On the other hand there are some things wherein we notably excel—­entirely too many for me to undertake to enumerate them here; still, I think I might be pardoned for enumerating a conspicuous few.  We could teach Europe a lot about creature comforts and open plumbing and personal cleanliness and good food and courtesy to women—­not the flashy, cheap courtesy which impels a Continental to rise and click his heels and bend his person forward from the abdomen and bow profoundly when a strange woman enters the railway compartment where he is seated, while at the same time he leaves his wife or sister to wrestle with the heavy luggage; but the deeper, less showy instinct which makes the average American believe that every woman is entitled to his protection and consideration when she really needs it.  In the crowded street-car he may keep his seat; in the crowded lifeboat he gives it up.

I almost forgot to mention one other detail in which, so far as I could judge, we lead the whole of the Old World—­dentistry.  Probably you have seen frequent mention in English publications about decayed gentlewomen.  Well, England is full of them.  It starts with the teeth.

The leisurely, long, slantwise course across the Atlantic gives one time, also, for making the acquaintance of one’s fellow passengers and for wondering why some of them ever went to Europe anyway.  A source of constant speculation along these lines was the retired hay-and-feed merchant from Michigan who traveled with us.  One gathered that he had done little else in these latter years of his life except to traipse back and forth between the two continents.  What particularly endeared him to the rest of us was his lovely habit of pronouncing all words of all languages according to a fonetic system of his own.  “Yes, sir,” you would hear him say, addressing a smoking-room audience of less experienced travelers, “my idee is that a fellow ought to go over on an English ship, if he likes the exclusability, and come back on a German ship if he likes the sociableness.  Take my case.  The last trip I made I come over on the Lucy Tanner and went back agin on the Grocer K. First and enjoyed it both ways immense!”

Nor would this chronicle be complete without a passing reference to the lady from Cincinnati, a widow of independent means, who was traveling with her two daughters and was so often mistaken for their sister that she could not refrain from mentioning the remarkable circumstance to you, providing you did not win her everlasting regard by mentioning it first.  Likewise I feel that I owe the tribute of a line to the elderly Britain who was engaged in a constant and highly successful demonstration of the fallacy of the claim set up by medical practitioners, to the effect that the human stomach can contain but one fluid pint at a time.  All day long, with his monocle goggling glassily from the midst of his face, like one lone porthole in a tank steamer, he disproved this statement by