A Hospitable Reception -- A Rustic Household -- The
Mother's Talk -- Pressing Invitations -- A Docile Visitor
-- The Family Room -- Trophies of Industry -- Overheating
-- A Walk in Ulrichsthal -- A Glass Polisher and his Family
-- His Notions -- A Glass Engraver -- His Skill and
Ingenuity -- His Earnings -- A Bohemian's Opinion on
English Singing -- Military Service -- Beetle Pictures --
Glass-making in Bohemia -- An Englishman's Forget-me-Not --
The Dinner -- Dessert on the Hill -- An Hour with the
Haymakers -- Magical Kreutzers -- An Evening at the
Wirthshaus -- Singing and Poetry -- A Moonlight Walk -- The
Lovers' Test.
I once promised a Bohemian glass engraver, who showed me specimens of
his skill under the murky sky of ugly Birmingham, that when the
favourable time came I would find out his native place, and have a
talk with his kinsfolk. The favourable time had come in all ways, for
no sooner did I make myself known to the old man who was summoned to
the door, than he took my hand and said, "Be welcome to my house."
Suiting action to word, he led me into a large, low room, hot as an
oven, where his wife and daughters and a sweetheart sat chatting away
the dusk. At first they were somewhat shy; but when I brought out a
little letter from the son in England, and the eldest daughter, having
lit a candle, read it aloud, the mother, overjoyed at hearing news
from "our Wilhelm," sprang up, gave me a kiss, and cried, "Only
think, an Englishman is come to see us!" Here was an end to the
shyness; and having shaken hands with all the lasses and the
sweetheart, I became as one of the family.
Of course I would stay all night; they could not think of letting me
go to seek quarters at the public-house, unless, indeed, their own
rustic entertainment would make me uncomfortable; and the entreaties
were accompanied by preparations for supper. Who could resist such
hearty hospitality? Not I; and forthwith an understanding prevailed
that whatever pleased them best would please me best; excepting, that
I should have leave to open one of the casements and sit close to it,
for to me the temperature of the room was unbearable. Besides the heat
from the stove, there was an odour of kine from the cowstall, which
forms one half of the house, separated from the living room only by a
passage.
We had merry talk while I ate my supper of eggs, coffee, and bread and
butter. "Our Wilhelm" was, however, the mother's favourite topic, and
she returned to it again and again. She must tell me, too, of her
other sons, one in America, another at Pesth; and how that one night
they were all awoke by a loud knocking at the door, and a voice
begging for a night's lodging. How that the stranger would not go
away, but continued to knock and beseech, until all at once the mother
recognised a tone, and cried, "Father, father, open the door! That's
our David's voice. Our David, come home to see us, all the way from
Hungary!" And then the joyful meeting that followed! Her eyes
glistened with tears as she told me this.
There were two beds in a little slip of a chamber opening from the
principal room, of which the one nearest the window was given up to
me, as I again had to stipulate for an open casement; and the more so,
as notwithstanding the heat, I was expected to bury myself between two
feather-beds, as the custom of the country is; the other was occupied
by the old man. As for mother and daughters, they retreated to some
place overhead, which must have been very like a loft.
Had I slept well? was the question next morning; and this being
answered in the affirmative, the family resolved by acclamation that I
should stay with them a fortnight at least, nor would they at first
believe that I could only spare them a single day. Could not an
Englishman do anything? What mattered it if I returned to London a
week sooner or later? The theatre at Steinschönau would be opened on
Sunday, and it would be such a nice walk to go and see the play. Why
should I be in a hurry to reach the mountains? Would it not be the
same if I went to the top of all the hills around Ulrichsthal?
So said the daughters, with much more of the like purport, and to
resist persuasions backed by bright eyes, good looks, and blithesome
voices, was a hard trial for my philosophy. However, I kept my
resolution even when the mother rounded up with, "Only a day! that's
not long enough to taste all my cookery." The good soul had risen
early to make fresh _Semmel_ for breakfast.
To pacify them, I promised to eat as much as ever I could, and to let
them do whatever they liked with me during the day. Thereupon two of
the damsels put on their broad-brimmed straw hats, shouldered their
rakes, and betook themselves to the hay-field; the youngest, a lassie
of fifteen, apprenticed to a glass engraver, said, "_Leb' wohl_," and
went away to her work; the old man, privileged to be idle through age
and infirmity, crept forth to find a sunshiny bit of grass on which to
have a snooze; the mother began to bustle with pot and pan about the
stove; and the eldest daughter, having put on her hat and a pink
scarf, claimed the right to show me all that was worth seeing in
Ulrichsthal.
We began with the room itself. Its furniture was simple enough: wooden
walls and ceiling; an uncomfortable wooden seat fixed to the wall
along two sides; a table and a few wooden chairs; and the old man's
polishing-bench, a fixture in one corner. The treadle and crank were
still in place, but motionless; half a dozen wheels and sundry tools
hung on the wall, memorials of the veteran's forty years of industry,
and the bench did duty as dresser and bookshelf. Among the books were
_Schiller's Werken_, in sixteen volumes, belonging to "our Wilhelm."
With that simple machinery, hoarsely whirring day after day all
through the prime of his manhood, had he gained wherewith to buy his
two plots of land, and the comfort of repose in declining age. Here,
in this overheated room, at once workshop, kitchen, and parlour, had
been reared those four comely daughters, and the tall son whom I had
met in England; all strong and hearty, in spite of high temperature
and certain noxious influences arising out of a want of proper decency
in the household economy. "We are used to it," was the answer, when I
expressed my surprise that they could bear to live familiar with
things offensive, and yet fearful of a passing breath from spring and
summer. But this want of perception is not confined to Ulrichsthal;
you cannot help noticing it in many, if not in most, Bohemian
villages, and on the Silesian side of the mountains.
But the damsel is impatient. We set off towards a row of houses on a
higher part of the slope. Each has its long and narrow piece of land,
an orchard immediately behind the house; then patches of wheat,
barley, poppies, beetroot, grass, and potatoes, cultivated, with few
exceptions, by the several families. But labourers can be hired when
wanted, who are willing to work for one or two florins a week.
We went into one of the houses. There sat a family grinding and
polishing glass, alternating field-work by a day at the treadles. The
operations were not new to me, but there was novelty to see them
carried on in such a homely way; to see elegant vases, dishes,
goblets, and jugs, fit ornaments for a palace, in the hands of
rustics, or lying about on a rough pine shelf. The father, a tall,
pale-faced man, with a somewhat careworn expression, stopped the noise
of the wheels as soon as he heard of a visitor from London, and talked
about that which he understood best--his business. Full thirty years
had he sat at the bench, training up his children to the work one
after another, but had not realized all the benefits he once hoped
for. The brittle ware came to him in boxes from Prague, forty-five
miles, and, when polished, was sent back in the same way; he having to
bear the loss of whatever was broken while in his hands. "Look here,"
he said, showing me a large handsome jug; "my daughter spent a whole
month over that jug, and then, as you see, broke the handle off. So I
must keep it, and lose fifteen florins." To him it was useless: he
could only place it apart with other crippled specimens--memorials of
misfortune. "Ah! if glass would not break, then he would not be poor.
However," he added, "we always get bread. God be thanked! And our bit
of land helps." Cutters and polishers earn about four florins a week.
He thought it good that young men got away to England, for they not
only earned great wages, but escaped the remorseless military service.
"A young man is not safe here: perhaps he works for twelve, eighteen
months, and thinks he will be left quiet for the rest of his term,
when all at once comes a sharp order, and he must away to Italy for a
year or two."
Then he set his treadle going, to show me that in Bohemia the polisher
holds his glass against the bottom of the wheel, and, consequently,
has the work always under his eye; while, in England, he holds it
against the top of the wheel, and must be always turning it over to
look at the surface.
Higher up the slope we came to another house, where, instead of the
harsh sound of grinding, we heard but a faint, busy hum. A change came
over Röschen's manner as she entered, and saw a young man sitting at a
lathe; and their greeting, when he looked round, was after the manner
of lovers before a witness. On being told that I had come to see glass
engraving, the young man plied his wheel briskly, and, taking up a
ruby tazza, in a few minutes there stood a deer with branching antlers
on a rough hillock in its centre--a pure white intaglio set in the
red. I had never before seen the process, and was surprised by its
simplicity. All those landscapes, hunting-scenes, pastoral groups, and
whatever else which appear as exquisite carvings in the glass, are
produced by a few tiny copper wheels, or disks. The engraver sits at
a small lathe against a window, with a little rack before him,
containing about a score of the copper disks, varying in size from the
diameter of a halfpenny down to its thickness, all mounted on
spindles, and sharpened on the edge. He paints a rough outline of the
design on the surface of the glass, and, selecting the disk that suits
best, he touches the edge with a drop of oil, inserts it in the
mandril, sets it spinning, and, holding the glass against it from
below, the little wheel eats its way in with astonishing rapidity. The
glass, held lightly in the hands, is shifted about continually, till
all the greater parts of the figure are worked out; then, for the
lesser parts, a smaller disk is used, and at last the finest touches,
such as blades of grass, the tips of antlers, eyebrows, and so forth,
are put in with the smallest. Every minute he holds the glass up
between his eye and the light, watching the development of the design;
now making a broad excavation, now changing the disk every ten
seconds, and giving touches so slight and rapid that the unpractised
eye can scarcely follow them; and in this way he produces effects of
foreshortening, of roundness, and light and shade, which, to an
eye-witness, appear little less than wonderful.
The work in hand happened to be _tazzi_, and in less than half an hour
I saw deer in various positions roughed out on six of them, and three
completely finished. Then the engraver fetched other specimens of his
skill from up-stairs--a dish with a historical piece in the centre,
and vignettes round the rim--a bowl engirdled by sylvan scenes, where
fauns and satyrs, jolly old Pan and bacchanals, laughed out upon you
from forest bowers and mazy vineyards--all, even to the twinkling
eyes, the untrimmed beards, and delicate tendrils, wrought out by the
copper wheels.
The merchants at Prague took care that he should never lack work, and,
according to the quality, he could earn from four to eight florins a
week, and save money. Beef cost him 11 kreutzers the pound, veal 10,
and salt 6 kreutzers. His bread was home-made. The lathe was his own:
it cost forty florins; and the house, and the long strip of ground
that sloped away behind, half hidden by the orchard. He did no
field-work, but left that to his mother, who lived with him, and hired
labourers. "It goes better in the house where a woman is," he said,
with a glance at Röschen.
The cleanliness and order of his own room--workshop though it
was--justified his words. And though old habit would not yet permit
him to sit with open door and window, he did not aggravate summer-heat
by stove-heat, but had a cooking-place in an outer shed. His house had
four rooms, of which two up-stairs, and a loft--all built of wood. The
floor of the room above formed the ceiling, all the joints covered by
a straight sapling split down the middle, resting on joists big and
strong enough to carry a town-hall. Between these massive timbers hung
pictures of saints, a drawing of trees, and a guitar. The engraver
could play and sing, and recreated himself with music in the evenings,
and on Sundays.
He had heard that the English were fond of music, and thought there
must be plenty of good singing among the working-people; and it
surprised him not a little to be told that the Islanders' love for
sweet sounds went far--far beyond their power of producing them.
"Ah!" interrupted Röschen, "my brother writes that there is no music
in his English workmates' singing."
The engraver thought it a great privation, and could not well
comprehend how the evenings could pass agreeably without a little
music at home. "And when you are away from home," he went on, "it
seems still better. Like all the young men here, I have been a
soldier, have marched to Bucharest, to Pesth, to Trent, and Innsbruck,
and what should we do on those long marches, and in dull quarters, if
we could not sing?"
Concerning the military service, he thought it a hardship to be
obliged to serve, whether or no, but compensated by advantages. It
added to a young man's knowledge and experience to march to distant
lands, to see strange scenes, and strange people. You could always
tell the difference between one who had travelled, even as a soldier,
and a stay-at-home; the one had something to talk about, the other had
nothing. Then, the pleasure of coming home again--a pleasure so sweet,
that the thought of marching forth once more could hardly embitter it.
For his part, he had been at home eighteen months, glad to resume his
craft, and for the present saw no prospect of a call to arms. But
there remained yet one year of his term unexpired, and he was liable
at any moment to get an order requiring him to leave everything, and
march. "Who can tell," he said, "how hard it is to go away so
suddenly, to leave the little home, and all friends? Right glad shall
I be when the year is over."
Röschen looked as if she would be glad too, and, to make me aware of
all the young man's cleverness, she took down the frame of trees from
the wall and put it in my hands. I then saw that what looked like a
coloured drawing was a picture made of insects. The engraver had a
taste for natural history, and with a collection of beetles of all
sizes, black, brown, green, gold, and sapphire, had constructed the
group of trees which, when looked at from the middle of the room,
showed as a highly-finished drawing. You saw here and there a withered
branch shooting from the foliage--it was nothing but the horns and
legs ingeniously placed, and those deep hollows in the trunks, places
where owls may haunt, are produced by an artful arrangement of wings.
Then Röschen would have him fetch down his trays of moths and
portfolio of drawings. The moths had all been collected in walks about
the neighbourhood, and were carefully preserved and labelled. The
drawings showed the hand of an artist. The engraver had begun to learn
to draw in school at the age of eleven, and had practised ever since,
for without good drawing one could not engrave glass. He spoke of
Röschen's youngest sister as a real genius, who would one day outstrip
all the engravers in Ulrichsthal.
Bohemia was the first to rival, and soon to excel, Venice in the art
of glass-making. In her vast forests she found exhaustless stores of
fuel and potash, and quartz and lime in her rocks, and produced a
white glass which won universal admiration until about the beginning
of last century, when English manufacturers discovered the process for
making flint-glass with oxyde of lead as an ingredient. There was
nothing superior to this glass, so it has been said, but the diamond,
and the Bohemians, finding their craft in danger, introduced coloured
glass, frosted glass, and pleasing styles of ornament. This practice
they have since kept up. Their works are mostly situate in the great
forests on the Bavarian frontier, where fuel and labour are alike
cheap: the managers are well taught, and have a good knowledge of
chemistry, and by striving always after something new, reproducing at
times long-forgotten Venice patterns, they have achieved a reputation
due more to the taste and elegance displayed in the forms of their
manufactures than to their quality. From the rude forest villages the
articles are sent all across the kingdom to the northern districts,
where, as we have seen, the finishing touches that are to fit them for
stately halls and drawing-rooms, are applied by the hands of humble
cottagers.
We were about to leave, when the engraver asked if I would not like to
try my hand at the lathe, and, without waiting for an answer, he
brought out a small, plain beaker of thick glass, and begged me to cut
a forget-me-not upon it as a memorial of my visit. The process looked
so easy, that I thought there would be no great risk in an attempt, so
I sat down, spread out my elbows to rest upon the cushions, put my
foot to the treadle, and the glass to the wheel. Whiz--skirr-r-r-r,
and there was a fine white blur which, by a stretch of fancy, might
have been taken for a cloud. Karl--as Röschen called him--took the
beaker, and, leaning across me as I sat, speedily converted the blur
into a rose, and bade me try again. I presented the opposite side, and
this time with better effect, for the result was a very passable
forget-me-not. I have seen many a worse on _A Trifle from Margate_.
Röschen then said something about meeting in the evening, and we made
haste home, for it was dinner-time. Immediately on arrival she
proceeded to roll out a small piece of dry brown dough into a thin
sheet, which she cut into strips, and these strips, laid three or four
together, and shredded down very thin, produced an imitation of
vermicelli, which was thrown into the soup.
Now all was ready, and a proud woman was the mother as the soup was
followed by two kinds of meat, stewed and roast--salad, potatoes, and
a cool, slightly acid preserve, made from forest berries. And for
drink there was pale beer from the _Wirthshaus_. She did not fail to
remind me of my promise to "eat a plenty."
Nor, after we had sipped our coffee, did Röschen fail to remind me of
my morning's surrender, and pointing to the high hill-top, about two
miles off, she said, "I mean to take you up there." So, as my docility
remained unimpaired, we braved the hot sun, and had a very pretty walk
over broken ground, and down into a bosky valley, watered by a noisy
brook, before we reached the hill-foot. Then flowery meads, and
presently the shadow of a forest, where we regaled ourselves with a
second dessert of juicy bilberries and wild strawberries, both growing
in profusion. From a little clearing, not far from the top, we saw
heaving darkly against the blue, the hills of the Saxon Switzerland.
The last bit was steep and pathless; but at length we came out upon a
little hollow platform, the summit of a precipice, from which, the
trees diverging and sinking on either hand, there was a grand view
over the vale we had left, and far away, over field and hamlet, meadow
and coppice, to a wavy line of hills, gray, purple, green, and brown,
blended on the horizon. We sat for an hour; and after scanning the
principal features Röschen pointed out the details, naming every house
and field within a great sweep. Each man's little property lay
distinctly mapped out, and we could see the neighbours and her sisters
working in the sunshine.
Our way back led us across the hay-field, where the lasses were
bustling to finish in time for some evening's diversion, the nature of
which was a secret. I proposed to help them, threw off my coat, seized
a fork, and flung the hay up to the lass in the wagon quicker than she
could trim it. Röschen took a rake, and had enough to do in gathering
up the heaps which, pitching too vigorously, I sent clean over the
wagon. All at once, as I was stooping, down came a mountain on my
back, and the three lasses, taking advantage of my fall, came piling
heap on heap above me--Pelion upon Ossa--till I was well-nigh
smothered, and they went almost wild with laughter. They sat down to
recover themselves; but when they saw me, after laborious thrust and
heave, come creeping ingloriously out, their jocund mirth broke out
again, and provoked me into a spirit of retaliation.
"As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure,
The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure."
Then we fell to work once more, and when the wagon was laden I showed
to the ragged urchin who was hired to drive, three of the lumbering
old copper coins, bigger than penny-pieces, which pass for kreutzers
in the neighbourhood, and at sight thereof he made the old horse drag
the load home and come back for another in less time than horse had
ever accomplished the task in Ulrichsthal. The second load was the
last: by the time it was all pitched up our shadows grew long, and we
followed it up to the house, where the mother had coffee and _Semmel_
ready for us.
Now Röschen, reminding me once more of my promise to be tractable,
revealed the secret. Karl was coming down, and Gottfried--the
sweetheart I had seen the night before--and perhaps another, and then
we were all to go to the _Wirthshaus_, about half an hour's walk.
Presently the young men came in, and the lasses having changed their
rustic garb for holiday gowns and dangling gold ear-drops, we walked
in procession across fields to the rendezvous. A shout of welcome
greeted our arrival from the young fellows already assembled--the
Londoner was duly introduced, and treated by the host with especial
favour, and we all sat down to a table, every man with his tankard of
beer. The cup circulated literally, the custom being that everybody
should drink from everybody's tankard. The lasses took their turn,
though modestly and with discretion, as became them. The talk crackled
merrily for awhile, and when it flagged a small tray bearing a set of
little ninepins which were to be knocked down by a teetotum was placed
on the table. The pins were so contrived that they could be all
erected at once by pulling a string at one end of the tray, and the
game went round not less briskly than the tankards, shouts of laughter
repaying him who set the teetotum a-spinning without molestation to
the pins. Then I proposed a song, and Karl charmed all ears with a
musical ditty: another followed with a harmonious ballad, which had a
chorus for burden, and as the tuneful harmony filled the room I could
not help contrasting it with what would have been heard in a similar
rustic alehouse in England. The ballad led to a talk about poetry, and
one and another recited stanzas of favourite poems, and all seemed
familiar with the best authors, drawing illustrations from Bürger's
_Lenore_, Schiller's _Song of the Bell_, Goethe's _Erl King_, and one
or two ventured upon the _Niebelungenlied_.
The moon was high in heaven when we broke up, and gently the night
wind swept across the fields laden with the freshness of dew. As we
walked along the narrow paths Gottfried had to undergo a test: his
maiden plucked a large ox-eye daisy, pulled the petals off one by one,
keeping time with a few spoken surmises[E]:
"_Du liebst mich vom Herzen,
mit Schmerzen,
ein Wenig,
oder gar nicht._"
The last petal came off with _vom Herzen_, but yet the inquirer was
not quite content. It was all very well to be loved _from the heart_;
but _with pain_ or _grief_ would have been much better. Then nothing
would do but Röschen must try the experiment on me, and reciting and
plucking she went round the frail circlet, and ended with _gar nicht_.
She looked curiously at Karl, and Karl looked as if he were not by
any means dissatisfied that she had got _not at all_ for a
conclusion.
It was past twelve when we came to our door, and then "farewell" had
to be said, and "adieu till to-morrow;" and so ended for me a day of
rural life that I shall long remember.
If, reader, you should ever pay a visit of inquiry to the
Ulrichsthalers, I feel assured they will tell you that next to
themselves the best fellow in the world is an Englishman.
FOOTNOTE:
[E] Thou lovest me from the heart:
with pain:
a little;
or not at all.