A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

Stammato was arrested, tried, and condemned, with the

old-time Venetian promptness. He was hanged between

the two great columns in the Piazza–with a gilded rope,

out of compliment to his love of gold, perhaps. He got

no good of his booty at all–it was ALL recovered.

In Venice we had a luxury which very seldom fell to our lot

on the continent–a home dinner with a private family.

If one could always stop with private families,

when traveling, Europe would have a charm which it

now lacks. As it is, one must live in the hotels,

of course, and that is a sorrowful business.

A man accustomed to American food and American domestic

cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe;

but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.

He would have to do without his accustomed morning meal.

That is too formidable a change altogether; he would

necessarily suffer from it. He could get the shadow,

the sham, the base counterfeit of that meal; but it would

do him no good, and money could not buy the reality.

To particularize: the average American’s simplest and

commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak;

well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can

get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it

resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness.

It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff,

and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an

American hotel. The milk used for it is what the French

call “Christian” milk–milk which has been baptized.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European “coffee,”

one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins

to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted

layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream,

after all, and a thing which never existed.

Next comes the European bread–fair enough, good enough,

after a fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic;

and never any change, never any variety–always the same

tiresome thing.

Next, the butter–the sham and tasteless butter; no salt

in it, and made of goodness knows what.

Then there is the beefsteak. They have it in Europe, but they

don’t know how to cook it. Neither will they cut it right.

It comes on the table in a small, round pewter platter.

It lies in the center of this platter, in a bordering

bed of grease-soaked potatoes; it is the size, shape,

and thickness of a man’s hand with the thumb and fingers

cut off. It is a little overdone, is rather dry,

it tastes pretty insipidly, it rouses no enthusiasm.

Imagine a poor exile contemplating that inert thing;

and imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better

land and setting before him a mighty porterhouse steak an

inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle;

dusted with a fragrant pepper; enriched with little

melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness

and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling

out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms;

a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing

an outlying district of this ample county of beefsteak;

the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the

tenderloin still in its place; and imagine that the angel

also adds a great cup of American home-made coffee,

with a cream a-froth on top, some real butter, firm and

yellow and fresh, some smoking hot-biscuits, a plate

of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup–could

words describe the gratitude of this exile?

The European dinner is better than the European breakfast,

but it has its faults and inferiorities; it does not satisfy.

He comes to the table eager and hungry; he swallows his

soup–there is an undefinable lack about it somewhere;

thinks the fish is going to be the thing he wants–

eats it and isn’t sure; thinks the next dish is perhaps

the one that will hit the hungry place–tries it,

and is conscious that there was a something wanting

about it, also. And thus he goes on, from dish to dish,

like a boy after a butterfly which just misses getting