But the worst of all is, that Europe cannot be persuaded to imitate our railway methods. Two or three years ago I liked the European methods, but experience has dislodged that superstition. All over the Continent the system--to call it by an extravagant term--is sufficiently poor and slow and clumsy, or unintelligent; but in these regards Italy and France are entitled to the chromo. In Italy it takes more than half an hour to buy a through ticket to Paris at Cook & Sons’ offices, there is such a formidable amount of red tape and recording connected with the vast transaction. Every little detail of the matter must be written down in a set of books--your name, condition, nationality, religion, date, hour, number of the train, and all that; and at last you get your ticket and think you are done, but you are not; it must be carried to the station and stamped; and even that is not the end, for if you stop over at any point it must be stamped again or it is forfeited. And yet you save time and trouble by going to Cook instead of to the station. Buying your ticket does not finish your job. Your trunks must be weighed, and paid for at about human-being rates. This takes another quarter of an hour of your time--perhaps half an hour if you are at the tail of the procession. You get paper checks, which are twice as easy to lose as brass ones. You cannot secure a seat beforehand, but must take your chances with the general rush to the train. If you have your family with you, you may have to distribute them among several cars. There is one annoying feature which is common all over the Continent, and that is, that if you want to make a short journey you cannot buy your ticket whenever you find the ticket office open, but must wait until it is doing business for your particular train; and that only begins, as a rule, a quarter of an hour before the train’s time of starting. The cars are most ingeniously inconvenient, cramped, and uncomfortable, and in Italy they are phenomenally dirty. The European “system” was devised either by a maniac or by a person whose idea was to hamper, bother, and exasperate the traveler in all conceivable ways and sedulously and painstakingly discourage custom. In Italy, as far as my experience goes, it is the custom to use the sleeping cars on the day trains and take them off when the sun goes down. One thing is sure, anyway: if that is not the case, it will be, presently, when they think of it. They can be depended upon to snap up as darling an idea as that with joy.