By the time those gorged and converted pilgrims touched the Eastern seaboard again any one of them, if he caught fire, would burn for about four days with a clear blue flame, and many valuable packing-house by-products could be gleaned from his ruins.  It would bind us all, foreigner and native alike, in closer ties of love and confidence, and it would turn the tide of travel westward from Europe, instead of eastward from America.

Let’s do it sometime—­and appoint me conductor of the expedition!

Chapter X

Modes of the Moment; a Fashion Article

Among the furbearing races the adult male of the French species easily excels.  Some fine peltries are to be seen in Italy, and there is a type of farming Englishman who wears a stiff set of burnishers projecting out round his face in a circular effect suggestive of a halo that has slipped down.  In connection with whiskers I have heard the Russians highly commended.  They tell me that, from a distance, it is very hard to distinguish a muzhik from a bosky dell, whereas a grand duke nearly always reminds one of something tasty and luxuriant in the line of ornamental arborwork.  The German military man specializes in mustaches, preference being given to the Texas longhorn mustache, and the walrus and kitty-cat styles.  A dehorned German officer is rarely found and a muley one is practically unknown.  But the French lead all the world in whiskers—­both the wildwood variety and the domesticated kind trained on a trellis.  I mention this here at the outset because no Frenchman is properly dressed unless he is whiskered also; such details properly appertain to a chapter on European dress.

Probably every freeborn American citizen has at some time in his life cherished the dream of going to England and buying himself an outfit of English clothes—­just as every woman has had hopes of visiting Paris and stocking up with Parisian gowns on the spot where they were created, and where—­so she assumes—­they will naturally be cheaper than elsewhere.  Those among us who no longer harbor these fancies are the men and women who have tried these experiments.

After she has paid the tariff on them a woman is pained to note that her Paris gowns have cost her as much as they would cost her in the United States—­so I have been told by women who have invested extensively in that direction.  And though a man, by the passion of the moment, may be carried away to the extent of buying English clothes, he usually discovers on returning to his native land that they are not adapted to withstand the trying climatic conditions and the critical comments of press and public in this country.  What was contemplated as a triumphal reentrance becomes a footrace to the nearest ready-made clothing store.