ces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of
others"; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint
Yankee fashion:
"Now, you've been spoke to!"
He felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform. He
realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of
general sight-seeing. One must be eager, verdant, to write happily the
story of travel. Replying to a letter from Howells on the subject he
said:
I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you
mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he
be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate
hotels, and I hate the opera, and I hate the old masters. In truth
I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to
satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam
at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have
got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to
do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort
would burst me.
Clemens became his own courier for a time in Italy, and would seem to
have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years
afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later
attempt:
"Am a shining success as a courier," he records, "by the use of francs.
Have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with
confidence."
He declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could
have employed one to advantage on the trip out of Italy, for it was a
desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams. When,
after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at last
in Munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter
quarters, at No. 1a, Karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the
home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery.
And the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the
porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! So Livy and
Clara Spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and I retired to a
private place to pray. By and by we all retired to our narrow
German beds, and when Livy and I had finished talking across the
room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then
pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the
|