traveler a little fractious as well as
tired, they get the tables turned on them. A lady just arrived
at Genoa, when halfway to the hotel with one of these persuasive
personages snatched her bag out of his hand and walked into the rival
albergo because he said with an aggravating accent, "I sall get you
a ticket for de steam-er." "No you sha'n't, either: I have got
it myself," she said; and so they parted company, to his infinite
amazement. My friend--it was a friend of mine--turned back, on
second thoughts, to offer the man something for having carried her
belongings, but he put on offended dignity and declared that he didn't
want her money. She was rather sorry afterward that he didn't do
violence to his feelings and take it; and so, no doubt, was he.

Our Carlstad commissioner beguiled the length of the way to the
inn, at which we were a little inclined to grumble, by pointing out
everything of note in our walk through the town. We had been reading
up in the train, and knew that Carlstad was the capital of a district,
had five thousand inhabitants, and was nearly destroyed by fire in
1865; but he, a son of the place, and seeing in his mind's eye its
rising glory when the railroad should be completed, did not let us
off with that. We had to look and admire just where he told us. "Wide
streets," he would say in his finely-chopped English. "Houses all very
high--new since the fire. See here! there's the telegraph-office."

At which, to answer in the style he understood best, we must have
responded, "Oh, I say! Well. Very good! All right!"

"You shall go to the theatre if you want to," he remarked at last,
in that sweet, protecting way peculiar to his class from the habitual
confounding of _can, shall_ and _will_, and that put us into good
humor directly. To go to the theatre would be just the thing.

"Oh yes, everybody goes," he said. It was a Danish company--very good
actors--very pretty piece; but we rather expected to care more for the
_everybody_ than either the piece or the actors; and so it proved.

We went early, and established ourselves in the orchestra-stalls, as
already stated, while our guardian accepted an unpretending seat
for himself, where he remained in readiness to tow us home after the
performance. And then the spectators began to come in, and positively
some of the very people who used to be at the panorama. I know there
was a lady in front of me, in Mechanic Hall, who wore her hair in
just such