Like Rev. Laurence Sterne, Traveler Henry Baerlein wore rosy spectacles when he went on a journey. But he supplies you with the same kind, so he makes a good companion. Traveler Baerlein speaks foreign languages like a native, and everywhere he went people would drop whatever they were doing to engage him in extended and animated chats. Such was the charm of his tongue or his appearance that a chambermaid in a hotel, a respectable woman with a son, left her job to go walking with him. Other occasional companions were a gypsy fiddler, a bishop, a mayor. Once a beautiful peasant woman fell in love with him for a night, begged him to help her revenge herself on her absent and unfaithful husband. Baerlein was a perfect gentleman. Philosophical, he took everything as it came, let it go the same way. Some of Baerlein's stories are too good not to be true: After the boundaries had quieted down a peasant found the frontier ran through his house, making his lavatory foreign ground. It would have taken him two weeks, every time, to get his passport visaed. A farmer was complaining to a friend that his land was the poorest in Slovakia and would not even support a partridge. Up flew a partridge. Said the friend: "There's one partridge, anyhow." "And was it not flying away?'' said the farmer. The Author. Henry Baerlein was born in Manchester, England, on April Fool's Day 55 years ago. A traveler by inclination, he knows especially well the Near East, Mexico, Spain, the republics of Central Europe. Credited with knowing more about Czechoslovakia than any other living Englishman, he has written several other books about it. Baerlein's travels have been largely "calm and peaceful," except in Mexico (where he collided with Yucatan authorities), Albania (where his linguistic excellence got him suspected as a Yugoslav spy, and where a man in Durazzo is still waiting to kill him). Other books: The House of the Fighting Cocks, Over the Hills of Ruthenia, The March of the 70,000, Mariposa, On the Forgotten Road.