I had acquired such a heavy load of true British hauteur that in
parting on the landing dock I merely bowed distantly toward those
of my fellow Americans to whom I had not been introduced; and they,
having contracted the same disease, bowed back in the same haughty
and distant manner.

When some of us met again, however, in Vienna, the insulation had
been entirely rubbed off and we rushed madly into one another's
arms and exchanged names and addresses; and, babbling feverishly
the while, we told one another what our favorite flower was, and
our birthstone and our grandmother's maiden name, and what we
thought of a race of people who regarded a cup of ostensible coffee
and a dab of honey as constituting a man's-size breakfast. And,
being pretty tolerably homesick by that time, we leaned in toward
a common center and gave three loud, vehement cheers for the land
of the country sausage and the home of the buckwheat cake--and,
as giants refreshed, went on our ways rejoicing.

That, though, was to come later. At present we are concerned with
the trip over and what we had severally learned from it. I
personally had learned, among other things, that the Atlantic
Ocean, considered as such, is a considerably overrated body.
Having been across it, even on so big and fine and well-ordered a
ship as this ship was, the ocean, it seemed to me, was not at all
what it had been cracked up to be.

During the first day out it is a novelty and after that a
monotony--except when it is rough; and then it is a doggoned
nuisance. Poets without end have written of the sea, but I take
it they stayed at home to do their writing. They were not on the