ault of Barscheit may be traced back to a certain historical pillar of
salt, easily recalled by all those who attended Sunday-school.
"Rubbering" is a vulgar phrase, and I disdain to use it.

When a woman looks around it is invariably a portent of trouble; the
man forgets his important engagement, and runs amuck, knocking over
people, principles and principalities. If Aspasia had not observed
Pericles that memorable day; if there had not been an oblique slant to
Calypso's eyes as Ulysses passed her way; if the eager Delilah had not
offered favorable comment on Samson's ringlets; in fact, if all the
women in history and romance had gone about their affairs as they
should have done, what uninteresting reading history would be to-day!

Now, this is a story of a woman who looked around, and of a man who did
not keep his appointment on time; out of a grain of sand, a mountain.
Of course there might have been other causes, but with these I'm not
familiar.

This Duchy of Barscheit is worth looking into. Imagine a country with
telegraph and telephone and medieval customs, a country with electric
lights, railways, surface-cars, hotel elevators and ancient laws!
Something of the customs of the duchy must be told in the passing,
though, for my part, I am vigorously against explanatory passages in
stories of action. Barscheit bristled with militarism; the little man
always imitates the big one, but lacks the big man's excuses.
Militarism entered into and overshadowed the civic laws.

There were three things you might do without offense; you might bathe,
eat and sleep, only you must not sleep out loud. The citizen of
Barscheit was hemmed in by a set of laws which had their birth in the
dark dungeons of the Inquisition. They congealed the blood of a man
born and bred in a commercial country. If you broke a law, you were
relentlessly punished; there was no mercy. In America we make laws and
then hide them in dull-looking volumes which the public have neither
the time nor the inclination to read. In this duchy of mine it was
different; you ran into a law on every corner, in every park, in every
public building: little oblong signs, enameled, which told you that you
could _not_ do something or other--"Forbidden!" The beauty of German
laws is that when you learn all the things that you can not do, you
begin to find out that the things you can do are not worth a hang in
the doing.

As soon as a person learned to read he or s