ell. "Oh!--Baedeker! And are you
going to let a Black Forest Dutchman like Baedeker persuade you that
this daub is by Kaulbach? Come! That's a little too much!" He rejected
the birthplaces of famous persons one and all; they could not drive
through a street or into a park, whose claims to be this or that street
or park he did not boldly dispute; and he visited a pitiless incredulity
upon the dishes of the _table d'hote_, concerning which he always
answered his wife's questions: "Oh, he _says_ it's beef," or veal, or
fowl, as the case might be; and though he never failed to relish his own
dinner, strange fears began to affect the appetite of Mrs. Kenton. It
happened that he never did come out with these sneers before other
travellers, but his wife was always expecting him to do so, and
afterwards portrayed herself as ready to scream, the whole time. She was
not a nervous person, and regarding the colonel's jokes as part of the
matrimonial contract, she usually bore them, as I have hinted, with
severe composure; accepting them all, good, bad, and indifferent, as
something in the nature of man which she should understand better after
they had been married longer. The present journey was made just after
the close of the war; they had seen very little of each other while he
was in the army, and it had something of the fresh interest of a bridal
tour. But they sojourned only a day or two in the places between
Strasburg and Vienna; it was very cold and very unpleasant getting
about, and they instinctively felt what every wise traveller knows, that
it is folly to be lingering in Germany when you can get into Italy; and
so they hurried on.

It was nine o'clock one night when they reached Salzburg; and when their
baggage had been visited and their passports examined, they had still
half an hour to wait before the train went on. They profited by the
delay to consider what hotel they should stop at in Vienna, and they
advised with their Bradshaw on the point. This railway guide gave in its
laconic fashion several hotels, and specified the Kaiserin Elisabeth as
one at which there was a table d'hote, briefly explaining that at most
hotels in Vienna there was none.

"That settles it," said Mrs. Kenton. "We will go to the Kaiserin
Elisabeth, of course. I'm sure I never want the bother of ordering
dinner in English, let alone German, which never was meant for human
beings to speak."

"It's a language you can't tell the truth in," sai