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A HOCHE-POTE OF GOSSIP

Chatter About Souvenir Spoons as an Incentive to Travel.

The Frenchman's Tea-Drinking Aunt- How Thebes Was Recalled- A Remarkable Family on Sunday Island.

The passion for collecting spoons from every city which one visits continues--as one would say of a diphtheria epidemic--unabated. And every lady who really prides herself on having the daintiest novelty in household goblets now shows her full set of silver spoons, procured in cities as diverse as the patterns of the handles. San Francisco and Florence, St. Petersburg, and St. Augustine, Havana, and Munich rattle together in metallic merriment, and display their rival designs; and Omaha is now represented in these collections by the most appropriate design. It is the head of an Omaha Indian-an actual portrait, and, therefore, a really impressive face. The feathers of the headdress form the end of the handle, and the slope of the shoulders makes the outline of the spoon. Beneath, an open gate betrays the name of Omaha. This is the work of a very well-known dealer in silverware in this city, who has done a deal of good designing, but who has never confessed to his workmanship until recently. This mania for collecting spoons as souvenirs of one's journeying is a harmless enough one, and does quite as well as any other device for getting rid of surplus money. But it emphasizes the fact, which is undeniably true, that a good many travel, not because they want to see and know the world, but merely because they do not want to stay at home. It is somewhat irritating to know that the benefits of life so frequently come to those who have not the ability to appreciate them. There are hundreds of girls in Europe today who remember very little about the cities they visit except that they got a spoon of a certain design there on a particular street. And, meantime, at home there are girls throbbing with the fine curiosity of the student or the adventurer, who would use such opportunities of travel in the largest and best ways. I remember once talking with a friend of mine who had just come back from Egypt.

"Tell me something about Thobes," I said to her, stretching myself of the grass in expectation of a treat. "Tell me everything about it that you can remember."

"Thobes," she said, dreamily, taking a beautiful hat from her head and looking at it reflectively, 'is really the most surprising place. The shops are as good as those in Paris. You will hardly believe it, but I got this hat there."

I was telling this story one night to a friendly little Frenchman up in the harbor of Taku, in Alaska.

"Your friend was young," he cried, charitably, "and you say she was also pretty. One forgives everything to such-even to be jited by one-that is also not past forgiveness. But consider my case. I have an aunt who is horribly old, but who never dies. When she does, what she has will be mine. She adores me, principally because when I go to see her I tell her very wild stories. All the time I am telling them she holds up her fan and emits little shrieks of horror. But all the same, she has cut off all her nephews, who are good young men and do not amuse her. Fancy, them, my feeling when six months out of every year this dear aunt of mine exhausts her strength and consumes her fortune by traveling over the globe. And for what purpose? My dear madam, only to see in how many latitudes she can drink tea! even if it were coffee the thought would not be so revolting. But tea! She learned to drink it from an English lover whom she once had. He died, and I suppose her eternal tea drinking is a sort of votive offering-as one burns a lamp before the Virgia for the repose of a friend's soul. This aunt of mine has steeped tea in the shadow of the pyramids and never once looked up at the monuments. She has set her pot in the geyser water of New Zealand and returned with poor reports of the country because her tea tasted of sulfur, she has rotated in Algiers and drunk tea with the notables of the English colony, and last year, if you can believe me, she actually went to South Africa and drank tea with a Dutch woman who whips her slaves with her own hands. She can show you a don't that her tea pot got in the Indian ocean, and another that it got on the steppes of Russia, and I don't distinctly remember but I think she told me she once dropped it off the Matterhorn and walked down herself and picked it up off the ledge of a precipice."

He was a little Frenchman, and I highly valued him and his lies, but I found out that with all his cleverness he made mistakes.

There was an English woman on board our boat who divided her stateroom with me. She got on at a port somewhere in British Columbia, and at the close of a day in harbor. I had been ashore all day engaged. In the pleasing occupation of wrecking buggies. That is to say, I had a good horse, who had a mouth of cast iron, and a will as unbending as the British lion's. And this brute insisted, whenever we met a horse and vehicle on the road, of turning out to the left. I resisted I swore by the American eagle that I would not be conquered by a bloody British quadruped. And I wasn't. I had my way. But to my astonishment I ran into nearly every team I encountered, it was not till the day was nearly ended that I found out that the horse was right and I was wrong, and that it was the custom of the country in driving to turn to the left.

"Well I came back from this day's exciting experience to find a most astonishing pile of bags and bandboxes and parcels before my stateroom door, and on them was sitting a quiet-looking woman whom I immediately took for a lady's maid.

"I am sorry you were kept waiting without," I said, "why didn't you ask the steward to let you in?"

"I wished to wait and see if you would be willing that I should share the stateroom with you," she said sweetly. She had a lovely voice, and a fine enunciation, and a second later I thought that what she was really waiting for was to see if she wanted to stay with me. And then I knew she was not a lady's maid at all, but a middle-aged gentlewoman, who was seeing the world. I found, in fact, that she was making a journey around the world, and that she had given herself four years to do it in.

"She also," cried the little Frenchman when I told him about her, "is trying to see in how many elimates she can drink tea, or perhaps she is knitting an afghan and wishes to add each row in the territory of a different monarch."

But he was wrong. She was a great traveler. She had the spirit of those old Englishmen in her who conquered the unknown continent of America, who penetrated the orient and Africa and the wild islands of the Pacific. She would sit in a frail boat that was being forced up the rapids and never open her thin lips; she would not even shut her eyes when a frightened shoal of salmon swerved the boat from its course, and then their frenzy dashed against the stones and incarnadined the shallows with their blood she would plod all day through the racking chaparral, drenched and without food, and never complain; she would wade a creek, or climb a mountain or go down in a mine or run with the miners from a dynamite blast, or slide down an incline in a quartz mill, and all with an unassuming, spinster-like sir that was the very acme of modesty and feminity. To be sure she usually had her knitting along, but she took that same reason that the gentlemen took their tobacco. The needles used to protrude from her pocket when she stood on the glorified ice of a glacier lit by the sunset. Crevasses of ultra-in urine terribly beautiful yawned at her feet, and beneath grounded the lee in its never-ending struggle sounding like a world a making back of her the uprising wall of crystal flashed into red transparent and mystic. But the English gentlewoman was undismayed. She knew that her boots were watertight, that her purse was in the