W

E are all so earnest now-adays (more or less in the Pontifex sense) that we do not like to give frivolous reasons for our states of soul. Almost any reason is frivolous which is not based on the welfare of at least a million people. It is not reputable, for example, to resent the Great War on any but national grounds at the very least; and if you can make your grounds international or planetary, so much the better. "The higher selfishness," once so fashionable, is out of court. "Service" is the word. The civilized are meant to serve; the uncivilized to be Sometimes one wonders a little why the uncivilized have no duties; why I must feel so keenly my responsibility to the colored lady who feels no responsibility even for wages received-to me. But that is to confuse a present with a past definition of service, and I hurry to elude the verbal trap.

On the whole, though, if one has a personal grievance, one had better out with it, not attempting to deprecate. I waited for two years after the Armistice to see if my sense of grievance would not abate, if I could not conquer it by spiritual means. I cannot. It is still there, irking me. Though France and England should forget, I shall never, never forgive the Kaiser. He has taken from me the one recreation on which, through gray days and gold, winter and summer, fat years and lean, I could always count. He has made the guide-books of no avail, and forced Cook's Tourist Handbook out of print. I could overlook his ruining the Almanach de Gotha; but I resent, with a deepening resentment, his frustration of the continental Bradshaw and the sailing-lists of the seven seas. He has not only ruined the literature of travel, since anyone who goes anywhere now, and writes a book about it, must needs dilate upon political conditions; he has annihilated the time-tables of the world. It

is no comfort to me to know that he is more bored at Doorn than I am in Princeton. No revenge upon his person would bring amelioration to my mood; for reparation, neither he nor the German people could make. It is his fault that the minimum steamship fare to Europe is two hundred and fifty dollars. But worse, far worse: it is his fault that old Baedekers are no good and that new Baedekers cannot be born; it is his fault that even Cook cannot tell you now at what hour you change for Bokhara. It used to be about 10.40 A. M., and you changed at Merv.

To a hearth-bound person of wandering tastes, travel-descriptions are less good than guide-books, and guide-books, even, less good than time-tables. Next to going somewhere yourself is not reading the adventures of someone who has been. Next to going somewhere yourself is looking up the best way to get there; planning out every inch of the journey, even to Samarkand. Guide-books are useful, especially in the matter of hotels. But what you really need is time-tables rising in heaps about your armchair. A pencil and paper, too, to make your itinerary and reckon up the cost of the trip. When the journey is a complicated one, many hours can be spent over the task, and no novel can compete with it in excitement. The Kaiser has made such pleasuring practically impossible. Even in Europe, who knows when trains will run, or how slowly? To be sure, the only train in Europe that interested one much in the old days was the Orient Express. I have heard vaguely that its service has been resumed. But you cannot trust what you read in the newspapers, and Cook has issued no orangecolored book since 1914. I do not believe much in the Orient Express. Besides, who wants, now, to take it? It was never anything but the first stage of the journey-a concession to weakstomached folk who preferred a wagon-lit

to a Messageries Maritimes boat. Part of the fun was always to see how cheaply the trip could be made, and that meant going by water as much of the way as possible. One of the most delightful journeys I ever planned was practicable for a summer's vacation, and, considering what you got, heavenly cheap. From New York to Libau by the RussianAmerican line; by rail to St. Petersburg and Moscow, then to Nijni Novgorod, where you hit the great Fair. Then down the Volga by steamboat to the Caspian: absurdly inexpensive, and according to folk who had done it, exceeding comfortable in the matter of cabins and food. Across the Caspian from Astrakhan to Baku; the trans-Caucasian railway via Tiflis to Batum; a Black Sea Messageries Maritimes boat (touching at Trebizond) to Constantinople. If your margin was big, the Orient Express; if not, another Messageries Maritimes steamer (via Patras, and therefore, if you liked, Athens) to Marseilles. And so home. I have lost my old calculations of expense; but it was actually a thinkable summer holiday.

Well: you can see. The Kaiser has killed the Russian-American line; he has knocked the Russian railways and the Volga boats to flinders; he has abolished the great Fair at Nijni, which used to have a picture all to itself in the geographies; he has closed the Caspian and the Black Sea to tourist travel. Even if one could have afforded time and money to go from Astrakhan to Krasnovodsk instead of to Baku, and take the trans-Caspian to Samarkand-changing at Merv for Bokhara-he has made it physically impossible. At times one planned trips regardless of money; but there was never any fun in planning trips that even a millionaire would not think of taking. We never went in, Mr. Cook and I, for Arctic exploration or migration by caravan. We planned only thinkable things, with railways and steamers to co-operate, journeys where, to be sure, you cut down your luggage, but still had luggage. And tickets; most especially tickets. A ticket to Samarkand: think of it! But there are no tickets to Samarkand now. I never expected to buy one anyhow; but I expected to be able at any time to find out

how much one cost. That was all the reality I ever asked; and the Kaiser has taken away even my "less vivid condition"-not only my future indicative, but my potential optative.

One used in former days to think of India-not very hopefully, but with enough enthusiasm to thumb an old Murray. The Kaiser was ever a hypocrite. Do you realize that in 1914 was issued (in German only) the first Baedeker's guide to India, Farther India, Burmah, the Straits Settlements, Siam, and Java? Yes: he published a guidebook to India, and proceeded immediately to make it impossible for anyone to get there. I do not know what the present state of passports to India may be. Last year, still, it was pretty difficult to get in. You had to show cause. In any case, is India, at the present moment, a place that you wish to go to? You know that it is not. It is so little, just now, a place you desire to visit, that there is no fun in seeing how to get there. There always had to be, back of one's research and computation, the sense that if there were time, and if there were money, it would all be infinitely practicable and a pure delight. I do not suppose there is any chance of getting hold of that 1914 Baedeker for India. I cannot, in any case, read German without a dictionary. Even if I could get it, and could read it, it would do me no good. The Kaiser has spoiled India. To be sure, I still-occasionally-thumb my unspeakable Murray; and you would think Murray the perfect guide-book for a stay-at-home, since he always persuades you that a country with a guide-book like that is a country to stay away from. But that is not what I want of a guide-book. I want one that truly lures, even though I cannot go. Besides, my Murray is more than out of date. It was published long before 1914; and since 1914 all things are different.

That is the worst thing the Kaiser has done. He has not only frustrated the time-tables and made guide-books "date"; he has ruined even the places you could conceivably get to and find your way about in. Even the beloved countries one knew before. . . . they are stricken with poverty, fuel-and-food

shortage; they are torn between distrust of the foreigner and desire to offset the exchange; they breed typhus and revolution, at any moment, in the most unlikely spots. If you travel at all in familiar lands, you practically have to travel as a profiteer. You cannot go to Switzerland at all. The Kaiser filled it up early with German royalties who have now hung out an S. R. O. sign. Oh, yes, I know that people are thronging to Europe. But either they have a particular reason for going, or they are rich, or insensitive, or they were always of a pacifistic strain. Many of us would be glad enough of a good excuse to go, no doubt; but without the excuse we rather shrink from it. Especially with the minimum fare at two hundred and fifty. As for the stay-athome who takes it out in meticulous planning, there is no fun left. Who can say how late a train will be, or what a hotel will charge, or where you may not be indefinitely held up by an epidemic or a strike? There was always a chance that you might not make those carefully planned connections; but now you are not even sure that any given train exists. There is still northern Africa, and the Far East, and the South Seas? Yes, I suppose So. But how can I know whether my pre-war time-table tells me contemporary truth about trains between Tunis and Algiers? Remember, Mr. Cook refuses to issue a new one. "Automobiles," people say vaguely. But you cannot compute the cost of a journey that is made by snatching a motor-car at every turn. And counting the cost was part of the pleasure. I am not a traveller, you see: only an agence. The South Seas, they tell me, have been hard hit by the influenza; and what with the death-rate and the manners of the Polynesian poilu, even Tahiti is not what it used to be. The Marquesas were always hard to get to, and meant tramp schooners. Cook never offered information about them. Besides, Mr. Frederick O'Brien has taken away any desire for the Marquesas that Stevenson and Jack London had left one. Of course you can go to Fiji or Samoa, stopping over a steamer on your way to Australia. But from port to port with one stop, and then back again, is not what I call a trip.

Even the cruises among the Pacific Islands, arranged for by a bureau or a company, are but charmless substitutes for your own pondered itinerary. All very well, perhaps, if you are really going, but meaningless if you are not.

The only hunting ground left to the amateur agence is the Far East. Even there, one has no time-tables, alas! The excellent guides issued by the Imperial Japanese Government Railways are, however, the only proper substitute I know of for the Baedeker drug. I recommend them to fellow addicts. They do give you a vast amount of information about steamship lines, and they tell you, at least, the length of time trains take. Also the price of rickshaws and wheelbarrows and the single automobile in a Cambodian town. I have almost planned a journey to Sumatra, via all sorts of places. Even so, I cannot say definitely to myself, "On Wednesday, of such a date, at ten-forty A. M., I should leave Batavia for Soerabaya." The only inspired voice was Thomas Cook's, and it is stilled.

South America, some sympathizer will suggest. Well, give me a South American guide-book, and I will see. I have never discovered one. If I once "rolled down to Rio," I might be content to take any train there was. But there is no satisfaction to be had in mere planning, if I do not know what time the train goes and where it will take me, what the fare is, and what the accommodations are. I should be willing to chance the train that runs from Callao to Lima, or the one that crosses the Andes from Valparaiso to Buenos Aires. I am sure the scenery in both cases is magnificent. But I have no other assurance about either one. A trip of any sort to South America would be all margin and no precision. I leave it to others.

In the old days, I was wont to scorn imaginary travelling in the United States. Since the Kaiser took away my pastime, I have grown humble. I collect timetables of every line that runs from Chicago to the Coast. (I know how I want to go to Chicago.) I gather, with meekness, items of interest about Butte and San Antonio, and consider the merits of the Columbia River Highway and the Apache

S a loyal New England woman my grandmother always had pie and cake on the breakfast-table. I was born with three grandmothers, all from New England. As I remember her, my maternal grandmother seemed to be always cooking, in a perpetual checked apron, with her sleeves rolled up and a spoon or a fork or a rolling-pin in her hand, tasting the bean porridge or prodding the potatoes to see if they were boiled, or kneading bread, or rolling pie-crust, or frying crullers with twisted strands like a harp. She seemed to be always going back and forth between the cook-stove and the buttery and the brick oven, or going down the cellar stairs with a lighted candle in an iron candlestick (having a hook on one side

to hang it on the potato-bin), on her way to the cool buttery, where the milk was kept in shining pans, and where the cheeses stood in long rows on the shelves, and where the barrel of maple-syrup stood in the corner and gradually crystallized into maple-sugar. In the farther end of the cellar buttery was the cheese

press, and along the floor under the shelves was a row of stone crocks containing sausages put down in lard.

My grandmother's cellar was cool and dry, with a floor of concrete, from which the last leaf that blew down from the yard was swept up and returned whence it came. The bins for the apples and potatoes were raised from the floor for a free circulation of air, and the cider-barrel