“Was he—­was he married?”

He who is intent upon studying the effect of foreign climes upon the American temperament should by no means overlook the colonies of resident Americans in the larger European cities, particularly the colonies in such cities as Paris and Rome and Florence.  In Berlin, the American colony is largely made up of music students and in Vienna of physicians; but in the other places many folks of many minds and many callings constitute the groups.  Some few have left their country for their country’s good and some have expatriated themselves because, as they explain in bursts of confidence, living is cheaper in France than it is in America.  I suppose it is, too, if one can only become reconciled to doing without most of the comforts which make life worth while in America or anywhere else.  Included among this class are many rather unhappy old ladies who somehow impress you as having been shunted off to foreign parts because there were no places for them in the homes of their children and their grandchildren.  So now they are spending their last years among strangers, trying with a desperate eagerness to be interested in people and things for which they really care not a fig, with no home except a cheerless pension.

Also there are certain folk—­products, in the main, of the Eastern seaboard—­who, from having originally lived in America and spent most of their time abroad, have now progressed to the point where they now live mostly abroad and visit America fleetingly once in a blue moon.  As a rule these persons know a good deal about Europe and very little about the country that gave them birth.  The stock-talk of European literature is at their tongue’s tip.  They speak of Ibsen in the tone of one mourning the passing of a near, dear, personal friend, and as for Zola—­ah, how they miss the influence of his compelling personality!  But for the moment they cannot recall whether Richard K. Fox ran the Police Gazette or wrote the “Trail of the Lonesome Pine.”

They are up on the history of the Old World.  From memory they trace the Bourbon dynasty from the first copper-distilled Charles to the last sourmashed Louis.  But as regards our own Revolution, they aren’t quite sure whether it was started by the Boston Tea Party or Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.  Languidly they inquire whether that quaint Iowa character, Uncle Champ Root, is still Speaker of the House?  And so the present Vice-President is named Elihu Underwood?  Or isn’t he?  Anyway, American politics is such a bore.  But they stand ready, at a minute’s notice, to furnish you with the names, dates and details of all the marriages that have taken place during the last twenty years in the royal house of Denmark.