In this day and generation, when everybody goes to Europe, it is
difficult to discover the only person who never has been there. But I
am that one, and therefore the stir it occasioned in the bosom of my
amiable family when I announced that I, too, was about to join the
vast majority, is not easy to imagine. But if you think that I at once
became a person of importance it only goes to show that you do not
know the family. My mother, to be sure, hovered around me the way she
does when she thinks I am going into typhoid fever. I never have had
typhoid fever, but she is always on the watch for it, and if it ever
comes it will not catch her napping. She will meet it half-way. And
lest it elude her watchfulness, she minutely questions every pain
which assails any one of us, for fear, it may be her dreaded foe. Yet
when my sister's blessed lamb baby had it before he was a year old,
and after he had got well and I was not afraid he would be struck dead
for my wickedness, I said to her, "Well, mamma, you must have taken
solid comfort out of the first real chance you ever had at your pet
fever," she said I ought to be ashamed of myself.

My father began to explain international banking to me as his share in
my preparations, but I utterly discouraged him by asking the
difference between a check and a note. He said I reminded him of the
juryman who asked the difference between plaintiff and defendant. I
soothed him by assuring him that I knew I would always find somebody
to go to the bank with me.

"Most likely 'twill be Providence, then, as He watches over children
and fools," said my cousin, with what George Eliot calls "the brutal
candor of a near relation."

My brother-in-law lent me ten Baedekers, and offered his hampers and