Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 95, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1898 — AMERICAN TOURISTS. [ARTICLE]

AMERICAN TOURISTS.

Devote Themselves Abroad to Things They Wouldn’t See at Home. “One of the curiosities of American travel abroad,” said a tourist who has just returned from his annual spring jaunt on the continent, "is a man’s anxiety to look at the very things in Europe that he can see, if he will, at his own doorsteps at home. For instance, about ‘eyery young New Yorker who passes a few weeks on the continent I goes to all the zoological gardens menI tioned in the guide books. In Dresden i he may ignore the Bruhl terrace, take ! but a fleeting glance at the wonderful ' art gallery, and hardly wink at the I footprints of the great Napoleon, but he | will gape for a whole afternoon at the bears and lions, tigers and elephants in the zoological garden, although at home he never Would dream of passing half the time in the park or circus menagerie; in fact, probably would not think of going to either once a year. “He does the same thing in Vienna, in Paris, in Frankfort and in Berlin. In each of these towns there are a thousand rare sights that he never will see duplicated in his native land, but he leaves half of them unobserved to hunt up more bears, lions and tigers in the local menageries. i "Next to the zoological gardens, the churches seem to have the strongest hold on the American sightseers. Now, outside of a few masterpieces of cathedral architecture, central European churches do not appeal to the untrained eye any more than do many of our tine American churches. The time used by the average American youth in examining spires and gaping at vaults, altars and chancels is just so much time wasted, as, to his eye, the whole exhibition is just what he sees any day in passing St.'Paul’s or old Trinity, or the cathedral. Yet he clings to those churches as he does to the zoological gardens, just because, they are mentioned in the guide books. “I might add to this list of time-wast-ing practices the American habit of visiting and lingering around all the monuments to men, big and small, in European cities. Men who never turn to right or left in New York to distinguish between a statue and a drinking fountain race wildly on the continent after the most insignificant public statues, as if every public monument were ns worthy as the Arch of Triumph in Paris, or the Brandenburg gate in Berlin or the Trafalgar square shaft in London. And while chasing up these animals and churches and commonplace statues of 'people they never heard of the American tourists neglect the art galleri •, the libraries, the great military spectacles dnd the peecliarly national entertainments whose like they never have seen and cannot find on this side of the i water." —N. Y. Sun.