Food in Germany is cheaper than anywhere else almost, I reckon; and, selected with care and discrimination, a German dinner is an excellently good dinner.  Certain dishes in England—­and they are very certain, for you get them at every meal—­are good, too, and not overly expensive.  There are some distinctive Austrian dishes that are not without their attractions either.  Speaking by and large, however, I venture the assertion that, taking any first-rate restaurant in any of the larger American cities and balancing it off against any establishment of like standing in Europe, the American restaurant wins on cuisine, service, price, flavor and attractiveness.

Centuries of careful and constant press-agenting have given French cookery much of its present fame.  The same crafty processes of publicity, continued through a period of eight or nine hundred years, have endowed the European scenic effects with a glamour and an impressiveness that really are not there, if you can but forget the advertising and consider the proposition on its merits.

Take their rivers now—­their historic rivers, if you please.  You are traveling—­heaven help you—­on a Continental train.  Between spells of having your ticket punched or torn apart, or otherwise mutilated; and getting out at the border to see your trunks ceremoniously and solemnly unloaded and unlocked, and then as ceremoniously relocked and reloaded after you have conferred largess on everybody connected with the train, the customs regulations being mainly devised for the purpose of collecting not tariff but tips—­between these periods, which constitute so important a feature of Continental travel—­you come, let us say, to a stream.

It is a puny stream, as we are accustomed to measure streams, boxed in by stone walls and regulated by stone dams, and frequently it is mud-colored and, more frequently still, runs between muddy banks.  In the West it would probably not even be dignified with a regular name, and in the East it would be of so little importance that the local congressman would not ask an annual appropriation of more than half a million dollars for the purposes of dredging, deepening and diking it.  But even as you cross it you learn that it is the Tiber or the Arno, the Elbe or the Po; and, such is the force of precept and example, you immediately get all excited and worked up over it.

English rivers are beautiful enough in a restrained, well-managed, landscape-gardened sort of way; but Americans do not enthuse over an English river because of what it is in itself, but because it happens to be the Thames or the Avon—­because of the distinguished characters in history whose names are associated with it.

Hades gets much of its reputation the same way.