Stay Where You're Happy
IN board the steamer Java I met an English gentleman by the name of Mr. Gale. “And who was Mr. Gale?” you ask. I know not, except that he was of so bland a nature I felt he must be a “Gale from Heaven.” We were leaning over the rail of the vessel, watching the first appearance of land — Ireland sending out to meet us the “Skelligs,” a cross-looking projection, like the snarly dog that comes out to serenade you with a volley of yelps at the gate of a friend, or like a dark-browed Fenian appearing to challenge the British ships, and bid them “mind their eye,” and look out how they run “forninst ould Ireland” — when Mr. Gale summed up all his advice about European travel in the terse phrase:
“STAY WHERE YOU’RE HAPPY:’ yI
“Mr. Talmage, do not be rushing about in Europe, as Americans generally do. Stay where you ‘r happy!”
We set this down as among the wisest counsels ever given us, although at the very first place we stopped it nearly ruined our prospects for seeing anything beside Scotland.
Americans travelling in Europe are for the most part in immensity of perspiration. Starting with what they call “the small and insignificant island of Great Britain,” and having adopted the feeling of the Yankee who said he thought England a very nice little island, but he was afraid to go out nights lest he should fall off, they expect to see all Europe in a few days. They spend much of their time at depots, inquiring about the next train, or rush past Mont Blanc, with no time to stop, chasing up a lost valise.
In our company was an American, who had five ladies and eight trunks. Getting into Switzerland, he let the ladles come on to see the mountains, while he went back a two days’ journey, asking Belgium and Germany if they had seen anything of his trunks. As he Is unacquainted with the language, but has learned that Das Gepack is the German for ‘’ the luggage,” I imagine him going through the streets of Heidelberg, Frankfort, and Darmstadt, at dead of night, shouting till the people throw open the windows expecting a war-extra:
“Das Gepack! Das Gepack!”
Meanwhile we offered a little cologne to one of the unfortunate party bereft of their “things,’* and she refused to take it; and, on being urged, blushed, and hemm’d, and finally gave as her reason that she had no pocket-handkerchief. Alas! her clothes by that time were on the way to St. Petersburg or Halifax.
But why sneer at the father and husband on his errand of mercy scouring Europe for his wife’s silk dresses? May he be prospered! If he do not find the chignons, may he at least be so happy as to discover the pocket-handkerchiefs! What more Important than clothes? But for a deficit in this, John Gilpin would have been respectable and happy, even at the time he could not hold his horse. Lack of this is what made Eve chilly in Paradise.
As for ourselves, we carry all our baggage in our two hands, and yet we have two changes of apparel a day; namely, in the morning when we put it on, and in the night when we take it off. Nobody can steal our baggage unless they steal us. Often travellers, worn out with unnecessary incumbrances, wish they were home. They are not happy. They want to go to their mother. We found one American tugging along with a Swiss cottage nicely boxed up, the work of an Interlachen artificer. It. made us think of looking up a pocket edition of Jung Frau.
Many of our countrymen are exceedingly annoyed at their lack of skill in the use of the European languages. After a vain attempt to make a Parisian waiter understand French, they swear at him in English. But we remembered the art of the physician who put all the remains of old prescriptions in one bottle, — the oil, and the calomel, and the rhubarb, and the assafoetida, — and when he found a patient with “complication of diseases,” would shake up his old bottle and give him a dose. And so we have compounded a language for European travel.
We take a little French, and a litde German
374 ‘’STAV WHERE YOU’RE HAPPY:’
and a little English, with a few snatches of Chinese and Choctaw, and when we find a stubborn case of waiter or landlord that will not understand, we shake up all the dialects and give him a dose. It is sure to strike somewhere. If we do not make him understand, we at any rate give him a terrible scare.
We have not the anxiety of some in a strange land about getting things to eat. We like everything in all the round of diet, except animated cheese and odorous codfish; always have a good appetite, never in our lives missed a meal save once, when we could not get any, and knowing that Eine geyostete Rindfleisch Schiebe means a beefsteak, Eine Messer2i knife, and Eine Gabel a fork, and Eine Serviette a napkin, after that we feel reckless as to what we can or can not get.
In journeying from country to country, the change in the value of coins is apt to be inextricable. But guineas, and florins, and kreutzers, and double ducats cease to be a perplexity to us. We ask the price of a thing, look wise as if we knew all about it, and then hold out our hand and let him take his pick.
As riches take wings and fly away, we are determined to lose nothing in that manner. Fifty years from now a Turkish piaster will be worth to me as much as a Holland guilder; and it worries me not when I am cheated, for the man who cheats must In the end suffer more than I, so that my chagrin is lost in compassion for his misfortune.
In travelling let us go where we like it best, and then be happy. The manufacturer should go to Birmingham and Manchester. The skilful and mighty-handed machinery will make an impression upon him that he can get from nothing else. Let the shipwright travelling in Europe take considerable time at the Liverpool docks, and watch the odd-looking craft that hover about the French coast. The philanthropist will busy himself in looking up Newman Hall’s “Ragged Schools,” and go out a few days to Bristol to talk with George Muller, and go down to Billingsgate to hear the women sell fish with the same slang as they did fifty years ago. Let the poet go to* Grub Street, Cripplegate, and, as the cab jostles through the dark and filthy street, look out and see the places In olden time frequented by hungry authors, and have his sensibilities shocked at finding that John Milton’s house, in which “Paradise Lost” was written, is now a soap factory.
If a man be fond of a fine horse, and wants to see the perfection of neck, and hoof, and back, and flanks, tamed thunderbolts controlled by caparisoned drivers, let him go out every clear evening, at six o’clock, to Hyde Park, or into the Royal Mews, back of Buckingham Place, and see the one hundred and sixty-eight white and bay horses that wait the Queen’s bidding. It is folly for a blind man to go to see Gleseback Falls, or a deaf one to hear the Freybourg organ, or a man whose lifetime reading has been confined to the almanac and his own ledger to spend much time in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Stay mily where you ‘re happy I
At the hotel in Antwerp, sitting at the table at the close of a day that had been to me a rapture among picture-galleries, a man sat down beside me, and said, ‘* What a dull place! There seems nothing going on! “He had “STAY WHERE YOU’RE HAPPY:’ Z77
applied to that exquisite city of art the business tests of the Bank of England. That was no place for him. Why did he ever come out from the shuffle and tumult of the London “Strand “?
Much of the world’s disquietude comes from the fact that they will not take the advice of the Encrlishman in the words headinor this chapter. Queen Mary was fondled and caressed in France. Courts bowed down and worshipped her beauty. But she went to Scotland, and Elizabeth cut the poor thing’s head off. Why did she not stay where she was happy?
Walter Scott had a good home in Castle Street, Edinburgh, no debts to pay, all the world bringing offerings to his genius. But he went up to Abbotsford; must have a roof like Melrose Abbey, and the grounds extensive as a king’s park. He sank his fortune, and roused up a pack of angry creditors, each one with his teeth at his throat. How much better for his peace if he had continued In the plain home. Why did he not stay where he was happy?
Maximilian had the confidence of Austria, and the richest of all earth’s treasures, — the love of a good woman’s heart. He gathered up all that he had and went to Mexico. A nation of assassins plotted for his life. He fell riddled with a crash of musketry, and his wife, Carlotta, goes back a maniac. They had enough before they went. They wanted more. One dead! The other crazy! Oh, that they had been wise enough to stay where they were happy!