ant antiquities, he rolled a cigarette and went out
for a smoke; but it came back at him again in Egypt. They were standing
below the chin of an ancient lady commonly called the Sphinx, when an
English traveler turned to young America. "I say," he said; "Yankeedom
beats us all out on this old dame, doesn't it? You've a carved colossus
in your own West a few trifling billion years older than this, haven't
you?" Young America, with a weakness somewhere in his middle, "guessed
they had." Then looking over the old jewels taken from the ruins of
Pompeii, he was asked, "how America was progressing excavating her
ruins;" and he heard for the first time in his life that the finest
crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from his own
home State. The experience gave him something to think about.

The incident is typical of many of the 120,000 people who yearly trek to
Europe for holiday. _We have to go abroad to learn how to come home._ We
go to Europe and find how little we have seen of America. It is when you
are motoring in France that you first find out there is a great "Camino
Real" almost 1,000 miles long, much of it above cloud line, from Wyoming
to Texas. It's some European who has "a shootin' box" out in the Pecos,
who tells you about it. Of course, if you like spending $12,000 a year
for "a shootin' box" in Scotland, that is another matter. There are
various ways of having a good time; but when I go fishing I like to
catch trout and not be a sucker.

Spite of the legend, "Why go to Europe? See America first," we keep on
going to Europe to see America. Why? For a lot of reasons; and most of
them lies.

Some fool once said, and we keep on repeating it--that it costs more to
go West than it does to go to Europe. So it does, if "going West" means
staying at hotels that are weak imitations of the Waldorf and the Plaza,
where you never get a sniff of the real West, nor meet anyone but
traveling Easterners like yourself; but if you strike away from the
beaten trail, you can see the real West, and have your holiday, and go
drunk on the picturesque, and break your neck mountain climbing, and
catch more trout than you can lie about, and kill as much bear meat as
you have courage, at less expense than it will cost you to stay at home.
From Chicago to the backbone of the Rockies will cost you something over
$33 or $50 one way. You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that,
unless you go steerage; and if yo