the wife
announced that she would like of all things to see America, but--she did
not wish to go there with her husband. I suggested that she come with
me--an endeavor to rise to the Rumanian mood which was received with
tolerant urbanity by her husband, and by the lady who looked like
Nazimova with very cheering expressions of assent.

"When you return from Constantinople," she flashed back as they left the
table, "don't forget!"

These were the first Rumanians I had met. They were amiable, they spoke
French--it almost seemed as if they had heard the tales that are usually
told of their little capital, and were trying to play the appropriate
introduction to Bucarest.

Here it is, this little nation, only a trifle larger than the State of
Pennsylvania, a half-Latin island in an ocean of Magyars and Slavs. On
the north is Russia, on the south the grave and stubborn Bulgars (Slav
at any rate in speech), on the west Hungary, and here, between the
Carpathians and the Black Sea, this Frenchified remnant of the empire of
ancient Rome. Their speech when it is not French is full of Latin
echoes, and a Rumanian, however mixed his blood, is as fond of thinking
himself a lineal and literal descendant of the Roman colonists as a New
Englander is of ancestors in the Mayflower. At the Alhambra in Bucarest
next evening, after the cosmopolite artistes had done then-perfunctory
turns and returned to their street clothes and the audience, to begin
the more serious business of the evening, the movie man in the gallery
threw on the screen--no, not some military hero nor the beautiful Queen
whose photograph you will remember, but the head of the Roman Emperor
Trajan! And the listless crowd, drowsing cynically in its tobacco smoke,
broke into obedient applause, just as they would at home at the sight of
the flag or a picture of the President.

Bucarest, like all the capitals of Spanish America, is another "little
Paris," but the Rumanians, possibly because unhampered by sombre Spanish
tradition or perhaps any traditions at all, succeed more completely in
borrowing the vices and escaping the virtues of the great capital they
are supposed to imitate. It would be more to the point to call Bucarest
a little Buenos Aires. There is much the same showiness; a similar
curious mixture of crudeness and luxury. But Buenos Aires is one of the
world's great cities, and always just beyond the asphalt you can somehow
feel the pampa and its endl