En route — May 1896.
[DEAR CHAS:]
The night is passed and with the day comes "a hope" but
during the blackness I had "a suffer" — I read until two — five
hours — and then slept until five when the middle man who had
slept on my shoulder all
night left the train and the second one to whom Bernardi was
so polite left me alone and had the porter fit me up a bed so
that I slept until seven again — Then the Guardian Angel
returned for his traps and I bade him a sleepy adieu and was
startled to see two soldiers standing shading their eyes in
salute in the doorway and two gentlemen bowing to my kind
protector with the obsequiousness of servants — He sort of
smiled back at me and walked away with the soldiers and 13
porters carrying his traps. So I rung up the conductor and he
said it was the King's Minister with his eyes sticking out of his
head — the conductor's eyes — not the Minister's. I don't know
what a King's Minister is but he liked your whiskey — I am now
passing through the Austrian Tyrol which pleases me so much
that I am chortling with joy — None of the places for which my
ticket call are on any map — but don't you care, I don't care —
I wish I could adequately describe last night with nothing but
tunnels hours in length so that you had to have all the
windows down and the room looked like a safe and full of
tobacco smoke and damp spongey smoke from the engine, and bad
air. That first compartment I went in was filled later with
German women who took off their skirts and the men took off
their shoes. Everybody in the rear of the car is filthy dirty
but I had a wash at the Custom house and now I am almost clean
and quite happy. The day is beautiful and the compartment is
all my own — I am absolutely enchanted with the Tyrol — I have
never seen such quaint picture book houses and mills with
wheels like that in the Good for Nothing and crucifixes
wonderfully carved and snow mountains and dark green forests —
The sky is perfect and the air is filled with the sun and the train
moves so smoothly that I can see little blue flowers, baby
blue, Bavarian blue flowers, in the Spring grass. Such dear
old castles like birds nests and such homelike old mills and
red-faced millers with feathers in their caps you never saw
out of a comic opera — The man in here with me now is a
Russian, of course, and saw the last Coronation and knows that
my suite is on the principal Street and attends to my changing
money and getting an omelette — I can survive another night
now having had an omelette not so good as Madam Masi's but
still an omelette — I have now left Munich and the Russian and
a conductor whom I mistook for a hereditary prince of Bavaria,
with tassels down his back, has assured me he is going to
Berlin, and that I am going to Berlin and much else to which I
smile knowingly and say mucho gracia, wee wee, ya ya, ich
slemmer, ich limmer and other long speeches ending with "an
er — "
DICK.
