It has long been the canny custom of writers on travel bent to defray the expense of their journeyings by dashing off tales filled with foreign flavour. Dickens did it, and Dante. It has been tried all the way from Tasso to Twain; from Raskin to Roosevelt. A pleasing custom it is and thrifty withal, and one that has saved many a one but poorly prepared for the European robber in uniform the moist and unpleasant task of swimming home.

Your writer spends seven days, say, in Paris. Result? The Latin Quarter story. Oh, mes enfants! That Parisian student-life story! There is the beautiful young American girl—beautiful, but as earnest and good as she is beautiful, and as talented as she is earnest and good. And wedded, be it understood, to her art—preferably painting or singing. From New York! Her name must be something prim, yet winsome. Lois will do—Lois, la belle Américaine. Then the hero—American too. Madly in love with Lois. Tall he is and always clean-limbed—not handsome, but with one of those strong, rugged faces. His name, too, must be strong and plain, yet snappy. David is always good. The villain is French, fascinating, and wears a tiny black moustache to hide his mouth, which is cruel.

The rest is simple. A little French restaurant—Henri\'s. Know you not Henri\'s? Tiens! But Henri\'s is not for the tourist. A dim little shop and shabby, modestly tucked away in the shadows of the Rue Brie. But the food! Ah, the—whadd\'you-call\'ems—in the savoury sauce, that is Henri\'s secret! The tender, broiled poularde, done to a turn! The bottle of red wine! Mais oui; there one can dine under the watchful glare of Rosa, the plump, black-eyed wife of the concierge. With a snowy apron about her buxom waist, and a pot of red geraniums somewhere, and a sleek, lazy cat contentedly purring in the sunny window!

Then Lois starving in a garret. Temptation! Sacré bleu! Zut! Also nom d\'un nom! Enter David. Bon! Oh, David, take me away! Take me back to dear old Schenectady. Love is more than all else, especially when no one will buy your pictures.

The Italian story recipe is even simpler. A pearl necklace; a low, clear whistle. Was it the call of a bird or a signal? His-s-s-st! Again! A black cape; the flash of steel in the moonlight; the sound of a splash in the water; a sickening gurgle; a stifled cry! Silence! His-st! Vendetta!

There is the story made in Germany, filled with students and steins and scars; with beer and blonde, blue-eyed M?dchen garbed—the M?dchen, that is—in black velvet bodice, white chemisette, scarlet skirt with two rows of black ribbon at the bottom, and one yellow braid over the shoulder. Especially is this easily accomplished if actually written in the Vaterland, German typewriting machines being equipped with umlauts.

And yet not one of these formulas would seem to fit the story of Mary Gowd. Mary Gowd, with her frumpy English hat and her dreadful English fringe, and her brick-red English cheeks, which not even the enervating Italian sun, the years of bad Italian food or the damp and dim little Roman room had been able to sallow. Mary Gowd, with her shabby blue suit and her mangy bit of fur, and the glint of humour in her pale blue eyes. Many, many times that same glint of humour had saved English Mary Gowd from seeking peace in the muddy old Tiber.

Her card read imposingly thus: Mary M. Gowd, Cicerone. Certificated and Licensed Lecturer on Art and Archaeology. Via del Babbuino, Roma.

In plain language Mary Gowd was a guide. Now, Rome is swarming with guides; but they are men guides. They besiege you in front of Cook\'s. They perch at the top of the Capitoline Hill, ready to pounce on you when you arrive panting from your climb up the shallow steps. They lie in wait in the doorway of St. Peter\'s. Bland, suave, smiling, quiet, but insistent, they dog you from the Vatican to the Catacombs.

Hundreds there are of these little men—undersized, even in this land of small men—dapper, agile, low-voiced, crafty. In his inner coat pocket each carries his credentials, greasy, thumb-worn documents, but precious. He glances at your shoes—this insinuating one—or at your hat, or at any of those myriad signs by which he marks you for his own. Then up he steps and speaks to you in the language of your country, be you French, German, English, Spanish or American.

And each one of this clan—each slim, feline little man in blue serge, white-toothed, gimlet-eyed, smooth-tongued, brisk—hated Mary Gowd. They hated her with the hate of an Italian for an outlander—with the hate of an Italian for a woman who works with her brain—with the hate of an Italian who sees another taking the bread out of his mouth. All this, coupled with the fact that your Italian is a natural-born hater, may indicate that the life of Mary Gowd had not the lyric lilt that life is commonly reputed to have in sunny Italy.

Oh, there is no formula for Mary Gowd\'s story. In the first place, the tale of how Mary Gowd came to be the one woman guide in Rome runs like melodrama. And Mary herself, from her white cotton gloves, darned at the fingers, to her figure, which mysteriously remained the same in spite of fifteen years of scant Italian fare, does not fit gracefully into the r?le of heroine.

Perhaps that story, scraped to bedrock, shorn of all floral features, may gain in force what it loses in artistry.

She was twenty-two when she came to Rome—twenty-two and art-mad. She had been pretty, with that pink-cheesecloth prettiness of the provincial English girl, who degenerates into blowsiness at thirty. Since seventeen she had saved and scrimped and contrived for this modest Roman holiday. She had given painting lessons—even painted on loathsome china—that the little hoard might grow. And when at last there was enough she had come to this Rome against the protests of the fussy English father and the spinster English sister.

The man she met quite casually one morning in the Sistine Chapel—perhaps he bumped her elbow as they stood staring up at the glorious ceiling. A thousand pardons! Ah, an artist too? In five minutes they were chattering like mad—she in bad French and exquisite English; he in bad English and exquisite French. He knew Rome—its pictures, its glories, its history—as only an Italian can. And he taught her art, and he taught her Italian, and he taught her love.

And so they were married, or ostensibly married, though Mary did not know the truth until three months later when he left her quite as casually as he had met her, taking with him the little hoard, and Mary\'s English trinkets, and Mary\'s English roses, and Mary\'s broken pride.

So! There was no going back to the fussy father or the spinster sister. She came very near resting her head on Father Tiber\'s breast in those days. She would sit in the great galleries for hours, staring at the wonder-works. Then, one day, again in the Sistine Chapel, a fussy little American woman had approached her, her eyes snapping. Mary was sketching, or trying to.

"Do you speak English?"

"I am English," said Mary.

The feathers in the hat of the fussy little woman quivered.

"Then tell me, is this ceiling by Raphael?"

"Ceiling!" gasped Mary Gowd. "Raphael!"

Then, very gently, she gave the master\'s name.

"Of course!" snapped the excited little American. "I\'m one of a party of eight. We\'re all school-teachers And this guide"—she waved a hand in the direction of a rapt little group standing in the agonising position the ceiling demands—"just informed us that the ceiling is by Raphael. And we\'re paying him ten lire!"

"Won\'t you sit here?" Mary Gowd made a place for her. "I\'ll tell you."

And she did tell her, finding a certain relief from her pain in unfolding to this commonplace little woman the glory of the masterpiece among masterpieces.

"Why—why," gasped her listener, who had long since beckoned the other seven with frantic finger, "how beautifully you explain it! How much you know! Oh, why can\'t they talk as you do?" she wailed, her eyes full of contempt for the despised guide.

"I am happy to have helped you," said Mary Gowd.

"Helped! Why, there are hundreds of Americans who would give anything to have some one like you to be with them in Rome."

Mary Gowd\'s whole body stiffened. She stared fixedly at the grateful little American school-teacher.

"Some one like me—"

The little teacher blushed very red.

"I beg your pardon. I wasn\'t thinking. Of course you don\'t need to do any such work, but I just couldn\'t help saying—"

"But I do need work," interrupted Mary Gowd. She stood up, her cheeks pink again for the moment, her eyes bright. "I thank you. Oh, I thank you!"

"You thank me!" faltered the American.

But Mary Gowd had folded her sketchbook and was off, through the vestibule, down the splendid corridor, past the giant Swiss guard, to the noisy, sunny Piazza di San Pietro.

That had been fifteen years ago. She had taken her guide\'s examinations and passed them. She knew her Rome from the crypt of St. Peter\'s to the top of the Janiculum Hill; from the Campagna to Tivoli. She read and studied and learned. She delved into the past and brought up strange and interesting truths. She could tell you weird stories of those white marble men who lay so peacefully beneath St. Peter\'s dome, their ringed hands crossed on their breasts. She learned to juggle dates with an ease that brought gasps from her American clients, with their history that went back little more than one hundred years.

She learned to designate as new anything that failed to have its origin stamped B.C.; and the Magnificent Augustus, he who boasted of finding Rome brick and leaving it marble, was a mere nouveau riche with his miserable A.D. 14.

She was as much at home in the Thermae of Caracalla as you in your white-and-blue-tiled bath. She could juggle the history of emperors with one hand and the scandals of half a dozen kings with the other. No ruin was too unimportant for her attention—no picture too faded for her research. She had the centuries at her tongue\'s end. Michelangelo and Canova were her brothers in art, and Rome was to her as your back-garden patch is to you.

Mary Gowd hated this Rome as only an English woman can who has spent fifteen years in that nest of intrigue. She fought the whole race of Roman guides day after day. She no longer turned sick and faint when they hissed after her vile Italian epithets that her American or English clients quite failed to understand. Quite unconcernedly she would jam down the lever of the taximeter the wily Italian cabby had pulled only halfway so that the meter might register double. And when that foul-mouthed one crowned his heap of abuse by screaming "Camorrista! Camor-r-rista!" at her, she would merely shrug her shoulders and say "Andate presto!" to show him she was above quarrelling with a cabman.

She ate eggs and bread, and drank the red wine, never having conquered her disgust for Italian meat since first she saw the filthy carcasses, fly-infested, dust-covered, loathsome, being carted through the swarming streets.

It was six o\'clock of an evening early in March when Mary Gowd went home to the murky little room in the Via Babbuino. She was too tired to notice the sunset. She was too tired to smile at the red-eyed baby of the cobbler\'s wife, who lived in the rear. She was too tired to ask Tina for the letters that seldom came. It had been a particularly trying day, spent with a party of twenty Germans, who had said "Herrlich!" when she showed them the marvels of the Vatican and "Kolossal!" at the grandeur of the Colosseum and, for the rest, had kept their noses buried in their Baedekers.

She groped her way cautiously down the black hall. Tina had a habit of leaving sundry brushes, pans or babies lying about. After the warmth of the March sun outdoors the house was cold with that clammy, penetrating, tomblike chill of the Italian home.

"Tina!" she called.

From the rear of the house came a cackle of voices. Tina was gossiping. There was no smell of supper in the air. Mary Gowd shrugged patient shoulders. Then, before taking off the dowdy hat, before removing the white cotton gloves, she went to the window that overlooked the noisy Via Babbuino, closed the massive wooden shutters, fastened the heavy windows and drew the thick curtains. Then she stood a moment, eyes shut. In that little room the roar of Rome was tamed to a dull humming. Mary Gowd, born and bred amid the green of Northern England, had never become hardened to the maddening noises of the Via Babbuino: The rattle and clatter of cab wheels; the clack-clack of thousands of iron-shod hoofs; the shrill, high cry of the street venders; the blasts of motor horns that seemed to rend the narrow street; the roar and rumble of the electric trams; the wail of fretful babies; the chatter of gossiping women; and above and through and below it all the cracking of the cabman\'s whip—that sceptre of the Roman cabby, that wand which is one part whip and nine parts crack. Sometimes it seemed to Mary Gowd that her brain was seared and welted by the pistol-shot reports of those eternal whips.

She came forward now and lighted a candle that stood on the table and another on the dresser. Their dim light seemed to make dimmer the dark little room. She looked about with a little shiver. Then she sank into the chintz-covered chair that was the one bit of England in the sombre chamber. She took off the dusty black velvet hat, passed a hand over her hair with a gesture that was more tired than tidy, and sat back, her eyes shut, her body inert, her head sagging on her breast.

The voices in the back of the house had ceased. From the kitchen came the slipslop of Tina\'s slovenly feet. Mary Gowd opened her eyes and sat up very straight as Tina stood in the doorway. There was nothing picturesque about Tina. Tina was not one of those olive-tinted, melting-eyed daughters of Italy that one meets in fiction. Looking at her yellow skin and her wrinkles and her coarse hands, one wondered whether she was fifty, or sixty, or one hundred, as is the way with Italian women of Tina\'s class at thirty-five.

Ah, the signora was tired! She smiled pityingly. Tired! Not at all, Mary Gowd assured her briskly. She knew that Tina despised her because she worked like a man.

"Something fine for supper?" Mary Gowd asked mockingly. Her Italian was like that of the Romans themselves, so soft, so liquid, so perfect.

Tina nodded vigorously, her long earrings shaking.

"Vitello"—she began, her tongue clinging lovingly to the double l sound—"Vee-tail-loh—"

"Ugh!" shuddered Mary Gowd. That eternal veal and mutton, pinkish, flabby, sickening!

"What then?" demanded the outraged Tina.

Mary Gowd stood up, making gestures, hat in hand.

"Clotted cream, with strawberries," she said in English, an unknown language, which always roused Tina to fury. "And a steak—a real steak of real beef, three inches thick and covered with onions fried in butter. And creamed chicken, and English hothouse tomatoes, and fresh peaches and little hot rolls, and coffee that isn\'t licorice and ink, and—and—"

Tina\'s dangling earrings disappeared in her shoulders. Her outspread palms were eloquent.

"Crazy, these English!" said the shoulders and palms. "Mad!"

Mary Gowd threw her hat on the bed, pushed aside a screen and busied herself with a little alcohol stove.

"I shall prepare an omelet," she said over her shoulder in Italian. "Also, I have here bread and wine."

"Ugh!" granted Tina.

"Ugh, veal!" grunted Mary Gowd. Then, as Tina\'s flapping feet turned away: "Oh, Tina! Letters?"

Tina fumbled at the bosom of her gown, thought deeply and drew out a crumpled envelope. It had been opened and clumsily closed again. Fifteen years ago Mary Gowd would have raged. Now she shrugged philosophic shoulders. Tina stole hairpins, opened letters that she could not hope to decipher, rummaged bureau drawers, rifled cupboards and fingered books; but then, so did most of the other Tinas in Rome. What use to complain?

Mary Gowd opened the thumb-marked letter, bringing it close to the candlelight. As she read, a smile appeared.

"Huh! Gregg," she said, "Americans!" She glanced again at the hotel letterhead on the stationery—the best hotel in Naples. "Americans—and rich!"

The pleased little smile lingered as she beat the omelet briskly for her supper.

The Henry D. Greggs arrived in Rome on the two o\'clock train from Naples. And all the Roman knights of the waving palm espied them from afar and hailed them with whoops of joy. The season was still young and the Henry D. Greggs looked like money—not Italian money, which is reckoned in lire, but American money, which mounts grandly to dollars. The postcard men in the Piazza delle Terme sped after their motor taxi. The swarthy brigand, with his wooden box of tawdry souvenirs, marked them as they rode past. The cripple who lurked behind a pillar in the colonnade threw aside his coat with a practised hitch of his shoulder to reveal the sickeningly maimed arm that was his stock in trade.

Mr. and Mrs. Henry D. Gregg had left their comfortable home in Batavia, Illinois, with its sleeping porch, veranda and lawn, and seven-passenger car; with its two glistening bathrooms, and its Oriental rugs, and its laundry in the basement, and its Sunday fried chicken and ice cream, because they felt that Miss Eleanora Gregg ought to have the benefit of foreign travel. Miss Eleanora Gregg thought so too: in fact, she had thought so first.

Her name was Eleanora, but her parents called her Tweetie, which really did not sound so bad as it might if Tweetie had been one whit less pretty. Tweetie was so amazingly, Americanly pretty that she could have triumphed over a pet name twice as absurd.

The Greggs came to Rome, as has been stated, at two P.M. Wednesday. By two P.M. Thursday Tweetie had bought a pair of long, dangling earrings, a costume with a Roman striped collar and sash, and had learned to loll back in her cab in imitation of the dashing, black-eyed, sallow women she had seen driving on the Pincio. By Thursday evening she was teasing Papa Gregg for a spray of white aigrets, such as those same languorous ladies wore in feathery mists atop their hats.

"But, Tweet," argued Papa Gregg, "what\'s the use? You can\'t take them back with you. Custom-house regulations forbid it."

The rather faded but smartly dressed Mrs. Gregg asserted herself:

"They\'re barbarous! We had moving pictures at the club showing how they\'re torn from the mother birds. No daughter of mine—"

"I don\'t care!" retorted Tweetie. "They\'re perfectly stunning; and I\'m going to have them."

And she had them—not that the aigret incident is important; but it may serve to place the Greggs in their respective niches.

At eleven o\'clock Friday morning Mary Gowd called at the Gregg\'s hotel, according to appointment. In far-away Batavia, Illinois, Mrs. Gregg had heard of Mary Gowd. And Mary Gowd, wit............