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EUROPE REVISED

By Irvin S. Cobb


To My Small Daughter

Who bade me shed a tear at the tomb of Napoleon, which I was very glad
to do, because when I got there my feet certainly were hurting me.




NOTE

The picture on page 81 purporting to show the undersigned leaping head
first into a German feather-bed does the undersigned a cruel injustice.
He has a prettier figure than that--oh, oh, much prettier!

The reader is earnestly entreated not to look at the picture on page 81.
It is the only blot on the McCutcheon of this book.

Respectfully,

The Author.




Chapter I



We Are Going Away From Here

Foreword.--It has always seemed to me that the principal drawback
about the average guidebook is that it is over-freighted with facts.
Guidebooks heretofore have made a specialty of facts--have abounded in
them; facts to be found on every page and in every paragraph. Reading
such a work, you imagine that the besotted author said to himself, "I
will just naturally fill this thing chock-full of facts"--and then went
and did so to the extent of a prolonged debauch.

Now personally I would be the last one in the world to decry facts as
such. In the abstract I have the highest opinion of them. But facts,
as someone has said, are stubborn things; and stubborn things, like
stubborn people, are frequently tiresome. So it occurred to me that
possibly there might be room for a guidebook on foreign travel which
would not have a single indubitable fact concealed anywhere about its
person. I have even dared to hope there might be an actual demand on
the part of the general public for such a guidebook. I shall endeavor to
meet that desire--if it exists.

While we are on the subject I wish to say there is probably not
a statement made by me here or hereafter which cannot readily be
controverted. Communications from parties desiring to controvert this or
that assertion will be considered in the order received. The line
forms on the left and parties will kindly avoid crowding. Triflers and
professional controverters save stamps.

With these few introductory remarks we now proceed to the first subject,
which is The Sea: Its Habits and Peculiarities, and the Quaint Creatures
Found upon Its Bosom.

From the very start of this expedition to Europe I labored under a
misapprehension. Everybody told me that as soon as I had got my sea
legs I would begin to love the sea with a vast and passionate love. As a
matter of fact I experienced no trouble whatever in getting my sea legs.
They were my regular legs, the same ones I use on land. It was my sea
stomach that caused all the bother. First I was afraid I should not
get it, and that worried me no little. Then I got it and was regretful.
However, that detail will come up later in a more suitable place. I am
concerned now with the departure.

Somewhere forward a bugle blares; somewhere rearward a bell jangles. On
the deck overhead is a scurry of feet. In the mysterious bowels of the
ship a mighty mechanism opens its metal mouth and speaks out briskly.
Later it will talk on steadily, with a measured and a regular voice;
but now it is heard frequently, yet intermittently, like the click of
a blind man's cane. Beneath your feet the ship, which has seemed until
this moment as solid as a rock, stirs the least little bit, as though it
had waked up. And now a shiver runs all through it and you are reminded
of that passage from Pygmalion and Galatea where Pygmalion says with
such feeling:

She starts; she moves; she seems to feel the thrill of life along her
keel.

You are under way. You are finally committed to the great adventure. The
necessary good-bys have already been said. Those who in the goodness of
their hearts came to see you off have departed for shore, leaving sundry
suitable and unsuitable gifts behind. You have examined your stateroom,
with its hot and cold decorations, its running stewardess, its all-night
throb service, and its windows overlooking the Hudson--a stateroom
that seemed so large and commodious until you put one small submissive
steamer trunk and two scared valises in it. You are tired, and yon white
bed, with the high mudguards on it, looks mighty good to you; but you
feel that you must go on deck to wave a fond farewell to the land you
love and the friends you are leaving behind.

You fight your way to the open through companionways full of frenzied
persons who are apparently trying to travel in every direction at once.
On the deck the illusion persists that it is the dock that is moving and
the ship that is standing still. All about you your fellow passengers
crowd the rails, waving and shouting messages to the people on the dock;
the people on the dock wave back and shout answers. About every other
person is begging somebody to tell auntie to be sure to write. You
gather that auntie will be expected to write weekly, if not oftener.

As the slice of dark water between boat and dock widens, those who are
left behind begin running toward the pierhead in such numbers that each
wide, bright-lit door-opening in turn suggests a flittering section of
a moving-picture film. The only perfectly calm person in sight is a
gorgeous, gold-laced creature standing on the outermost gunwale of the
dock, wearing the kind of uniform that a rear admiral of the Swiss navy
would wear--if the Swiss had any navy--and holding a speaking trumpet
in his hand. This person is not excited, for he sends
thirty-odd-thousand-ton ships off to Europe at frequent intervals, and
so he is impressively and importantly blase about it; but everybody else
is excited. You find yourself rather that way. You wave at persons you
know and then at persons you do not know.

You continue to wave until the man alongside you, who has spent years
of his life learning to imitate a siren whistle with his face, suddenly
twines his hands about his mouth and lets go a terrific blast right in
your ear. Something seems to warn you that you are not going to care for
this man.

The pier, ceasing to be a long, outstretched finger, seems to fold back
into itself, knuckle-fashion, and presently is but a part of the oddly
foreshortened shoreline, distinguishable only by the black dot of
watchers clustered under a battery of lights, like a swarm of hiving
bees. Out in midstream the tugs, which have been convoying the ship, let
go of her and scuttle off, one in this direction and one in that, like a
brace of teal ducks getting out of a walrus' way.

Almost imperceptibly her nose straightens down the river and soon on
the starboard quarter--how quickly one picks up these nautical
terms!--looming through the harbor mists, you behold the statue of Miss
Liberty, in her popular specialty of enlightening the world. So you go
below and turn in. Anyway, that is what I did; for certain of the larger
