Explore "Europe Revised" by Irvin S. Cobb on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Getting back again to guides, I am reminded that our acquaintanceship / with the second member of the Mark Twain brotherhood was staged in / Paris. This gentleman wished himself on us one afternoon at the Hotel / des Invalides. We did not engage him; he engaged us, doing the trick / with such finesse and skill that before we realized it we had been / retained to accompany him to various points of interest in and round / Paris. However, we remained under his control one day only. At nightfall / we wrested ourselves free and fled under cover of darkness to German / soil, where we were comparatively safe.
I never knew a man who advanced so rapidly in a military way as he did / during the course of that one day. Our own national guard could not / hold a candle to him. He started out at ten A. M. by being an officer of / volunteers in the Franco-Prussian War; but every time he slipped away / and took a nip out of his private bottle, which was often, he advanced / in rank automatically. Before the dusk of evening came he was a corps / commander, who had been ennobled on the field of battle by the hand of / Napoleon the Third.