FUNCHAL THE LONG BRANCH OF MADEIRA; NICE BALMY PLACE FOR A REST AFTER A PANIC. STEAMER LEAVES LONDON TWICE A WEEK. HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS BY CABLE
Among those present who came all the way from Medicine Hat was the cowboy girl, who could ride a mustang, toss a steer with a lariat, shoot a bear or climb a tree. She wore a sombrero, rolled up her sleeves, and was just dying to show what she could do if she had only half a chance. She got it when we came to the donkey rides in Egypt. She was a "Dreadnaught girl," sure enough.
The claims of the pocket "Venus" from the "Soo," must not be forgotten. She was small and of the reversible, air-cooled, selective type, but as perfect as anything ever seen in a glass case. She wore a spray of soft-shell crab-apple blossoms in her hair, which stamped her with the bloom of Arcady. She spilled her chatter lavishly, and had the small change of conversation right at her finger-tips. She had an early-English look, and was deservedly popular with the boys.
The beet-sugar man from Colorado also had his place. This specialist put his table to sleep before we lost sight of land. He stifled his listeners with sugar statistics, informing them how many tons of beets the State produced and what they were worth in money; how much to expect from an acre, and the risks and profits of the industry: a collection of facts that were the mythology of alleged truth. If you were good the gods would make you a sugar-king in the world to come, and Colorado was to be financially sugar-cured in the sweet by-and-by. His whole song was a powerful anaesthetic, and many at the table did not know the meal was over till the steward woke them up.
One among our crowd who really mattered was a tall, gloomy, dyspeptic man, hard to approach, but once known he never failed to harp on his favorite string,—the old masters and the Barbizon school of painting. This man had all the ready veneer of the art connoisseur. He used to talk by the hour about the great pictures he had seen, and gave each artist a descriptive niche for what he thought him famous: such as, the expression of Rubens; the grace of Raphael; the purity of Domenichino; the correggiosity of Correggio; the learning of Poussin; the air of Guido; the taste of Coraceis, and the drawing of Michelangelo. This, of course, was all Greek to most of us, but it raised the tone of the smoking-room and enveloped the entire ship in a highly artistic atmosphere which no odors from the galley could overcome. Incidentally I may say, however, he didn't know all about them, for one day a wag set a trap for him by saying he had had a fine bit of Botticelli at dinner.
"My dear sir," exclaimed our "authority," "Botticelli isn't a cheese; he was a famous fiddler!"
"I have always had an impression he was an old master," said another passenger, who was an amused listener.
It is impossible for any large body of travelers to escape the man who by every device tries to impress his fellows with the idea that he is a Mungo Park on his travels, and so our harmless impostor had his "trunkage" plastered with labels from all parts of the world, sold to him by hotel porters, who deal in them. He wore the fez, of course, and sported a Montenegrin order on his lapel; he had Turkish slippers; he carried a Malacca cane; he wrapped himself in a Mohave blanket and he wore a Caracas carved gold ring on his four-in-hand scarf. But his crowning effort was in wearing the great traveling badge, the English fore-and-aft checked cap, with its ear flaps tied up over the crown, leaving the front and rear scoops exposed. Not all of the passengers carried this array of proofs, but many dabbled in them just a little bit. It doesn't do, however, when assuming this role to have had your hair cut in Rome, New York, or to have bought your "pants" in Paris, Texas, for if you are guilty in those matters you will give the impression of being a mammoth comique on his annual holiday.