This page has been validated.
THE TOURIST
187

local colour, and establish a precedent for unlimited intrusion."

This is generous, and it is not a common point of view. "Americans do roam so," I heard an Englishwoman remark discontentedly in Cook's Paris office, where she was waiting with manifest impatience while the clerk made up tickets for a party of trans-Atlantic kindred. It never seemed to occur to her that she was not upon her own native heath. The habit of classifying our distastes proves how strong is our general sense of injury. We dislike English tourists more than French, or French more than English, or Americans more than either, or Germans most of all,—the last a common verdict. There is a power of universal mastery about the travelling Teuton which affronts our feebler souls. We cannot cope with him; we stand defeated at every turn by his resistless determination to secure the best. The windows of the railway carriages, the little sunny tables in the hotel dining-rooms, the back seats—commanding the view—of the Swiss funiculaires; all these strong positions he occupies at once with the strategical genius