ing. The crowd, its appetite increasing
by what it had fed on, remained. What next? Ah! The personal servants
and valets of the youthful aristocrat from Berlin emerged from the
station and entered a break. No baggage as yet. "Drat the folk!" I
exclaimed, "why don't they clear out and leave the way for
pedestrians." But it was not to be. A murmur arose when finally a
baggage-wagon decked by the royal colours appeared. Trunks were piled
on it, and only when it disappeared did the crowd melt. I thought of
Gessler's cap on the pole and William Tell. Curiosity is perhaps the
prime root of patriotism.

Finally, as too much Strauss palls, also too much Stuttgart. I first
visited the pretty city in 1896 en route to Bayreuth, and on my return
to New York I remember chiding Victor Herbert for leaving the place
where he had completed his musical education. He merely smiled. He
knew. So do I. A Residenzstadt finally ends in a half-mad desire to
escape; anywhere, anywhere, only let it be a big town where the
inhabitants don't stare at you as if you were a wild animal. Stuttgart
is full of stare-cats (as is Berlin for that matter). And those hills
that at first are so attractive--they hem in the entire city, which is
bowl-shaped, in a valley--become monotonous. They stifle you. To live
up there on the heights is another thing; then the sky is an
accomplice in your optical pleasures, but below--especially when the
days are rainy and the nights doleful, as they are in November--oh,
then you cry: Let me see once more summer-sunlit Holland and its wide
plains punctuated only by church spires and windmills!

Otherwise Stuttgart is an easy-going spot. It's cheaper than Dresden
or Munich (though it was expensive during the Strauss week); the
eating at the restaurants is about one-half the price of first-rate
establishments in New York (and not as good by a long shot); lodgings
are also cheap, and often nasty--Germany is not altogether hygienic,
notwithstanding her superiority over America in matters musical; but
the motor-cars are simply miraculous to the New Yorker accustomed to
the bullies, bandits, and swindlers who pretend to be chauffeurs in
our metropolis. For twenty-five cents you can ride nearly a half-hour
in Stuttgart in cars faultlessly conducted. A two and a half hours'
trip round the town--literally--in the hills, through the park cost
seven marks (one dollar and seventy-five cents)--and even then the
driver was distinctly ap