fine Vienna
shops exposing elegant craftsmanship of many kinds. Here you can buy
rich glass, leather-work, enamelled silver, worked ivory, lace,
beautiful bindings, fans, house-ornaments of every conceivable kind in
ultra-perfect taste. All that is for sale suggests a luxurious way of
life--aristocratic and cultured existence, and certainly not the showy
splendour of the parvenu. You will hear it said in other parts of
Europe you have still to go to Vienna to buy certain things. As long
as the skilled craftsmen and clever workers of many kinds remain, these
objects of luxury will be for sale. Besides these, there are, of
course, many more ordinary things for which Vienna is noted--velour
hats, bronze shoes, and the rest. These, reckoned at world-price
figures, are sold at one-third of their value. But there is little
market for them.

The next most characteristic things of the city must be the thousands
of cafes, where you sit at your coffee surrounded by animated crowds of
men reading papers, discussing politics and business, the whole press
of Europe at their disposal. Your waiter brings your coffee and
automatically at the same time the "Daily Telegraph," or "Figaro," or
the "Chicago Tribune," or the "Berliner Tageblatt," or "Obshy Delo,"
according to your accent and appearance. Time seems to cease to have
real value in a cafe; it is easy to spend hours over one cup of coffee
and the newspapers--the difficulty is at last to pay and go.

The restaurants also are full. Though the bread is of rye the meat and
potatoes are of the usual quality. Waiters give you white bread
surreptitiously. Your hand is below the level of the table and
suddenly you find that it is holding a soft roll of white bread. For
this you will not be charged in your bill, as it is illegal to sell it
you. You pay the waiter when he helps you on with your coat. You can
get milk and butter and sugar in this way if you are ready to forget
that someone's children may have to do without somewhere in Vienna.

There is an extraordinary diversity of styles and prices at
restaurants. A lunch for yourself and three friends will cost three to
four thousand crowns at the "Bristol," but the same lunch round the
corner goes for five hundred. Going in with a certain M---- to a
fashionable restaurant, one could see that the waiters knew him
perfectly well, and the head waiter was most affable. But he averred
as he looked round the restaurant th