Italy - The Northern Part Of It Anyhow - Is
Also Reasonably Shy Of This Commodity.
In the German-speaking countries all street cars and all railway
trains sail with battened hatches.
In their palmiest days the
Jimmy Hope gang could not have opened a window in a German sleeping
car - not without blasting; and trying to open a window in the
ordinary first or second class carriage provides healthful exercise
for an American tourist, while affording a cheap and simple form
of amusement for his fellow passengers. If, by superhuman efforts
and at the cost of a fingernail or two, he should get one open,
somebody else in the compartment as a matter of principle, immediately
objects; and the retired brigadier-general, who is always in charge
of a German train, comes and seals it up again, for that is the
rule and the law; and then the natives are satisfied and sit in
sweet content together, breathing a line of second-handed air that
would choke a salamander.
Once, a good many years ago - in the century before the last I think
it was - a member of the Teutonic racial stock was accidentally
caught out in the fresh air and some of it got into his lungs.
And, being a strange and a foreign influence to which the lungs
were unused, it sickened him; in fact I am not sure but that it
killed him on the spot. So the emperors of Germany and Austria
got together and issued a joint ukase on the subject and, so far
as the traveling public was concerned, forever abolished those
dangerous experiments.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 46 of 341
Words from 12199 to 12467
of 93169
