the brewery fathers. They are drinking more beer in France--even
making a fairly good beer. And then--

But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there is
anything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!

Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my
day and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is
but a moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of
the new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are
no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the
crossing a ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient
tubs which have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading
to the latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers
of any one of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the
appointments of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is
indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the
ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst
they dine, and a sky parlor where they go after dinner for their
coffee and what not; a tea-room for the five-o'clockers; and except in
excessive weather scarcely any motion at all. It is this palm garden
which most appeals to a certain lady of my very intimate acquaintance
who had made many crossings and never gone to her meals--sick from shore
to shore--until the gods ordained for her a watery, winery, flowery
paradise--where the billows ceased from troubling and a woman could
appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times, lodged a
la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and sip her wine with perfect
contentment. Coming ashore from our last crossing a friend found her
in the Red Room of that hostel just as she had been sitting the evening
before on shipboard.

"Seems hardly any motion at all," she said, looking about her and
fancying herself still at sea, as well she might.

Chapter the Eighteenth

The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John
Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny

I

What may be called the Grover Cleveland period of American politics
began with the election of that extraordinary person--another man of
destiny--to the governorship of New York. Nominated, as it were, by
chance, he carried the State by an unprecedented majority. That was not
because of his popularity,