“Heavens! I've et everything there is going, I guess; it would take you a month to learn the names of the vittles. I've got 'em all in my diary.” “I suppose you enjoyed the ruins,” I said. And she went on: “I saw a bull temple; it was very nice. You know, they used to worship bulls. I don't know what for. They must have been hard up for something to worship. There was five of us traveling on our own hooks. We saw one temple that was quite nicely carved--had crows and goats on it. I love goats. Sometimes I think that I must have been a goat in some previous life.” I disagreed with her. “The pyramids were curious things,” she continued. “Some folks never slid down into 'em at all after traveling all that distance, but I slid. Since I was a child I have always loved sliding. The most interesting thing I saw was three baby camels and some Highland soldiers in Jerusalem with no pants on and funny little skirts that came down to their knees,” she continued. “In the Holy Land I saw a lot of men in skirts with baggy pants reaching from their knees down.” She was apparently much interested in the subject of pants, and hurried on: “I found a wonderful old knocker there. By the way, I'm making a collection of knockers. Have you seen any good ones here in Rome?” “Not a knocker! But I haven't been looking for them.” And I added, “I wonder some one doesn't make a collection of pants--pants of every age and clime.” “What kind of pants did the ancient Romans wear?” she asked. “The same as Adam--the style hadn't changed in ages.” This woman had got a knocker in Jerusalem, and seen some baby camels and a number of pantless men; she had seen a bull temple and slid into a pyramid in Egypt; she had “et vittles” everywhere, and suffered from cramp in sundry places, and languished in a hot, stuffy state-room with a quarrelsome lady from Connecticut, all for sixteen hundred dollars and four months of time. Yet far more than half of the great caravan of American tourists invading Europe and the East get no more than she did. The poetry and beauty of the Old World and the money of the New are thus wasted on each other. “America is a pretty good country,” I suggested. “There are buildings in New York as wonderful as any you will see here, and our scenery is excellent.” “But we have no ruins,” said Mrs. Fraley. “On the contrary, we have the grandest ruins in the world,” I insisted. “We have the ruins of slavery and of the old error of unequal, rights; there all our feudal inheritance has been turned into ruins. Even that everlasting lake of fire, which is still needed in Europe, is with us a cold and mossy ruin. Nothing in it but garbage these days. We have physical ruins, too, and very ancient ones, but we are a working community, not a show. In our structures, like the Pennsylvania Station, is the sublimity of hope and promise, not the sublimity of death and decay.”