“Go to Switzerland?” asked Whitwell.

“I slipped over into the edge of it.”

“I want to know!  Well, now them Alps, now—­they so much bigger ’n the White Hills, after all?”

“Well, I don’t know about all of ’em,” said Jeff.  “There may be some that would compare with our hills, but I should say that you could take Mount Washington up and set it in the lap of almost any one of the Alps I saw, and it would look like a baby on its mother’s knee.”

“I want to know!” said Whitwell again.  His tone expressed disappointment, but impartiality; he would do justice to foreign superiority if he must.  “And about the ocean.  What about waves runnin? mountains high?”

“Well, we didn’t have it very rough.  But I don’t believe I saw any waves much higher than Lion’s Head.”  Jeff laughed to find Whitwell taking him seriously.  “Won’t that satisfy you?”

“Oh, it satisfies me.  Truth always does.  But, now, about London.  You didn’t seem to say so much about London in your letters, now.  Is it so big as they let on?  Big—­that is, to the naked eye, as you may say?”

“There a’n’t any one place where you can get a complete bird’s-eye view of it,” said Jeff, “and two-thirds of it would be hid in smoke, anyway.  You’ve got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more than a comfortable meal.”

Whitwell laughed for joy in the bold figure.

“I’ll tell you.  When you’ve landed and crossed up from Liverpool, and struck London, you feel as if you’d gone to sea again.  It’s an ocean—­a whole Atlantic of houses.”

“That’s right!” crowed Whitwell.  “That’s the way I thought it was.  Growin’ any?”

Jeff hesitated.  “It grows in the night.  You’ve heard about Chicago growing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, London grows a whole Chicago every night.”

“Good!” said Whitwell.  “That suits me.  And about Paris, now.  Paris strike you the same way?”

“It don’t need to,” said Jeff.  “That’s a place where I’d like to live.  Everybody’s at home there.  It’s a man’s house and his front yard, and I tell you they keep it clean.  Paris is washed down every morning; scrubbed and mopped and rubbed dry.  You couldn’t find any more dirt than you could in mother’s kitchen after she’s hung out her wash.  That so, Mr. Westover?”

Westover confirmed in general Jeff’s report of the cleanliness of Paris.

“And beautiful!  You don’t know what a good-looking town is till you strike Paris.  And they’re proud of it, too.  Every man acts as if he owned it.  They’ve had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of yours, Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black ever since the war with Germany; and they mean to have her back, some day.”

“Great country, Jombateeste!” Whitwell shouted to the Canuck.