German beer-gardens,--the music, the decorum, the absence of
intoxication, the intelligence manifested in conversation. Then to
out-door life again.]
Other traits. Houses have curtains on the outside of windows as well
as on the inside, and windows are nearly always double, with a space
of about four inches between. They open outward and inward, instead of
up and down; when closed, all noise is shut out. Indeed, there is no
noise on even the busiest streets, which are so smooth that no sounds
are heard but those of horses' feet; no screaming of papers or wares
of any sort is permitted, and no chimes! Then, again, people in the
most ordinary circumstances have fine lace curtains and beautifully
woven fabrics hanging around in graceful festoons, portières, statuary,
pictures, flowers, birds, and books; often the most beautiful things
in the way of prints are pinned frameless on the walls; there are
beautiful marquetry floors, but no carpets.
Again, the orchards throughout the country are without protecting
walls, just as farms are. At each corner a stone marks the division,
and when ploughing, a couple of reversed furrows from stone to stone
serves both as a division and promenade, and crops are not only grown
to this line of demarcation, but grow over it, so that at a distance
there is no division at all. I have seen branches bent to the ground
with ripe fruit, and children walking under them to _buy_ from an
old woman or man across the way, never apparently even thinking of
molesting what is not theirs. This is one of the things that fill you
with wonder. In Weimar, between the Goethe House and the principal
school, a long branch _loaded with red apples_ hung over the way,
almost touching my head, and yet it was under this that hundreds of
children passed daily to and from school.
A pleasant custom in Berlin, as in London, is window-gardening--windows
constructed so on purpose, the glass projecting a couple of feet beyond
the side of the house, forming attractive ferneries, wherein are
contained various sorts of cryptogami, as well as flowers in bloom,
needing but little attention, as the moisture evaporating from the
soil, etc., having no way of escaping, is taken up by the leaves. Also
at the entrance to houses I have noticed beautiful dwarf apple-trees,
with glossy leaves, and bearing an abundance of diminutive fruit.
On one of these little trees, yesterday, I counted fifty-three ripe
apples. These on the pavement day and night, and just the height of
a boy's hand in passing, notwithstanding what I had observed about
fenceless orchards, made me suspect them apples of Sodom, or they
certainly would have been plucked. To satisfy curiosity, I called on a
florist having some for sale, and found that they tasted as good as
they looked. I have concluded, therefore, that if Adam and Eve had been
Germans there would have been no Fall; and I know no race doing more
towards having Eden restored than these same people.
A RAMBLE IN PRUSSIA.
STEPHEN POWERS.
[Country life in Prussia is well delineated in the following
description of a journey on foot from Wittenberg to Potsdam. It
is not an alluring picture, and brings us into the presence of
a stolid generation such as would scarcely be looked for in the
rural districts of that active realm.]
Once out of Wittenberg, I journeyed on along the ancient royal highway,
between the ever-welcome colonnades of stately poplars, planted that
the royal head might never be scorched by the too ardent sun of summer.
The sun shone as brightly as it ever does in blue old Germany, but what
a weary, weary land to my eyes, on the pitiless cold May-day, was that
sandy champaign, almost utterly naked in its hopeless sterility, and
diversified only now and then by a bald-headed knoll, swelling broadly
up with a thousand acres! So indescribably blue and cold and pinched
was it, without any vegetation but a forest of cultivated pines, which,
after a quarter of a century, had struggled up with their wretched,
scraggy stems only fifteen feet! The very soil looked blue and thin
and skinny, and the rye looked blue, and so meagre and chilled that it
could not conceal the ground or the knees of the men who plucked up the
weeds.
All the dismal immensity of this fenceless, hedgeless, houseless waste,
except an acre of rye in a thousand, was given up to the sorrel, the
lichens, and the quitches. The very air seemed poor and attenuated like
thin skimmed milk. All the houses were clustered together in little
villages far apart, where they huddled close, as if for warmth; the
dead, dull peat-fires gave forth no cheerful wreathing smoke; and in
all the desolate waste there was scarcely a soul abroad. The faces
of the yellow-haired children, who were occasionally watching some
geese, were mottled with blue and purple and goose-pimples, and if a
man ventured abroad to pluck up weeds in the stunted rye, which seemed
to shiver with a kind of rustling, starved chilliness, his hands were
bluer than the air. So utterly worn out, so bluish-wan and starved with
the lapse of untold centuries, seemed all the earth and the air of that
Germany which I looked out upon on that dismal May forenoon.
Lamartine says the blood of the Germans is blue, but that of these
Brandenburgers must certainly be sour.
It will readily be believed that I did not undertake a pilgrimage
through this inexpressibly bleak region in pursuit of fine landscapes.
I wished only to visit, by their own firesides and in their own fields,
that sturdy, grim, Puritanic race of Brandenburgers, to whom Prussia is
primarily indebted for all her greatness.
It was weary hours after the middle of the day before the spires of
Wittenberg disappeared below a sand-hill. The afternoon was far spent,
and I began to cast longing glances ahead in search of an eligible
tavern, for I thoroughly agree with Dr. Johnson that "there is nothing
which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is
produced as by a good tavern."
I had come up with a thumping lout of a young peasant, who strode along
with his "clouted shoon," measuring about a yard and a quarter at a
stride, whose voice blubbered and gurgled up out of his stomach in such
a manner that the fierce wind whisked it away, and left me nothing but
an occasional horse-laugh (whereupon I would also laugh, though I had
not the remotest notion of the matters whereof he was discoursing); and
by his advice I passed several inns, though I found afterwards, to my
sorrow, he was looking only for the cheapest. At last we came to one
which was meaner than all the others, but I was too weary to go a step
farther. It bore the pretentious name of the inn of the Green Linden.
It was a mere hovel, built of cobbles and mud-stuccoed, tawny-yellow
within, greenish-yellowish without, with an earthen floor and benches
around the walls. Above the door were twined some sprigs of Whitsuntide
birch, which I had seen during the day on the peasants' hats, wagons,
and everywhere.
Around a pine table were eight or ten men and hobbledehoys, each with a
_Schoppen_ of terribly stiff beer before him, and most of them smoking
the long goosenecked porcelain pipe, while four of them were intent on
cards. The men were hard, gristly-faced, sour-blooded fellows, who only
muttered now and then a monosyllable, which I could seldom understand;
while the youths looked on with the most vacuous, loamy countenances
imaginable. So intent were they on the miserable game that they gave
no heed to our arrival, and when I endeavored to ascertain who was the
landlord, I received only a blank stare or a gesture of impatience. I
sat down and waited, and I confess for a few minutes my enthusiasm for
the Prussian people fell absolutely to the freezing-point.
After about half an hour the landlord seemed to be disturbed in his
mind by a suspicion that I was a foreigner, drew near and ascertained
that fact, whereupon he brought me some vile black coffee and some good
wheaten _Semmel_, and then returned to his occupation. The players
continued at their game far into the night, and though the stakes were
of the most trifling nature, often only a half-penny, they displayed a
fierce and obstinate eagerness which was surprising. They would rise up
on their feet, lean far across the table and smite it with appalling
violence. When they at last desisted, and were preparing to disperse,
they collected about me, and, finding I was an American, listened to me
awhile with a kind of drowsy, immovable passiveness, while the smoke
lazily swirled above their heads. Unlike the lively Swabians and the
joyous drinkers of the sunny wine of Freiburg, they scarcely asked any
questions or expressed any interest beyond grunting their assent or
wonder.
At last the host and myself were left alone, and then he proceeded to
prepare the only couch he could offer by shaking down on the floor a
bundle of rye straw. He tucked me all up, as if I were one of his young
_Buben_, shook the hand which I reached out from the straw, and left
me with a cheerful _Schlafen Sie wohl_. In the adjoining room a lusty
fellow stretched himself on a bench, pillowed his head on a portentous
loaf of rye bread, not having even inserted that useful article of diet
into a pillow-case, and there he snored--_stertitque supinus_--the
livelong night in a tone so audible that I was greatly tempted to rise
and introduce a wisp of rye straw judiciously into his windpipe.
When I sat up on my couch next morning, pulling the straw out of my
hair, I said to myself, like Richard, "Oh, I have passed a miserable
night!" I had not had any "fearful dreams," nor, for that matter, any
sleep, that I was aware of; neither had I any "ugly sights," because it
was too dark to see them, but I felt them. They appeared to be greatly
rejoiced to be permitted, once in their lives, to extract blood out of
a man's veins instead of beer.
The next day I passed through spectacles of the most wonderfully minute
and unceasing toil. In an artificial pine-forest, where the trees
were become too large to be ploughed, there were men on their knees
plucking the weeds between the rows; others in long sheep-skin cloaks
were weeding fields of flax; a woman was culling in a royal forest
the merest sprigs and leaf-stems for fuel; others along the roadside
snipped off the close, short fleece of grass, and carried it in mighty
bundles on their backs for the stalled cattle. Here a stalwart yeoman
lazily leans his chin on his crook, guarding three sheep as they nimbly
nibble! Peasant-women, going to the village to hawk their little
produce, shuffled along with their wooden shoes, making a prodigious
dust, chatting cheerfully with their stolid lords, though they were
bowed down nearly to the earth beneath the intolerable weight of
vegetables. And the infamous brutal tyrants trudged along beside the
poor women, never even offering to touch the burdens with so much as
one of their fingers!
I think the Prussians will certainly never "witch the world with noble
horsemanship." The horses are splendid creatures for farm-animals,
strong and glossy and round, superb as the finest Clydesdales; but the
owners seem to have no confidence upon their backs, and little skill
in guiding them in vehicles. The Prussians are by no means a chivalric
race, in the etymologic sense. In all my travels in Prussia I have yet
to see a civilian on horseback outside of a city, and even there it
is usually only officers who prance through the streets. The immense
superiority of the Hungarian cavalry over the Prussian was abundantly
demonstrated in the Bohemian campaign until the magnificent infantry
battalions turned the scale; and the dreaded "three Uhlans" of Edmond
About were far oftener Poles than Prussians.
It is said that the potentates of Germany, when paying a visit of
ceremony to a foreign sovereign, always take with them a favorite
charger or two to whose paces they are accustomed, that there may be
no blunders or embarrassments in the reviews through their unskilful
horsemanship. These poor peasants evince little more confidence
in their skill than do their sovereigns, and the outrageously
unprofessional and awkward manner in which they handle the noble brutes
would enrage a lover of handsome horses beyond endurance. To save toll
at the gates, they not unfrequently hitch one horse to a two-horse
wagon, so that the pole bruises and thumps his legs in a shameful
manner. And then to hitch the head of one gallant horse to the tail of
another!
In the village of Beelitz I had an amusing adventure, resulting from my
ignorance of the customs of the country, which illustrates a certain
phase of Prussian society. Upon entering the village, I began to cast
about me for some eligible tavern wherein I might take my customary
mid-day repast. The first one I approached was the inn of the Black
Horse, but there were rather too many yellow-haired, unwashed children
and dingy geese about it; besides, the sign hung down from one corner.
The only other inn was the White Eagle, which was scarcely any better,
but it was Hobson's choice. It was an extremely small and unpretentious
edifice, though with walls nearly a man's stature in thickness,
and I could overhear the appetizing clink of knives on plates just
inside the door; so, in doubt whether it was really a public tavern
or not, I rapped. Only the clink of the dinner-knives responded. The
operation was repeated with a certain amount of vigor. There was a
kind of objurgatory remark made within, and in a moment the door was
opened about two feet, and an immense brawny arm, bared to the elbow,
was extended around the edge of the door. In the fingers there was
clutched a bunch of some substance which appeared to solicit my closer
inspection. A single glance revealed to me the interesting fact that it
was bread: it was undoubtedly bread.
This was an unexpectedly prompt response to my desires, and presented
an opportunity for the acquisition of a limited amount of provisions
cheap, but one of which my conscience would not permit me to avail
myself. However, I scrutinized the bread with quite a lively interest.
It was manifestly good bread, but was now somewhat dry: indeed, I may
say it was altogether devoid of moisture. Presently the hand holding
this article of diet executed a sudden movement of impatience, or as
it were of beckoning or blandishment, as if I were expected to take
this bread and masticate the same. But as I still hesitated, the hand
was suddenly withdrawn into the tavern, there was a very audible
remark made inside, and then the brawny hostess owning the hand
presented herself at the door, and immediately appeared to have made an
astounding discovery. Blushes and embarrassment! Stammerings! Mutual
explanations! Ample and shamefaced apologies! A substantial dinner
of boiled beef and cabbage! _Moral:_ In a country where beggars are
numerous never knock at the tavern door.
THE SALT-MINES OF WIELICZKA.[A]
J. ROSS BROWNE.
[J. Ross Browne, author of "Yusef," "Crusoe's Island," "The Land
of Thor," etc., is well known for the humorous vein of many of
his productions. Such is the case with "An American Family in
Germany," from which we make the following selection. It is at
once humorous and instructive. The extract given, however, is
simply descriptive, having too much of interest in itself to need
any adventitious aid. The mine described may serve in a measure
as an artificial counterpart to our natural Mammoth Cave. Descent
into the mine was made by means of a long rope with canvas straps
for seats. There is a stairway cut in solid rock-salt, but it is
wet and slippery, and the rope is usually chosen in preference.]
[Footnote A: From "An American Family in Germany." Copyright, Harper &
Brothers.]
In a few minutes we touched bottom, or rather, by something like
instinct, the machine stopped just as we reached the base of the shaft,
and allowed us to glide off gently on the firm earth. We are now at the
first stage of our journey, having descended something over two hundred
feet. The ramifications of the various tunnels are so intricate and
extensive that they may be said to resemble more the streets of a large
city than a series of excavations made in the bowels of the earth.
These subterranean passages are named after various kings and emperors,
and diverge in every direction, opening at intervals into spacious
caverns and apartments, and undermining the country for a distance of
several miles. Some of them pass entirely under the town of Wieliczka.
In general they are supported by massive beams of wood, and where the
overhanging masses of salt require a still stronger support they are
sustained by immense columns of the original stratum. In former times
almost all the passages were upheld by pillars of salt, but wherever
it has been practicable these have been removed and beams of timber
substituted. The first stratum consists of an amalgam of salt and
dark-colored clay. Deeper down come alternate strata of marl, pebbles,
sand, and blocks of crystal salt. The inferior or green salt is nearest
to the surface; the crystal, called _schilika_, lies in the deeper
parts.
From the subordinate officer sent by the Inspector-General to accompany
us I learned many interesting particulars in reference to the manner of
procuring the salt. He also told some amusing legends of the prominent
places, and furnished me with some statistics, which, if true, are
certainly wonderful. For instance, to traverse the various passages
and chambers embraced within the four distinct stories of which the
mines consist, and see every object of interest, would require three
weeks. The aggregate length of the whole is four hundred English miles;
the greatest depth yet reached is two thousand three hundred feet.
The number of workmen employed in the various operations underground,
exclusive of those above, is upward of a thousand. The amount of salt
annually dug out is two hundred millions of pounds, which, at the
average market value, would be worth ten millions of gulden. Immense
as this yield is, it is inconsiderable, taking into view the unlimited
capacity of the mines. With proper machinery and a judicious investment
of labor the quantity of salt that might be excavated is almost beyond
conjecture.
It is natural to suppose that the air in these vast subterranean
passages must be impure, and consequently deleterious to health. Such,
however, does not appear to be the case. It is both dry and pure, and,
so far as I could judge by breathing it, not in the least oppressive.
The miners are said to be remarkable for longevity. Several of them,
according to the guide, have worked in the mines for forty years,
and have never been sick a day. The equability of the temperature is
probably conducive to health. Only a few degrees of variation are
shown by the thermometer between summer and winter. It is true that in
some of the deepest recesses, which are not sufficiently ventilated,
hydrogen gas occasionally collects. In one instance it caught fire, and
cost the loss of many lives, but precautions have since been taken to
prevent similar accidents.
I was greatly impressed by the profound silence of these vast caverns.
When we stood still the utter absence of sound was appalling. The
falling of a pin would have been a relief. Not even the faintest
vibration in the air was perceptible. No desert could be more silent,
no solitude more awful. I stood apart from the guides and lamp-bearers
in a separate vault, at the distance of a few hundred feet, in order
that I might fully appreciate this profound inertion, and it really
seemed as if the world were no more.
From some of these tunnels we emerged into open caverns, where a
few workmen were employed at their dreary labors. I was surprised
that there were not more to be seen, but was informed that they are
scattered in small parties through miles of earth, so that the number
is not apparent to the casual visitor. As we approached the places
where they are at work the dull clicking of the picks and hammers
produced a singular effect through the vast solitudes, as if the
gnomes, supposed to inhabit gloomy pits, were busily engaged at their
diabolical arts.
We came suddenly upon one group of workmen, under a shelving ledge, who
were occupied in detaching masses of crystallized salt from a cleft in
which they worked. They were naked to the middle, having nothing on but
coarse trousers and boots, and wrought with their crowbars and picks
by the light of a few grease-lamps held by grimy little boys, with
shaggy heads,--members, no doubt, of the same subterranean family.
Some of the men were lying on their backs, punching away with
tremendous toil at the ragged masses of salt overhead, their heads,
faces, and bodies glittering with the showers of salt grit that fell
upon them, while others stood up to their armpits in dark holes delving
into the lower crevices. Seeing our lights, they stopped to gaze at
us. Was it possible they were human beings, these bearded, shaggy,
grimy-looking monsters? Surely, if so, they well represented the
infernal character of the place. Never upon earth (the surface of it I
mean) had I seen such a monstrous group,--shocks of hair all powdered
with salt, glaring eyeballs overhung by white lashes flashing in the
fitful blaze of lamps, brawny forms glittering with crystal powder,
and marked by dark currents of sweat. No wonder I stared at them with
something akin to distrust. They might be monsters in reality, and take
a sudden notion to hurl me into one of their infernal pits by way of
pastime, in which case the only consolation would be, that where there
was such an abundance of salt there would be no difficulty about the
preservation of my remains.
After all, there was something sad in the condition of these poor
wretches, shut out from the glorious light of day, immured in deep dark
pits, hundreds of feet underground, rooting, as it were, for life in
the bowels of the earth. Surely the salt with which other men flavor
their food is gathered with infinite toil, and mingled with bitter
sweat!
[Illustration: INNSBRUCK, THERESA STREET]
Yet, strange as it may seem, I was informed by the guide that these
workmen are so accustomed to this kind of life that they prefer it to
any other. By the rules of the Directory they are divided into gangs,
as on board a ship. The working gang is not permitted to remain under
ground more than eight hours; it is then relieved. The current belief
that some of them live in the mines is not sustained by the facts. In
former times it is quite probable that such was the case. At present
the administration of affairs is more humane than it was in an earlier
period in the history of the mines. The operatives are free to quit
whenever they please, as in any private establishment. Plenty of others
are always ready to take their places. The pay is good, averaging from
thirty kreutzers to a florin a day. Whenever it is practicable the
work is done by the piece. Each man receives so much for a specified
result. Good workmen can make two or three hundred florins a year. The
salt is gotten out in various forms, according to the depth of the
stratum. Where it is mixed with an amalgam of hard earth it is cut into
cylindrical blocks, and exported in that form to Russia. The finer
qualities are crushed, and packed in barrels for exportation to various
parts of Prussia and Austria....