“I expect you had to pay,” said poppa.

“You’re so impatient.  I looked coldly on, and between the different coloured acts I made a calculation of the amount the hotel opposite was losing by its extortion.  I took considerable satisfaction in doing it.  You can get excited over a little thing like that just as much as if it were the entire Monroe Doctrine; and I couldn’t sleep, hardly, that night for thinking of the things I’d say to the hotel clerk if the illumination item decorated the bill next day.  Cut myself shaving in the morning over it—­thing I never do.  Well, there it was—­’Illumination de la chute de la Rhin,’ same old French story, a franc apiece.”

“I thought, somehow, from what you’ve been saying, that it would be there,” remarked the Senator patiently.

“Well, sir, I tried to control myself, but I guess the clerk would tell you I was pretty wild.  There wasn’t an argument I didn’t use.  I threw as many lights on the situation as they did on the Falls.  I asked him how it would be if a person preferred his Falls plain?  I told him I paid him board and lodging for what Schaffhausen could show me, not for what I could show Schaffhausen.  I used the words ‘pillage,’ ‘outrage,’ and other unmistakable terms, and I spoke of communicating the matter to the American Consul at Berne.”

“And after that?” inquired the Senator.

“Oh, it wasn’t any use.  After that I paid, and moved.  Moved right up here, this morning.  But I thought about it a good deal on the way, and concluded that, if I wasn’t prepared to sample every hotel within ten miles of this cataract for the sake of not being imposed upon, I’d have to take up a different attitude.  So I walked up to the manager the minute we arrived, fierce as an Englishman—­beg your pardon, Squire Mafferton, but the British have a ferocious way with hotel managers, as a rule.  I didn’t mean anything personal—­and said to him exactly as if it was my hotel, and he was merely stopping in it, ‘Sir,’ I said, ’I understand that the guests of this hotel are allowed to subscribe to an electric illumination of the Falls of the Rhine.  You may put me down for ten francs.  Now I’m prepared, for the first time, to appreciate the evening’s entertainment.”

Shortly after the recital of Mr. Malt’s experiences the illumination began, and we realised what it was to drink coffee in fairyland.  Poppa advises me, however, to attempt no description of the Falls of Schaffhausen by any light, because “there,” he says, “you will come into competition with Ruskin.”  The Senator is perfectly satisfied with Ruskin’s description of the Falls; he says he doesn’t believe much could be added to it.  Though he himself was somewhat depressed by them, he found that he liked them so much better than Niagara.  I heard him myself tell five different Alpine climbers, in precise figures, how much more water went over our own cataract.

It was discovered that evening that Mr. and Mrs. Malt, and Emmeline, and Miss Callis and the Count were going on to Heidelberg and down the Rhine by precisely the same train and steamer that we had ourselves selected.  Mrs. Malt was looking forward to the ruins on the embattled Rhine with all the enthusiasm we had expended upon Venice, but Mr. Malt declared himself so full of the picturesque already that he didn’t know how he was going to hold another castle.