sidewalk; the kiosks for advertising, all thickly plastered over with posters, half of which should have been in an art gallery and the other half in a garbage barrel; a well-dressed pair, kissing in the full glare of a street light; an imitation art student, got up to look like an Apache, and—­no doubt—­plenty of real Apaches got up to look like human beings; a silk-hatted gentleman, stopping with perfect courtesy to help a bloused workman lift a baby-laden baby carriage over an awkward spot in the curbing, and the workingman returning thanks with the same perfect courtesy; our own driver, careening along in a manner suggestive of what certain East Side friends of mine would call the Chariot Race from Ben Hirsch; and a stout lady of the middle class sitting under a cafe awning caressing her pet mole.

To the Belgian belongs the credit of domesticating the formerly ferocious Belgian hare, and the East Indian fakir makes a friend and companion of the king cobra; but it remained for those ingenious people, the Parisians, to tame the mole, which other races have always regarded as unbeautiful and unornamental, and make a cunning little companion of it and spend hours stroking its fleece.  This particular mole belonging to the stout middle-aged lady in question was one of the largest moles and one of the curliest I ever saw.  It was on the side of her nose.

You see a good deal of mole culture going on here.  Later, with the reader’s permission, we shall return to Paris and look its inhabitants over at more length; but for the time being I think it well for us to be on our travels.  In passing I would merely state that on leaving a Paris hotel you will tip everybody on the premises.

Oh, yes—­but you will!

Let us move southward.  Let us go to Sunny Italy, which is called Sunny Italy for the same reason that the laughing hyena is called the laughing hyena—­not because he laughs so frequently, but because he laughs so seldom.  Let us go to Rome, the Eternal City, sitting on her Seven Hills, remembering as we go along that the currency has changed and we no longer compute sums of money in the franc but in the lira.  I regret the latter word is not pronounced as spelled—­it would give me a chance to say that the common coin of Italy is a lira, and that nearly everybody in Rome is one also.

Chapter VII

Thence On and On to Verbotenland

Ah, Rome—­the Roma of the Ancients—­the Mistress of the Olden World—­the Sacred City!  Ah, Rome, if only your stones could speak!  It is customary for the tourist, taking his cue from the guidebooks, to carry on like this, forgetting in his enthusiasm that, even if they did speak, they would doubtless speak Italian, which would leave him practically where he was before.  And so, having said it myself according to formula, I shall proceed to state the actual facts: