risoned with clean linen, talcumed,
exuding Jockey Club, prepared for surgical and psychic shock, his legs
drilled hollow to admit of precious fluids, his pockets bulging with
kronen. He is a lovely, mellow creature, a virtuoso of the domestic
virtues when home, but now, at large in Europe, he craves excitement.
His timid soul is bent on participating in the deviltries for which
Vienna is famous. His blood is thumping through his arteries in
three-four time. His mind is inflamed by such strophes as "_Es giebt nur
a Kaiserstadt; es giebt nur a Wien_" and "_Immer luste, fesch und
munter, und der Wiener geht nit unter_." But he is brought gradually to
the realisation that something is amiss. Can it be that the vice
crusaders have been at work? Have the militant moralists and the
professional women hunters, in their heated yearnings to flay the
transgressor, fallen foul of Vienna?

He expected to find a city which would be one roseate and romantic
revel, given over to joys of the flesh, to wine-drinking and
confetti-throwing, overrun with hussies, gone mad with lascivious
waltzes, reeking with Babylonish amours. He dreamed of Vienna as one
continual debauch, one never-ceasing saturnalia, an eternal tournament
of perfumed hilarities. His lewd dreams of the "gayest city in Europe"
have produced in him a marked hallucinosis with visions of Neronic
orgies, magnificently prodigal--deliriums of chromatic disorder.

But as he walks down the Kaerntnerstrasse, encircles the Ring and stands
with bulging inquisitive eyes on the corner of the Wiedner Hauptstrasse
and Karlsplatz, he wonders what can be the matter. Where, indeed, is
that prodigality of flowers and spangled satin he has heard so much
about? Where are those super-orchestras sweating over the scores of
seductive waltzes? Where the silken ankles and the glittering eyes, the
kisses and the flutes, the beery laughter and the delirious leg shaking?
The excesses of merrymaking are nowhere discoverable. Des Moines, Iowa,
or Camden, New Jersey, would present quite as festive a spectacle, he
thinks, as he gazes up at the sepulchral shadows on the gigantic
Opernhaus before him. He cannot understand the nocturnal solitude of the
streets. There is actual desolation about him. A chlorotic girl, her
cheeks unskilfully painted, brushes up to him with a careless "_Geh
Rudl, gib ma a Spreitzn._" But that might happen in Cleveland, Ohio--and
Cleveland is not framed as a modern Tyre. He is