A Tramp Abroad quotes

She waded over, and the army followed. So a great Frankish victory or defeat was gained or avoided; and in order to commemorate the episode, Charlemagne commanded a city to be built there, which he named Frankfort—the ford of the Franks.

None of the other cities where this event happened were named for it. This is good evidence that Frankfort was the first place it occurred at.

Frankfort has another distinction—it is the birthplace of the German alphabet; or at least of the German word for alphabet—buchstaben. They say that the first movable types were made on birch sticks—buchstabe—hence the name.

In one of the shops I had the luck to stumble upon a book which has charmed me nearly to death. It is entitled The Legends Of The Rhine From Basle To Rotterdam, by F. J. Kiefer; translated by L. W. Garnham, B.A.

All tourists mention the Rhine legends—in that sort of way which quietly pretends that the mentioner has been familiar with them all his life, and that the reader cannot possibly be ignorant of them—but no tourist ever tells them.

So this little book fed me in a very hungry place; and I, in my turn, intend to feed my reader, with one or two little lunches from the same larder. I shall not mar Garnham’s translation by meddling with its English;

Last came the Empress of Germany and the Grand Duchess of Baden in a closed carriage; these passed through the low-bowing groups of servants and disappeared in the hotel, exhibiting to us only the backs of their heads, and then the show was over.

It appears to be as difficult to land a monarch as it is to launch a ship.

But as to Heidelberg. The weather was growing pretty warm,—very warm, in fact. So we left the valley and took quarters at the Schloss Hotel, on the hill, above the Castle.

I felt something of the same sense of humiliation and injury which one feels when he finds that a human stranger has been clandestinely inspecting him in his privacy and mentally commenting upon him.

I eyed the raven, and the raven eyed me.

Nothing was said during some seconds.

I still made no reply. Now the adversary raised his head and called. There was an answering croak from a little distance in the wood—evidently a croak of inquiry. The adversary explained with enthusiasm, and the other raven dropped everything and came.

The two sat side by side on the limb and discussed me as freely and offensively as two great naturalists might discuss a new kind of bug.

The thing became more and more embarrassing. They called in another friend. This was too much. I saw that they had the advantage of me, and so I concluded to get out of the scrape by walking out of it.

They enjoyed my defeat as much as any low white people could have done. They craned their necks and laughed at me (for a raven can laugh, just like a man), they squalled insulting remarks after me as long as they could see me.

They were nothing but ravens—I knew that—what they thought of me could be a matter of no consequence—and yet when even a raven shouts after you, “What a hat!” “Oh, pull down your vest!” and that sort of thing, it hurts you and humiliates you, and there is no getting around it with fine reasoning and pretty arguments.

Animals talk to each other, of course. There can be no question about that; but I suppose there are very few people who can understand them. I never knew but one man who could. I knew he could, however, because he told me so himself.

You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw.

Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.

Now I’ve never heard a jay use bad grammar but very seldom; and when they do, they are as ashamed as a human; they shut right down and leave.

… jay can laugh, a jay can feel shame, a jay can reason and plan and discuss, a jay likes gossip and scandal, a jay has got a sense of humor, a jay knows when he is an ass just as well as you do—maybe better.

If a jay ain’t human, he better take in his sign, that’s all.

Now I’m going to tell you a perfectly true fact about some bluejays."

but otherwise he is just as much human as you be. And I’ll tell you for why. A jay’s gifts, and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground.

A jay hasn’t got any more principle than a Congressman.

A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

but otherwise he is just as much human as you be. And I’ll tell you for why. A jay’s gifts, and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn’t got any more principle than a Congressman.

A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

The sacredness of an obligation is such a thing which you can’t cram into no bluejay’s head. Now, on top of all this, there’s another thing; a jay can out-swear any gentleman in the mines. You think a cat can swear. Well, a cat can;

“Well, sir, they roosted around here on the housetop and the trees for an hour, and guffawed over that thing like human beings.

It ain’t any use to tell me a bluejay hasn’t got a sense of humor, because I know better.

And memory, too. They brought jays here from all over the United States to look down that hole, every summer for three years. Other birds, too.

When the candidates can hold no more, a count is instituted and the one who has drank the greatest number of pints is proclaimed king. I was told that the last beer king elected by the corps—or by his own capabilities—emptied his mug seventy-five times.

No stomach could hold all that quantity at one time, of course—but there are ways of frequently creating a vacuum, which those who have been much at sea will understand.

One sees so many students abroad at all hours, that he presently begins to wonder if they ever have any working-hours. Some of them have, some of them haven’t. Each can choose for himself whether he will work or play;

It seemed right and proper that students should indulge in dogs; but everybody else had them, too—old men and young ones, old women and nice young ladies.

If there is one spectacle that is unpleasanter than another, it is that of an elegantly dressed young lady towing a dog by a string.

It is said to be the sign and symbol of blighted love. It seems to me that some other way of advertising it might be devised, which would be just as conspicuous and yet not so trying to the proprieties.

so, all the five corps were present in strong force. In the windows at the vacant end of the room stood six or eight, narrow-bladed swords with large protecting guards for the hand, and outside was a man at work sharpening others on a grindstone.

He understood his business; for when a sword left his hand one could shave himself with it.

It was observable that the young gentlemen neither bowed to nor spoke with students whose caps differed in color from their own. This did not mean hostility, but only an armed neutrality.

and so, under the fierce exhilaration of the clashing steel, he would yield and look after all.

Sometimes spectators of these duels faint—and it does seem a very reasonable thing to do, too.

Both parties to this fourth duel were badly hurt so much that the surgeon was at work upon them nearly or quite an hour—a fact which is suggestive. But this waiting interval was not wasted in idleness by the assembled students.

to decline and still remain in the corps would make him unpleasantly conspicuous, and properly so, since he knew, when he joined, that his main business, as a member, would be to fight.

No, there is no law against declining—except the law of custom, which is confessedly stronger than written law, everywhere.

The ten men whose duels I had witnessed did not go away when their hurts were dressed, as I had supposed they would, but came back, one after another, as soon as they were free of the surgeon, and mingled with the assemblage in the …

Much as the modern French duel is ridiculed by certain smart people, it is in reality one of the most dangerous institutions of our day.

Since it is always fought in the open air, the combatants are nearly sure to catch cold.

M. Paul de Cassagnac, the most inveterate of the French duelists, had suffered so often in this way that he is at last a confirmed invalid;

Gambetta and M. Fourtou in the French Assembly, I knew that trouble must follow. I knew it because a long personal friendship with M. Gambetta revealed to me the desperate and implacable nature of the man.

Vast as are his physical proportions, I knew that the thirst for revenge would penetrate to the remotest frontiers of his person.

I did not wait for him to call on me, but went at once to him. As I had expected, I found the brave fellow steeped in a profound French calm. I say French calm, because French calmness and English calmness have points of difference.

First, we drew up my principal’s will. I insisted upon this, and stuck to my point.

I said I had never heard of a man in his right mind going out to fight a duel without first making his will. He said he had never heard of a man in his right mind doing anything of the kind.

When he had finished the will, he wished to proceed to a choice of his “last words.” He wanted to know how the following words, as a dying exclamation, struck me:

“I DIE THAT FRANCE MIGHT LIVE.”

I said that this remark seemed to lack relevancy; but he said relevancy was a matter of no consequence in last words, what you wanted was thrill.

The next thing in order was the choice of weapons. My principal said he was not feeling well, and would leave that and the other details of the proposed meeting to me. Therefore I wrote the following note and carried it to M. Fourtou’s friend:

“Well, for instance, what would it be?”

“That’s about the size of it,” I said. “Now, if it is a fair question, what was your side proposing to shed?”

I had him there. He saw he had made a blunder, so he hastened to explain it away. He said he had spoken jestingly.

I then begged him to go and suggest a distance, for my mind was growing weak and confused under the strain which had been put upon it. He named sixty-five yards. I nearly lost my patience. I said:

“Sixty-five yards, with these instruments? Squirt-guns would be deadlier at fifty. Consider, my friend, you and I are banded together to destroy life, not make it eternal.”

But with all my persuasions, all my arguments, I was only able to get him to reduce the distance to thirty-five yards; and even this concession he made with reluctance, and said with a sigh, “I wash my hands of this slaughter;

I laid it, all lonely and forlorn, in the center of the vast solitude of his palm. He gazed at it and shuddered. And still mournfully contemplating it, he murmured in a broken voice:

“Alas, it is not death I dread, but mutilation.”

I heartened him once more, and with such success that he presently said, “Let the tragedy begin. Stand at my back; do not desert me in this solemn hour, my friend.”

that other second embraced me; the surgeons, the orators, the undertakers, the police, everybody embraced, everybody congratulated, everybody cried, and the whole atmosphere was filled with praise and with joy unspeakable.

It seems to me then that I would rather be a hero of a French duel than a crowned and sceptered monarch.

When the commotion had somewhat subsided, the body of surgeons held a consultation, and after a good deal of debate decided that with proper care and nursing there was reason to believe that I would survive my injuries.

I have no complaints to make against any one. I acted for myself, and I can stand the consequences.

Without boasting, I think I may say I am not afraid to stand before a modern French duelist, but as long as I keep in my right mind I will never consent to stand behind one again.

One day we took the train and went down to Mannheim to see “King Lear” played in German. It was a mistake. We sat in our seats three whole hours and never understood anything but the thunder and lightning;

One day we took the train and went down to Mannheim to see “King Lear” played in German. It was a mistake.

We sat in our seats three whole hours and never understood anything but the thunder and lightning; and even that was reversed to suit German ideas, for the thunder came first and the lightning followed after.

The behavior of the audience was perfect. There were no rustlings, or whisperings, or other little disturbances; each act was listened to in silence, and the applauding was done after the curtain was down.

Another time, we went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree—otherwise an opera—the one called “Lohengrin.” The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief.

The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.

There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the four hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of that long, dragging, relentless season of suffering is indestructible.

There is where the deep ingenuity of the operatic idea is betrayed. It deals so largely in pain that its scattered delights are prodigiously augmented by the contrasts.

A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.

I have since found out that there is nothing the Germans like so much as an opera. They like it, not in a mild and moderate way, but with their whole hearts. This is a legitimate result of habit and education.

For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaps her thought—and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too:

“Auntie, I just know I’ve got five hundred fleas on me!”

That was probably over the average. Yes, it must have been very much over the average.

In that large audience, that night, there were eight very conspicuous people. These were ladies who had their hats or bonnets on.

What a blessed thing it would be if a lady could make herself conspicuous in our theaters by wearing her hat.

It is not usual in Europe to allow ladies and gentlemen to take bonnets, hats, overcoats, canes, or umbrellas into the auditorium, but in Mannheim this rule was not enforced because the audiences were largely made up of people from a distance, and among these …

But the “celebrate” was an astonishing disappointment to me.

If he had been behind a screen I should have supposed they were performing a surgical operation on him.

I looked at my friend—to my great surprise he seemed intoxicated with pleasure, his eyes were dancing with eager delight.

In Germany they always hear one thing at an opera which has never yet been heard in America, perhaps—I mean the closing strain of a fine solo or duet. We always smash into it with an earthquake of applause.

The result is that we rob ourselves of the sweetest part of the treat; we get the whiskey, but we don’t get the sugar in the bottom of the glass.

Our way of scattering applause along through an act seems to me to be better than the Mannheim way of saving it all up till the act is ended.

Jump and run, the boat’s afire and there ain’t a minute to lose!” All those ladies looked sweetly up and smiled, nobody stirred, the old lady pulled her spectacles down, looked over them, and said, gently:

“But you mustn’t catch cold, child. Run and put on your breastpin, and then come and tell us all about it.”

It was a cruel chill to give to a poor little devil’s gushing vehemence. He was expecting to be a sort of hero—the creator of a wild panic—and here everybody sat and smiled a mocking smile, and an old woman made fun of his bugbear.

… sweetest and best, the fiddlers under the eaves of the stage sawed away for dear life, with the cold overflow spouting down the backs of their necks, and the dry and happy King sat in his lofty box and wore his gloves to ribbons applauding.

“More yet!” cried the King; “more yet—let loose all the thunder, turn on all the water! I will hang the man that raises an umbrella!”

When this most tremendous and effective storm that had ever been produced in any theater was at last over, the King’s approbation was measureless. He cried:

It was a royal idea—that storm—and royally carried out.

But observe the moderation of the King; he did not insist upon his encore.

If he had been a gladsome, unreflecting American opera-audience, he probably would have had his storm repeated and repeated until he drowned all those people.

These doors fitted so snugly and continued the figures of the paper so unbrokenly, that when they were closed one had to go feeling and searching along the wall to find them.

There was a stove in the corner—one of those tall, square, stately white porcelain things that looks like a monument and keeps you thinking of death when you ought to be enjoying your travels.

The windows looked out on a little alley, and over that into a stable and some poultry and pig yards in the rear of some tenement-houses.

Harris and I occupied the same room which he had occupied and the same paper had not quite peeled off the walls yet.

The furniture was quaint old carved stuff, full four hundred years old, and some of the smells were over a thousand.

There was a hook in the wall, which the landlord said the terrific old Goetz used to hang his iron hand on when he took it off to go to bed.

I was glad to get a facsimile of the letter written by this fine old German Robin Hood, though I was not able to read it.

He was a better artist with his sword than with his pen.

We went down by the river and saw the Square Tower. It was a very venerable structure, very strong, and very ornamental. There was no opening near the ground. They had to use a ladder to get into it, no doubt.

The head of the family sat in the foreground, and beyond him extended a sharply receding and diminishing row of sons; facing him sat his wife, and beyond her extended a low row of diminishing daughters.

The family was usually large, but the perspective bad.

Then we hired the hack and the horse which Goetz von Berlichingen used to use, and drove several miles into the country to visit the place called Weibertreu—Wife’s Fidelity I suppose it means. It was a feudal castle of the Middle Ages.

We were in bed by ten, for we wanted to be up and away on our tramp homeward with the dawn. I hung fire, but Harris went to sleep at once.

I hate a man who goes to sleep at once; there is a sort of indefinable something about it which is not exactly an insult, and yet is an insolence; and one which is hard to bear, too.

I lay there fretting over this injury, and trying to go to sleep; but the harder I tried, the wider awake I grew. I got to feeling very lonely in the dark, with no company but an undigested dinner.

My anger grew to a frenzy.

I finally did what all persons before me have done, clear back to Adam,—resolved to throw something.

I reached down and got my walking-shoes, then sat up in bed and listened, in order to exactly locate the noise. But I couldn’t do it; it was as unlocatable as a cricket’s noise;

I looked around; I was at Harris’s bed, a Sabbath-day’s journey from my own.

There was only one sofa; it was against the wall; there was only one chair where a body could get at it—I had been revolving around it like a planet, and colliding with it like a comet half the night.

I explained how I had been employing myself, and why. Then the landlord’s party left, and the rest of us set about our preparations for breakfast, for the dawn was ready to break.

I explained how I had been employing myself, and why. Then the landlord’s party left, and the rest of us set about our preparations for breakfast, for the dawn was ready to break.

I glanced furtively at my pedometer, and found I had made 47 miles. But I did not care, for I had come out for a pedestrian tour anyway.

When the landlord learned that I and my agents were artists, our party rose perceptibly in his esteem; we rose still higher when he learned that we were making a pedestrian tour of Europe.

there seems to be a wheel missing—this would be corrected in a finished Work, of course. This thing flying out behind is not a flag, it is a curtain. That other thing up there is the sun, but I didn’t get enough distance on it.

I do not remember, now, what that thing is that is in front of the man who is running, but I think it is a haystack or a woman.

This study was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1879, but did not take any medal; they do not give medals for studies.

That other thing up there is the sun, but I didn’t get enough distance on it. I do not remember, now, what that thing is that is in front of the man who is running, but I think it is a haystack or a woman.

This study was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1879, but did not take any medal; they do not give medals for studies.

We discharged the carriage at the bridge. The river was full of logs—long, slender, barkless pine logs—and we leaned on the rails of the bridge, and watched the men put them together into rafts.

In low water these neat narrow-edged dikes project four or five inches above the surface, like the comb of a submerged roof, but in high water they are overflowed.

A hatful of rain makes high water in the Neckar, and a basketful produces an overflow.

There are dikes abreast the Schloss Hotel, and the current is violently swift at that point.

I said we were on a pedestrian tour to Heidelberg, and would like to take passage with him. I said this partly through young Z, who spoke German very well, and partly through Mr. X, who spoke it peculiarly.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

The captain hitched up his trousers, then shifted his quid thoughtfully.

It was a deep and satisfying pleasure to see the sun create the new morning, and gradually, patiently, lovingly, clothe it on with splendor after splendor, and glory after glory, till the miracle was complete.

How different is this marvel observed from a raft, from what it is when one observes it through the dingy windows of a railway-station in some wretched village while he munches a petrified sandwich and waits for the train.

[Transcriber’s Note for edition 12: on the advice of two German-speaking volunteers, the German letters a, o, and u with umlauts have been rendered as ae, oe, and ue instead of as, variously, :a, a”, :o, o” and :u, u” as in previous editions.]

She uses both rudders all the time, and they are powerful enough to enable her to turn to the right or the left and steer around curves, in spite of the strong resistance of the chain.

I would not have believed that that impossible thing could be done; but I saw it done, and therefore I know that there is one impossible thing which can be done.

What miracle will man attempt next?

In one place we saw a nicely dressed German gentleman without any spectacles. Before I could come to anchor he had got underway. It was a great pity. I so wanted to make a sketch of him.

The captain comforted me for my loss, however, by saying that the man was without any doubt a fraud who had spectacles, but kept them in his pocket in order to make himself conspicuous.

Below Hassmersheim we passed Hornberg, Goetz von Berlichingen’s old castle. It stands on a bold elevation two hundred feet above the surface of the river; it has high vine-clad walls enclosing trees, and a peaked tower about seventy-five feet high.

it has high vine-clad walls enclosing trees, and a peaked tower about seventy-five feet high. The steep hillside, from the castle clear down to the water’s edge, is terraced, and clothed thick with grape vines.

This is like farming a mansard roof.

All the steeps along that part of the river which furnish the proper exposure, are given up to the grape. That region is a great producer of Rhine wines. The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines;

That region is a great producer of Rhine wines. The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage.

One tells them from vinegar by the label.

The Hornberg hill is to be tunneled, and the new railway will pass under the castle.

It was seven hundred years ago. She had a number of rich and noble lovers and one poor and obscure one, Sir Wendel Lobenfeld.

With the native chuckleheadedness of the heroine of romance, she preferred the poor and obscure lover.

With the native sound judgment of the father of a heroine of romance, the von Berlichingen of that day shut his daughter up in his donjon keep, or his oubliette, or his culverin, or some such place, and resolved that she should stay there until …

the boat was upset, mocking every exertion; the waves rose to the gunwale, and splitting on the hard stones, the Boat broke into Pieces. The youth sank into the depths, but the squire was thrown on shore by a powerful wave."

The bitterest things have been said about the Lorelei during many centuries, but surely her conduct upon this occasion entitles her to our respect.

One feels drawn tenderly toward her and is moved to forget her many crimes and remember only the good deed that crowned and closed her career.

Here is the music, and the German words by Heinrich Heine. This song has been a favorite in Germany for forty years, and will remain a favorite always, maybe.

I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation.

When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment—but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment.

No translation could be closer. He has got in all the facts; and in their regular order, too. There is not a statistic wanting.

It is as succinct as an invoice.

That is what a translation ought to be; it should exactly reflect the thought of the original. You can’t sing “Above wonderfully there,” because it simply won’t go to the tune, without damaging the singer;

“Susan bathing, surprised by the two old man. In the background the lapidation of the condemned.”

(“Lapidation” is good; it is much more elegant than “stoning.”)

“St. Rochus sitting in a landscape with an angel who looks at his plague-sore, whilst the dog the bread in his mouth attents him.”

He was as long as a railway-train, and had the customary impenetrable green scales all over him. His breath bred pestilence and conflagration, and his appetite bred famine.

He ate men and cattle impartially, and was exceedingly unpopular.

The German emperor of that day made the usual offer: he would grant to the destroyer of the dragon, any one solitary thing he might ask for;

But the monarch had given his word, and he kept it. To everybody’s surprise, the unselfish monopolist immediately reduced the price of spectacles to such a degree that a great and crushing burden was removed from the nation.

The emperor, to commemorate this generous act, and to testify his appreciation of it, issued a decree commanding everybody to buy this benefactor’s spectacles and wear them, whether they needed them or not.

So originated the wide-spread custom of wearing spectacles in Germany; and as a custom once established in these old lands is imperishable, this one remains universal in the empire to this day.

You can’t back a raft upstream, you can’t hurry it downstream, you can’t scatter out to one side when you haven’t any room to speak of, you won’t take to the perpendicular cliffs on the other shore when they appear to be blasting there, too.

Your resources are limited, you see. There is simply nothing for it but to watch and pray.

For some hours we had been making three and a half or four miles an hour and we were still making that. We had been dancing right along until those men began to shout;

No poet who valued his reputation would touch such a theme as that.

I should be distinguished as the only “distinguished dead” who went down to the grave unsonneted, in 1878.

But we escaped, and I have never regretted it.

It seems that the heavy work in the quarries and the new railway gradings is done mainly by Italians. That was a revelation.

We have the notion in our country that Italians never do heavy work at all, but confine themselves to the lighter arts, like organ-grinding, operatic singing, and assassination.

We have blundered, that is plain.

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

Thus my education proceeded easily and comfortably for me, but not for Harris.

Three courses of a table d’hôte 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.

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

Among these was my Etruscan tear-jug.

I have made a little sketch of it here; 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.

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.

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 decalcomania butterflies would be, and these people fling mud at the elegant Englishman, Byng, who wrote a book called The Bric-a-brac …

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.

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;

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.

… 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:

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.

”

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 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.

“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.

"

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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!

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:

With so big and so derisive an audience as that, a sufferer 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 they had never caught one crying out, after the open-air exhibition was instituted.”

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 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!

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;

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.

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.

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;

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.

I suppose there are two kinds of music—one kind which one feels, just as an oyster might, and another sort which requires a higher faculty, a faculty which must be assisted and developed by teaching.

Yet if base music gives certain of us wings, why should we want any other? But we do.

We want it because the higher and better like it.

We want it without giving it the necessary time and trouble; so we climb into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a lie; we pretend we like it.

it reconciles him—and me, now—to the floating of iron cable-chains and other unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top of the mud—I mean the water.

The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility—that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie.

But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do it, and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it.

I asked him if he was “all fixed.” He said he was. That was very true. He had a trunk, two small satchels, and an umbrella. I was to pay him fifty-five dollars a month and railway fares.

On the continent the railway fare on a trunk is about the same it is on a man.

Couriers do not have to pay any board and lodging. This seems a great saving to the tourist—at first. It does not occur to the tourist that somebody pays that man’s board and lodging.

It is much easier to catch it than it is to shoot it, and only the experienced chamois-hunter can do either. Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the “scarcity” of the chamois. It is the reverse of scarce.

Droves of one hundred million chamois are not unusual in the Swiss hotels.

Indeed, they are so numerous as to be a great pest. The romancers always dress up the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume, whereas the best way to hunt this game is to do it without any costume at all.

Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the “scarcity” of the chamois. It is the reverse of scarce. Droves of one hundred million chamois are not unusual in the Swiss hotels. Indeed, they are so numerous as to be a great pest.

The romancers always dress up the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume, whereas the best way to hunt this game is to do it without any costume at all.

The article of commerce called chamois-skin is another fraud; nobody could skin a chamois, it is too small. The creature is a humbug in every way, and everything which has been written about it is sentimental exaggeration.

Indeed, they are so numerous as to be a great pest. The romancers always dress up the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume, whereas the best way to hunt this game is to do it without any costume at all.

The article of commerce called chamois-skin is another fraud; nobody could skin a chamois, it is too small.

The creature is a humbug in every way, and everything which has been written about it is sentimental exaggeration. It was no pleasure to me to find the chamois out, for he had been one of my pet illusions;

It is worth three francs when he buys it, but a bonanza could not purchase it after his great deeds have been inscribed upon it. There are artisans all about Switzerland whose trade it is to burn these things upon the alpenstock of the tourist.

And observe, a man is respected in Switzerland according to his alpenstock.

I found I could get no attention there, while I carried an unbranded one. However, branding is not expected, so I soon remedied that. The effect upon the next detachment of tourists was very marked. I felt repaid for my trouble.

I said, “I was only talking—I didn’t intend to approach her, but I see that you do not know what an intrepid person I am.

I am not afraid of any woman that walks.

I will go and speak to this young girl.”

“Oh, don’t I!” said I—but I didn’t.

I wished the sea had washed the rudder and the smoke-stack and the captain away—then I could have located this questioner.

“And don’t you remember how frightened poor Mary was, and how she cried?”

“That makes it more singular than ever,” murmured my beautiful friend.

“Because when the parents speak of that child now, they always call it Susan Amelia.”

That spiked my gun. I could not say anything. I was entirely out of verbal obliquities; to go further would be to lie, and that I would not do;

“Ah, me, you struck the summit! You struck the loftiest altitude of stupidity that human effort has ever reached.

You shall have a monument of jackasses’ skulls as high as the Strasburg spire if you die before I do.

They wanted to know I was from the same ‘establishment’ that you hailed from, did they? What did they mean by ‘establishment’?”

I had been well scorched by the young woman, but no matter, I took it out on Harris.

One should always “get even” in some way, else the sore place will go on hurting.

The Hofkirche is celebrated for its organ concerts. All summer long the tourists flock to that church about six o’clock in the evening, and pay their franc, and listen to the noise.

The place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion—and all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings.

The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is.

Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people. Louis XVI did not die in his bed, consequently history is very gentle with him;

The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is.

Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people.

Louis XVI did not die in his bed, consequently history is very gentle with him; she is charitable toward his failings, and she finds in him high virtues which are not usually considered to be virtues when they are lodged in kings.

He did not do it because it would be harmful, but because he hoped it was not yet too late to achieve by it the good which it would have done if applied earlier.

His comprehension was always a train or two behindhand.

If a national toe required amputating, he could not see that it needed anything more than poulticing; when others saw that the mortification had reached the knee, he first perceived that the toe needed cutting off—so he cut it off;

when others saw that the mortification had reached the knee, he first perceived that the toe needed cutting off—so he cut it off; and he severed the leg at the knee when others saw that the disease had reached the thigh.

He was good, and honest, and well meaning, in the matter of chasing national diseases, but he never could overtake one.

As a private man, he would have been lovable; but viewed as a king, he was strictly contemptible.

now here I was, at last, right in the creature’s home; so wherever I went that distressing “HOO’hoo! HOO’hoo! HOO’hoo!” was always in my ears. For a nervous man, this was a fine state of things.

Some sounds are hatefuler than others, but no sound is quite so inane, and silly, and aggravating as the “HOO’hoo” of a cuckoo clock, I think.

I bought one, and am carrying it home to a certain person; for I have always said that if the opportunity ever happened, I would do that man an ill turn.

That would be more lasting, and more satisfactory every way. So I bought the cuckoo clock; and if I ever get home with it, he is “my meat,” as they say in the mines.

I thought of another candidate—a book-reviewer whom I could name if I wanted to—but after thinking it over, I didn’t buy him a clock. I couldn’t injure his mind.

We visited the two long, covered wooden bridges which span the green and brilliant Reuss just below where it goes plunging and hurrahing out of the lake. These rambling, sway-backed tunnels are very attractive things, with their alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting water.

So saying, Riley blandly turned on his heel and left the astonished school-teacher standing there, a musing and motionless snow image shining in the broad glow of the street-lamp.

He never got that post-office.

To go back to Lucerne and its fishers, I concluded, after about nine hours’ waiting, that the man who proposes to tarry till he sees something hook one of those well-fed and experienced fishes will find it wisdom to “put up at Gadsby’s” and take …

And away he went. He went uninjured, too—I had the murderous impulse to harpoon him in the back with my alpenstock, but as I raised the weapon the disposition left me;

I found I hadn’t the heart to kill him, he was such a joyous, innocent, good-natured numbskull.

Half an hour later I was sitting on a bench inspecting, with strong interest, a noble monolith which we were skimming by—a monolith not shaped by man, but by Nature’s free great hand—a massy pyramidal rock eighty feet high, devised by Nature ten million years …

We told him he could move along if he was in a hurry.

He said he wasn’t in such a very particular hurry, but he wanted to get to the top while he was young.

We told him to clear out, then, and leave the things at the uppermost hotel and say we should be along presently.

5, 6, and 7, and during the remainder of the day hired the rest of the jodelers, at a franc apiece, not to jodel any more.

There is somewhat too much of the jodeling in the Alps.

About the middle of the afternoon we passed through a prodigious natural gateway called the Felsenthor, formed by two enormous upright rocks, with a third lying across the top.

Water can only be made cold enough for summer comfort by being prepared in a refrigerator or a closed ice-pitcher.

Europeans say ice-water impairs digestion. How do they know?—they never drink any.

At ten minutes past six we reached the Kaltbad station, where there is a spacious hotel with great verandas which command a majestic expanse of lake and mountain scenery.

We did so. We could ill afford this loss of time.

We climbed and climbed; and we kept on climbing; we reached about forty summits, but there was always another one just ahead.

It came on to rain, and it rained in dead earnest. We were soaked through and it was bitter cold. Next a smoky fog of clouds covered the whole region densely, and we took to the railway-ties to keep from getting lost.

but at last Harris happened to look around, and there stood a huge, dim, spectral hotel where the precipice had been. One could faintly discern the windows and chimneys, and a dull blur of lights.

Our first emotion was deep, unutterable gratitude, our next was a foolish rage, born of the suspicion that possibly the hotel had been visible three-quarters of an hour while we sat there in those cold puddles quarreling.

Yes, it was the Rigi-Kulm hotel—the one that occupies the extreme summit, and whose remote little sparkle of lights we had often seen glinting high aloft among the stars from our balcony away down yonder in Lucerne.

“What have you done?

You’ve got up at half past seven o’clock in the evening to see the sun rise, that’s what you’ve done.

”

“Of course not.

The hotel merely has a property interest in the sun, it has nothing to do with the management of it.

It is a precarious kind of property, too; a succession of total eclipses would probably ruin this tavern. Now what can be the matter with this sunrise?”

“It is perfectly true! Why couldn’t you have thought of that sooner? Now we’ve lost another one! And all through your blundering.

It was exactly like you to light a pipe and sit down to wait for the sun to rise in the west.

”

However—to be exact—there is one place where the serenity lapses for a while; this is while one is crossing the Schnurrtobel Bridge, a frail structure which swings its gossamer frame down through the dizzy air, over a gorge, like a vagrant spider-strand.

One has no difficulty in remembering his sins while the train is creeping down this bridge; and he repents of them, too; though he sees, when he gets to Vitznau, that he need not have done it, the bridge was perfectly safe.

So ends the eventual trip which we made to the Rigi-Kulm to see an Alpine sunrise.

“Then why do you use them? Why have you used all this Chinese and Choctaw and Zulu rubbish?”

“Because I didn’t know any French but two or three words, and I didn’t know any Latin or Greek at all.”

“That is nothing. Why should you want to use foreign words, anyhow?”

When the musing spider steps upon the red-hot shovel, he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels up. Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the tranquil and unsuspecting Agent.

I can be dreadfully rough on a person when the mood takes me.

We now prepared for a considerable walk—from Lucerne to Interlaken, over the Bruenig Pass. But at the last moment the weather was so good that I changed my mind and hired a four-horse carriage.

Presently we passed the place where a man of better odor was born. This was the children’s friend, Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas.

There are some unaccountable reputations in the world.

This saint’s is an instance. He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children, yet it appears he was not much of a friend to his own.

… when fifty years old he left them, and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible, and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other noises from the nursery, doubtless.

Judging by Pilate and St. Nicholas, there exists no rule for the construction of hermits; they seem made out of all kinds of material.

But Pilate attended to the matter of expiating his sin while he was alive, whereas St. Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys, Christmas eve, forever, and conferring kindness on other people’s children, to make up for deserting his own.

During his hermit life, according to legend, he partook of the bread and wine of the communion once a month, but all the rest of the month he fasted.

A constant marvel with us, as we sped along the bases of the steep mountains on this journey, was, not that avalanches occur, but that they are not occurring all the time.

One does not understand why rocks and landslides do not plunge down these declivities daily. A landslip occurred three quarters of a century ago, on the route from Arth to Brunnen, which was a formidable thing.

So with a mock groan which made her laugh again, Neddy ordered the champagne.

The fact that this young woman had never moistened the selvedge edge of her soul with a less plebeian tipple than champagne, had a marked and subduing effect on Harris.

He believed she belonged to the royal family. But I had my doubts.

There never was a completer victory; I was the only non-combatant left on the field. I would not have deserted my countrywoman anyhow, but indeed I had no desires in that direction.

None of us like mediocrity, but we all reverence perfection. This girl’s music was perfection in its way; it was the worst music that had ever been achieved on our planet by a mere human being.

I moved up close, and never lost a strain. When she got through, I asked her to play it again. She did it with a pleased alacrity and a heightened enthusiasm. She made it all discords, this time.

I moved up close, and never lost a strain. When she got through, I asked her to play it again. She did it with a pleased alacrity and a heightened enthusiasm. She made it all discords, this time.

She got an amount of anguish into the cries of the wounded that shed a new light on human suffering.

She was on the war-path all the evening. All the time, crowds of people gathered on the porches and pressed their noses against the windows to look and marvel, but the bravest never ventured in.

“He was very thoughtful. But tell me—why did you charge him more than you are charging me?”

“That is very simple, also: I do not have to pay you a percentage.”

“Oh, I begin to see. You would have had to pay the courier a percentage.”

It could not pay him to be a better one than he was, because I could not afford to buy things through him. He was a good enough courier for the small amount he got out of his service.

Yes, to travel with a courier is bliss, to travel without one is the reverse.

I have had dealings with some very bad couriers; but I have also had dealings with one who might fairly be called perfection. He was a young Polander, named Joseph N. Verey.

One of these departed spirits told me, in a sad and lifeless way, that there is no way for him to live but by whey, and dearly, dearly loved whey, he didn’t know whey he did, but he did.

After making this pun he died—that is the whey it served him.

Some other remains, preserved from decomposition by the grape system, told me that the grapes were of a peculiar breed, highly medicinal in their nature, and that they were counted out and administered by the grape-doctors as methodically as if they were pills.

… it was an impressive thing to observe two men, who had been cured by the two processes, engaged in conversation—said their pauses and accompanying movements were so continuous and regular that a stranger would think himself in the presence of a couple of automatic machines.

One finds out a great many wonderful things, by traveling, if he stumbles upon the right person.

I did not remain long at the Kursaal; the music was good enough, but it seemed rather tame after the cyclone of that Arkansaw expert.

The spirit of the place was a sense of deep, pervading peace; one might dream his life tranquilly away there, and not miss it or mind it when it was gone.

The summer departed with the sun, and winter came with the stars.

It grew to be a bitter night in that little hotel, backed up against a precipice that had no visible top to it, but we kept warm, and woke in time in the morning to find that everybody else had left for Gemmi three hours …

What a frightful distance he would fall!—for there are very few birds that fly as high as his starting-point. He would strike and bounce, two or three times, on his way down, but this would be no advantage to him.

I would as soon take an airing on the slant of a rainbow as in such a front yard.

I would rather, in fact, for the distance down would be about the same, and it is pleasanter to slide than to bounce. I could not see how the peasants got up to that chalet—the region seemed too steep for anything but a balloon.

Its name seems to indicate that it is a noble flower and that it is white. It may be noble enough, but it is not attractive, and it is not white.

The fuzzy blossom is the color of bad cigar ashes, and appears to be made of a cheap quality of gray plush.

It has a noble and distant way of confining itself to the high altitudes, but that is probably on account of its looks;

Whenever a man or a woman showed us cold neglect, we spoke up confidently in our own tongue and asked for such information as we happened to need, and we always got a reply in the same language.

The English and American folk are not less kindly than other races, they are only more reserved, and that comes of habit and education.

In one dreary, rocky waste, away above the line of vegetation, we met a procession of twenty-five mounted young men, all from America.

I think it must have marked the limit of real estate in this world. It would be hard to set a money value upon any piece of earth that lies between that spot and the empty realm of space.

That man may claim the distinction of owning the end of the world, for if there is any definite end to the world he has certainly found it.

From here forward we moved through a storm-swept and smileless desolation.

Here we came upon a new board shanty, and found some men engaged in building a stone house; so the Schwarenbach was soon to have a rival. We bought a bottle or so of beer here; at any rate they called it beer, but

I knew by the price that it was dissolved jewelry, and I perceived by the taste that dissolved jewelry is not good stuff to drink.

I always took the inside, when I heard or saw the mule coming, and flattened myself against the wall. I preferred the inside, of course, but I should have had to take it anyhow, because the mule prefers the outside.

A mule’s preference—on a precipice—is a thing to be respected.

Well, his choice is always the outside.

… this gallery and see a sheer summitless and bottomless wall of rock before him, across a gorge or crack a biscuit’s toss in width—but he could not see the bottom of his own precipice unless he lay down and projected his nose over the edge.

I did not do this, because I did not wish to soil my clothes.

Every few hundred yards, at particularly bad places, one came across a panel or so of plank fencing;

It bent outward a foot! I never made a gasp before that came so near suffocating me. The English youth’s face simply showed a lively surprise, but nothing more.

He went swinging along valleyward again, as if he did not know he had just swindled a coroner by the closest kind of a shave.

The Alpine litter is sometimes like a cushioned box made fast between the middles of two long poles, and sometimes it is a chair with a back to it and a support for the feet. It is carried by relays of strong porters.

Then we sat down to polish off the perspiration and arrange about what we would do with him when we got him. Harris was for contributing him to the British Museum; but I was for mailing him to his widow.

That is the difference between Harris and me: Harris is all for display, I am all for the simple right, even though I lose money by it.

Harris argued in favor of his proposition against mine, I argued in favor of mine and against his. The discussion warmed into a dispute; the dispute warmed into a quarrel. I finally said, very decidedly:

but rather than have bad blood about the matter, I said we would toss up for them. I threw heads and won, but it was a barren victory, for although we spent all the next day searching, we never found a bone.

I cannot imagine what could ever have become of that fellow.

The town in the valley is called Leuk or Leukerbad.

We pointed our course toward it, down a verdant slope which was adorned with fringed gentians and other flowers, and presently entered the narrow alleys of the outskirts and waded toward the middle of the town through liquid “fertilizer.”

They ought to either pave that village or organize a ferry.

Harris’s body was simply a chamois-pasture; his person was populous with the little hungry pests; his skin, when he stripped, was splotched like a scarlet-fever patient’s;

his person was populous with the little hungry pests; his skin, when he stripped, was splotched like a scarlet-fever patient’s; so, when we were about to enter one of the Leukerbad inns, and he noticed its sign, “Chamois Hotel,” he refused to stop there.

He said the chamois was plentiful enough, without hunting up hotels where they made a specialty of it.

I was indifferent, for the chamois is a creature that will neither bite me nor abide with me; but to calm Harris, we went to the Hôtel des Alpes.

Ladies near her looked like children, and the men about her looked mean. They looked like failures; and they looked as if they felt so, too. She sat with her back to us. I never saw such a back in my life.

I would have so liked to see the moon rise over it.

The whole congregation waited, under one pretext or another, till she finished her dinner and went out; they wanted to see her at full altitude, and they found it worth tarrying for.

Many a person would have given up and descended, but I stuck to my task, and would not yield until I had accomplished it. I felt a just pride in my exploit, but I would not have repeated it for the wealth of the world.

I shall break my neck yet with some such foolhardy performance, for warnings never seem to have any lasting effect on me.

When the people of the hotel found that I had been climbing those crazy Ladders, it made me an object of considerable attention.

These perilous things are built against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or three hundred feet high. The peasants, of both sexes, were climbing up and down them, with heavy loads on their backs.

I ordered Harris to make the ascent, so I could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he accomplished the feat successfully, through a subagent, for three francs, which I paid.

It makes me shudder yet when I think of what I felt when I was clinging there between heaven and earth in the person of that proxy.

While we were walking over it, along with a party of horsemen, I noticed that even the larger raindrops made it shake. I called Harris’s attention to it, and he noticed it, too.

It seemed to me that if I owned an elephant that was a keepsake, and I thought a good deal of him, I would think twice before I would ride him over that bridge.

We climbed up to the village of St. Nicholas, about half past four in the afternoon, waded ankle-deep through the fertilizer-juice, and stopped at a new and nice hotel close by the little church.

There was a lovable English clergyman who did not get to the table d’hôte at all. His breeches had turned up missing, and without any equivalent.

He said he was not more particular than other people, but he had noticed that a clergyman at dinner without any breeches was almost sure to excite remark.

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation through his head.

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued to ring

I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation through his head.

Most church-bells in the world are of poor quality, and have a harsh and rasping sound which upsets the temper and produces much sin, but the St.

Vitus’s dance, and the rest the blind staggers.

An American village at ten o’clock on a summer Sunday is the quietest and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature; but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later.

Mr. Poe’s poem of the “Bells” stands incomplete to this day;

It is not merely unnecessary, it is generally painful; for the average clergyman could not fire into his congregation with a shotgun and hit a worse reader than himself, unless the weapon scattered shamefully.

I am not meaning to be flippant and irreverent, I am only meaning to be truthful.

The average clergyman, in all countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader. One would think he would at least learn how to read the Lord’s Prayer, by and by, but it is not so.

The average clergyman, in all countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader. One would think he would at least learn how to read the Lord’s Prayer, by and by, but it is not so.

He races through it as if he thought the quicker he got it in, the sooner it would be answered.

A person who does not appreciate the exceeding value of pauses, and does not know how to measure their duration judiciously, cannot render the grand simplicity and dignity of a composition like that effectively.

… well enough that it is so, for the public reciter or “reader” who goes around trying to imitate the sounds of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find himself “up a stump” when he got to the church-bell—as Joseph Addison would say.

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.

It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.

Its strange form, its august isolation, and its majestic unkinship with its own kind, make it—so to speak—the Napoleon of the mountain world. “Grand, gloomy, and peculiar,” is a phrase which fits it as aptly as it fitted the great captain.

Think of a monument a mile high, standing on a pedestal two miles high!

This is what the Matterhorn is—a monument.

We made Zermatt at three in the afternoon, nine hours out from St. Nicholas.

Distance, by guide-book, twelve miles; by pedometer seventy-two.

We were in the heart and home of the mountain-climbers, now, as all visible things testified. The snow-peaks did not hold themselves aloof, in aristocratic reserve; they nestled close around, in a friendly, sociable way;

it was all I could do to even realize him, while looking straight at him at short range. I would rather face whole Hyde Parks of artillery than the ghastly forms of death which he has faced among the peaks and precipices of the mountains.

There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it.

I have not jumped to this conclusion; I have traveled to it per gravel-train, so to speak. I have thought the thing all out, and am quite sure I am right. A born climber’s appetite for climbing is hard to satisfy;

but by a combination of luck and care, the whole four thousand seven hundred feet of descent to Breil was accomplished without a slip, or once missing the way.”

His wounds kept him abed some days. Then he got up and climbed that mountain again.

That is the way with a true Alp-climber; the more fun he has, the more he wants.

I rose, jaded and rusty, and went to the noon meal, where I found myself the center of interest and curiosity; for the news was already abroad.

It is not easy to eat calmly when you are a lion; but it is very pleasant, nevertheless.

As usual, at Zermatt, when a great ascent is about to be undertaken, everybody, native and foreign, laid aside his own projects and took up a good position to observe the start. The expedition consisted of 198 persons, including the mules;

I refer to the paregoric. But for that beneficent drug, would have not one of those men slept a moment during that fearful night.

But for that gentle persuader they must have tossed, unsoothed, the night through; for the whiskey was for me.

Yes, they would have risen in the morning unfitted for their heavy task. As it was, everybody slept but my agent and me—only we and the barkeepers. I would not permit myself to sleep at such a time.

There was not the slightest change recorded by the instrument, during the whole time. Words cannot describe the comfort that that friendly, hopeful, steadfast thing was to me in that season of trouble.

It was a defective barometer, and had no hand but the stationary brass pointer, but I did not know that until afterward.

If I should be in such a situation again, I should not wish for any barometer but that one.

This was a serious difficulty; in fact, it was an impossibility. The courage of the men began to waver immediately; once more we were threatened with a panic. But when the danger was most imminent, we were saved in a mysterious way.

A mule which had attracted attention from the beginning by its disposition to experiment, tried to eat a five-pound can of nitroglycerin.

This happened right alongside the rock. The explosion threw us all to the ground, and covered us with dirt and debris; it frightened us extremely, too, for the crash it made was deafening, and the violence of the shock made the ground tremble.

The explosion was heard as far as Zermatt; and an hour and a half afterward, many citizens of that town were knocked down and quite seriously injured by descending portions of mule meat, frozen solid.

This shows, better than any estimate in figures, how high the experimenter went.

We had nothing to do, now, but bridge the cellar and proceed on our way. With a cheer the men went at their work. I attended to the engineering, myself.

I got it out, and boiled one of my cameras, but the thing was a failure; it made the wood swell up and burst, and I could not see that the lenses were any better than they were before.

I now concluded to boil a guide. It might improve him, it could not impair his usefulness.

But I was not allowed to proceed. Guides have no feeling for science, and this one would not consent to be made uncomfortable in its interest.

I now concluded to boil a guide. It might improve him, it could not impair his usefulness. But I was not allowed to proceed.

Guides have no feeling for science, and this one would not consent to be made uncomfortable in its interest.

In the midst of my scientific work, one of those needless accidents happened which are always occurring among the ignorant and thoughtless. A porter shot at a chamois and missed it and crippled the Latinist.

I explained to the head chaleteer just how the thing happened, and that I was only searching for the road, and would certainly have given him timely notice if I had known he was up there.

I said I had meant no harm, and hoped I had not lowered myself in his estimation by raising him a few rods in the air.

I said many other judicious things, and finally when I offered to rebuild his chalet, and pay for the breakages, and throw in the cellar, he was mollified and satisfied. He hadn’t any cellar at all, before;

I said many other judicious things, and finally when I offered to rebuild his chalet, and pay for the breakages, and throw in the cellar, he was mollified and satisfied.

He hadn’t any cellar at all, before; he would not have as good a view, now, as formerly, but what he had lost in view he had gained in cellar, by exact measurement.

He said there wasn’t another hole like that in the mountains—and he would have been right if the late mule had not tried to eat up the nitroglycerin.

Then he removed his gracious presence.

It is a great and solemn thing to have a grandfather.

I have not purposed to misrepresent this boy in any way, for what little indignation he excited in me soon passed and left nothing behind it but compassion. One cannot keep up a grudge against a vacuum.

I have not purposed to misrepresent this boy in any way, for what little indignation he excited in me soon passed and left nothing behind it but compassion.

One cannot keep up a grudge against a vacuum.

I have tried to repeat this lad’s very words; if I have failed anywhere I have at least not failed to reproduce the marrow and meaning of what he said.

The Grandson of twenty-three referred to himself five or six times as an “old traveler,” and as many as three times (with a serene complacency which was maddening) as a “man of the world.”

There was something very delicious about his leaving Boston to her “narrowness,” unreproved and uninstructed.

I formed the caravan in marching order, presently, and after riding down the line to see that it was properly roped together, gave the command to proceed. In a little while the road carried us to open, grassy land.

I boiled my thermometer, and sure enough, this spot, which purported to be two thousand feet higher than the locality of the hotel, turned out to be nine thousand feet lower.

Thus the fact was clearly demonstrated that, above a certain point, the higher a point seems to be, the lower it actually is.

Our ascent itself was a great achievement, but this contribution to science was an inconceivably greater matter.

Cavilers object that water boils at a lower and lower temperature the higher and higher you go, and hence the apparent anomaly. I answer that

I do not base my theory upon what the boiling water does, but upon what a boiled thermometer says. You can’t go behind the thermometer.

I had a magnificent view of Monte Rosa, and apparently all the rest of the Alpine world, from that high place. All the circling horizon was piled high with a mighty tumult of snowy crests.

The Matterhorn is always experimenting, and always gets up fine effects, too. In the sunset, when all the lower world is palled in gloom, it points toward heaven out of the pervading blackness like a finger of fire.

In the sunrise—well, they say it is very fine in the sunrise.

Authorities agree that there is no such tremendous “layout” of snowy Alpine magnitude, grandeur, and sublimity to be seen from any other accessible point as the tourist may see from the summit of the Riffelberg. Therefore, let the tourist rope himself up and go there;

Later again, one of the mountain’s sides was clean and clear, and another side densely clothed from base to summit in thick smokelike cloud which feathered off and flew around the shaft’s sharp edge like the smoke around the corners of a burning building.

The Matterhorn is always experimenting, and always gets up fine effects, too.

In the sunset, when all the lower world is palled in gloom, it points toward heaven out of the pervading blackness like a finger of fire. In the sunrise—well, they say it is very fine in the sunrise.

I set my mind at work, and soon thought out a plan. One looks straight down upon the vast frozen river called the Gorner Glacier, from the Gorner Grat, a sheer precipice twelve hundred feet high.

We had one hundred and fifty-four umbrellas—and what is an umbrella but a parachute?

I mentioned this noble idea to Harris, with enthusiasm, and was about to order the Expedition to form on the Gorner Grat, with their umbrellas, and prepare for flight by platoons, each platoon in command of a guide, when Harris stopped me and urged me …

I soon found a sentence which threw a dazzling light upon the matter. It said, “The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little less than an inch a day.”

I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom had my confidence so wantonly betrayed.

I made a small calculation: One inch a day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three and one-eighteenth miles. Time required to go by glacier, a little over five hundred years!

“That is European management, all over! An inch a day—think of that! Five hundred years to go a trifle over three miles! But I am not a bit surprised.

It’s a Catholic glacier. You can tell by the look of it. And the management.

”

After a reflective pause, Harris added, “A little less than an inch a day; a little less than an inch, mind you.

Well, I’m losing my reverence for glaciers.

”

I was feeling much the same way myself. I have traveled by canal-boat, ox-wagon, raft, and by the Ephesus and Smyrna railway; but when it comes down to good solid honest slow motion, I bet my money on the glacier.

As a means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure; but as a vehicle of slow freight, I think she fills the bill.

In the matter of putting the fine shades on that line of business, I judge she could teach the Germans something.

I was feeling much the same way myself.

I have traveled by canal-boat, ox-wagon, raft, and by the Ephesus and Smyrna railway; but when it comes down to good solid honest slow motion, I bet my money on the glacier.

As a means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure; but as a vehicle of slow freight, I think she fills the bill.

now, one was brown and wrinkled and horny with age, while the other was still as young and fair and blemishless as if those forty years had come and gone in a single moment, leaving no mark of their passage.

Time had gone on, in the one case; it had stood still in the other.

A man who has not seen a friend for a generation, keeps him in mind always as he saw him last, and is somehow surprised, and is also shocked, to see the aging change the years have wrought when he sees him again.

Time had gone on, in the one case; it had stood still in the other.

A man who has not seen a friend for a generation, keeps him in mind always as he saw him last, and is somehow surprised, and is also shocked, to see the aging change the years have wrought when he sees him again.

Marie Couttet’s experience, in finding his friend’s hand unaltered from the image of it which he had carried in his memory for forty years, is an experience which stands alone in the history of man, perhaps.

Lord Douglas was a youth of nineteen. The three other victims fell nearly four thousand feet, and their bodies lay together upon the glacier when found by Mr. Whymper and the other searchers the next morning. Their graves are beside the little church in Zermatt.

Switzerland is simply a large, humpy, solid rock, with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Consequently, they do not dig graves, they blast them out with powder and fuse. They cannot afford to have large graveyards, the grass skin is too circumscribed and too valuable. It is all required for the support of the living.

Again we passed between those grass-clad prodigious cliffs, specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high. It did not seem possible that the imaginary chamois even could climb those precipices.

Lovers on opposite cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and correspond with a rifle.

In Switzerland the farmer’s plow is a wide shovel, which scrapes up and turns over the thin earthy skin of his native rock—and there the man of the plow is a hero. Now here, by our St.

that of the man who fell down the mimic shaft, and that of the daring hero who was lowered into the depths to bring him up. I knew one small chap who always insisted on playing both of these parts—and he carried his point.

He would tumble into the shaft and die, and then come to the surface and go back after his own remains.

It is the smartest boy that gets the hero part everywhere; he is head guide in Switzerland, head miner in Nevada, head bull-fighter in Spain, etc.;

She was the landlord’s daughter. And I remember that the only native match to her I saw in all Europe was the young daughter of the landlord of a village inn in the Black Forest.

Why don’t more people in Europe marry and keep hotel?

Next morning we left with a family of English friends and went by train to Brevet, and thence by boat across the lake to Ouchy (Lausanne).

some of them—like Byron’s and Victor Hugo’s—of the first celebrity. Why didn’t he amuse himself reading these names? Then there are the couriers and tourists—swarms of them every day—what was to hinder him from having a good time with them?

I think Bonnivard’s sufferings have been overrated.

A soap-bubble is the most beautiful thing, and the most exquisite, in nature; that lovely phantom fabric in the sky was suggestive of a soap-bubble split open, and spread out in the sun.

I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap-bubble, if there was only one in the world?

One could buy a hatful of Koh-i-Noors with the same money, no doubt.

One falls shorter of the truth than that, sometimes, in trying to explain mysteries to the little people. I could have found out the cause of this awe-compelling miracle by inquiring, for it is not infrequent at Mont Blanc,—but I did not wish to know.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into the matter.

We took a walk down street, a block or two, and a place where four streets met and the principal shops were clustered, found the groups of men in the roadway thicker than ever—for this was the Exchange of Chamonix.

Indeed he wouldn’t, so he wouldn’t.

I resolved, then, that I would do all I could to injure Mont Blanc.

In the record-book was a list of all the fatal accidents which happened on the mountain. It began with the one in 1820 when the Russian Dr.

The man said that that lantern was on the Grands Mulets, some sixty-five hundred feet above the valley! I know by our Riffelberg experience, that it would have taken us a good part of a week to go up there.

I would sooner not smoke at all, than take all that trouble for a light.

Even in the daytime the foreshadowing effect of this mountain’s close proximity creates curious deceptions.

This daring theory had been received with frantic scorn by some of my fellow-scientists, and with an eager silence by others. Among the former I may mention Prof. H——y; and among the latter Prof. T——l.

Such is professional jealousy; a scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself.

There is no feeling of brotherhood among these people. Indeed, they always resent it when I call them brother. To show how far their ungenerosity can carry them, I will state that I offered to let Prof.

“Confound you, what do you yell like that for, right here in the street?"

That brought me down to Chamonix, like a flirt.

I gave that man some spiritual advice and disposed of him, and then paid the telescope man his full fee, and said that we were charmed with the trip and would remain down, and not reascend and require him to fetch us down by telescope.

Three adventurous English gentlemen, [1] of great experience in mountain-climbing, made up their minds to ascend Mont Blanc without guides or porters. All endeavors to dissuade them from their project failed. Powerful telescopes are numerous in Chamonix.

These huge brass tubes, mounted on their scaffoldings and pointed skyward from every choice vantage-ground, have the formidable look of artillery, and give the town the general aspect of getting ready to repel a charge of angels.

The reader may easily believe that the telescopes had plenty of custom on that August morning in 1866, for everybody knew of the dangerous undertaking which was on foot, and all had fears that misfortune would result.

A great many women have made the ascent of Mont Blanc. An English girl, Miss Stratton, conceived the daring idea, two or three years ago, of attempting the ascent in the middle of winter. She tried it—and she succeeded.

Moreover, she froze two of her fingers on the way up, she fell in love with her guide on the summit, and she married him when she got to the bottom again.

There is nothing in romance, in the way of a striking “situation,” which can beat this love scene in midheaven on an isolated ice-crest with the thermometer at zero and an Artic gale blowing.

However, I value it less as a work of art than as a fashion-plate.

Miss d’Angeville put on a pair of men’s pantaloons to climb it, which was wise; but she cramped their utility by adding her petticoat, which was idiotic.

One of the mournfulest calamities which men’s disposition to climb dangerous mountains has resulted in, happened on Mont Blanc in September 1870. M. D’Arve tells the story briefly in his Histoire Du Mont Blanc. In the next chapter I will copy its chief features.

Nothing is gained in the Alps by over-exertion; nothing is gained by crowding two days’ work into one for the poor sake of being able to boast of the exploit afterward.

It will be found much better, in the long run, to do the thing in two days, and then subtract one of them from the narrative.

This saves fatigue, and does not injure the narrative. All the more thoughtful among the Alpine tourists do this.

“

Such as you?—an ambulance!

”

“What do we need, then?”

I was so stung by this brutal remark that I took my custom elsewhere.

Betimes, next morning, we had reached an altitude of five thousand feet above the level of the sea. Here we camped and breakfasted. There was a cabin there—the spot is called the Caillet—and a spring of ice-cold water.

Here we camped and breakfasted. There was a cabin there—the spot is called the Caillet—and a spring of ice-cold water. On the door of the cabin was a sign, in French, to the effect that “One may here see a living chamois for fifty centimes.”

We did not invest; what we wanted was to see a dead one.

A little after noon we ended the ascent and arrived at the new hotel on the Montanvert, and had a view of six miles, right up the great glacier, the famous Mer de Glace.

He had collected blackmail from two or three hundred people already, that day, but had not chipped out ice enough to impair the glacier perceptibly.

I have heard of a good many soft sinecures, but it seems to me that keeping toll-bridge on a glacier is the softest one I have encountered yet.

That was a blazing hot day, and it brought a persistent and persecuting thirst with it. What an unspeakable luxury it was to slake that thirst with the pure and limpid ice-water of the glacier!

Perhaps a strict average of the world might develop the fact that where one in 1,000 of America’s population dies, two in 1,000 of the other populations of the earth succumb.

I do not like to make insinuations, but I do think the above statistics darkly suggest that these people over here drink this detestable water “on the sly.”

We climbed the moraine on the opposite side of the glacier, and then crept along its sharp ridge a hundred yards or so, in pretty constant danger of a tumble to the glacier below.

I got along, slowly, safely, and uncomfortably, and finally reached the middle. My hopes began to rise a little, but they were quickly blighted; for there I met a hog—a long-nosed, bristly fellow, that held up his snout and worked his nostrils at me inquiringly.

A hog on a pleasure excursion in Switzerland—think of it!

It is striking and unusual; a body might write a poem about it. He could not retreat, if he had been disposed to do it.

There were twenty or thirty ladies and gentlemen behind us; we all turned about and went back, and the hog followed behind.

The creature did not seem set up by what he had done; he had probably done it before.

We reached the restaurant on the height called the Chapeau at four in the afternoon. It was a memento-factory, and the stock was large, cheap, and varied.

As he passed out of sight at last, an old Englishman settled himself in his seat and said:

“Well, I am satisfied, I have seen the principal features of Swiss scenery—Mont Blanc and the goiter—now for home!”

We spent a few pleasant restful days at Geneva, that delightful city where accurate time-pieces are made for all the rest of the world, but whose own clocks never give the correct time of day by any accident.

This was “Purgatory street.” After a little I said, “now I’ve got the right place, anyway ... no, this is ‘Paradise street’; I’m further from home than I was in the beginning.” Those were queer names—Calvin was the author of them, likely.

“Hell” and “Purgatory” fitted those two streets like a glove, but the “Paradise” appeared to be sarcastic.

I came out on the lake-front, at last, and then I knew where I was. I was walking along before the glittering jewelry shops when I saw a curious performance.

One does not see it as frequently in Paris as he might expect to, for there the law says, in effect, “It is the business of the weak to get out of the way of the strong.”

We fine a cabman if he runs over a citizen; Paris fines the citizen for being run over.

At least so everybody says—but I saw something which caused me to doubt; I saw a horseman run over an old woman one day—the police arrested him and took him away. That looked as if they meant to punish him.

I probably blushed, then, for there was occasion. Through the interpreter I begged the boy’s pardon, but I nobly refused to take back the ten cents. I said I was accustomed to squandering large sums in that way—it was the kind of person I was.

Then I retired to make a note to the effect that in Italy persons connected with the drama do not cheat.

The episode with the showman reminds me of a dark chapter in my history. I once robbed an aged and blind beggar-woman of four dollars—in a church. It happened this way.

The episode with the showman reminds me of a dark chapter in my history.

I once robbed an aged and blind beggar-woman of four dollars—in a church.

It happened this way. When I was out with the Innocents Abroad, the ship stopped in the Russian port of Odessa and I went ashore, with others, to view the town.

That experience has been of priceless value and benefit to me; for I resolved then, that as long as I lived I would never again rob a blind beggar-woman in a church; and I have always kept my word.

The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of booky teaching, but of experience.

In Milan we spent most of our time in the vast and beautiful Arcade or Gallery, or whatever it is called.

The episode was interesting, but we could not have afforded all the time to it if we had known nothing was going to come of it but a reconciliation.

Note made—in Italy, people who quarrel cheat the spectator.

We had another disappointment afterward. We approached a deeply interested crowd, and in the midst of it found a fellow wildly chattering and gesticulating over a box on the ground which was covered with a piece of old blanket.

It was generally conceded by the artists with whom I talked, that that subdued splendor, that mellow richness, is imparted to the picture by age.

Then why should we worship the Old Master for it, who didn’t impart it, instead of worshiping Old Time, who did?

Perhaps the picture was a clanging bell, until Time muffled it and sweetened it.

So vividly is noise suggested, that spectators who become absorbed in the picture almost always fall to shouting comments in each other’s ears, making ear-trumpets of their curved hands, fearing they may not otherwise be heard.

One often sees a tourist, with the eloquent tears pouring down his cheeks, funnel his hands at his wife’s ear, and hears him roar through them, “Oh, to be there and at rest!”

None but the supremely great in art can produce effects like these with the silent brush.

One often sees a tourist, with the eloquent tears pouring down his cheeks, funnel his hands at his wife’s ear, and hears him roar through them, “Oh, to be there and at rest!”

None but the supremely great in art can produce effects like these with the silent brush.

Twelve years ago I could not have appreciated this picture. One year ago I could not have appreciated it. My study of Art in Heidelberg has been a noble education to me. All that I am today in Art, I owe to that.

None but the supremely great in art can produce effects like these with the silent brush.

Twelve years ago I could not have appreciated this picture. One year ago I could not have appreciated it. My study of Art in Heidelberg has been a noble education to me. All that I am today in Art, I owe to that.

The other great work which fascinated me was Bassano’s immortal Hair Trunk. This is in the Chamber of the Council of Ten. It is in one of the three forty-foot pictures which decorate the walls of the room.

Every time its squat domes disappeared from my view, I had a despondent feeling; whenever they reappeared, I felt an honest rapture—I have not known any happier hours than those I daily spent in front of Florian’s, looking across the Great Square at it.

Propped on its long row of low thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast warty bug taking a meditative walk.

St. Mark’s is not the oldest building in the world, of course, but it seems the oldest, and looks the oldest—especially inside.

Propped on its long row of low thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast warty bug taking a meditative walk.

St. Mark’s is not the oldest building in the world, of course, but it seems the oldest, and looks the oldest—especially inside.

When the ancient mosaics in its walls become damaged, they are repaired but not altered; the grotesque old pattern is preserved. Antiquity has a charm of its own, and to smarten it up would only damage it.

If one could always stop with private families, when traveling, Europe would have a charm which it now lacks. As it is, one must live in the hotels, of course, and that is a sorrowful business.

A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe; but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.

He would have to do without his accustomed morning meal. That is too formidable a change altogether; he would necessarily suffer from it. He could get the shadow, the sham, the base counterfeit of that meal;

To particularize: the average American’s simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage.

You can get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness.

It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel. The milk used for it is what the French call “Christian” milk—milk which has been baptized.

and at the end the exile and the boy have fared about alike; the one is full, but grievously unsatisfied, the other has had plenty of exercise, plenty of interest, and a fine lot of hopes, but he hasn’t got any butterfly.

There is here and there an American who will say he can remember rising from a European table d’hôte perfectly satisfied; but we must not overlook the fact that there is also here and there an American who will lie.

The number of dishes is sufficient; but then it is such a monotonous variety of unstriking dishes. It is an inane dead-level of “fair-to-middling.” There is nothing to accent it.

Now a vast roast turkey, stretched on the broad of his back, with his heels in the air and the rich juices oozing from his fat sides ... but I may as well stop there, for they would not know how to cook him.

They can’t even cook a chicken respectably; and as for carving it, they do that with a hatchet.

Americans intending to spend a year or so in European hotels will do well to copy this bill and carry it along. They will find it an excellent thing to get up an appetite with, in the dispiriting presence of the squalid table d’hôte.

Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born.

I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired; but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say, “Where’s your haggis?” and the Fijian would sigh and say, “Where’s your missionary?”

N.B.—No household should ever be without this talisman.

It has been noticed that tramps never return for another ash-cake.

To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows: Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch.

Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies.

Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.

Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former into the water.

… from the plow, insert them in a hydraulic press, and when you shall have acquired a teaspoon of that pale-blue juice which a German superstition regards as milk, modify the malignity of its strength in a bucket of tepid water and ring up the breakfast.

Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.

Use a club, and avoid the joints.

Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.

Use a club, and avoid the joints.

I wonder why some things are? For instance, Art is allowed as much indecent license today as in earlier times—but the privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years.

Use a club, and avoid the joints.

I wonder why some things are?

For instance, Art is allowed as much indecent license today as in earlier times—but the privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years.

so glad, in fact, that it did not seem possible that anything could ever get me out of the country again. I had not enjoyed a pleasure abroad which seemed to me to compare with the pleasure I felt in seeing New York harbor again.

Europe has many advantages which we have not, but they do not compensate for a good many still more valuable ones which exist nowhere but in our own country.

Then we are such a homeless lot when we are over there! So are Europeans themselves, for that matter. They live in dark and chilly vast tombs—costly enough, maybe, but without conveniences.

He is not the clerk, he is not the landlord; he ranks above the clerk, and represents the landlord, who is seldom seen. Instead of going to the clerk for information, as we do at home, you go to the portier.

It is the pride of our average hotel clerk to know nothing whatever; it is the pride of the portier to know everything.

You ask the portier at what hours the trains leave—he tells you instantly; or you ask him who is the best physician in town; or what is the hack tariff; or how many children the mayor has;

Yes, what was true eight hundred years ago, is just as true today:

“Few there be that can keep a hotel.”

Perhaps it is because the landlords and their subordinates have in too many cases taken up their trade without first learning it. In Europe the trade of hotel-keeper is taught.

Even the top is not left bare, but is crowned with a flourishing group of trees and shrubs.

Misfortune has done for this old tower what it has done for the human character sometimes—improved it.

A gentleman remarked, one day, that it might have been fine to live in the castle in the day of its prime, but that we had one advantage which its vanished inhabitants lacked—the advantage of having a charming ruin to visit and muse over.

The Trifels people, in their day, five hundred years ago, could go and muse over majestic ruins that have vanished, now, to the last stone.

There have always been ruins, no doubt; and there have always been pensive people to sigh over them, and asses to scratch upon them their names and the important date of their visit.

Within a hundred years after Adam left Eden, the guide probably gave the usual general flourish with his hand and said: “Place where the animals were named, ladies and gentlemen; place where the tree of the forbidden fruit stood;

Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt.

It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie.

However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me.

However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me.

I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense.

What could this cask have been built for? The more one studies over that, the more uncertain and unhappy he becomes. Some historians say that thirty couples, some say thirty thousand couples, can dance on the head of this cask at the same time.

There are hundreds of these, and their dates stretch back through many centuries. One of them is a decree signed and sealed by the hand of a successor of Charlemagne, in the year 896.

A signature made by a hand which vanished out of this life near a thousand years ago, is a more impressive thing than even a ruined castle.

Luther’s wedding-ring was shown me; also a fork belonging to a time anterior to our era, and an early bootjack. And there was a plaster cast of the head of a man who was assassinated about sixty years ago.

Harris and I had been hard at work on our German during several weeks at that time, and although we had made good progress, it had been accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance, for three of our teachers had died in the mean time.

A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.

Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way;

A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.

Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp.

One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way;

I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man’s signature—not necessary, but pretty.

German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head—so as to reverse the construction

—but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.

That is manifestly absurd.

It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it.

Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called “separable verbs.”

The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

A favorite one is reiste ab—which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:

But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey.

This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would have been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason, the inventor of this language complicated it all he could.

When we wish to speak of our “good friend or friends,” in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form and have no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German tongue it is different.

When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it.

It is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:

well this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter.

Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland

, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested. Difficult?—troublesome?—these words cannot describe it. I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested. Difficult?—troublesome?—these words cannot describe it.

I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he could think of.

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all.

The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts;

Armed just with these two, and the word also, what cannot the foreigner on German soil accomplish? The German word also is the equivalent of the English phrase “You know,” and does not mean anything at all—in talk, though it sometimes does in print.

Every time a German opens his mouth an also falls out; and every time he shuts it he bites one in two that was trying to get out.

Now, the foreigner, equipped with these three noble words, is master of the situation. Let him talk right along, fearlessly; let him pour his indifferent German forth, and when he lacks for a word, let him heave a schlag into the vacuum;

That paragraph furnishes a text for a few remarks about one of the most curious and notable features of my subject—the length of German words.

Some German words are so long that they have a perspective.

Observe these examples:

And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page—and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too.

They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject.

I take a great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection.

We used to speak of a thing as a “never-to-be-forgotten” circumstance, instead of cramping it into the simple and sufficient word “memorable” and then going calmly about our business as if nothing had happened.

In those days we were not content to embalm the thing and bury it decently, we wanted to build a monument over it.

But in our newspapers the compounding-disease lingers a little to the present day, but with the hyphens left out, in the German fashion. This is the shape it takes: instead of saying “Mr.

Even the cumbersome German construction is not able to take the pathos out of that picture—indeed, it somehow seems to strengthen it.

This item is dated away back yonder months ago. I could have used it sooner, but I was waiting to hear from the Father-stork. I am still waiting.

“Also!” If I had not shown that the German is a difficult language, I have at least intended to do so. I have heard of an American student who was asked how he was getting along with his German, and who answered promptly:

“Also!” If I had not shown that the German is a difficult language, I have at least intended to do so. I have heard of an American student who was asked how he was getting along with his German, and who answered promptly:

“I am not getting along at all. I have worked at it hard for three level months, and all I have got to show for it is one solitary German phrase—‘zwei glas’” (two glasses of beer). He paused for a moment, reflectively; then added with feeling: “But I’ve got that solid!”

And if I have not also shown that German is a harassing and infuriating study, my execution has been at fault, and not my intent.

Or would not a comsumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word gewitter was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion—ausbruch.

Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that.

It seems to me that the Germans could do worse than import it into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with. The German word for hell—Hoelle—sounds more like helly than anything else; therefore, how necessarily chipper, frivolous, and unimpressive it is.

… we have used a word a couple of times in a paragraph, we imagine we are growing tautological, and so we are weak enough to exchange it for some other word which only approximates exactness, to escape what we wrongly fancy is a greater blemish.

Repetition may be bad, but surely inexactness is worse.

There are people in the world who will take a great deal of trouble to point out the faults in a religion or a language, and then go blandly about their business without suggesting any remedy. I am not that kind of person.

… in the Dative case, except he discover it by accident—and then he does not know when or where it was that he got into it, or how long he has been in it, or how he is ever going to get out of it again.

The Dative case is but an ornamental folly—it is better to discard it.

In the next place, I would move the Verb further up to the front. You may load up with ever so good a Verb, but I notice that you never really bring down a subject with it at the present German range—you only cripple it.

In the next place, I would move the Verb further up to the front.

You may load up with ever so good a Verb, but I notice that you never really bring down a subject with it at the present German range—you only cripple it.

So I insist that this important part of speech should be brought forward to a position where it may be easily seen with the naked eye.

Fourthly, I would reorganizes the sexes, and distribute them accordingly to the will of the creator. This as a tribute of respect, if nothing else.

Fifthly, I would do away with those great long compounded words; or require the speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments.

To wholly do away with them would be best, for ideas are more easily received and digested when they come one at a time than when they come in bulk. Intellectual food is like any other;

or require the speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments. To wholly do away with them would be best, for ideas are more easily received and digested when they come one at a time than when they come in bulk.

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than with a shovel.

Sixthly, I would require a speaker to stop when he is done, and not hang a string of those useless “haven sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden seins” to the end of his oration. This sort of gewgaws undignify a speech, instead of adding a grace.