re of a carriage round the island.
"Didn't you know they were Americans?" asks the irate father. "I
knew it at once."
"No," replies young hopeful: "they didn't say GUESS once."
And straightway the fawning-innkeeper returns to us, professing, with
his butter-lips, the greatest admiration of all Americans, and the
intensest anxiety to serve them, and all for pure good-will. The
English are even more bloodthirsty at sight of a travelere than the
Swiss, and twice as obsequious. But to return to our American. He
had all the railway timetables that he could procure; and he was
busily studying them, with the design of "getting on." I heard him
say to his companions, as he ransacked his pockets, that he was a
mass of hotel-bills and timetables. He confided to me afterward,
that his wife and her friend had got it into their heads that they
must go both to Vienna and Berlin. Was Berlin much out of the way in
going from Vienna to Paris? He said they told him it was n't. At
any rate, he must get round at such a date: he had no time to spare.
Then, besides the slowness of getting on, there were the trunks. He
lost a trunk in Switzerland, and consumed a whole day in looking it
up. While the steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout
porters came on board, and shouldered his baggage to take it ashore.
To his remonstrances in English they paid no heed; and it was some
time before they could be made to understand that the trunks were to
go on to Lindau. "There," said he, "I should have lost my trunks.
Nobody understands what I tell them: I can't get any information."
Especially was he unable to get any information as to how to "get
on." I confess that the restless American almost put me into a
fidget, and revived the American desire to "get on," to take the fast
trains, make all the connections,--in short, in the handsome language
of the great West, to "put her through." When I last saw our
traveler, he was getting his luggage through the custom-house, still
undecided whether to push on that night at eleven o'clock. But I
forgot all about him and his hurry when, shortly after, we sat at the
table-d'hote at the hotel, and the sedate Germans lit their cigars,
some of them before they had finished eating, and sat smoking as if
there were plenty of leisure for everything in this world.
A CITY OF COLOR
After a slow ride, of nearly eight hours, in what, in Germany, is
called an express train, through a rain and clouds
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