As we passed out into the damp
Viennese midnight he was loudly proclaiming that he "Was'h Bri'sh
subjesch," and that unless something was done mighty quick, would
complain to "Is Majeshy's rep(hic)shenativ' ver' firsch thing 'n
morn'."
So though I was sorry he was a cousin, I was selfishly and unfeignedly
glad that he was not a brother. Since in the mysterious and
unfathomable scheme of creation it seemed necessary that he should
be born somewhere, still he had not been born in America, and that
thought was very pleasing to me.
There was another variety of the tourist breed whose trail I most
earnestly desired to cross. I refer to the creature who must be
closely watched to prevent him, or her, from carrying off valuable
relics as souvenirs, and defacing monuments and statues and
disfiguring holy places with an inconsequential signature. In the
flesh - and such a person must be all flesh and no soul - I never
caught up with him, but more than once I came upon his fresh spoor.
In Venice our guide took us to see the nether prisons of the Palace
of the Doges. From the level of the Bridge of Sighs we tramped
down flights of stone stairs, one flight after another, until we
had passed the hole through which the bodies of state prisoners,
secretly killed at night, were shoved out into waiting gondolas
and had passed also the room where pincers and thumbscrew once did
their hideous work, until we came to a cellar of innermost,
deepermost cells, fashioned out of the solid rock and stretching
along a corridor that was almost as dark as the cells themselves.
Here, so we were told, countless wretched beings, awaiting the
tardy pleasure of the torturer or the headsman, had moldered in
damp and filth and pitchy blackness, knowing day from night only
by the fact that once in twenty-four hours food would be slipped
through a hole in the wall by unseen hands; lying here until
oftentimes death or the cruel mercy of madness came upon them
before the overworked executioner found time to rack their limbs
or lop off their heads.
