Likewise the first few days at sea provide opportunity for sorting out the large and variegated crop of impressions a fellow has been acquiring during all these crowded months.  The way the homeward-bound one feels now, he would swap any Old Master he ever saw for one peep at a set of sanitary bath fixtures.  Sight unseen, he stands ready to trade two cathedrals and a royal palace for a union depot.  He will never forget the thrill that shook his soul as he paused beneath the dome of the Pantheon; but he feels that, not only his soul but all the rest of him, could rally and be mighty cheerful in the presence of a dozen deep-sea oysters on the half shell —­regular honest-to-goodness North American oysters, so beautifully long, so gracefully pendulous of shape that the short-waisted person who undertakes to swallow one whole does so at his own peril.  The picture of the Coliseum bathed in the Italian moonlight will ever abide in his mind; but he would give a good deal for a large double sirloin suffocated Samuel J. Tilden style, with fried onions.  Beefsteak!  Ah, what sweet images come thronging at the very mention of the word!  The sea vanishes magically and before his entranced vision he sees The One Town, full of regular fellows and real people.  Somebody is going to have fried ham for supper—­five thousand miles away he sniffs the delectable perfume of that fried ham as it seeps through a crack in the kitchen window and wafts out into the street—­and the word passes round that there is going to be a social session down at the lodge to-night, followed, mayhap, by a small sociable game of quarter-limit upstairs over Corbett’s drug-store.  At this point, our traveler rummages his Elks’ button out of his trunk and gives it an affectionate polishing with a silk handkerchief.  And oh, how he does long for a look at a home newspaper—­packed with wrecks and police news and municipal scandals and items about the persons one knows, and chatty mention concerning Congressmen and gunmen and tango teachers and other public characters.

Thinking it all over here in the quiet and privacy of the empty sea, he realizes that his evening paper is the thing he has missed most.  To the American understanding foreign papers seem fearfully and wonderfully made.  For instance, German newspapers are much addicted to printing their more important news stories in cipher form.  The German treatment of a suspected crime for which no arrests have yet been made, reminds one of the jokes which used to appear, a few years ago, in the back part of Harper’s Magazine, where a good story was always being related of Bishop X, residing in the town of Y, who, calling one afternoon upon Judge Z, said to Master Egbert, the pet of the household, age four, and so on.  A German newspaper will daringly state that Banker ——­, president of the Bank of ——­ at ——­ who is suspected of sequestering the funds of that institution to his own uses is reported to have departed by stealth for the city of ——­, taking with him the wife of Herr ——.