chow,
Noumea, Sarawak. If you think that commerce, yielding to steel and
steam, has lost all romance, just give an idle day or two to London
docks. The very names upon the street signs are as exotic as a breath of
frankincense. Mango Wharf, Kamchatka Wharf, Havannah Street, the Borneo
Stores, Greenland Dock, Sealers' Yard--on all sides are these
suggestions of adventure beyond the sky-rim, of soft, tropical moons and
cold, arctic stars, of strange peoples, strange tongues and strange
lands. In one Limehouse barroom you will find sailors from Behring
Straits and the China Sea, the Baltic and the River Plate, the Congo and
Labrador, all calling London home, all paying an orang-outang's
devotions to the selfsame London barmaid, all drenched and paralysed by
London beer....

The _kaiserstadt_ of the world, this grim and grey old London! And the
river of rivers, this oily, sluggish, immemorial Thames! At its widest,
I suppose, it might be doubled upon itself and squeezed into the lower
Potomac, and no doubt the Mississippi, even at St. Louis, could swallow
it without rising a foot--but it leads from London Bridge to every coast
and headland of the world! Of all the pathways used by man this is the
longest and the greatest. And not only the greatest, but the loveliest.
Grant the Rhine its castles, the Hudson its hills, the Amazon its
stupendous reaches. Not one of these can match the wonder and splendour
of frail St. Stephen's, wrapped in the mists of a summer night, or the
cool dignity of St. Paul's, crowning its historic mount, or the iron
beauty of the bridges, or the magic of the ancient docks, or the
twinkling lights o' London, sweeping upward to the stars....

PARIS

[Illustration: PARIS]

PARIS

For the American professional seeker after the night romance of Paris,
the French have a phrase which, be it soever inelegant, retains still a
brilliant verity. The phrase is "_une belle poire_." And its Yankee
equivalent is "sucker."

The French, as the world knows, are a kindly, forgiving people; and
though they cast the epithet, they do so in manner tolerant and with
light arpeggio--of Yankee sneer and bitterness containing not a trace.
They cast it as one casts a coin into the hand of some maundering
beggar, with commingled oh-wells and philosophical pity. For in the
Frenchman of the Paris of to-day, though there run not the blood of
Lafayette, and though he detest Americans as he detests the Germans,