Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/143

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DIARY OF A PILGRIMAGE.
141

class Pullman car reserved for each two of you. Some of you have seen an omnibus, in the distance, and have wondered what it was used for. To suggest that you should travel in such a plebeian conveyance, is to give you a shock that takes you two days to recover from. You expect a private carriage, with a footman in livery, to take you through the mountains. You, all of you, must have the most expensive places in the theatre. The eight-mark and six-mark places are every bit as good as the ten-mark seats, of which there are only a very limited number; but you are grossly insulted if it is hinted that you should sit in anything but the dearest chairs. If the villagers would only be sensible and charge you ten marks for the eight-mark places, you would be happy; but they won't."

I must candidly confess that the English-speaking people one meets with on the Continent are, taken as a whole, a most disagreeable contingent. One hardly ever hears the English language spoken on the Continent, without hearing grumbling and sneering.

The women are the most objectionable. Foreigners undoubtedly see the very poorest specimens of the female kind we Anglo-Saxons have to show. The average female English or American tourist is rude and self-assertive, while, at the same time, ridiculously helpless and awkward. She is intensely selfish, and utterly inconsiderate of others; everlastingly complaining, and, in herself, drearily uninteresting. We travelled down in the omnibus from Ober-Ammergau with three perfect specimens of the species, accompanied by the usual miserable-looking man, who has had all the life talked out of him. They were grumbling the whole of the way at having been put to ride in an omnibus. It seemed that they had never been so