-night, followed, mayhap,
by a small sociable game of quarter-limit upstairs over Corbett's
drug-store. At this point, our traveler rummages his Elks' button
out of his trunk and gives it an affectionate polishing with a
silk handkerchief. And oh, how he does long for a look at a home
newspaper - packed with wrecks and police news and municipal
scandals and items about the persons one knows, and chatty mention
concerning Congressmen and gunmen and tango teachers and other
public characters.
Thinking it all over here in the quiet and privacy of the empty
sea, he realizes that his evening paper is the thing he has missed
most. To the American understanding foreign papers seem fearfully
and wonderfully made.
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