The great German steamship companies have developed, one might almost say created, a new type of American. This dawned on me last winter while taking a three months’ cruise to South America and back. The type is that of the retired business man who is enjoying his retirement. There was a time, not so long ago in our history, when he scarcely existed, for the simple reason that he never, or at least rarely, retired. Idleness spelled boredom. If in a misguided moment mother and the girls persuaded him to give up business he found himself confronted by an appalling amount of leisure rather impossible for him to manipulate and make use of. The Germans in their wonderful way have changed all that. Now when a middle-aged man has made enough money to live on comfortably they offer him something very definite and delightful to do. He can at any season of the year embark on a “floating hotel” and go to some far-away and interesting part of the world with little or no bother to himself. Just this I notice is what in large numbers he has of late years begun to take advantage of. He and a placid, pleasant wife visit the Mediterranean ports during the winter, investigate the Scandinavian countries, including the North Cape, during the summer, encircle the globe during the greater part of a year, and finally decide to go to South America. Everything is made so easy for him. He lives on the ship during the entire voyage except, perhaps, for a day or so here and there when, for a change, the party stays on shore at a hotel. The necessity of constantly ordering food or struggling with cabmen, waiters and shopkeepers in a foreign language he feels himself too old to learn is agreeably eliminated for him. He comes home with new interests, a widened horizon, refreshed in mind and body and usually ready to start out again the next year. There were many of them on the first South American cruise of last winter, and to me the type was a novel one. For one usually, in a vague sort of a way, thinks of middle-aged Americans traveling in strange countries for the first time as somewhat helpless, often bored, often irritated, uncertain as to where to go and looking forward with relief to the date of sailing homeward. Those I met last winter were anything but that. In a quiet, restful sort of a way they seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Their attitude toward it all was one of persons who had placed themselves in the hands of what literally was their creator.