We met also Mrs. Mullet, of Sioux City, a gay and copious widow of middle age, who appeared in the ship's concert with dark eyes well underscored to give them proper emphasis. She was a well-favored, sentimental lady with thick, wavy, brown hair. Her thoughts were also a bit wavy, but Betsey formed a high opinion of her. Mrs. Mullet was a neat dresser and resembled a fashion-plate. Her talk was well dressed in English accents. She often looked thoughtfully at my chin when we talked together, as if she were estimating its value as a site for a stand of whiskers. It was her apparent knowledge of art which interested Betsey. She talked art beautiful, as Sam Henshaw used to say, and was going to Italy to study it. There were schoolma'ams going over to improve their minds, and romping, sweetfaced girls setting out to be instructed in art or music, beyond moral boundaries, and knowing not that they would take less harm among the lions and hyenas of eastern Africa. When will our women learn that the centers of art and music in Europe are generally the exact centers of moral leprosy? There were stately, dignified, and inhuman people of the seaboard aristocracy of the East--the Europeans of America, who see only the crudeness of their own land. They have been dehorned--muleyed into freaks by degenerate habits of mind and body. A certain passenger called them the “Eunuchs of democracy,” but I wouldn't be so intemperate with the truth. One of them was the Lady Dorris, daughter of a New York millionaire, who came out of her own apartments one evening to peer laughingly into the dining-saloon, and say: “I love to look at them; they're so very, very curious!” Yes, we have a few Europeans in America, but I suspect that Europe is more than half American. Then there was Mr. Pike, the lumber king, from Prairie du Chien, who stroked his whiskers when he talked to me and looked me over from head to toe as if calculating the amount of good timber in me. He had retired, jumped from the lumber business into ancient history, and was now reporting the latest news from Tyre and Babylon. In this environment of character we proceeded with nothing to do but observe it, and with no suspicion that we were being introduced to the persons of a drama in which we were to play our parts in Italy. So now, then, the orchestra has ceased playing and the curtain is up again, and, with all these people on the stage, in the middle of the ocean word goes around the decks that there is a ship off the port side very near us. We look and observe that we are passing her. It is the _Caronia_, and we ride the seas with a better sense of comfort, knowing that Wilton is behind us. [Illustration: 0077] VI.--WE ARRIVE IN THE LAND OF LOVE AND SONG