Between Rome and Florence, our train stopped at a small way station in the mountains.  As soon as the little locomotive had panted itself to a standstill the train hands, following their habit, piled off the cars and engaged in a tremendous confab with the assembled officials on the platform.  Immediately all the loafers in sight drew cards.  A drowsy hillsman, muffled to his back hair in a long brown cloak, and with buskins on his legs such as a stage bandit wears, was dozing against the wall.  He looked as though he had stepped right out of a comic opera to add picturesqueness to the scene.  He roused himself and joined in; so did a bearded party who, to judge by his uniform, was either a Knight of Pythias or a general in the army; so did all the rest of the crowd.  In ten seconds they were jammed together in a hard knot, and going it on the high speed with the muffler off, fine white teeth shining, arms flying, shoulders shrugging, spinal columns writhing, mustaches rising and falling, legs wriggling, scalps and ears following suit.  Feeding hour in the parrot cage at the zoo never produced anything like so noisy and animated a scene.  In these parts acute hysteria is not a symptom; it is merely a state of mind.

A waiter in soiled habiliments hurried up, abandoning chances of trade at the prospect of something infinitely more exciting.  He wanted to stick his oar into the argument.  He had a few pregnant thoughts of his own craving utterance, you could tell that.  But he was handicapped into a state of dumbness by the fact that he needed both arms to balance a tray of wine and sandwiches on his head.  Merely using his voice in that company would not have counted.  He stood it as long as he could, which was not very long, let me tell you.  Then he slammed his tray down on the platform and, with one quick movement, jerked his coat sleeves back to his elbows, and inside thirty seconds he had the floor in both hands, as it were.  He conversed mainly with the Australian crawl stroke, but once in a while switched to the Spencerian free-arm movement and occasionally introduced the Chautauqua salute with telling effect.

On the Continent guides, as a class, excel in the gift of tongues —­guides and hotel concierges.  The concierge at our hotel in Berlin was a big, upstanding chap, half Russian and half Swiss, and therefore qualified by his breeding to speak many languages; for the Russians are born with split tongues and can give cards and spades to any talking crow that ever lived; while the Swiss lag but little behind them in linguistic aptitude.  It seemed such a pity that this man was not alive when the hands knocked off work on the Tower of Babel; he could have put the job through without extending himself.  No matter what the nationality of a guest might be—­and the guests were of many nationalities—­he could talk with that guest in his own language or in any other language the guest might fancy.  I myself was sorely tempted to try him on Coptic and early Aztec; but I held off.  My Coptic is not what it once was; and, partly through disuse and partly through carelessness, I have allowed my command of early Aztec to fall off pretty badly these last few months.