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.