During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics.  We had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted, after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding, and coffee (hey, there!—­with milk separate).  Now I was to get more of his ideas.  By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at Coketown.

II

“Say,” said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his right shoe, “did you ever read one of these best-sellers?  I mean the kind where the hero is an American swell—­sometimes even from Chicago—­who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling under an alias, and follows her to her father’s kingdom or principality?  I guess you have.  They’re all alike.  Sometimes this going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago wheat-broker worthy fifty millions.  But he’s always ready to break into the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B. and O. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason in the book for their being here.

“Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and finds out who she is.  He meets her on the corso or the strasse one evening and gives us ten pages of conversation.  She reminds him of the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring in three solid pages about America’s uncrowned sovereigns.  If you’d take his remarks and set ’em to music, and then take the music away from ’em, they’d sound exactly like one of George Cohan’s songs.

“Well, you know how it runs on, if you’ve read any of ’em—­he slaps the king’s Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they get in his way.  He’s a great fencer, too.  Now, I’ve known of some Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any fencers coming from there.  He stands on the first landing of the royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors who come to massacre the said king.  And then he has to fight duels with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.

“But the great scene is when his rival for the princess’ hand, Count Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel, armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian bloodhounds.  This scene is what runs the best-seller into the twenty-ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a check for the advance royalties.