had telegraphed precisely what you wished to do, and they were merely carrying out your intentions.  “You want to go to the Black Eagle Hotel:  I take you there.  You would like to dine:  you can have dinner at the hotel, or I shall show you a nice restaurant.”  We had not expected to find a member of the great European brotherhood just there in a little town in the heart of Sweden, and, taken unawares, fell an easy prey.  However, they do not invariably succeed in that way:  sometimes, if their officiousness is excessive, their English very exasperating and the 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.