The next moment we were all on shore weeping and embracing

for joy, while the rain poured down in torrents.

The captain said he had been a mariner for forty years

on the Neckar, and in that time had seen storms to make

a man's cheek blanch and his pulses stop, but he had never,

never seen a storm that even approached this one.

How familiar that sounded! For I have been at sea a good

deal and have heard that remark from captains with a

frequency accordingly.

We framed in our minds the usual resolution of thanks

and admiration and gratitude, and took the first

opportunity to vote it, and put it in writing and

present it to the captain, with the customary speech.

We tramped through the darkness and the drenching summer

rain full three miles, and reached "The Naturalist Tavern"

in the village of Hirschhorn just an hour before midnight,

almost exhausted from hardship, fatigue, and terror.

I can never forget that night.

The landlord was rich, and therefore could afford to be

crusty and disobliging; he did not at all like being

turned out of his warm bed to open his house for us.

But no matter, his household got up and cooked a quick

supper for us, and we brewed a hot punch for ourselves,

to keep off consumption. After supper and punch we

had an hour's soothing smoke while we fought the naval

battle over again and voted the resolutions; then we

retired to exceedingly neat and pretty chambers upstairs

that had clean, comfortable beds in them with heirloom

pillowcases most elaborately and tastefully embroidered

by hand.

Such rooms and beds and embroidered linen are as frequent

in German village inns as they are rare in ours.

Our villages are superior to German villages in

more merits, excellences, conveniences, and privileges

than I can enumerate, but the hotels do not belong in the list.

"The Naturalist Tavern" was not a meaningless name; for all

the halls and all the rooms were lined with large glass

cases which were filled with all sorts of birds and animals,

glass-eyed, ably stuffed, and set up in the most natural

eloquent and dramatic attitudes. The moment we were abed,

the rain cleared away and the moon came out. I dozed off

to sleep while contemplating a great white stuffed owl

which was looking intently down on me from a high perch

with the air of a person who thought he had met me before,

but could not make out for certain.

But young Z did not get off so easily. He said that as he was

sinking deliciously to sleep, the moon lifted away the shadows

and developed a huge cat, on a bracket, dead and stuffed,

but crouching, with every muscle tense, for a spring,

and with its glittering glass eyes aimed straight at him.

It made Z uncomfortable. He tried closing his own eyes,

but that did not answer, for a natural instinct kept

making him open them again to see if the cat was still

getting ready to launch at him--which she always was.

He tried turning his back, but that was a failure;

he knew the sinister eyes were on him still. So at

last he had to get up, after an hour or two of worry

and experiment, and set the cat out in the hall. So he won,

that time.

CHAPTER XVIII

[The Kindly Courtesy of Germans]

In the morning we took breakfast in the garden,

under the trees, in the delightful German summer fashion.

The air was filled with the fragrance of flowers

and wild animals; the living portion of the menagerie

of the "Naturalist Tavern" was all about us. There were

great cages populous with fluttering and chattering

foreign birds, and other great cages and greater wire pens,

populous with quadrupeds, both native and foreign.

There were some free creatures, too, and quite sociable

ones they were. White rabbits went loping about the place,

and occasionally came and sniffed at our shoes and shins;

a fawn, with a red ribbon on its neck, walked up and

examined us fearlessly; rare breeds of chickens and

doves begged for crumbs, and a poor old tailless raven

hopped about with a humble, shamefaced mein which said,

"Please do not notice my exposure--think how you would

feel in my circumstances, and be charitable." If he

was observed too much, he would retire behind something

and stay there until he judged the party's interest had

found another object. I never have seen another dumb

creature that was so morbidly sensitive. Bayard Taylor,

who could interpret the dim reasonings of animals,

and understood their moral natures better than most men,

would have found some way to make this poor old chap forget

his troubles for a while, but we have not his kindly art,

and so had to leave the raven to his griefs.

After breakfast we climbed the hill and visited the ancient

castle of Hirschhorn, and the ruined church near it.

There were some curious old bas-reliefs leaning against

the inner walls of the church--sculptured lords of

Hirschhorn in complete armor, and ladies of Hirschhorn

in the picturesque court costumes of the Middle Ages.

These things are suffering damage and passing to decay,

for the last Hirschhorn has been dead two hundred years,

and there is nobody now who cares to preserve the family relics.

In the chancel was a twisted stone column, and the captain

told us a legend about it, of course, for in the matter

of legends he could not seem to restrain himself; but I

do not repeat his tale because there was nothing plausible

about it except that the Hero wrenched this column into its

present screw-shape with his hands --just one single wrench.

All the rest of the legend was doubtful.

But Hirschhorn is best seen from a distance, down the river.

Then the clustered brown towers perched on the green hilltop,

and the old battlemented stone wall, stretching up and over

the grassy ridge and disappearing in the leafy sea beyond,

make a picture whose grace and beauty entirely satisfy

the eye.

We descended from the church by steep stone stairways

which curved this way and that down narrow alleys

between the packed and dirty tenements of the village.

It was a quarter well stocked with deformed, leering,

unkempt and uncombed idiots, who held out hands or caps

and begged piteously. The people of the quarter were not

all idiots, of course, but all that begged seemed to be,

and were said to be.

I was thinking of going by skiff to the next town,

Necharsteinach; so I ran to the riverside in advance of

the party and asked a man there if he had a boat to hire.

I suppose I must have spoken High German--Court German--I

intended it for that, anyway--so he did not understand me.

I turned and twisted my question around and about,

trying to strike that man's average, but failed.

He could not make out what I wanted. Now Mr. X arrived,

faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied

this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way:

"Can man boat get here?"

The mariner promptly understood and promptly answered.

I can comprehend why he was able to understand that

particular sentence, because by mere accident all the

words in it except "get" have the same sound and the same

meaning in German that they have in English; but how he

managed to understand Mr. X's next remark puzzled me.

I will insert it, presently. X turned away a moment,

and I asked the mariner if he could not find a board,

and so construct an additional seat. I spoke in the

purest German, but I might as well have spoken in the

purest Choctaw for all the good it did. The man tried

his best to understand me; he tried, and kept on trying,

harder and harder, until I saw it was really of no use,

and said:

"There, don't strain yourself--it is of no consequence."

Then X turned to him and crisply said:

"MACHEN SIE a flat board."

I wish my epitaph may tell the truth about me if the man

did not answer up at once, and say he would go and borrow

a board as soon as he had lit the pipe which he was filling.

We changed our mind about taking a boat, so we did not have

to go. I have given Mr. X's two remarks just as he made them.

Four of the five words in the first one were English,

and that they were also German was only accidental,

not intentional; three out of the five words in the second

remark were English, and English only, and the two German

ones did not mean anything in particular, in such a connection.

X always spoke English to Germans, but his plan was

to turn the sentence wrong end first and upside down,

according to German construction, and sprinkle in a German

word without any essential meaning to it, here and there,

by way of flavor. Yet he always made himself understood.

He could make those dialect-speaking raftsmen understand

him, sometimes, when even young Z had failed with them;

and young Z was a pretty good German scholar. For one thing,

X always spoke with such confidence--perhaps that helped.

And possibly the raftsmen's dialect was what is called

PLATT-DEUTSCH, and so they found his English more familiar

to their ears than another man's German. Quite indifferent

students of German can read Fritz Reuter's charming

platt-Deutch tales with some little facility because many

of the words are English. I suppose this is the tongue

which our Saxon ancestors carried to England with them.

By and by I will inquire of some other philologist.

However, in the mean time it had transpired that the men

employed to calk the raft had found that the leak was not

a leak at all, but only a crack between the logs--a crack

that belonged there, and was not dangerous, but had been

magnified into a leak by the disordered imagination of

the mate. Therefore we went aboard again with a good degree

of confidence, and presently got to sea without accident.

As we swam smoothly along between the enchanting shores,

we fell to swapping notes about manners and customs

in Germany and elsewhere.

As I write, now, many months later, I perceive that each of us,

by observing and noting and inquiring, diligently and day

by day, had managed to lay in a most varied and opulent

stock of misinformation. But this is not surprising;

it is very difficult to get accurate details in any country.

For example, I had the idea once, in Heidelberg,

to find out all about those five student-corps. I started

with the White Cap corps. I began to inquire of this

and that and the other citizen, and here is what I found

out:

1. It is called the Prussian Corps, because none

but Prussians are admitted to it.

2. It is called the Prussian Corps for no particular reason.

It has simply pleased each corps to name itself after

some German state.

3. It is not named the Prussian Corps at all, but only

the White Cap Corps.

4. Any student can belong to it who is a German by birth.

5. Any student can belong to it who is European by birth.

6. Any European-born student can belong to it, except he

be a Frenchman.

7. Any student can belong to it, no matter where he

was born.

8. No student can belong to it who is not of noble blood.

9. No student can belong to it who cannot show three full

generations of noble descent.

10. Nobility is not a necessary qualification.

11. No moneyless student can belong to it.

12. Money qualification is nonsense--such a thing has

never been thought of.

I got some of this information from students themselves

--students who did not belong to the corps.

I finally went to headquarters--to the White Caps--where I

would have gone in the first place if I had been acquainted.

But even at headquarters I found difficulties; I perceived

that there were things about the White Cap Corps which

one member knew and another one didn't. It was natural;

for very few members of any organization know ALL that can

be known about it. I doubt there is a man or a woman

in Heidelberg who would not answer promptly and confidently

three out of every five questions about the White Cap Corps

which a stranger might ask; yet it is a very safe bet

that two of the three answers would be incorrect every time.

There is one German custom which is universal--the bowing

courteously to strangers when sitting down at table or

rising up from it. This bow startles a stranger out of his

self-possession, the first time it occurs, and he is likely

to fall over a chair or something, in his embarrassment,

but it pleases him, nevertheless. One soon learns to expect

this bow and be on the lookout and ready to return it;

but to learn to lead off and make the initial bow

one's self is a difficult matter for a diffident man.

One thinks, "If I rise to go, and tender my box,

and these ladies and gentlemen take it into their heads

to ignore the custom of their nation, and not return it,

how shall I feel, in case I survive to feel anything."

Therefore he is afraid to venture. He sits out the dinner,

and makes the strangers rise first and originate the bowing.

A table d'ho^te dinner is a tedious affair for a man

who seldom touches anything after the three first courses;

therefore I used to do some pretty dreary waiting

because of my fears. It took me months to assure myself

that those fears were groundless, but I did assure myself

at last by experimenting diligently through my agent.

I made Harris get up and bow and leave; invariably his bow

was returned, then I got up and bowed myself and retired.

Thus my education proceeded easily and comfortably for me,

but not for Harris. Three courses of a table d'ho^te

dinner were enough for me, but Harris preferred thirteen.

Even after I had acquired full confidence, and no longer needed

the agent's help, I sometimes encountered difficulties.

Once at Baden-Baden I nearly lost a train because I could

not be sure that three young ladies opposite me at table

were Germans, since I had not heard them speak; they might

be American, they might be English, it was not safe to venture

a bow; but just as I had got that far with my thought,

one of them began a German remark, to my great relief

and gratitude; and before she got out her third word,

our bows had been delivered and graciously returned,

and we were off.

There is a friendly something about the German character

which is very winning. When Harris and I were making

a pedestrian tour through the Black Forest, we stopped at

a little country inn for dinner one day; two young ladies

and a young gentleman entered and sat down opposite us.

They were pedestrians, too. Our knapsacks were strapped

upon our backs, but they had a sturdy youth along to carry

theirs for them. All parties were hungry, so there was

no talking. By and by the usual bows were exchanged,

and we separated.

As we sat at a late breakfast in the hotel at Allerheiligen,

next morning, these young people and took places

near us without observing us; but presently they saw

us and at once bowed and smiled; not ceremoniously,

but with the gratified look of people who have found

acquaintances where they were expecting strangers.

Then they spoke of the weather and the roads. We also

spoke of the weather and the roads. Next, they said they

had had an enjoyable walk, notwithstanding the weather.

We said that that had been our case, too. Then they said

they had walked thirty English miles the day before,

and asked how many we had walked. I could not lie, so I

told Harris to do it. Harris told them we had made thirty

English miles, too. That was true; we had "made" them,

though we had had a little assistance here and there.

After breakfast they found us trying to blast some

information out of the dumb hotel clerk about routes,

and observing that we were not succeeding pretty well,

they went and got their maps and things, and pointed

out and explained our course so clearly that even a New

York detective could have followed it. And when we

started they spoke out a hearty good-by and wished us

a pleasant journey. Perhaps they were more generous

with us than they might have been with native wayfarers

because we were a forlorn lot and in a strange land;

I don't know; I only know it was lovely to be treated so.

Very well, I took an American young lady to one of the fine

balls in Baden-Baden, one night, and at the entrance-door

upstairs we were halted by an official--something about Miss

Jones's dress was not according to rule; I don't remember

what it was, now; something was wanting--her back hair,

or a shawl, or a fan, or a shovel, or something.

The official was ever so polite, and every so sorry,

but the rule was strict, and he could not let us in.

It was very embarrassing, for many eyes were on us.

But now a richly dressed girl stepped out of the ballroom,

inquired into the trouble, and said she could fix it in

a moment. She took Miss Jones to the robing-room, and soon

brought her back in regulation trim, and then we entered

the ballroom with this benefactress unchallenged.

Being safe, now, I began to puzzle through my sincere

but ungrammatical thanks, when there was a sudden mutual

recognition --the benefactress and I had met at Allerheiligen.

Two weeks had not altered her good face, and plainly

her heart was in the right place yet, but there was such

a difference between these clothes and the clothes I

had seen her in before, when she was walking thirty miles

a day in the Black Forest, that it was quite natural

that I had failed to recognize her sooner. I had on MY

other suit, too, but my German would betray me to a person

who had heard it once, anyway. She brought her brother

and sister, and they made our way smooth for that evening.

Well--months afterward, I was driving through the streets

of Munich in a cab with a German lady, one day, when she

said:

"There, that is Prince Ludwig and his wife, walking along there."

Everybody was bowing to them--cabmen, little children,

and everybody else--and they were returning all the bows

and overlooking nobody, when a young lady met them and made

a deep courtesy.

"That is probably one of the ladies of the court,"

said my German friend.

I said:

"She is an honor to it, then. I know her. I don't know

her name, but I know HER. I have known her at Allerheiligen

and Baden-Baden. She ought to be an Empress, but she

may be only a Duchess; it is the way things go in this way."

If one asks a German a civil question, he will be quite

sure to get a civil answer. If you stop a German in the

street and ask him to direct you to a certain place,

he shows no sign of feeling offended. If the place be

difficult to find, ten to one the man will drop his own

matters and go with you and show you.

In London, too, many a time, strangers have walked several

blocks with me to show me my way.

There is something very real about this sort of politeness.

Quite often, in Germany, shopkeepers who could not furnish

me the article I wanted have sent one of their employees

with me to show me a place where it could be had.

CHAPTER XIX

[The Deadly Jest of Dilsberg]

However, I wander from the raft. We made the port

of Necharsteinach in good season, and went to the hotel

and ordered a trout dinner, the same to be ready

against our return from a two-hour pedestrian excursion

to the village and castle of Dilsberg, a mile distant,

on the other side of the river. I do not mean that we

proposed to be two hours making two miles--no, we meant

to employ most of the time in inspecting Dilsberg.

For Dilsberg is a quaint place. It is most quaintly

and picturesquely situated, too. Imagine the beautiful

river before you; then a few rods of brilliant green sward

on its opposite shore; then a sudden hill--no preparatory

gently rising slopes, but a sort of instantaneous hill

--a hill two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet high,

as round as a bowl, with the same taper upward that an

inverted bowl has, and with about the same relation

of height to diameter that distinguishes a bowl of good

honest depth--a hill which is thickly clothed with

green bushes--a comely, shapely hill, rising abruptly

out of the dead level of the surrounding green plains,

visible from a great distance down the bends of the river,

and with just exactly room on the top of its head

for its steepled and turreted and roof-clustered cap

of architecture, which same is tightly jammed and compacted

within the perfectly round hoop of the ancient village wall.

There is no house outside the wall on the whole hill,

or any vestige of a former house; all the houses are

inside the wall, but there isn't room for another one.

It is really a finished town, and has been finished

a very long time. There is no space between the wall

and the first circle of buildings; no, the village wall

is itself the rear wall of the first circle of buildings,

and the roofs jut a little over the wall and thus

furnish it with eaves. The general level of the massed

roofs is gracefully broken and relieved by the dominating

towers of the ruined castle and the tall spires of a

couple of churches; so, from a distance Dilsberg has

rather more the look of a king's crown than a cap.

That lofty green eminence and its quaint coronet form

quite a striking picture, you may be sure, in the flush

of the evening sun.

We crossed over in a boat and began the ascent by a narrow,

steep path which plunged us at once into the leafy deeps

of the bushes. But they were not cool deeps by any means,

for the sun's rays were weltering hot and there was

little or no breeze to temper them. As we panted up

the sharp ascent, we met brown, bareheaded and barefooted

boys and girls, occasionally, and sometimes men;

they came upon us without warning, they gave us good day,

flashed out of sight in the bushes, and were gone as

suddenly and mysteriously as they had come. They were

bound for the other side of the river to work. This path

had been traveled by many generations of these people.

They have always gone down to the valley to earn their bread,

but they have always climbed their hill again to eat it,

and to sleep in their snug town.

It is said that the Dilsbergers do not emigrate much;

they find that living up there above the world, in their

peaceful nest, is pleasanter than living down in the

troublous world. The seven hundred inhabitants are all

blood-kin to each other, too; they have always been blood-kin

to each other for fifteen hundred years; they are simply

one large family, and they like the home folks better than

they like strangers, hence they persistently stay at home.

It has been said that for ages Dilsberg has been merely

a thriving and diligent idiot-factory. I saw no idiots there,

but the captain said, "Because of late years the government

has taken to lugging them off to asylums and otherwheres;

and government wants to cripple the factory, too, and is

trying to get these Dilsbergers to marry out of the family,

but they don't like to."

The captain probably imagined all this, as modern science

denies that the intermarrying of relatives deteriorates

the stock.

Arrived within the wall, we found the usual village

sights and life. We moved along a narrow, crooked lane

which had been paved in the Middle Ages. A strapping,

ruddy girl was beating flax or some such stuff in a little

bit of a good-box of a barn, and she swung her flail

with a will--if it was a flail; I was not farmer enough

to know what she was at; a frowsy, barelegged girl was

herding half a dozen geese with a stick--driving them

along the lane and keeping them out of the dwellings;

a cooper was at work in a shop which I know he did not make

so large a thing as a hogshead in, for there was not room.

In the front rooms of dwellings girls and women were

cooking or spinning, and ducks and chickens were waddling

in and out, over the threshold, picking up chance crumbs

and holding pleasant converse; a very old and wrinkled man

sat asleep before his door, with his chin upon his breast

and his extinguished pipe in his lap; soiled children

were playing in the dirt everywhere along the lane,

unmindful of the sun.

Except the sleeping old man, everybody was at work,

but the place was very still and peaceful, nevertheless;

so still that the distant cackle of the successful hen smote

upon the ear but little dulled by intervening sounds.

That commonest of village sights was lacking here--the

public pump, with its great stone tank or trough of

limpid water, and its group of gossiping pitcher-bearers;

for there is no well or fountain or spring on this tall hill;

cisterns of rain-water are used.

Our alpenstocks and muslin tails compelled attention,

and as we moved through the village we gathered a considerable

procession of little boys and girls, and so went in some

state to the castle. It proved to be an extensive pile of

crumbling walls, arches, and towers, massive, properly grouped

for picturesque effect, weedy, grass-grown, and satisfactory.

The children acted as guides; they walked us along the top

of the highest walls, then took us up into a high tower

and showed us a wide and beautiful landscape, made up

of wavy distances of woody hills, and a nearer prospect

of undulating expanses of green lowlands, on the one hand,

and castle-graced crags and ridges on the other,

with the shining curves of the Neckar flowing between.

But the principal show, the chief pride of the children,

was the ancient and empty well in the grass-grown court

of the castle. Its massive stone curb stands up three

or four feet above-ground, and is whole and uninjured.

The children said that in the Middle Ages this well was

four hundred feet deep, and furnished all the village

with an abundant supply of water, in war and peace.

They said that in the old day its bottom was below the level

of the Neckar, hence the water-supply was inexhaustible.

But there were some who believed it had never been a well

at all, and was never deeper than it is now--eighty feet;

that at that depth a subterranean passage branched from it

and descended gradually to a remote place in the valley,

where it opened into somebody's cellar or other hidden recess,

and that the secret of this locality is now lost.

Those who hold this belief say that herein lies the

explanation that Dilsberg, besieged by Tilly and many

a soldier before him, was never taken: after the longest

and closest sieges the besiegers were astonished to

perceive that the besieged were as fat and hearty as ever,

and were well furnished with munitions of war--therefore

it must be that the Dilsbergers had been bringing these

things in through the subterranean passage all the time.

The children said that there was in truth a subterranean

outlet down there, and they would prove it. So they set

a great truss of straw on fire and threw it down the well,

while we leaned on the curb and watched the glowing

mass descend. It struck bottom and gradually burned out.

No smoke came up. The children clapped their hands and

said:

"You see! Nothing makes so much smoke as burning straw--now

where did the smoke go to, if there is no subterranean outlet?"

So it seemed quite evident that the subterranean outlet

indeed existed. But the finest thing within the ruin's

limits was a noble linden, which the children said was

four hundred years old, and no doubt it was. It had

a mighty trunk and a mighty spread of limb and foliage.

The limbs near the ground were nearly the thickness

of a barrel.

That tree had witnessed the assaults of men in mail

--how remote such a time seems, and how ungraspable is the

fact that real men ever did fight in real armor!--and it

had seen the time when these broken arches and crumbling

battlements were a trim and strong and stately fortress,

fluttering its gay banners in the sun, and peopled with vigorous

humanity--how impossibly long ago that seems!--and here

it stands yet, and possibly may still be standing here,

sunning itself and dreaming its historical dreams,

when today shall have been joined to the days called "ancient."

Well, we sat down under the tree to smoke, and the captain

delivered himself of his legend:

THE LEGEND OF DILSBERG CASTLE

It was to this effect. In the old times there was once

a great company assembled at the castle, and festivity

ran high. Of course there was a haunted chamber

in the castle, and one day the talk fell upon that.

It was said that whoever slept in it would not wake again

for fifty years. Now when a young knight named Conrad

von Geisberg heard this, he said that if the castle were

his he would destroy that chamber, so that no foolish

person might have the chance to bring so dreadful

a misfortune upon himself and afflict such as loved

him with the memory of it. Straightway, the company

privately laid their heads together to contrive some

way to get this superstitious young man to sleep in that chamber.

And they succeeded--in this way. They persuaded

his betrothed, a lovely mischievous young creature,

niece of the lord of the castle, to help them in their plot.

She presently took him aside and had speech with him.

She used all her persuasions, but could not shake him;

he said his belief was firm, that if he should sleep

there he would wake no more for fifty years, and it made

him shudder to think of it. Catharina began to weep.

This was a better argument; Conrad could not out against it.

He yielded and said she should have her wish if she would only

smile and be happy again. She flung her arms about his neck,

and the kisses she gave him showed that her thankfulness

and her pleasure were very real. Then she flew to tell

the company her success, and the applause she received

made her glad and proud she had undertaken her mission,

since all alone she had accomplished what the multitude had

failed in.

At midnight, that night, after the usual feasting,

Conrad was taken to the haunted chamber and left there.

He fell asleep, by and by.

When he awoke again and looked about him, his heart

stood still with horror! The whole aspect of the chamber

was changed. The walls were moldy and hung with

ancient cobwebs; the curtains and beddings were rotten;

the furniture was rickety and ready to fall to pieces.

He sprang out of bed, but his quaking knees sunk under

him and he fell to the floor.

"This is the weakness of age," he said.

He rose and sought his clothing. It was clothing no longer.

The colors were gone, the garments gave way in many places

while he was putting them on. He fled, shuddering,

into the corridor, and along it to the great hall. Here he

was met by a middle-aged stranger of a kind countenance,

who stopped and gazed at him with surprise. Conrad said:

"Good sir, will you send hither the lord Ulrich?"

The stranger looked puzzled a moment, then said:

"The lord Ulrich?"

"Yes--if you will be so good."

The stranger called--"Wilhelm!" A young serving-man came,

and the stranger said to him:

"Is there a lord Ulrich among the guests?"

"I know none of the name, so please your honor."

Conrad said, hesitatingly:

"I did not mean a guest, but the lord of the castle, sir."

The stranger and the servant exchanged wondering glances.

Then the former said:

"I am the lord of the castle."

"Since when, sir?"

"Since the death of my father, the good lord Ulrich

more than forty years ago."

Conrad sank upon a bench and covered his face with his

hands while he rocked his body to and fro and moaned.

The stranger said in a low voice to the servant:

"I fear me this poor old creature is mad. Call some one."

In a moment several people came, and grouped themselves about,

talking in whispers. Conrad looked up and scanned

the faces about him wistfully.

Then he shook his head and said, in a grieved voice:

"No, there is none among ye that I know. I am old and alone

in the world. They are dead and gone these many years

that cared for me. But sure, some of these aged ones I see

about me can tell me some little word or two concerning them."

Several bent and tottering men and women came nearer

and answered his questions about each former friend

as he mentioned the names. This one they said had been

dead ten years, that one twenty, another thirty.

Each succeeding blow struck heavier and heavier.

At last the sufferer said:

"There is one more, but I have not the courage to--O

my lost Catharina!"

One of the old dames said:

"Ah, I knew her well, poor soul. A misfortune overtook

her lover, and she died of sorrow nearly fifty years ago.

She lieth under the linden tree without the court."

Conrad bowed his head and said:

"Ah, why did I ever wake! And so she died of grief for me,

poor child. So young, so sweet, so good! She never wittingly

did a hurtful thing in all the little summer of her life.

Her loving debt shall be repaid--for I will die of grief

for her."

His head drooped upon his breast. In the moment there

was a wild burst of joyous laughter, a pair of round

young arms were flung about Conrad's neck and a sweet

voice cried:

"There, Conrad mine, thy kind words kill me--the farce

shall go no further! Look up, and laugh with us--'twas

all a jest!"

And he did look up, and gazed, in a dazed wonderment

--for the disguises were stripped away, and the aged

men and women were bright and young and gay again.

Catharina's happy tongue ran on:

"'Twas a marvelous jest, and bravely carried out.

They gave you a heavy sleeping-draught before you went

to bed, and in the night they bore you to a ruined chamber

where all had fallen to decay, and placed these rags

of clothing by you. And when your sleep was spent and you

came forth, two strangers, well instructed in their parts,

were here to meet you; and all we, your friends,

in our disguises, were close at hand, to see and hear,

you may be sure. Ah, 'twas a gallant jest! Come, now,

and make thee ready for the pleasures of the day.

How real was thy misery for the moment, thou poor lad!

Look up and have thy laugh, now!"

He looked up, searched the merry faces about him

in a dreamy way, then sighed and said:

"I am aweary, good strangers, I pray you lead me to her grave."

All the smile vanished away, every cheek blanched,

Catharina sunk to the ground in a swoon.

All day the people went about the castle with troubled faces,

and communed together in undertones. A painful hush

pervaded the place which had lately been so full of

cheery life. Each in his turn tried to arouse Conrad

out of his hallucination and bring him to himself;

but all the answer any got was a meek, bewildered stare,

and then the words:

"Good stranger, I have no friends, all are at rest these

many years; ye speak me fair, ye mean me well, but I know

ye not; I am alone and forlorn in the world--prithee

lead me to her grave."

During two years Conrad spent his days, from the

early morning till the night, under the linden tree,

mourning over the imaginary grave of his Catharina.

Catharina was the only company of the harmless madman.

He was very friendly toward her because, as he said,

in some ways she reminded him of his Catharina whom he had

lost "fifty years ago." He often said:

"She was so gay, so happy-hearted--but you never smile;

and always when you think I am not looking, you cry."

When Conrad died, they buried him under the linden,

according to his directions, so that he might rest

"near his poor Catharina." Then Catharina sat under

the linden alone, every day and all day long, a great

many years, speaking to no one, and never smiling;

and at last her long repentance was rewarded with death,

and she was buried by Conrad's side.

Harris pleased the captain by saying it was good legend;

and pleased him further by adding:

"Now that I have seen this mighty tree, vigorous with

its four hundred years, I feel a desire to believe

the legend for ITS sake; so I will humor the desire,

and consider that the tree really watches over those poor

hearts and feels a sort of human tenderness for them."

We returned to Necharsteinach, plunged our hot heads

into the trough at the town pump, and then went to the

hotel and ate our trout dinner in leisurely comfort,

in the garden, with the beautiful Neckar flowing at our feet,

the quaint Dilsberg looming beyond, and the graceful

towers and battlements of a couple of medieval castles

(called the "Swallow's Nest" [1] and "The Brothers.")

assisting the rugged scenery of a bend of the river

down to our right. We got to sea in season to make the

eight-mile run to Heidelberg before the night shut down.

We sailed by the hotel in the mellow glow of sunset,

and came slashing down with the mad current into the narrow

passage between the dikes. I believed I could shoot the

bridge myself, and I went to the forward triplet of logs

and relieved the pilot of his pole and his responsibility.

1. The seeker after information is referred to Appendix

E for our captain's legend of the "Swallow's Nest"

and "The Brothers."

We went tearing along in a most exhilarating way, and I

performed the delicate duties of my office very well indeed

for a first attempt; but perceiving, presently, that I

really was going to shoot the bridge itself instead

of the archway under it, I judiciously stepped ashore.

The next moment I had my long-coveted desire: I saw

a raft wrecked. It hit the pier in the center and went

all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches

struck by lightning.

I was the only one of our party who saw this grand sight;

the others were attitudinizing, for the benefit of the long

rank of young ladies who were promenading on the bank,

and so they lost it. But I helped to fish them out of

the river, down below the bridge, and then described it

to them as well as I could.

They were not interested, though. They said they were

wet and felt ridiculous and did not care anything for

descriptions of scenery. The young ladies, and other people,

crowded around and showed a great deal of sympathy,

but that did not help matters; for my friends said they

did not want sympathy, they wanted a back alley and solitude.

CHAPTER XX

[My Precious, Priceless Tear-Jug]

Next morning brought good news--our trunks had arrived

from Hamburg at last. Let this be a warning to the reader.

The Germans are very conscientious, and this trait makes

them very particular. Therefore if you tell a German you

want a thing done immediately, he takes you at your word;

he thinks you mean what you say; so he does that thing

immediately--according to his idea of immediately

--which is about a week; that is, it is a week if it refers

to the building of a garment, or it is an hour and a half

if it refers to the cooking of a trout. Very well; if you

tell a German to send your trunk to you by "slow freight,"

he takes you at your word; he sends it by "slow freight,"

and you cannot imagine how long you will go on enlarging

your admiration of the expressiveness of that phrase

in the German tongue, before you get that trunk.

The hair on my trunk was soft and thick and youthful,

when I got it ready for shipment in Hamburg; it was baldheaded

when it reached Heidelberg. However, it was still sound,

that was a comfort, it was not battered in the least;

the baggagemen seemed to be conscientiously careful,

in Germany, of the baggage entrusted to their hands.

There was nothing now in the way of our departure, therefore we

set about our preparations.

Naturally my chief solicitude was about my collection

of Ceramics. Of course I could not take it with me,

that would be inconvenient, and dangerous besides.

I took advice, but the best brick-a-brackers were divided

as to the wisest course to pursue; some said pack the

collection and warehouse it; others said try to get it

into the Grand Ducal Museum at Mannheim for safe keeping.

So I divided the collection, and followed the advice of

both parties. I set aside, for the Museum, those articles

which were the most frail and precious.

Among these was my Etruscan tear-jug. I have made a little

sketch of it here; [Figure 6] that thing creeping up

the side is not a bug, it is a hole. I bought this

tear-jug of a dealer in antiquities for four hundred

and fifty dollars. It is very rare. The man said the

Etruscans used to keep tears or something in these things,

and that it was very hard to get hold of a broken one, now.

I also set aside my Henri II. plate. See sketch

from my pencil; [Figure 7] it is in the main correct,

though I think I have foreshortened one end of it a little

too much, perhaps. This is very fine and rare; the shape

is exceedingly beautiful and unusual. It has wonderful

decorations on it, but I am not able to reproduce them.

It cost more than the tear-jug, as the dealer said

there was not another plate just like it in the world.

He said there was much false Henri II ware around,

but that the genuineness of this piece was unquestionable.

He showed me its pedigree, or its history, if you please;

it was a document which traced this plate's movements

all the way down from its birth--showed who bought it,

from whom, and what he paid for it--from the first buyer

down to me, whereby I saw that it had gone steadily up

from thirty-five cents to seven hundred dollars. He said

that the whole Ceramic world would be informed that it

was now in my possession and would make a note of it,

with the price paid. [Figure 8]

There were Masters in those days, but, alas--it is not so now.

Of course the main preciousness of this piece lies in its color;

it is that old sensuous, pervading, ramifying, interpolating,

transboreal blue which is the despair of modern art.

The little sketch which I have made of this gem cannot

and does not do it justice, since I have been obliged

to leave out the color. But I've got the expression, though.

However, I must not be frittering away the reader's time

with these details. I did not intend to go into any

detail at all, at first, but it is the failing of the

true ceramiker, or the true devotee in any department

of brick-a-brackery, that once he gets his tongue or his

pen started on his darling theme, he cannot well stop

until he drops from exhaustion. He has no more sense

of the flight of time than has any other lover when talking

of his sweetheart. The very "marks" on the bottom

of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into

a gibbering ecstasy; and I could forsake a drowning

relative to help dispute about whether the stopple

of a departed Buon Retiro scent-bottle was genuine or spurious.

Many people say that for a male person, bric-a-brac hunting

is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes,

or decorating Japanese pots with decalcomanie butterflies

would be, and these people fling mud at the elegant Englishman,

Byng, who wrote a book called THE BRIC-A-BRAC HUNTER,

and make fun of him for chasing around after what they choose

to call "his despicable trifles"; and for "gushing" over

these trifles; and for exhibiting his "deep infantile delight"

in what they call his "tuppenny collection of beggarly

trivialities"; and for beginning his book with a picture

of himself seated, in a "sappy, self-complacent attitude,

in the midst of his poor little ridiculous bric-a-brac junk

shop."

It is easy to say these things; it is easy to revile us,

easy to despise us; therefore, let these people rail on;

they cannot feel as Byng and I feel--it is their loss,

not ours. For my part I am content to be a brick-a-bracker

and a ceramiker--more, I am proud to be so named.

I am proud to know that I lose my reason as immediately

in the presence of a rare jug with an illustrious mark

on the bottom of it, as if I had just emptied that jug.

Very well; I packed and stored a part of my collection,

and the rest of it I placed in the care of the Grand Ducal

Museum in Mannheim, by permission. My Old Blue China

Cat remains there yet. I presented it to that excellent

institution.

I had but one misfortune with my things. An egg which I

had kept back from breakfast that morning, was broken

in packing. It was a great pity. I had shown it to the

best connoisseurs in Heidelberg, and they all said it

was an antique. We spent a day or two in farewell visits,

and then left for Baden-Baden. We had a pleasant

trip to it, for the Rhine valley is always lovely.

The only trouble was that the trip was too short.

If I remember rightly it only occupied a couple of hours,

therefore I judge that the distance was very little,

if any, over fifty miles. We quitted the train at Oos,

and walked the entire remaining distance to Baden-Baden,

with the exception of a lift of less than an hour which we

got on a passing wagon, the weather being exhaustingly warm.

We came into town on foot.

One of the first persons we encountered, as we walked

up the street, was the Rev. Mr. ------, an old friend

from America--a lucky encounter, indeed, for his is

a most gentle, refined, and sensitive nature, and his

company and companionship are a genuine refreshment.

We knew he had been in Europe some time, but were not

at all expecting to run across him. Both parties burst

forth into loving enthusiasms, and Rev. Mr. ------said:

"I have got a brimful reservoir of talk to pour out

on you, and an empty one ready and thirsting to receive

what you have got; we will sit up till midnight

and have a good satisfying interchange, for I leave

here early in the morning." We agreed to that, of course.

I had been vaguely conscious, for a while, of a person

who was walking in the street abreast of us; I had glanced

furtively at him once or twice, and noticed that he

was a fine, large, vigorous young fellow, with an open,

independent countenance, faintly shaded with a pale

and even almost imperceptible crop of early down,

and that he was clothed from head to heel in cool and

enviable snow-white linen. I thought I had also noticed

that his head had a sort of listening tilt to it.

Now about this time the Rev. Mr. ------said:

"The sidewalk is hardly wide enough for three, so I will

walk behind; but keep the talk going, keep the talk going,

there's no time to lose, and you may be sure I will do

my share." He ranged himself behind us, and straightway that

stately snow-white young fellow closed up to the sidewalk

alongside him, fetched him a cordial slap on the shoulder

with his broad palm, and sung out with a hearty cheeriness:

"AMERICANS for two-and-a-half and the money up! HEY?"

The Reverend winced, but said mildly:

"Yes--we are Americans."

"Lord love you, you can just bet that's what _I_ am,

every time! Put it there!"

He held out his Sahara of his palm, and the Reverend laid

his diminutive hand in it, and got so cordial a shake

that we heard his glove burst under it.

"Say, didn't I put you up right?"

"Oh, yes."

"Sho! I spotted you for MY kind the minute I heard

your clack. You been over here long?"

"About four months. Have you been over long?"

"LONG? Well, I should say so! Going on two YEARS,

by geeminy! Say, are you homesick?"

"No, I can't say that I am. Are you?"

"Oh, HELL, yes!" This with immense enthusiasm.

The Reverend shrunk a little, in his clothes, and we

were aware, rather by instinct than otherwise, that he

was throwing out signals of distress to us; but we did

not interfere or try to succor him, for we were quite happy.

The young fellow hooked his arm into the Reverend's, now,

with the confiding and grateful air of a waif who has

been longing for a friend, and a sympathetic ear,

and a chance to lisp once more the sweet accents of the

mother-tongue--and then he limbered up the muscles

of his mouth and turned himself loose--and with such a

relish! Some of his words were not Sunday-school words,

so I am obliged to put blanks where they occur.

"Yes indeedy! If _I_ ain't an American there AIN'T

any Americans, that's all. And when I heard you fellows

gassing away in the good old American language, I'm ------

if it wasn't all I could do to keep from hugging you! My

tongue's all warped with trying to curl it around these

------forsaken wind-galled nine-jointed German words here;

now I TELL you it's awful good to lay it over a Christian

word once more and kind of let the old taste soak it.

I'm from western New York. My name is Cholley Adams.

I'm a student, you know. Been here going on two years.

I'm learning to be a horse-doctor! I LIKE that part of it,

you know, but ------these people, they won't learn a fellow

in his own language, they make him learn in German; so before

I could tackle the horse-doctoring I had to tackle this

miserable language.

"First off, I thought it would certainly give me

the botts, but I don't mind now. I've got it where the

hair's short, I think; and dontchuknow, they made me

learn Latin, too. Now between you and me, I wouldn't

give a ------for all the Latin that was ever jabbered;

and the first thing _I_ calculate to do when I get through,

is to just sit down and forget it. 'Twon't take me long,

and I don't mind the time, anyway. And I tell you what!

the difference between school-teaching over yonder and

school-teaching over here--sho! WE don't know anything

about it! Here you're got to peg and peg and peg and there

just ain't any let-up--and what you learn here, you've got

to KNOW, dontchuknow --or else you'll have one of these

------spavined, spectacles, ring-boned, knock-kneed old

professors in your hair. I've been here long ENOUGH,

and I'm getting blessed tired of it, mind I TELL you.

The old man wrote me that he was coming over in June,

and said he'd take me home in August, whether I was done

with my education or not, but durn him, he didn't come;

never said why; just sent me a hamper of Sunday-school

books, and told me to be good, and hold on a while.

I don't take to Sunday-school books, dontchuknow--I

don't hanker after them when I can get pie--but I

READ them, anyway, because whatever the old man tells

me to do, that's the thing that I'm a-going to DO,

or tear something, you know. I buckled in and read

all those books, because he wanted me to; but that kind

of thing don't excite ME, I like something HEARTY.

But I'm awful homesick. I'm homesick from ear-socket

to crupper, and from crupper to hock-joint; but it ain't

any use, I've got to stay here, till the old man drops

the rag and give the word--yes, SIR, right here in this

------country I've got to linger till the old man says

COME!--and you bet your bottom dollar, Johnny, it AIN'T

just as easy as it is for a cat to have twins!"

At the end of this profane and cordial explosion he

fetched a prodigious "WHOOSH!" to relieve his lungs

and make recognition of the heat, and then he straightway

dived into his narrative again for "Johnny's" benefit,

beginning, "Well, ------it ain't any use talking,

some of those old American words DO have a kind

of a bully swing to them; a man can EXPRESS himself

with 'em--a man can get at what he wants to SAY, dontchuknow."

When we reached our hotel and it seemed that he was

about to lose the Reverend, he showed so much sorrow,

and begged so hard and so earnestly that the Reverend's heart

was not hard enough to hold out against the pleadings

--so he went away with the parent-honoring student, like a

right Christian, and took supper with him in his lodgings,

and sat in the surf-beat of his slang and profanity

till near midnight, and then left him--left him pretty

well talked out, but grateful "clear down to his frogs,"

as he expressed it. The Reverend said it had transpired

during the interview that "Cholley" Adams's father

was an extensive dealer in horses in western New York;

this accounted for Cholley's choice of a profession.

The Reverend brought away a pretty high opinion of

Cholley as a manly young fellow, with stuff in him for

a useful citizen; he considered him rather a rough gem,

but a gem, nevertheless.

CHAPTER XXI

[Insolent Shopkeepers and Gabbling Americans]

Baden-Baden sits in the lap of the hills, and the natural

and artificial beauties of the surroundings are combined

effectively and charmingly. The level strip of ground

which stretches through and beyond the town is laid

out in handsome pleasure grounds, shaded by noble trees

and adorned at intervals with lofty and sparkling

fountain-jets. Thrice a day a fine band makes music

in the public promenade before the Conversation House,

and in the afternoon and evening that locality is populous

with fashionably dressed people of both sexes, who march

back and forth past the great music-stand and look very

much bored, though they make a show of feeling otherwise.

It seems like a rather aimless and stupid existence.

A good many of these people are there for a real

purpose, however; they are racked with rheumatism,

and they are there to stew it out in the hot baths.

These invalids looked melancholy enough, limping about on

their canes and crutches, and apparently brooding over

all sorts of cheerless things. People say that Germany,

with her damp stone houses, is the home of rheumatism.

If that is so, Providence must have foreseen that it

would be so, and therefore filled the land with the

healing baths. Perhaps no other country is so generously

supplied with medicinal springs as Germany. Some of

these baths are good for one ailment, some for another;

and again, peculiar ailments are conquered by combining

the individual virtues of several different baths.

For instance, for some forms of disease, the patient drinks

the native hot water of Baden-Baden, with a spoonful

of salt from the Carlsbad springs dissolved in it.

That is not a dose to be forgotten right away.

They don't SELL this hot water; no, you go into the

great Trinkhalle, and stand around, first on one foot

and then on the other, while two or three young girls

sit pottering at some sort of ladylike sewing-work

in your neighborhood and can't seem to see you --polite

as three-dollar clerks in government offices.

By and by one of these rises painfully, and

"stretches"--stretches

fists and body heavenward till she raises her heels from

the floor, at the same time refreshing herself with a yawn

of such comprehensiveness that the bulk of her face disappears

behind her upper lip and one is able to see how she is

constructed inside--then she slowly closes her cavern,

brings down her fists and her heels, comes languidly forward,

contemplates you contemptuously, draws you a glass of hot water

and sets it down where you can get it by reaching for it. You

take it and say:

"How much?"--and she returns you, with elaborate indifference,

a beggar's answer:

"NACH BELIEBE" (what you please.)

This thing of using the common beggar's trick and the common

beggar's shibboleth to put you on your liberality when you

were expecting a simple straightforward commercial transaction,

adds a little to your prospering sense of irritation.

You ignore her reply, and ask again:

"How much?"

--and she calmly, indifferently, repeats:

"NACH BELIEBE."

You are getting angry, but you are trying not to show it;

you resolve to keep on asking your question till she changes

her answer, or at least her annoyingly indifferent manner.

Therefore, if your case be like mine, you two fools

stand there, and without perceptible emotion of any kind,

or any emphasis on any syllable, you look blandly into each

other's eyes, and hold the following idiotic conversation:

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

I do not know what another person would have done,

but at this point I gave up; that cast-iron indifference,

that tranquil contemptuousness, conquered me, and I struck

my colors. Now I knew she was used to receiving about a

penny from manly people who care nothing about the opinions

of scullery-maids, and about tuppence from moral cowards;

but I laid a silver twenty-five cent piece within her

reach and tried to shrivel her up with this sarcastic

speech:

"If it isn't enough, will you stoop sufficiently from

your official dignity to say so?"

She did not shrivel. Without deigning to look at me at all,

she languidly lifted the coin and bit it!--to see if it

was good. Then she turned her back and placidly waddled

to her former roost again, tossing the money into an open

till as she went along. She was victor to the last,

you see.

I have enlarged upon the ways of this girl because they

are typical; her manners are the manners of a goodly

number of the Baden-Baden shopkeepers. The shopkeeper

there swindles you if he can, and insults you whether

he succeeds in swindling you or not. The keepers of

baths also take great and patient pains to insult you.

The frowsy woman who sat at the desk in the lobby

of the great Friederichsbad and sold bath tickets,

not only insulted me twice every day, with rigid fidelity

to her great trust, but she took trouble enough to cheat

me out of a shilling, one day, to have fairly entitled

her to ten. Baden-Baden's splendid gamblers are gone,

only her microscopic knaves remain.

An English gentleman who had been living there

several years, said:

"If you could disguise your nationality, you would not

find any insolence here. These shopkeepers detest the

English and despise the Americans; they are rude to both,

more especially to ladies of your nationality and mine.

If these go shopping without a gentleman or a man-servant,

they are tolerably sure to be subjected to petty insolences

--insolences of manner and tone, rather than word,

though words that are hard to bear are not always wanting.

I know of an instance where a shopkeeper tossed a coin back

to an American lady with the remark, snappishly uttered,

'We don't take French money here.' And I know of a case

where an English lady said to one of these shopkeepers,

'Don't you think you ask too much for this article?'

and he replied with the question, 'Do you think you are

obliged to buy it?' However, these people are not impolite

to Russians or Germans. And as to rank, they worship that,

for they have long been used to generals and nobles.

If you wish to see what abysses servility can descend,

present yourself before a Baden-Baden shopkeeper in the

character of a Russian prince."

It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud,

and snobbery, but the baths are good. I spoke with

many people, and they were all agreed in that. I had

the twinges of rheumatism unceasingly during three years,

but the last one departed after a fortnight's bathing there,

and I have never had one since. I fully believe I left my

rheumatism in Baden-Baden. Baden-Baden is welcome to it.

It was little, but it was all I had to give. I would

have preferred to leave something that was catching,

but it was not in my power.

There are several hot springs there, and during two

thousand years they have poured forth a never-diminishing

abundance of the healing water. This water is conducted

in pipe to the numerous bath-houses, and is reduced to

an endurable temperature by the addition of cold water.

The new Friederichsbad is a very large and beautiful building,

and in it one may have any sort of bath that has ever

been invented, and with all the additions of herbs and

drugs that his ailment may need or that the physician

of the establishment may consider a useful thing to put

into the water. You go there, enter the great door,

get a bow graduated to your style and clothes from the

gorgeous portier, and a bath ticket and an insult from

the frowsy woman for a quarter; she strikes a bell and a

serving-man conducts you down a long hall and shuts you

into a commodious room which has a washstand, a mirror,

a bootjack, and a sofa in it, and there you undress

at your leisure.

The room is divided by a great curtain; you draw this

curtain aside, and find a large white marble bathtub,

with its rim sunk to the level of the floor,

and with three white marble steps leading down to it.

This tub is full of water which is as clear as crystal,

and is tempered to 28 degrees Re'aumur (about 95 degrees

Fahrenheit). Sunk into the floor, by the tub, is a covered

copper box which contains some warm towels and a sheet.

You look fully as white as an angel when you are stretched

out in that limpid bath. You remain in it ten minutes,

the first time, and afterward increase the duration from

day to day, till you reach twenty-five or thirty minutes.

There you stop. The appointments of the place are

so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate,

and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself

adoring the Friederichsbad and infesting it.

We had a plain, simple, unpretending, good hotel,

in Baden-Baden--the Ho^tel de France--and alongside my room

I had a giggling, cackling, chattering family who always

went to bed just two hours after me and always got up two

hours ahead of me. But this is common in German hotels;

the people generally go to bed long after eleven and get

up long before eight. The partitions convey sound

like a drum-head, and everybody knows it; but no matter,

a German family who are all kindness and consideration

in the daytime make apparently no effort to moderate

their noises for your benefit at night. They will sing,

laugh, and talk loudly, and bang furniture around in a most

pitiless way. If you knock on your wall appealingly,

they will quiet down and discuss the matter softly among

themselves for a moment--then, like the mice, they fall

to persecuting you again, and as vigorously as before.

They keep cruelly late and early hours, for such noisy folk.

Of course, when one begins to find fault with foreign

people's ways, he is very likely to get a reminder to look

nearer home, before he gets far with it. I open my note-book

to see if I can find some more information of a valuable

nature about Baden-Baden, and the first thing I fall upon is

this:

"BADEN-BADEN (no date). Lot of vociferous Americans

at breakfast this morning. Talking AT everybody,

while pretending to talk among themselves. On their

first travels, manifestly. Showing off. The usual

signs--airy, easy-going references to grand distances

and foreign places. 'Well GOOD-by, old fellow

--if I don't run across you in Italy, you hunt me up in

London before you sail.'"

The next item which I find in my note-book is this one:

"The fact that a band of 6,000 Indians are now murdering

our frontiersmen at their impudent leisure, and that we

are only able to send 1,200 soldiers against them,

is utilized here to discourage emigration to America.

The common people think the Indians are in New Jersey."

This is a new and peculiar argument against keeping our army

down to a ridiculous figure in the matter of numbers.

It is rather a striking one, too. I have not distorted

the truth in saying that the facts in the above item,

about the army and the Indians, are made use of to

discourage emigration to America. That the common

people should be rather foggy in their geography,

and foggy as to the location of the Indians, is a matter

for amusement, maybe, but not of surprise.

There is an interesting old cemetery in Baden-Baden, and

we spent several pleasant hours in wandering through it

and spelling out the inscriptions on the aged tombstones.

Apparently after a man has laid there a century or two,

and has had a good many people buried on top of him,

it is considered that his tombstone is not needed by him

any longer. I judge so from the fact that hundreds

of old gravestones have been removed from the graves

and placed against the inner walls of the cemetery.

What artists they had in the old times! They chiseled angels

and cherubs and devils and skeletons on the tombstones

in the most lavish and generous way--as to supply--but

curiously grotesque and outlandish as to form. It is not

always easy to tell which of the figures belong among

the blest and which of them among the opposite party.

But there was an inscription, in French, on one of those

old stones, which was quaint and pretty, and was plainly

not the work of any other than a poet. It was to this

effect:

Here Reposes in God, Caroline de Clery, a Religieuse

of St. Denis aged 83 years--and blind. The light

was restored to her in Baden the 5th of January, 1839

We made several excursions on foot to the neighboring villages,

over winding and beautiful roads and through enchanting

woodland scenery. The woods and roads were similar to those

at Heidelberg, but not so bewitching. I suppose that roads

and woods which are up to the Heidelberg mark are rare in the

world.

Once we wandered clear away to La Favorita Palace,

which is several miles from Baden-Baden. The grounds

about the palace were fine; the palace was a curiosity.

It was built by a Margravine in 1725, and remains as she

left it at her death. We wandered through a great many

of its rooms, and they all had striking peculiarities

of decoration. For instance, the walls of one room were

pretty completely covered with small pictures of the

Margravine in all conceivable varieties of fanciful costumes,

some of them male.

The walls of another room were covered with grotesquely

and elaborately figured hand-wrought tapestry.

The musty ancient beds remained in the chambers,

and their quilts and curtains and canopies were decorated

with curious handwork, and the walls and ceilings frescoed

with historical and mythological scenes in glaring colors.

There was enough crazy and rotten rubbish in the building

to make a true brick-a-bracker green with envy.

A painting in the dining-hall verged upon the indelicate

--but then the Margravine was herself a trifle indelicate.

It is in every way a wildly and picturesquely decorated house,

and brimful of interest as a reflection of the character

and tastes of that rude bygone time.

In the grounds, a few rods from the palace, stands the

Margravine's chapel, just as she left it--a coarse

wooden structure, wholly barren of ornament. It is said

that the Margravine would give herself up to debauchery

and exceedingly fast living for several months at a time,

and then retire to this miserable wooden den and spend

a few months in repenting and getting ready for another

good time. She was a devoted Catholic, and was perhaps

quite a model sort of a Christian as Christians went then,

in high life.

Tradition says she spent the last two years of her life in the

strange den I have been speaking of, after having indulged

herself in one final, triumphant, and satisfying spree.

She shut herself up there, without company, and without

even a servant, and so abjured and forsook the world.

In her little bit of a kitchen she did her own cooking;

she wore a hair shirt next the skin, and castigated herself

with whips--these aids to grace are exhibited there yet.

She prayed and told her beads, in another little room,

before a waxen Virgin niched in a little box against the wall;

she bedded herself like a slave.

In another small room is an unpainted wooden table,

and behind it sit half-life-size waxen figures of the

Holy Family, made by the very worst artist that ever

lived, perhaps, and clothed in gaudy, flimsy drapery.

[1] The margravine used to bring her meals to this table

and DINE WITH THE HOLY FAMILY. What an idea that was!

What a grisly spectacle it must have been! Imagine it:

Those rigid, shock-headed figures, with corpsy complexions

and fish glass eyes, occupying one side of the table

in the constrained attitudes and dead fixedness that

distinguish all men that are born of wax, and this wrinkled,

smoldering old fire-eater occupying the other side,

mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in the ghostly

stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight.

It makes one feel crawly even to think of it.

1. The Savior was represented as a lad of about fifteen

years of age. This figure had lost one eye.

In this sordid place, and clothed, bedded, and fed like

a pauper, this strange princess lived and worshiped during

two years, and in it she died. Two or three hundred

years ago, this would have made the poor den holy ground;

and the church would have set up a miracle-factory there

and made plenty of money out of it. The den could be moved

into some portions of France and made a good property even now.

CHAPTER XXII

[The Black Forest and Its Treasures]

From Baden-Baden we made the customary trip into the

Black Forest. We were on foot most of the time. One cannot

describe those noble woods, nor the feeling with which they

inspire him. A feature of the feeling, however, is a deep

sense of contentment; another feature of it is a buoyant,

boyish gladness; and a third and very conspicuous feature

of it is one's sense of the remoteness of the work-day

world and his entire emancipation from it and its affairs.

Those woods stretch unbroken over a vast region;

and everywhere they are such dense woods, and so still,

and so piney and fragrant. The stems of the trees are trim

and straight, and in many places all the ground is hidden

for miles under a thick cushion of moss of a vivid green color,

with not a decayed or ragged spot in its surface, and not

a fallen leaf or twig to mar its immaculate tidiness.

A rich cathedral gloom pervades the pillared aisles;

so the stray flecks of sunlight that strike a trunk

here and a bough yonder are strongly accented,

and when they strike the moss they fairly seem to burn.

But the weirdest effect, and the most enchanting is that

produced by the diffused light of the low afternoon sun;

no single ray is able to pierce its way in, then, but the

diffused light takes color from moss and foliage,

and pervades the place like a faint, greet-tinted mist,

the theatrical fire of fairyland. The suggestion of mystery

and the supernatural which haunts the forest at all times

is intensified by this unearthly glow.

We found the Black Forest farmhouses and villages

all that the Black Forest stories have pictured them.

The first genuine specimen which we came upon was

the mansion of a rich farmer and member of the Common

Council of the parish or district. He was an important

personage in the land and so was his wife also,

of course. His daughter was the "catch" of the region,

and she may be already entering into immortality as the

heroine of one of Auerbach's novels, for all I know.

We shall see, for if he puts her in I shall recognize her

by her Black Forest clothes, and her burned complexion,

her plump figure, her fat hands, her dull expression,

her gentle spirit, her generous feet, her bonnetless head,

and the plaited tails of hemp-colored hair hanging down

her back.

The house was big enough for a hotel; it was a hundred

feet long and fifty wide, and ten feet high, from ground

to eaves; but from the eaves to the comb of the mighty roof

was as much as forty feet, or maybe even more. This roof

was of ancient mud-colored straw thatch a foot thick,

and was covered all over, except in a few trifling spots,

with a thriving and luxurious growth of green vegetation,

mainly moss. The mossless spots were places where

repairs had been made by the insertion of bright new

masses of yellow straw. The eaves projected far down,

like sheltering, hospitable wings. Across the gable that

fronted the road, and about ten feet above the ground,

ran a narrow porch, with a wooden railing; a row of

small windows filled with very small panes looked upon

the porch. Above were two or three other little windows,

one clear up under the sharp apex of the roof.

Before the ground-floor door was a huge pile of manure.

The door of the second-story room on the side of the house

was open, and occupied by the rear elevation of a cow.

Was this probably the drawing-room? All of the front

half of the house from the ground up seemed to be

occupied by the people, the cows, and the chickens,

and all the rear half by draught-animals and hay.

But the chief feature, all around this house, was the big

heaps of manure.

We became very familiar with the fertilizer in the Forest.

We fell unconsciously into the habit of judging of a man's

station in life by this outward and eloquent sign.

Sometimes we said, "Here is a poor devil, this is manifest."

When we saw a stately accumulation, we said, "Here is

a banker." When we encountered a country-seat surrounded

by an Alpine pomp of manure, we said, "Doubtless a duke

lives here."

The importance of this feature has not been properly

magnified in the Black Forest stories. Manure is evidently

the Black-Forester's main treasure--his coin, his jewel,

his pride, his Old Master, his ceramics, his bric-a-brac,

his darling, his title to public consideration,

envy, veneration, and his first solicitude when he gets

ready to make his will. The true Black Forest novel,

if it is ever written, will be skeletoned somewhat in this way:

SKELETON FOR A BLACK FOREST NOVEL

Rich old farmer, named Huss. Has inherited great wealth

of manure, and by diligence has added to it. It is

double-starred in Baedeker. [1] The Black forest artist

paints it--his masterpiece. The king comes to see it.

Gretchen Huss, daughter and heiress. Paul Hoch,

young neighbor, suitor for Gretchen's hand--ostensibly;

he really wants the manure. Hoch has a good many cart-loads

of the Black Forest currency himself, and therefore is a

good catch; but he is sordid, mean, and without sentiment,

whereas Gretchen is all sentiment and poetry.

Hans Schmidt, young neighbor, full of sentiment,

full of poetry, loves Gretchen, Gretchen loves him.

But he has no manure. Old Huss forbids him in the house.

His heart breaks, he goes away to die in the woods,

far from the cruel world--for he says, bitterly, "What is man,

without manure?"

1. When Baedeker's guide-books mention a thing and put

two stars (**) after it, it means well worth visiting.

M.T.

[Interval of six months.]

Paul Hoch comes to old Huss and says, "I am at last

as rich as you required--come and view the pile."

Old Huss views it and says, "It is sufficient--take

her and be happy,"--meaning Gretchen.

[Interval of two weeks.]

Wedding party assembled in old Huss's drawing-room. Hoch

placid and content, Gretchen weeping over her hard fate.

Enter old Huss's head bookkeeper. Huss says fiercely,

"I gave you three weeks to find out why your books

don't balance, and to prove that you are not a defaulter;

the time is up--find me the missing property or you go

to prison as a thief." Bookkeeper: "I have found it."

"Where?" Bookkeeper (sternly--tragically): "In the bridegroom's

pile!--behold the thief--see him blench and tremble!"

[Sensation.] Paul Hoch: Lost, lost!"--falls over the cow

in a swoon and is handcuffed. Gretchen: "Saved!" Falls

over the calf in a swoon of joy, but is caught in the arms

of Hans Schmidt, who springs in at that moment. Old Huss:

"What, you here, varlet? Unhand the maid and quit the place."

Hans (still supporting the insensible girl): "Never! Cruel

old man, know that I come with claims which even you

cannot despise."

Huss: "What, YOU? name them."

Hans: "Listen then. The world has forsaken me, I forsook

the world, I wandered in the solitude of the forest,

longing for death but finding none. I fed upon roots,

and in my bitterness I dug for the bitterest,

loathing the sweeter kind. Digging, three days agone,

I struck a manure mine!--a Golconda, a limitless Bonanza,

of solid manure! I can buy you ALL, and have mountain

ranges of manure left! Ha-ha, NOW thou smilest a smile!"

[Immense sensation.] Exhibition of specimens from the mine.

Old Huss (enthusiastically): "Wake her up, shake her up,

noble young man, she is yours!" Wedding takes place on

the spot; bookkeeper restored to his office and emoluments;

Paul Hoch led off to jail. The Bonanza king of the Black

Forest lives to a good old age, blessed with the love of his

wife and of his twenty-seven children, and the still sweeter

envy of everybody around.

We took our noon meal of fried trout one day at the Plow Inn,

in a very pretty village (Ottenhoefen), and then went into

the public room to rest and smoke. There we found nine

or ten Black Forest grandees assembled around a table.

They were the Common Council of the parish. They had

gathered there at eight o'clock that morning to elect

a new member, and they had now been drinking beer four

hours at the new member's expense. They were men of fifty

or sixty years of age, with grave good-natured faces,

and were all dressed in the costume made familiar to us

by the Black Forest stories; broad, round-topped black felt

hats with the brims curled up all round; long red waistcoats

with large metal buttons, black alpaca coats with the

waists up between the shoulders. There were no speeches,

there was but little talk, there were no frivolities;

the Council filled themselves gradually, steadily, but surely,

with beer, and conducted themselves with sedate decorum,

as became men of position, men of influence, men of manure.

We had a hot afternoon tramp up the valley, along the grassy

bank of a rushing stream of clear water, past farmhouses,

water-mills, and no end of wayside crucifixes and saints

and Virgins. These crucifixes, etc., are set up in

memory of departed friends, by survivors, and are almost

as frequent as telegraph-poles are in other lands.

We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck;

we traveled under a beating sun, and always saw the shade

leave the shady places before we could get to them.

In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike

a piece of road at its time for being shady. We had a

particularly hot time of it on that particular afternoon,

and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact

that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides

above our heads were even worse off than we were.

By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable

glare and heat any longer; so we struck across the ravine

and entered the deep cool twilight of the forest, to hunt

for what the guide-book called the "old road."

We found an old road, and it proved eventually to be the

right one, though we followed it at the time with the conviction

that it was the wrong one. If it was the wrong one there

could be no use in hurrying; therefore we did not hurry,

but sat down frequently on the soft moss and enjoyed

the restful quiet and shade of the forest solitudes.

There had been distractions in the carriage-road

--school-children, peasants, wagons, troops of

pedestrianizing students from all over Germany

--but we had the old road to ourselves.

Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious

ant at his work. I found nothing new in him--certainly

nothing to change my opinion of him. It seems to me that

in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely

overrated bird. During many summers, now, I have watched him,

when I ought to have been in better business, and I have

not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any

more sense than a dead one. I refer to the ordinary ant,

of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful

Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies,

hold slaves, and dispute about religion. Those particular

ants may be all that the naturalist paints them,

but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.

I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest-working

creature in the world--when anybody is looking--but his

leather-headedness is the point I make against him.

He goes out foraging, he makes a capture, and then what

does he do? Go home? No--he goes anywhere but home.

He doesn't know where home is. His home may be only

three feet away--no matter, he can't find it. He makes

his capture, as I have said; it is generally something

which can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else;

it is usually seven times bigger than it ought to be;

he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it;

he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts;

not toward home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly

and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful

of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and instead

of going around it, he climbs over it backward dragging

his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side,

jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes,

moistens his hands, grabs his property viciously, yanks it

this way, then that, shoves it ahead of him a moment,

turns tail and lugs it after him another moment, gets madder

and madder, then presently hoists it into the air and goes

tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed;

it never occurs to him to go around it; no, he must climb it;

and he does climb it, dragging his worthless property

to the top--which is as bright a thing to do as it would

be for me to carry a sack of flour from Heidelberg to Paris

by way of Strasburg steeple; when he gets up there he

finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory glance

at the scenery and either climbs down again or tumbles down,

and starts off once more--as usual, in a new direction.

At the end of half an hour, he fetches up within six inches

of the place he started from and lays his burden down;

meantime he has been over all the ground for two yards around,

and climbed all the weeds and pebbles he came across.

Now he wipes the sweat from his brow, strokes his limbs,

and then marches aimlessly off, in as violently a hurry

as ever. He does not remember to have ever seen it before;

he looks around to see which is not the way home, grabs his

bundle and starts; he goes through the same adventures he

had before; finally stops to rest, and a friend comes along.

Evidently the friend remarks that a last year's grasshopper

leg is a very noble acquisition, and inquires where he

got it. Evidently the proprietor does not remember

exactly where he did get it, but thinks he got it "around

here somewhere." Evidently the friend contracts to help

him freight it home. Then, with a judgment peculiarly

antic (pun not intended), then take hold of opposite ends

of that grasshopper leg and begin to tug with all their

might in opposite directions. Presently they take a rest

and confer together. They decide that something is wrong,

they can't make out what. Then they go at it again,

just as before. Same result. Mutual recriminations follow.

Evidently each accuses the other of being an obstructionist.

They lock themselves together and chew each other's jaws

for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till

one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs.

They make up and go to work again in the same old insane way,

but the crippled ant is at a disadvantage; tug as he may,

the other one drags off the booty and him at the end of it.

Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his shins

bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way.

By and by, when that grasshopper leg has been dragged

all over the same old ground once more, it is finally

dumped at about the spot where it originally lay,

the two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and decide

that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property

after all, and then each starts off in a different

direction to see if he can't find an old nail or something

else that is heavy enough to afford entertainment and at

the same time valueless enough to make an ant want to own it.

There in the Black Forest, on the mountainside,

I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this

with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight.

The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist.

He had a round body the size of a pea. The little ant

--observing that I was noticing--turned him on his back,

sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him into the air and

started vigorously off with him, stumbling over little pebbles,

stepping on the spider's legs and tripping himself up,

dragging him backward, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him

up stones six inches high instead of going around them,

climbing weeds twenty times his own height and jumping

from their summits--and finally leaving him in the middle

of the road to be confiscated by any other fool of an

ant that wanted him. I measured the ground which this

ass traversed, and arrived at the conclusion that what he

had accomplished inside of twenty minutes would constitute

some such job as this--relatively speaking--for a man;

to wit: to strap two eight-hundred-pound horses together,

carry them eighteen hundred feet, mainly over (not around)

boulders averaging six feet high, and in the course

of the journey climb up and jump from the top of one

precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred

and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down,

in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them,

and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for

vanity's sake.

Science has recently discovered that the ant does not

lay up anything for winter use. This will knock him

out of literature, to some extent. He does not work,

except when people are looking, and only then when the

observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be

taking notes. This amounts to deception, and will injure

him for the Sunday-schools. He has not judgment enough

to know what is good to eat from what isn't. This amounts

to ignorance, and will impair the world's respect for him.

He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again.

This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact

is established, thoughtful people will cease to look

up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle him.

His vaunted industry is but a vanity and of no effect,

since he never gets home with anything he starts with.

This disposes of the last remnant of his reputation

and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent,

since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him

any more. It is strange, beyond comprehension, that so

manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so

many nations and keep it up so many ages without being

found out.

The ant is strong, but we saw another strong thing,

where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular

power before. A toadstool--that vegetable which springs

to full growth in a single night--had torn loose and

lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice

its own bulk into the air, and supported it there,

like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools,

with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose.

But what good would it do?

All our afternoon's progress had been uphill. About five

or half past we reached the summit, and all of a sudden

the dense curtain of the forest parted and we looked

down into a deep and beautiful gorge and out over a

wide panorama of wooded mountains with their summits

shining in the sun and their glade-furrowed sides dimmed

with purple shade. The gorge under our feet--called

Allerheiligen--afforded room in the grassy level at its

head for a cozy and delightful human nest, shut away

from the world and its botherations, and consequently

the monks of the old times had not failed to spy it out;

and here were the brown and comely ruins of their church

and convent to prove that priests had as fine an instinct

seven hundred years ago in ferreting out the choicest

nooks and corners in a land as priests have today.

A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives

a brisk trade with summer tourists. We descended

into the gorge and had a supper which would have been

very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.

The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything

else if left to their own devices. This is an argument

of some value in support of the theory that they were

the original colonists of the wild islands of the coast

of Scotland. A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked

upon one of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle

savages rendered the captain such willing assistance

that he gave them as many oranges as they wanted.

Next day he asked them how they liked them. They shook

their heads and said:

"Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn't

things for a hungry man to hanker after."

We went down the glen after supper. It is beautiful--a

mixture of sylvan loveliness and craggy wildness.

A limpid torrent goes whistling down the glen, and toward

the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between lofty

precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls.

After one passes the last of these he has a backward

glimpse at the falls which is very pleasing--they rise

in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and glittering cascades,

and make a picture which is as charming as it is unusual.

CHAPTER XXIII

[Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]

We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in

one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out

the next morning after breakfast determined to do it.

It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest

summer weather for it. So we set the pedometer and then

stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through

the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath

of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing

we might never have anything to do forever but walk

to Oppenau and keep on doing it and then doing it over again.

Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie

in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.

The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by,

and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active;

the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon

a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace

to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes

from the talk. It is no matter whether one talks wisdom

or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment

lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping

of the sympathetic ear.

And what motley variety of subjects a couple of people will

casually rake over in the course of a day's tramp! There

being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order,

and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single

topic until it grows tiresome. We discussed everything

we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes,

that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free,

boundless realm of the things we were not certain about.

Harris said that if the best writer in the world once got

the slovenly habit of doubling up his "haves" he could

never get rid of it while he lived. That is to say,

if a man gets the habit of saying "I should have liked

to have known more about it" instead of saying simply

and sensibly, "I should have liked to know more about it,"

that man's disease is incurable. Harris said that his sort

of lapse is to be found in every copy of every newspaper

that has ever been printed in English, and in almost all

of our books. He said he had observed it in Kirkham's

grammar and in Macaulay. Harris believed that milk-teeth

are commoner in men's mouths than those "doubled-up haves." [1]

1. I do not know that there have not been moments in the

course of the present session when I should have been

very glad to have accepted the proposal of my noble friend,

and to have exchanged parts in some of our evenings

of work.--[From a Speech of the English Chancellor

of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]

That changed the subject to dentistry. I said I believed

the average man dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation,

and that he would yell quicker under the former operation

than he would under the latter. The philosopher Harris

said that the average man would not yell in either case

if he had an audience. Then he continued:

"When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac,

we used to be brought up standing, occasionally, by an

ear-splitting howl of anguish. That meant that a soldier

was getting a tooth pulled in a tent. But the surgeons

soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry.

There never was a howl afterward--that is, from the man

who was having the tooth pulled. At the daily dental

hour there would always be about five hundred soldiers

gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental chair

waiting to see the performance--and help; and the moment

the surgeon took a grip on the candidate's tooth and began

to lift, every one of those five hundred rascals would

clap his hand to his jaw and begin to hop around on one

leg and howl with all the lungs he had! It was enough

to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous

unanimous caterwaul burst out! With so big and so derisive

an audience as that, a suffer wouldn't emit a sound though

you pulled his head off. The surgeons said that pretty

often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst

of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out,

after the open-air exhibition was instituted."

Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death,

death suggested skeletons--and so, by a logical process

the conversation melted out of one of these subjects

and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up

Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he

had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.

When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,

a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad

countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,

and without removing his hands from the depths

of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin

of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged

about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf,

stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip

against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans,

aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth,

laid him low, and said with composure:

"Whar's the boss?"

"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious

bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face

with his eye.

"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"

"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"

"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git

a show somers if I kin, 'taint no diffunce what--I'm strong

and hearty, and I don't turn my back on no kind of work,

hard nur soft."

"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"

"Well, I don't re'ly k'yer a durn what I DO learn,

so's I git a chance fur to make my way. I'd jist as soon

learn print'n's anything."

"Can you read?"

"Yes--middlin'."

"Write?"

"Well, I've seed people could lay over me thar."

"Cipher?"

"Not good enough to keep store, I don't reckon,

but up as fur as twelve-times-twelve I ain't no slouch.

'Tother side of that is what gits me."

"Where is your home?"

"I'm f'm old Shelby."

"What's your father's religious denomination?"

"Him? Oh, he's a blacksmith."

"No, no--I don't mean his trade. What's his RELIGIOUS

DENOMINATION?"

"OH--I didn't understand you befo'. He's a Freemason."

"No, no, you don't get my meaning yet. What I mean is,

does he belong to any CHURCH?"

"NOW you're talkin'! Couldn't make out what you was a-tryin'

to git through yo' head no way. B'long to a CHURCH! Why,

boss, he's ben the pizenest kind of Free-will Babtis'

for forty year. They ain't no pizener ones 'n what HE is.

Mighty good man, pap is. Everybody says that. If they

said any diffrunt they wouldn't say it whar _I_ wuz

--not MUCH they wouldn't."

"What is your own religion?"

"Well, boss, you've kind o' got me, there--and yit

you hain't got me so mighty much, nuther. I think 't

if a feller he'ps another feller when he's in trouble,

and don't cuss, and don't do no mean things, nur noth'n'

he ain' no business to do, and don't spell the Saviour's

name with a little g, he ain't runnin' no resks--he's

about as saift as he b'longed to a church."

"But suppose he did spell it with a little g--what then?"

"Well, if he done it a-purpose, I reckon he wouldn't

stand no chance--he OUGHTN'T to have no chance, anyway,

I'm most rotten certain 'bout that."

"What is your name?"

"Nicodemus Dodge."

"I think maybe you'll do, Nicodemus. We'll give you

a trial, anyway."

"All right."

"When would you like to begin?"

"Now."

So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this

nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat off

and hard at it.

Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest

from the street, was a deserted garden, pathless,

and thickly grown with the bloomy and villainous "jimpson"

weed and its common friend the stately sunflower.

In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged

little "frame" house with but one room, one window, and no

ceiling--it had been a smoke-house a generation before.

Nicodemus was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bedchamber.

The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus,

right away--a butt to play jokes on. It was easy to see

that he was inconceivably green and confiding. George Jones

had the glory of perpetrating the first joke on him;

he gave him a cigar with a firecracker in it and winked

to the crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept

away the bulk of Nicodemus's eyebrows and eyelashes.

He simply said:

"I consider them kind of seeg'yars dangersome,"--and

seemed to suspect nothing. The next evening Nicodemus

waylaid George and poured a bucket of ice-water over him.

One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy

"tied" his clothes. Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom's

by way of retaliation.

A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later--he

walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night,

with a staring handbill pinned between his shoulders.

The joker spent the remainder of the night, after church,

in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on

the cellar door till toward breakfast-time to make sure

that the prisoner remembered that if any noise was made,

some rough treatment would be the consequence. The cellar

had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed

with six inches of soft mud.

But I wander from the point. It was the subject of

skeletons that brought this boy back to my recollection.

Before a very long time had elapsed, the village smarties

began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not having

made a very shining success out of their attempts on the

simpleton from "old Shelby." Experimenters grew scarce

and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue.

There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare

Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it.

He had a noble new skeleton--the skeleton of the late

and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village

drunkard--a grisly piece of property which he had bought

of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,

under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in

the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty

dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably

hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.

The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in Nicodemus's

bed!

This was done--about half past ten in the evening.

About Nicodemus's usual bedtime--midnight--the village

jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson

weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.

They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the

long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt,

and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly

back and forth, and wheezing the music of "Camptown Races"

out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing

against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top,

and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles,

five pounds of "store" candy, and a well-gnawed slab of

gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.

He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three

dollars and was enjoying the result!

Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were

drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard

a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside. We saw men

and women standing away up there looking frightened,

and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering

down the steep slope toward us. We got out of the way,

and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.

He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him

to do but trust to luck and take what might come.

When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is

no stopping till the bottom is reached. Think of people

FARMING on a slant which is so steep that the best you can

say of it--if you want to be fastidiously accurate--is,

that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite

so steep as a mansard roof. But that is what they do.

Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg

were stood up "edgeways." The boy was wonderfully jolted up,

and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from

small stones on the way.

Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone,

and by that time the men and women had scampered down

and brought his cap.

Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring

cottages and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted,

and stared at, and commiserated, and water was

brought for him to drink and bathe his bruises in.

And such another clatter of tongues! All who had seen

the catastrophe were describing it at once, and each

trying to talk louder than his neighbor; and one youth

of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill,

called attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us,

and thus triumphantly showed exactly how the thing had been done.

Harris and I were included in all the descriptions;

how we were coming along; how Hans Gross shouted;

how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter coming like

a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way,

and let him come; and with what presence of mind we

picked him up and brushed him off and set him on a rock

when the performance was over. We were as much heroes

as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized;

we were taken with Peter and the populace to Peter's

mother's cottage, and there we ate bread and cheese,

and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a most

sociable good time; and when we left we had a handshake

all around, and were receiving and shouting back LEB'

WOHL's until a turn in the road separated us from our

cordial and kindly new friends forever.

We accomplished our undertaking. At half past eight

in the evening we stepped into Oppenau, just eleven

hours and a half out of Allerheiligen--one hundred

and forty-six miles. This is the distance by pedometer;

the guide-book and the Imperial Ordinance maps make

it only ten and a quarter--a surprising blunder,

for these two authorities are usually singularly accurate

in the matter of distances.

CHAPTER XXIV

[I Protect the Empress of Germany]

That was a thoroughly satisfactory walk--and the only

one we were ever to have which was all the way downhill.

We took the train next morning and returned to Baden-Baden

through fearful fogs of dust. Every seat was crowded, too;

for it was Sunday, and consequently everybody was taking

a "pleasure" excursion. Hot! the sky was an oven--and

a sound one, too, with no cracks in it to let in any air.

An odd time for a pleasure excursion, certainly!

Sunday is the great day on the continent--the free day,

the happy day. One can break the Sabbath in a hundred

ways without committing any sin.

We do not work on Sunday, because the commandment forbids it;

the Germans do not work on Sunday, because the commandment

forbids it. We rest on Sunday, because the commandment

requires it; the Germans rest on Sunday because the

commandment requires it. But in the definition

of the word "rest" lies all the difference. With us,

its Sunday meaning is, stay in the house and keep still;

with the Germans its Sunday and week-day meanings seem

to be the same--rest the TIRED PART, and never mind the

other parts of the frame; rest the tired part, and use

the means best calculated to rest that particular part.

Thus: If one's duties have kept him in the house all the week,

it will rest him to be out on Sunday; if his duties

have required him to read weighty and serious matter all

the week, it will rest him to read light matter on Sunday;

if his occupation has busied him with death and funerals

all the week, it will rest him to go to the theater Sunday

night and put in two or three hours laughing at a comedy;

if he is tired with digging ditches or felling trees

all the week, it will rest him to lie quiet in the house

on Sunday; if the hand, the arm, the brain, the tongue,

or any other member, is fatigued with inanition,

it is not to be rested by added a day's inanition;

but if a member is fatigued with exertion, inanition is

the right rest for it. Such is the way in which the Germans

seem to define the word "rest"; that is to say, they rest

a member by recreating, recuperating, restore its forces.

But our definition is less broad. We all rest alike

on Sunday--by secluding ourselves and keeping still,

whether that is the surest way to rest the most of us

or not. The Germans make the actors, the preachers,

etc., work on Sunday. We encourage the preachers,

the editors, the printers, etc., to work on Sunday,

and imagine that none of the sin of it falls upon us;

but I do not know how we are going to get around the fact

that if it is wrong for the printer to work at his trade

on Sunday it must be equally wrong for the preacher to

work at his, since the commandment has made no exception

in his favor. We buy Monday morning's paper and read it,

and thus encourage Sunday printing. But I shall never do

it again.

The Germans remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy,

by abstaining from work, as commanded; we keep it

holy by abstaining from work, as commanded, and by

also abstaining from play, which is not commanded.

Perhaps we constructively BREAK the command to rest,

because the resting we do is in most cases only a name,

and not a fact.

These reasonings have sufficed, in a measure, to mend

the rent in my conscience which I made by traveling to

Baden-Baden that Sunday. We arrived in time to furbish

up and get to the English church before services began.

We arrived in considerable style, too, for the landlord

had ordered the first carriage that could be found,

since there was no time to lose, and our coachman was

so splendidly liveried that we were probably mistaken

for a brace of stray dukes; why else were we honored

with a pew all to ourselves, away up among the very elect

at the left of the chancel? That was my first thought.

In the pew directly in front of us sat an elderly lady,

plainly and cheaply dressed; at her side sat a young

lady with a very sweet face, and she also was quite

simply dressed; but around us and about us were clothes

and jewels which it would do anybody's heart good to

worship in.

I thought it was pretty manifest that the elderly lady

was embarrassed at finding herself in such a conspicuous

place arrayed in such cheap apparel; I began to feel sorry

for her and troubled about her. She tried to seem very busy

with her prayer-book and her responses, and unconscious

that she was out of place, but I said to myself, "She is

not succeeding--there is a distressed tremulousness

in her voice which betrays increasing embarrassment."

Presently the Savior's name was mentioned, and in her flurry

she lost her head completely, and rose and courtesied,

instead of making a slight nod as everybody else did.

The sympathetic blood surged to my temples and I turned and gave

those fine birds what I intended to be a beseeching look,

but my feelings got the better of me and changed it into

a look which said, "If any of you pets of fortune laugh

at this poor soul, you will deserve to be flayed for it."

Things went from bad to worse, and I shortly found myself

mentally taking the unfriended lady under my protection.

My mind was wholly upon her. I forgot all about the sermon.

Her embarrassment took stronger and stronger hold upon her;

she got to snapping the lid of her smelling-bottle--it

made a loud, sharp sound, but in her trouble she snapped

and snapped away, unconscious of what she was doing.

The last extremity was reached when the collection-plate

began its rounds; the moderate people threw in pennies,

the nobles and the rich contributed silver, but she laid

a twenty-mark gold piece upon the book-rest before her

with a sounding slap! I said to myself, "She has parted

with all her little hoard to buy the consideration of these

unpitying people--it is a sorrowful spectacle." I did not

venture to look around this time; but as the service closed,

I said to myself, "Let them laugh, it is their opportunity;

but at the door of this church they shall see her step

into our fine carriage with us, and our gaudy coachman

shall drive her home."

Then she rose--and all the congregation stood while she

walked down the aisle. She was the Empress of Germany!

No--she had not been so much embarrassed as I had supposed.

My imagination had got started on the wrong scent, and that

is always hopeless; one is sure, then, to go straight

on misinterpreting everything, clear through to the end.

The young lady with her imperial Majesty was a maid of

honor--and I had been taking her for one of her boarders,

all the time.

This is the only time I have ever had an Empress under

my personal protection; and considering my inexperience,

I wonder I got through with it so well. I should have

been a little embarrassed myself if I had known earlier

what sort of a contract I had on my hands.

We found that the Empress had been in Baden-Baden

several days. It is said that she never attends

any but the English form of church service.

I lay abed and read and rested from my journey's fatigues

the remainder of that Sunday, but I sent my agent to represent

me at the afternoon service, for I never allow anything

to interfere with my habit of attending church twice every

Sunday.

There was a vast crowd in the public grounds that night

to hear the band play the "Fremersberg." This piece tells

one of the old legends of the region; how a great noble

of the Middle Ages got lost in the mountains, and wandered

about with his dogs in a violent storm, until at last

the faint tones of a monastery bell, calling the monks

to a midnight service, caught his ear, and he followed

the direction the sounds came from and was saved.

A beautiful air ran through the music, without ceasing,

sometimes loud and strong, sometimes so soft that it

could hardly be distinguished--but it was always there;

it swung grandly along through the shrill whistling

of the storm-wind, the rattling patter of the rain,

and the boom and crash of the thunder; it wound soft

and low through the lesser sounds, the distant ones,

such as the throbbing of the convent bell, the melodious

winding of the hunter's horn, the distressed bayings

of his dogs, and the solemn chanting of the monks;

it rose again, with a jubilant ring, and mingled itself

with the country songs and dances of the peasants assembled

in the convent hall to cheer up the rescued huntsman

while he ate his supper. The instruments imitated all

these sounds with a marvelous exactness. More than one

man started to raise his umbrella when the storm burst

forth and the sheets of mimic rain came driving by;

it was hardly possible to keep from putting your hand

to your hat when the fierce wind began to rage and shriek;

and it was NOT possible to refrain from starting when

those sudden and charmingly real thunder-crashes were

let loose.

I suppose the "Fremersberg" is a very low-grade music;

I know, indeed, that it MUST be low-grade music, because it

delighted me, warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me,

enraptured me, that I was full of cry all the time,

and mad with enthusiasm. My soul had never had such a

scouring out since I was born. The solemn and majestic

chanting of the monks was not done by instruments,

but by men's voices; and it rose and fell, and rose again

in that rich confusion of warring sounds, and pulsing bells,

and the stately swing of that ever-present enchanting air,

and it seemed to me that nothing but the very lowest

of low-grade music COULD be so divinely beautiful.

The great crowd which the "Fremersberg" had called out was

another evidence that it was low-grade music; for only

the few are educated up to a point where high-grade music

gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music

to be able to enjoy it. I dislike the opera because I want

to love it and can't.