f adoring the
Friederichsbad and infesting it.

We had a plain, simple, unpretending, good hotel, in Baden-Baden--the
Hotel de France--and alongside my room I had a giggling, cackling,
chattering family who always went to bed just two hours after me and
always got up two hours ahead of me. But this is common in German
hotels; the people generally go to bed long after eleven and get up
long before eight. The partitions convey sound like a drum-head, and
everybody knows it; but no matter, a German family who are all kindness
and consideration in the daytime make apparently no effort to moderate
their noises for your benefit at night. They will sing, laugh, and talk
loudly, and bang furniture around in a most pitiless way. If you knock
on your wall appealingly, they will quiet down and discuss the matter
softly among themselves for a moment--then, like the mice, they fall to
persecuting you again, and as vigorously as before. They keep cruelly
late and early hours, for such noisy folk.

Of course, when one begins to find fault with foreign people's ways, he
is very likely to get a reminder to look nearer home, before he gets far
with it. I open my note-book to see if I can find some more information
of a valuable nature about Baden-Baden, and the first thing I fall upon
is this:

"BADEN-BADEN (no date). Lot of vociferous Americans at breakfast
this morning. Talking AT everybody, while pretending to talk among
themselves. On their first travels, manifestly. Showing off. The usual
signs--airy, easy-going references to grand distances and foreign
places. 'Well GOOD-by, old fellow--if I don't run across you in Italy,
you hunt me up in London before you sail.'"

The next item which I find in my note-book is this one:

"The fact that a band of 6,000 Indians are now murdering our
frontiersmen at their impudent leisure, and that we are only able
to send 1,200 soldiers against them, is utilized here to discourage
emigration to America. The common people think the Indians are in New
Jersey."

This is a new and peculiar argument against keeping our army down to a
ridiculous figure in the matter of numbers. It is rather a striking
one, too. I have not distorted the truth in saying that the facts in
the above item, about the army and the Indians, are made use of to
discourage emigration to America. That the common people should be
rather foggy in their geography, and foggy as to the location of the
Indians, is a matter for am