I really think that every traveler of to-day owes a debt of gratitude to Thomas Cook & Sons. I never knew, until I went abroad what an accommodation the offices of this concern are. Your mail is always courteously received and cared for; your routes and tickets are changed and altered at your slightest whim; your local bank is their cash-desk and the only advisers you have, if you are alone and without the native tongue at your convenience, are their clerks and agents at the train. It does not make any difference to me that that is their business and that they make a profit. In a foreign city where you are quite alone you would grant them twice the profit for this courtesy. And it was my experience, in the slight use I made of their service, that their orders and letters of advice were carefully respected and that when you came conducted by Thomas Cook, whether you took the best or the worst, you were politely and assiduously looked after. One of the most amusing letters that I received while abroad was from this same publisher-friend who wanted me to go to Venice. Not so long before I left Rome, he had arrived with his wife, daughter, and a young girl friend of his daughter whose first trip abroad they were sponsoring. At a luncheon they had given me, the matter of seeing the Pope had come up and I mentioned that I had been so fortunate as to find some one who could introduce me, and that it was just possible, if they wished it, that my friend would extend his courtesy to them. The young girls in particular were eager, but I was not sure. I left Rome immediately afterward, writing to my British correspondent, bespeaking his interest in their behalf, and at the same time to my publisher-friend that I was doing so. As an analysis of girlhood vagaries, keen and clever, read his letter: _My Dear Dreiser_: The young woman who thinks she wants to see the Pope goes under the name of Margaret,--but I wouldn’t try very hard to bring it about, because if Margaret went, my daughter would want to go, and if Margaret and my daughter went, my wife would feel out in the cold. (The old man can stand it.) Margaret’s motives are simply childish curiosity, possibly combined with a slight desire to give pleasure to the Holy Father. But don’t try to get that Papal interview for Margaret unless you can get it for all the ladies. You will introduce a serpent into my paradise. No serpent was introduced because I couldn’t get the interview.