While passing through a pleasure park in one of the European capitals I met, quite by accident, my fellow passenger on the Italian steamer, the Puritan rebel; she who smoked cigarettes, drank cocktails, was divorced and had gone to the Old World in search of a more congenial moral atmosphere and a husband with braid and buttons. Now she was drinking the cup of unrestrained pleasure, and having nearly drained it, it was beginning to taste bitter. Officers and attachés, Grand Opera, frivolous plays and care-free crowds, were beginning to pall upon her and she was unmistakably homesick; although she did not confess to that last fact. "I suppose," she said, "you can't get rid of Puritanism, when once it gets into your blood. It's an hereditary disease." "And it is contagious," I added. "I thought," she continued, "that at home we were small and narrow and that over here I should find a larger freedom; but you can't turn around here, without finding the bars up--racially, religiously, socially and politically. The only unobstructed passage is the way to Hell." Hers were large, black, dreamy eyes and the shadows of disappointment passed over them. Then, to shake off the gripping seriousness from her mood, she said, with a forced smile: "I am going to see the Merry Widow to-night with my Captain. They are both inane. Meeting you has made me blue, I fear; you remind me of my father." She said this reproachfully, I thought; although she added: "Let us sit down and talk things over. My daughter and the maid are listening to the music and I have nothing to do until my Captain comes to meet me." "Now please listen to me," I said when we were seated. "I was born over here, right in this city. My playground was this very park. I have tasted the best this city can offer a boy, as well as its worst. "Listen," I said again; for her eyes wandered to the gay crowds. "I also know your home city, and I wouldn't give one block in Hartford, Conn., not speaking from the commercial standpoint, for this whole magnificent city, with its Cathedral, its Grand Opera, its royal castle, its officers and its Merry Widow. Do you ask why? Just watch this crowd and let me interpret it to you. Those boys now passing are Bohemians, apprentices; and they are talking Czechish to make themselves obnoxious to the Germans whom they hate and who hate them, more than your forefathers hated the devil. "Do you see that Bosnian? Notice his smile as he sells a jack-knife to the Austrian soldier. His smile would be more genuine if he could knife this detested 'Schwab,' his enemy and the conquerer of his country. "Those men with the needle-pointed moustaches are Magyars, and they hate the Slavs and Germans and every one else who will not speak their language. "The officers with the red fez are Turks, as you know; just now they despise everything Austrian, and not without reason.