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Saunterings

by Charles Dudley Warner · English · Gutenberg #3128 · 501,149 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Saunterings

Author: Charles Dudley Warner


        
Release date: October 10, 2004 [eBook #3128]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3128

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAUNTERINGS ***



Produced by David Widger





SAUNTERINGS

By Charles Dudley Warner




MISAPPREHENSIONS CORRECTED

I should not like to ask an indulgent and idle public to saunter about
with me under a misapprehension. It would be more agreeable to invite it
to go nowhere than somewhere; for almost every one has been somewhere,
and has written about it. The only compromise I can suggest is, that we
shall go somewhere, and not learn anything about it. The instinct of the
public against any thing like information in a volume of this kind is
perfectly justifiable; and the reader will perhaps discover that this is
illy adapted for a text-book in schools, or for the use of competitive
candidates in the civil-service examinations.

Years ago, people used to saunter over the Atlantic, and spend weeks
in filling journals with their monotonous emotions. That is all
changed now, and there is a misapprehension that the Atlantic has been
practically subdued; but no one ever gets beyond the “rolling forties”
 without having this impression corrected.

I confess to have been deceived about this Atlantic, the roughest and
windiest of oceans. If you look at it on the map, it does n't appear to
be much, and, indeed, it is spoken of as a ferry. What with the eight
and nine days' passages over it, and the laying of the cable, which
annihilates distance, I had the impression that its tedious three
thousand and odd miles had been, somehow, partly done away with; but
they are all there. When one has sailed a thousand miles due east and
finds that he is then nowhere in particular, but is still out, pitching
about on an uneasy sea, under an inconstant sky, and that a thousand
miles more will not make any perceptible change, he begins to have some
conception of the unconquerable ocean. Columbus rises in my estimation.

I was feeling uncomfortable that nothing had been done for the memory
of Christopher Columbus, when I heard some months ago that thirty-seven
guns had been fired off for him in Boston. It is to be hoped that they
were some satisfaction to him. They were discharged by countrymen of
his, who are justly proud that he should have been able, after a search
of only a few weeks, to find a land where the hand-organ had never
been heard. The Italians, as a people, have not profited much by this
discovery; not so much, indeed, as the Spaniards, who got a reputation
by it which even now gilds their decay. That Columbus was born in Genoa
entitles the Italians to celebrate the great achievement of his life;
though why they should discharge exactly thirty-seven guns I do not
know. Columbus did not discover the United States: that we partly found
ourselves, and partly bought, and gouged the Mexicans out of. He did not
even appear to know that there was a continent here. He discovered
the West Indies, which he thought were the East; and ten guns would
be enough for them. It is probable that he did open the way to the
discovery of the New World. If he had waited, however, somebody else
would have discovered it,--perhaps some Englishman; and then we might
have been spared all the old French and Spanish wars. Columbus let the
Spaniards into the New World; and their civilization has uniformly been
a curse to it. If he had brought Italians, who neither at that time
showed, nor since have shown, much inclination to come, we should have
had the opera, and made it a paying institution by this time. Columbus
was evidently a person who liked to sail about, and did n't care much
for consequences.

Perhaps it is not an open question whether Columbus did a good thing in
first coming over here, one that we ought to celebrate with salutes and
dinners. The Indians never thanked him, for one party. The Africans had
small ground to be gratified for the market he opened for them. Here
are two continents that had no use for him. He led Spain into a dance
of great expectations, which ended in her gorgeous ruin. He introduced
tobacco into Europe, and laid the foundation for more tracts and nervous
diseases than the Romans had in a thousand years. He introduced the
potato into Ireland indirectly; and that caused such a rapid increase
of population, that the great famine was the result, and an enormous
emigration to New York--hence Tweed and the constituency of the Ring.
Columbus is really responsible for New York. He is responsible for our
whole tremendous experiment of democracy, open to all comers, the best
three in five to win. We cannot yet tell how it is coming out, what with
the foreigners and the communists and the women. On our great stage we
are playing a piece of mingled tragedy and comedy, with what denouement
we cannot yet say. If it comes out well, we ought to erect a monument
to Christopher as high as the one at Washington expects to be; and we
presume it is well to fire a salute occasionally to keep the ancient
mariner in mind while we are trying our great experiment. And this
reminds me that he ought to have had a naval salute.

There is something almost heroic in the idea of firing off guns for a
man who has been stone-dead for about four centuries. It must have had
a lively and festive sound in Boston, when the meaning of the salute was
explained. No one could hear those great guns without a quicker beating
of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who had made Boston
possible. We are trying to “realize” to ourselves the importance of the
12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence. If any one
wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him start out
among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise money for
powder to be exploded in his honor. And yet Columbus was a well-meaning
man; and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he found the only
one that was left.

Columbus made voyaging on the Atlantic popular, and is responsible for
much of the delusion concerning it. Its great practical use in this fast
age is to give one an idea of distance and of monotony.

I have listened in my time with more or less pleasure to very rollicking
songs about the sea, the flashing brine, the spray and the tempest's
roar, the wet sheet and the flowing sea, a life on the ocean wave, and
all the rest of it. To paraphrase a land proverb, let me write the songs
of the sea, and I care not who goes to sea and sings 'em. A square yard
of solid ground is worth miles of the pitching, turbulent stuff. Its
inability to stand still for one second is the plague of it. To lie on
deck when the sun shines, and swing up and down, while the waves run
hither and thither and toss their white caps, is all well enough to lie
in your narrow berth and roll from side to side all night long; to walk
uphill to your state-room door, and, when you get there, find you have
got to the bottom of the hill, and opening the door is like lifting up
a trap-door in the floor; to deliberately start for some object, and,
before you know it, to be flung against it like a bag of sand; to
attempt to sit down on your sofa, and find you are sitting up; to slip
and slide and grasp at everything within reach, and to meet everybody
leaning and walking on a slant, as if a heavy wind were blowing, and the
laws of gravitation were reversed; to lie in your berth, and hear all
the dishes on the cabin-table go sousing off against the wall in a
general smash; to sit at table holding your soup-plate with one hand,
and watching for a chance to put your spoon in when it comes high tide
on your side of the dish; to vigilantly watch, the lurch of the heavy
dishes while holding your glass and your plate and your knife and fork,
and not to notice it when Brown, who sits next you, gets the whole swash
of the gravy from the roast-beef dish on his light-colored pantaloons,
and see the look of dismay that only Brown can assume on such an
occasion; to see Mrs. Brown advance to the table, suddenly stop and
hesitate, two waiters rush at her, with whom she struggles wildly,
only to go down in a heap with them in the opposite corner; to see her
partially recover, but only to shoot back again through her state-room
door, and be seen no more;--all this is quite pleasant and refreshing
if you are tired of land, but you get quite enough of it in a couple
of weeks. You become, in time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes
about wishing “he vas a veek older;” and the eccentric man, who looks
at no one, and streaks about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose,
and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the
deck occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin
door, washes himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his
state-room, saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed,--as if the hard
narrow, uneasy shelf of a berth was anything like a bed!--and you have
heard at last pretty nearly all about the officers, and their twenty
and thirty years of sea-life, and every ocean and port on the habitable
globe where they have been. There comes a day when you are quite ready
for land, and the scream of the “gull” is a welcome sound.

Even the sailors lose the vivacity of the first of the voyage. The first
two or three days we had their quaint and half-doleful singing in chorus
as they pulled at the ropes: now they are satisfied with short
ha-ho's, and uncadenced grunts. It used to be that the leader sang,
in ever-varying lines of nonsense, and the chorus struck in with fine
effect, like this:


  “I wish I was in Liverpool town.   Handy-pan, handy O!
  O captain! where 'd you ship your crew   Handy-pan, handy O!
  Oh! pull away, my bully crew,   Handy-pan, handy O!”


There are verses enough of this sort to reach across the Atlantic; and
they are not the worst thing about it either, or the most tedious. One
learns to respect this ocean, but not to love it; and he leaves it with
mingled feelings about Columbus.

And now, having crossed it,--a fact that cannot be concealed,--let us
not be under the misapprehension that we are set to any task other than
that of sauntering where it pleases us.





PARIS AND LONDON


SURFACE CONTRASTS OF PARIS AND LONDON

I wonder if it is the Channel? Almost everything is laid to the Channel:
it has no friends. The sailors call it the nastiest bit of water in the
world. All travelers anathematize it. I have now crossed it three times
in different places, by long routes and short ones, and have always
found it as comfortable as any sailing anywhere, sailing being one of
the most tedious and disagreeable inventions of a fallen race. But such
is not the usual experience: most people would make great sacrifices
to avoid the hour and three quarters in one of those loathsome little
Channel boats,--they always call them loathsome, though I did n't see
but they are as good as any boats. I have never found any boat that
hasn't a detestable habit of bobbing round. The Channel is hated: and no
one who has much to do with it is surprised at the projects for bridging
it and for boring a hole under it; though I have scarcely ever met an
Englishman who wants either done,--he does not desire any more facile
communication with the French than now exists. The traditional hatred
may not be so strong as it was, but it is hard to say on which side is
the most ignorance and contempt of the other.

It must be the Channel: that is enough to produce a physical
disagreement even between the two coasts; and there cannot be a greater
contrast in the cultivated world than between the two lands lying so
close to each other; and the contrast of their capitals is even more
decided,--I was about to say rival capitals, but they have not enough
in common to make them rivals. I have lately been over to London for a
week, going by the Dieppe and New Haven route at night, and returning
by another; and the contrasts I speak of were impressed upon me anew.
Everything here in and about Paris was in the green and bloom of
spring, and seemed to me very lovely; but my first glance at an English
landscape made it all seem pale and flat. We went up from New Haven
to London in the morning, and feasted our eyes all the way. The French
foliage is thin, spindling, sparse; the grass is thin and light in
color--in contrast. The English trees are massive, solid in substance
and color; the grass is thick, and green as emerald; the turf is like
the heaviest Wilton carpet. The whole effect is that of vegetable
luxuriance and solidity, as it were a tropical luxuriance, condensed and
hardened by northern influences. If my eyes remember well, the French
landscapes are more like our own, in spring tone, at least; but the
English are a revelation to us strangers of what green really is, and
what grass and trees can be. I had been told that we did well to see
England before going to the Continent, for it would seem small and only
pretty afterwards. Well, leaving out Switzerland, I have seen nothing in
that beauty which satisfies the eye and wins the heart to compare with
England in spring. When we annex it to our sprawling country which lies
out-doors in so many climates, it will make a charming little retreat
for us in May and June, a sort of garden of delight, whence we shall
draw our May butter and our June roses. It will only be necessary to put
it under glass to make it pleasant the year round.

When we passed within the hanging smoke of London town, threading our
way amid numberless railway tracks, sometimes over a road and sometimes
under one, now burrowing into the ground, and now running along among
the chimney-pots,--when we came into the pale light and the thickening
industry of a London day, we could but at once contrast Paris.
Unpleasant weather usually reduces places to an equality of
disagreeableness. But Paris, with its wide streets, light, handsome
houses, gay windows and smiling little parks and fountains, keeps up
a tolerably pleasant aspect, let the weather do its worst. But London,
with its low, dark, smutty brick houses and insignificant streets,
settles down hopelessly into the dumps when the weather is bad. Even
with the sun doing its best on the eternal cloud of smoke, it is dingy
and gloomy enough, and so dirty, after spick-span, shining Paris. And
there is a contrast in the matter of order and system; the lack of both
in London is apparent. You detect it in public places, in crowds, in the
streets. The “social evil” is bad enough in its demonstrations in Paris:
it is twice as offensive in London. I have never seen a drunken woman in
Paris: I saw many of them in the daytime in London. I saw men and
women fight in the streets,--a man kick and pound a woman; and nobody
interfered. There is a brutal streak in the Anglo-Saxon, I fear,--a
downright animal coarseness, that does not exhibit itself the other side
of the Channel. It is a proverb, that the London policemen are never
at hand. The stout fellows with their clubs look as if they might do
service; but what a contrast they are to the Paris sergents de ville!
The latter, with his dress-coat, cocked hat, long rapier, white gloves,
neat, polite, attentive, alert,--always with the manner of a jesuit
turned soldier,--you learn to trust very much, if not respect; and you
feel perfectly secure that he will protect you, and give you your rights
in any corner of Paris. It does look as if he might slip that slender
rapier through your body in a second, and pull it out and wipe it,
and not move a muscle; but I don't think he would do it unless he were
directly ordered to. He would not be likely to knock you down and drag
you out, in mistake for the rowdy who was assaulting you.

A great contrast between the habits of the people of London and Paris is
shown by their eating and drinking. Paris is brilliant with cafes: all
the world frequents them to sip coffee (and too often absinthe), read
the papers, and gossip over the news; take them away, as all travelers
know, and Paris would not know itself. There is not a cafe in London:
instead of cafes, there are gin-mills; instead of light wine, there is
heavy beer. The restaurants and restaurant life are as different as can
be. You can get anything you wish in Paris: you can live very cheaply or
very dearly, as you like. The range is more limited in London. I do not
fancy the usual run of Paris restaurants. You get a great deal for your
money, in variety and quantity; but you don't exactly know what it is:
and in time you tire of odds and ends, which destroy your hunger without
exactly satisfying you. For myself, after a pretty good run of French
cookery (and it beats the world for making the most out of little), when
I sat down again to what the eminently respectable waiter in white and
black calls “a dinner off the Joint, sir,” with what belongs to it, and
ended up with an attack on a section of a cheese as big as a bass-drum,
not to forget a pewter mug of amber liquid, I felt as if I had touched
bottom again,--got something substantial, had what you call a square
meal. The English give you the substantials, and better, I believe, than
any other people. Thackeray used to come over to Paris to get a good
dinner now and then. I have tried his favorite restaurant here, the
cuisine of which is famous far beyond the banks of the Seine; but I
think if he, hearty trencher-man that he was, had lived in Paris, he
would have gone to London for a dinner oftener than he came here.

And as for a lunch,--this eating is a fascinating theme,--commend me to
a quiet inn of England. We happened to be out at Kew Gardens the other
afternoon. You ought to go to Kew, even if the Duchess of Cambridge is
not at home. There is not such a park out of England, considering
how beautiful the Thames is there. What splendid trees it has! the
horse-chestnut, now a mass of pink-and-white blossoms, from its
broad base, which rests on the ground, to its high rounded dome; the
hawthorns, white and red, in full flower; the sweeps and glades of
living green,--turf on which you walk with a grateful sense of drawing
life directly from the yielding, bountiful earth,--a green set out
and heightened by flowers in masses of color (a great variety of
rhododendrons, for one thing), to say nothing of magnificent greenhouses
and outlying flower-gardens. Just beyond are Richmond Hill and Hampton
Court, and five or six centuries of tradition and history and romance.
Before you enter the garden, you pass the green. On one side of it
are cottages, and on the other the old village church and its quiet
churchyard. Some boys were playing cricket on the sward, and children
were getting as intimate with the turf and the sweet earth as their
nurses would let them. We turned into a little cottage, which gave
notice of hospitality for a consideration; and were shown, by a pretty
maid in calico, into an upper room,--a neat, cheerful, common room,
with bright flowers in the open windows, and white muslin curtains
for contrast. We looked out on the green and over to the beautiful
churchyard, where one of England's greatest painters, Gainsborough, lies
in rural repose. It is nothing to you, who always dine off the best at
home, and never encounter dirty restaurants and snuffy inns, or run the
gauntlet of Continental hotels, every meal being an experiment of great
interest, if not of danger, to say that this brisk little waitress
spread a snowy cloth, and set thereon meat and bread and butter and a
salad: that conveys no idea to your mind. Because you cannot see that
the loaf of wheaten bread was white and delicate, and full of the
goodness of the grain; or that the butter, yellow as a guinea, tasted of
grass and cows, and all the rich juices of the verdant year, and was not
mere flavorless grease; or that the cuts of roast beef, fat and
lean, had qualities that indicate to me some moral elevation in
the cattle,--high-toned, rich meat; or that the salad was crisp and
delicious, and rather seemed to enjoy being eaten, at least, did n't
disconsolately wilt down at the prospect, as most salad does. I do not
wonder that Walter Scott dwells so much on eating, or lets his heroes
pull at the pewter mugs so often. Perhaps one might find a better lunch
in Paris, but he surely couldn't find this one.




PARIS IN MAY--FRENCH GIRLS--THE EMPEROR AT LONGCHAMPS

It was the first of May when we came up from Italy. The spring grew on
us as we advanced north; vegetation seemed further along than it was
south of the Alps. Paris was bathed in sunshine, wrapped in delicious
weather, adorned with all the delicate colors of blushing spring. Now
the horse-chestnuts are all in bloom and so is the hawthorn; and in
parks and gardens there are rows and alleys of trees, with blossoms
of pink and of white; patches of flowers set in the light green grass;
solid masses of gorgeous color, which fill all the air with perfume;
fountains that dance in the sunlight as if just released from prison;
and everywhere the soft suffusion of May. Young maidens who make their
first communion go into the churches in processions of hundreds, all
in white, from the flowing veil to the satin slipper; and I see them
everywhere for a week after the ceremony, in their robes of innocence,
often with bouquets of flowers, and attended by their friends; all
concerned making it a joyful holiday, as it ought to be. I hear, of
course, with what false ideas of life these girls are educated; how
they are watched before marriage; how the marriage is only one of
arrangement, and what liberty they eagerly seek afterwards. I met a
charming Paris lady last winter in Italy, recently married, who said
she had never been in the Louvre in her life; never had seen any of the
magnificent pictures or world-famous statuary there, because girls were
not allowed to go there, lest they should see something that they ought
not to see. I suppose they look with wonder at the young American girls
who march up to anything that ever was created, with undismayed front.

Another Frenchwoman, a lady of talent and the best breeding, recently
said to a friend, in entire unconsciousness that she was saying anything
remarkable, that, when she was seventeen, her great desire was to
marry one of her uncles (a thing not very unusual with the papal
dispensation), in order to keep all the money in the family! That was
the ambition of a girl of seventeen.

I like, on these sunny days, to look into the Luxembourg Garden: nowhere
else is the eye more delighted with life and color. In the afternoon,
especially, it is a baby-show worth going far to see. The avenues
are full of children, whose animated play, light laughter, and happy
chatter, and pretty, picturesque dress, make a sort of fairy grove
of the garden; and all the nurses of that quarter bring their charges
there, and sit in the shade, sewing, gossiping, and comparing the merits
of the little dears. One baby differs from another in glory, I suppose;
but I think on such days that they are all lovely, taken in the mass,
and all in sweet harmony with the delicious atmosphere, the tender
green, and the other flowers of spring. A baby can't do better than to
spend its spring days in the Luxembourg Garden.

There are several ways of seeing Paris besides roaming up and down
before the blazing shop-windows, and lounging by daylight or gaslight
along the crowded and gay boulevards; and one of the best is to go to
the Bois de Boulogne on a fete-day, or when the races are in progress.
This famous wood is very disappointing at first to one who has seen the
English parks, or who remembers the noble trees and glades and avenues
of that at Munich. To be sure, there is a lovely little lake and a
pretty artificial cascade, and the roads and walks are good; but the
trees are all saplings, and nearly all the “wood” is a thicket of small
stuff. Yet there is green grass that one can roll on, and there is a
grove of small pines that one can sit under. It is a pleasant place to
drive toward evening; but its great attraction is the crowd there. All
the principal avenues are lined with chairs, and there people sit to
watch the streams of carriages.

I went out to the Bois the other day, when there were races going on;
not that I went to the races, for I know nothing about them, per se,
and care less. All running races are pretty much alike. You see a lean
horse, neck and tail, flash by you, with a jockey in colors on his back;
and that is the whole of it. Unless you have some money on it, in the
pool or otherwise, it is impossible to raise any excitement. The day
I went out, the Champs Elysees, on both sides, its whole length, was
crowded with people, rows and ranks of them sitting in chairs and on
benches. The Avenue de l'Imperatrice, from the Arc de l'Etoile to the
entrance of the Bois, was full of promenaders; and the main avenues of
the Bois, from the chief entrance to the race-course, were lined with
people, who stood or sat, simply to see the passing show. There could
not have been less than ten miles of spectators, in double or triple
rows, who had taken places that afternoon to watch the turnouts of
fashion and rank. These great avenues were at all times, from three till
seven, filled with vehicles; and at certain points, and late in the day,
there was, or would have been anywhere else except in Paris, a jam. I
saw a great many splendid horses, but not so many fine liveries as
one will see on a swell-day in London. There was one that I liked. A
handsome carriage, with one seat, was drawn by four large and elegant
black horses, the two near horses ridden by postilions in blue and
silver,--blue roundabouts, white breeches and topboots, a round-topped
silver cap, and the hair, or wig, powdered, and showing just a little
behind. A footman mounted behind, seated, wore the same colors; and the
whole establishment was exceedingly tonnish.

The race-track (Longchamps, as it is called), broad and beautiful
springy turf, is not different from some others, except that the
inclosed oblong space is not flat, but undulating just enough for
beauty, and so framed in by graceful woods, and looked on by chateaux
and upland forests, that I thought I had never seen a sweeter bit of
greensward. St. Cloud overlooks it, and villas also regard it from other
heights. The day I saw it, the horse-chestnuts were in bloom; and there
was, on the edges, a cloud of pink and white blossoms, that gave a
soft and charming appearance to the entire landscape. The crowd in the
grounds, in front of the stands for judges, royalty, and people who are
privileged or will pay for places, was, I suppose, much as
usual,--an excited throng of young and jockey-looking men, with a few
women-gamblers in their midst, making up the pool; a pack of carriages
along the circuit of the track, with all sorts of people, except the
very good; and conspicuous the elegantly habited daughters of sin
and satin, with servants in livery, as if they had been born to it;
gentlemen and ladies strolling about, or reclining on the sward, and a
refreshment-stand in lively operation.

When the bell rang, we all cleared out from the track, and I happened to
get a position by the railing. I was looking over to the Pavilion, where
I supposed the Emperor to be, when the man next to me cried, “Voila!”
 and, looking up, two horses brushed right by my face, of which I saw
about two tails and one neck, and they were gone. Pretty soon they came
round again, and one was ahead, as is apt to be the case; and somebody
cried, “Bully for Therise!” or French to that effect, and it was all
over. Then we rushed across to the Emperor's Pavilion, except that I
walked with all the dignity consistent with rapidity, and there, in
the midst of his suite, sat the Man of December, a stout, broad, and
heavy-faced man as you know, but a man who impresses one with a sense of
force and purpose,--sat, as I say, and looked at us through his narrow,
half-shut eyes, till he was satisfied that I had got his features
through my glass, when he deliberately arose and went in.

All Paris was out that day,--it is always out, by the way, when the sun
shines, and in whatever part of the city you happen to be; and it
seemed to me there was a special throng clear down to the gate of the
Tuileries, to see the Emperor and the rest of us come home. He went
round by the Rue Rivoli, but I walked through the gardens. The soldiers
from Africa sat by the gilded portals, as usual,--aliens, and yet always
with the port of conquerors here in Paris. Their nonchalant indifference
and soldierly bearing always remind me of the sort of force the Emperor
has at hand to secure his throne. I think the blouses must look askance
at these satraps of the desert. The single jet fountain in the basin was
springing its highest,--a quivering pillar of water to match the stone
shaft of Egypt which stands close by. The sun illuminated it, and threw
a rainbow from it a hundred feet long, upon the white and green dome
of chestnut-trees near. When I was farther down the avenue, I had the
dancing column of water, the obelisk, and the Arch of Triumph all in
line, and the rosy sunset beyond.




AN IMPERIAL REVIEW

The Prince and Princess of Wales came up to Paris in the beginning of
May, from Italy, Egypt, and alongshore, stayed at a hotel on the Place
Vendome, where they can get beef that is not horse, and is rare, and
beer brewed in the royal dominions, and have been entertained with
cordiality by the Emperor. Among the spectacles which he has shown them
is one calculated to give them an idea of his peaceful intentions,-a
grand review of cavalry and artillery at the Bois de Boulogne. It always
seems to me a curious comment upon the state of our modern civilization,
when one prince visits another here in Europe, the first thing that the
visited does, by way of hospitality is to get out his troops, and show
his rival how easily he could “lick” him, if it came to that.

It is a little puerile. At any rate, it is an advance upon the old
fashion of getting up a joust at arms, and inviting the guest to come
out and have his head cracked in a friendly way.

The review, which had been a good deal talked about, came off in the
afternoon; and all the world went to it. The avenues of the Bois
were crowded with carriages, and the walks with footpads. Such a
constellation of royal personages met on one field must be seen; for,
besides the imperial family and Albert Edward and his Danish beauty,
there was to be the Archduke of Austria and no end of titled personages
besides. At three o'clock the royal company, in the Emperor's carriages,
drove upon the training-ground of the Bois, where the troops awaited
them. All the party, except the Princess of Wales, then mounted horses,
and rode along the lines, and afterwards retired to a wood-covered knoll
at one end to witness the evolutions. The training-ground is a noble,
slightly undulating piece of greensward, perhaps three quarters of a
mile long and half that in breadth, hedged about with graceful trees,
and bounded on one side by the Seine. Its borders were rimmed that day
with thousands of people on foot and in carriages,--a gay sight, in
itself, of color and fashion. A more brilliant spectacle than the field
presented cannot well be imagined. Attention was divided between the
gentle eminence where the imperial party stood,--a throng of noble
persons backed by the gay and glittering Guard of the Emperor, as brave
a show as chivalry ever made,--and the field of green, with its long
lines in martial array; every variety of splendid uniforms, the colors
and combinations that most dazzle and attract, with shining brass and
gleaming steel, and magnificent horses of war, regiments of black, gray,
and bay.

The evolutions were such as to stir the blood of the most sluggish. A
regiment, full front, would charge down upon a dead run from the far
field, men shouting, sabers flashing, horses thundering along, so that
the ground shook, towards the imperial party, and, when near, stop
suddenly, wheel to right and left, and gallop back. Others would succeed
them rapidly, coming up the center while their predecessors filed down
the sides; so that the whole field was a moving mass of splendid color
and glancing steel. Now and then a rider was unhorsed in the furious
rush, and went scrambling out of harm, while the steed galloped off with
free rein. This display was followed by that of the flying artillery,
battalion after battalion, which came clattering and roaring along,
in double lines stretching half across the field, stopped and rapidly
discharged its pieces, waking up all the region with echoes, filling the
plain with the smoke of gunpowder, and starting into rearing activity
all the carriage-horses in the Bois. How long this continued I do not
know, nor how many men participated in the review, but they seemed to
pour up from the far end in unending columns. I think the regiments must
have charged over and over again. It gave some people the impression
that there were a hundred thousand troops on the ground. I set it at
fifteen to twenty thousand. Gallignani next morning said there were only
six thousand! After the charging was over, the reviewing party rode to
the center of the field, and the troops galloped round them; and the
Emperor distributed decorations. We could recognize the Emperor and
Empress; Prince Albert in huzzar uniform, with a green plume in his
cap; and the Prince Imperial, in cap and the uniform of a lieutenant, on
horseback in front; while the Princess occupied a carriage behind them.

There was a crush of people at the entrance to see the royals make their
exit. Gendarmes were busy, and mounted guards went smashing through
the crowd to clear a space. Everybody was on the tiptoe of expectation.
There is a portion of the Emperor's guard; there is an officer of the
household; there is an emblazoned carriage; and, quick, there! with a
rush they come, driving as if there was no crowd, with imperial
haste, postilions and outriders and the imperial carriage. There is a
sensation, a cordial and not loud greeting, but no Yankee-like cheers.
That heavy gentleman in citizen's dress, who looks neither to right nor
left, is Napoleon III.; that handsome woman, grown full in the face of
late, but yet with the bloom of beauty and the sweet grace of command,
in hat and dark riding-habit, bowing constantly to right and left,
and smiling, is the Empress Eugenie. And they are gone. As we look for
something more, there is a rout in the side avenue; something is coming,
unexpected, from another quarter: dragoons dash through the dense mass,
shouting and gesticulating, and a dozen horses go by, turning the corner
like a small whirlwind, urged on by whip and spur, a handsome boy riding
in the midst,--a boy in cap and simple uniform, riding gracefully and
easily and jauntily, and out of sight in a minute. It is the boy Prince
Imperial and his guard. It was like him to dash in unexpectedly, as he
has broken into the line of European princes. He rides gallantly, and
Fortune smiles on him to-day; but he rides into a troubled future. There
was one more show,--a carriage of the Emperor, with officers, in English
colors and side-whiskers, riding in advance and behind: in it the future
King of England, the heavy, selfish-faced young man, and beside him his
princess, popular wherever she shows her winning face,--a fair, sweet
woman, in light and flowing silken stuffs of spring, a vision of lovely
youth and rank, also gone in a minute.

These English visitors are enjoying the pleasures of the French capital.
On Sunday, as I passed the Hotel Bristol, a crowd, principally English,
was waiting in front of it to see the Prince and Princess come out,
and enter one of the Emperor's carriages in waiting. I heard an
Englishwoman, who was looking on with admiration “sticking out” all
over, remark to a friend in a very loud whisper, “I tell you, the Prince
lives every day of his life.” The princely pair came out at length, and
drove away, going to visit Versailles. I don't know what the Queen would
think of this way of spending Sunday; but if Albert Edward never does
anything worse, he does n't need half the praying for that he gets every
Sunday in all the English churches and chapels.




THE LOW COUNTRIES AND RHINELAND


AMIENS AND QUAINT OLD BRUGES

They have not yet found out the secret in France of banishing dust from
railway-carriages. Paris, late in June, was hot, but not dusty: the
country was both. There is an uninteresting glare and hardness in
a French landscape on a sunny day. The soil is thin, the trees are
slender, and one sees not much luxury or comfort. Still, one does
not usually see much of either on a flying train. We spent a night at
Amiens, and had several hours for the old cathedral, the sunset light
on its noble front and towers and spire and flying buttresses, and the
morning rays bathing its rich stone. As one stands near it in front,
it seems to tower away into heaven, a mass of carving and
sculpture,--figures of saints and martyrs who have stood in the sun and
storm for ages, as they stood in their lifetime, with a patient waiting.
It was like a great company, a Christian host, in attitudes of praise
and worship. There they were, ranks on ranks, silent in stone, when
the last of the long twilight illumined them; and there in the same
impressive patience they waited the golden day. It required little fancy
to feel that they had lived, and now in long procession came down the
ages. The central portal is lofty, wide, and crowded with figures. The
side is only less rich than the front. Here the old Gothic builders let
their fancy riot in grotesque gargoyles,--figures of animals, and imps
of sin, which stretch out their long necks for waterspouts above. From
the ground to the top of the unfinished towers is one mass of rich
stone-work, the creation of genius that hundreds of years ago knew no
other way to write its poems than with the chisel. The interior is very
magnificent also, and has some splendid stained glass. At eight o'clock,
the priests were chanting vespers to a larger congregation than many
churches have on Sunday: their voices were rich and musical, and, joined
with the organ notes, floated sweetly and impressively through the dim
and vast interior. We sat near the great portal, and, looking down the
long, arched nave and choir to the cluster of candles burning on the
high altar, before which the priests chanted, one could not but remember
how many centuries the same act of worship had been almost uninterrupted
within, while the apostles and martyrs stood without, keeping watch of
the unchanging heavens.

When I stepped in, early in the morning, the first mass was in progress.
The church was nearly empty. Looking within the choir, I saw two stout
young priests lustily singing the prayers in deep, rich voices. One
of them leaned back in his seat, and sang away, as if he had taken
a contract to do it, using, from time to time, an enormous red
handkerchief, with which and his nose he produced a trumpet obligato. As
I stood there, a poor dwarf bobbled in and knelt on the bare stones, and
was the only worshiper, until, at length, a half-dozen priests swept
in from the sacristy, and two processions of young school-girls entered
from either side. They have the skull of John the Baptist in this
cathedral. I did not see it, although I suppose I could have done so for
a franc to the beadle: but I saw a very good stone imitation of it; and
his image and story fill the church. It is something to have seen the
place that contains his skull.

The country becomes more interesting as one gets into Belgium. Windmills
are frequent: in and near Lille are some six hundred of them; and they
are a great help to a landscape that wants fine trees. At Courtrai,
we looked into Notre Dame, a thirteenth century cathedral, which has a
Vandyke (“The Raising of the Cross”), and the chapel of the Counts
of Flanders, where workmen were uncovering some frescoes that were
whitewashed over in the war-times. The town hall has two fine old
chimney-pieces carved in wood, with quaint figures,--work that one must
go to the Netherlands to see. Toward evening we came into the ancient
town of Bruges. The country all day has been mostly flat, but thoroughly
cultivated. Windmills appear to do all the labor of the people,--raising
the water, grinding the grain, sawing the lumber; and they everywhere
lift their long arms up to the sky. Things look more and more what we
call “foreign.” Harvest is going on, of hay and grain; and men and women
work together in the fields. The gentle sex has its rights here. We saw
several women acting as switch-tenders. Perhaps the use of the switch
comes natural to them. Justice, however, is still in the hands of the
men. We saw a Dutch court in session in a little room in the town hall
at Courtrai. The justice wore a little red cap, and sat informally
behind a cheap table. I noticed that the witnesses were treated with
unusual consideration, being allowed to sit down at the table opposite
the little justice, who interrogated them in a loud voice. At the
stations to-day we see more friars in coarse, woolen dresses, and
sandals, and the peasants with wooden sabots.

As the sun goes to the horizon, we have an effect sometimes produced
by the best Dutch artists,--a wonderful transparent light, in which the
landscape looks like a picture, with its church-spires of stone, its
windmills, its slender trees, and red-roofed houses. It is a good light
and a good hour in which to enter Bruges, that city of the past. Once
the city was greater than Antwerp; and up the Rege came the commerce of
the East, merchants from the Levant, traders in jewels and silks. Now
the tall houses wait for tenants, and the streets have a deserted
air. After nightfall, as we walked in the middle of the roughly paved
streets, meeting few people, and hearing only the echoing clatter of the
wooden sabots of the few who were abroad, the old spirit of the place
came over us. We sat on a bench in the market-place, a treeless square,
hemmed in by quaint, gabled houses, late in the evening, to listen to
the chimes from the belfry. The tower is less than four hundred feet
high, and not so high by some seventy feet as the one on Notre Dame near
by; but it is very picturesque, in spite of the fact that it springs out
of a rummagy-looking edifice, one half of which is devoted to soldiers'
barracks, and the other to markets. The chimes are called the finest in
Europe. It is well to hear the finest at once, and so have done with the
tedious things. The Belgians are as fond of chimes as the Dutch are of
stagnant water. We heard them everywhere in Belgium; and in some towns
they are incessant, jangling every seven and a half minutes. The chimes
at Bruges ring every quarter hour for a minute, and at the full hour
attempt a tune. The revolving machinery grinds out the tune, which is
changed at least once a year; and on Sundays a musician, chosen by the
town, plays the chimes. In so many bells (there are forty-eight),
the least of which weighs twelve pounds, and the largest over eleven
thousand, there must be soft notes and sonorous tones; so sweet jangled
sounds were showered down: but we liked better than the confused chiming
the solemn notes of the great bell striking the hour. There is something
very poetical about this chime of bells high in the air, flinging down
upon the hum and traffic of the city its oft-repeated benediction of
peace; but anybody but a Lowlander would get very weary of it. These
chimes, to be sure, are better than those in London, which became a
nuisance; but there is in all of them a tinkling attempt at a tune,
which always fails, that is very annoying.

Bruges has altogether an odd flavor. Piles of wooden sabots are for sale
in front of the shops; and this ugly shoe, which is mysteriously kept on
the foot, is worn by all the common sort. We see long, slender carts in
the street, with one horse hitched far ahead with rope traces, and no
thills or pole.

The women-nearly every one we saw-wear long cloaks of black cloth with a
silk hood thrown back. Bruges is famous of old for its beautiful women,
who are enticingly described as always walking the streets with covered
faces, and peeping out from their mantles. They are not so handsome
now they show their faces, I can testify. Indeed, if there is in Bruges
another besides the beautiful girl who showed us the old council-chamber
in the Palace of justice, she must have had her hood pulled over her
face.

Next morning was market-day. The square was lively with carts, donkeys,
and country people, and that and all the streets leading to it were
filled with the women in black cloaks, who flitted about as numerous as
the rooks at Oxford, and very much like them, moving in a winged
way, their cloaks outspread as they walked, and distended with the
market-basket underneath. Though the streets were full, the town did not
seem any less deserted; and the early marketers had only come to life
for a day, revisiting the places that once they thronged. In the shade
of the tall houses in the narrow streets sat red-cheeked girls and women
making lace, the bobbins jumping under their nimble fingers. At the
church doors hideous beggars crouched and whined,--specimens of the
fifteen thousand paupers of Bruges. In the fishmarket we saw odd old
women, with Rembrandt colors in faces and costume; and while we strayed
about in the strange city, all the time from the lofty tower the chimes
fell down. What history crowds upon us! Here in the old cathedral,
with its monstrous tower of brick, a portion of it as old as the tenth
century, Philip the Good established, in 1429, the Order of the Golden
Fleece, the last chapter of which was held by Philip the Bad in 1559, in
the rich old Cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent. Here, on the square, is
the site of the house where the Emperor Maximilian was imprisoned by
his rebellious Flemings; and next it, with a carved lion, that in which
Charles II. of England lived after the martyrdom of that patient and
virtuous ruler, whom the English Prayerbook calls that “blessed martyr,
Charles the First.” In Notre Dame are the tombs of Charles the Bold and
Mary his daughter.

We begin here to enter the portals of Dutch painting. Here died Jan van
Eyck, the father of oil painting; and here, in the hospital of St. John,
are the most celebrated pictures of Hans Memling. The most exquisite in
color and finish is the series painted on the casket made to contain the
arm of St. Ursula, and representing the story of her martyrdom. You
know she went on a pilgrimage to Rome, with her lover, Conan, and
eleven thousand virgins; and, on their return to Cologne, they were all
massacred by the Huns. One would scarcely believe the story, if he did
not see all their bones at Cologne.




GHENT AND ANTWERP

What can one do in this Belgium but write down names, and let memory
recall the past? We came to Ghent, still a hand some city, though
one thinks of the days when it was the capital of Flanders, and its
merchants were princes. On the shabby old belfry-tower is the gilt
dragon which Philip van Artevelde captured, and brought in triumph from
Bruges. It was originally fetched from a Greek church in Constantinople
by some Bruges Crusader; and it is a link to recall to us how, at that
time, the merchants of Venice and the far East traded up the Scheldt,
and brought to its wharves the rich stuffs of India and Persia. The old
bell Roland, that was used to call the burghers together on the approach
of an enemy, hung in this tower. What fierce broils and bloody fights
did these streets witness centuries ago! There in the Marche au
Vendredi, a large square of old-fashioned houses, with a statue of
Jacques van Artevelde, fifteen hundred corpses were strewn in a quarrel
between the hostile guilds of fullers and brewers; and here, later, Alva
set blazing the fires of the Inquisition. Near the square is the
old cannon, Mad Margery, used in 1382 at the siege of Oudenarde,--a
hammered-iron hooped affair, eighteen feet long. But why mention
this, or the magnificent town hall, or St. Bavon, rich in pictures and
statuary; or try to put you back three hundred years to the wild days
when the iconoclasts sacked this and every other church in the Low
Countries?

Up to Antwerp toward evening. All the country flat as the flattest part
of Jersey, rich in grass and grain, cut up by canals, picturesque with
windmills and red-tiled roofs, framed with trees in rows. It has been
all day hot and dusty. The country everywhere seems to need rain; and
dark clouds are gathering in the south for a storm, as we drive up the
broad Place de Meir to our hotel, and take rooms that look out to the
lace-like spire of the cathedral, which is sharply defined against the
red western sky.

Antwerp takes hold of you, both by its present and its past, very
strongly. It is still the home of wealth. It has stately buildings,
splendid galleries of pictures, and a spire of stone which charms more
than a picture, and fascinates the eye as music does the ear. It still
keeps its strong fortifications drawn around it, to which the broad and
deep Scheldt is like a string to a bow, mindful of the unstable state
of Europe. While Berlin is only a vast camp of soldiers, every less city
must daily beat its drums, and call its muster-roll. From the tower
here one looks upon the cockpit of Europe. And yet Antwerp ought to have
rest: she has had tumult enough in her time. Prosperity seems returning
to her; but her old, comparative splendor can never come back. In the
sixteenth century there was no richer city in Europe.

We walked one evening past the cathedral spire, which begins in the
richest and most solid Gothic work, and grows up into the sky into an
exquisite lightness and grace, down a broad street to the Scheldt. What
traffic have not these high old houses looked on, when two thousand and
five hundred vessels lay in the river at one time, and the commerce
of Europe found here its best mart. Along the stream now is a not very
clean promenade for the populace; and it is lined with beer-houses,
shabby theaters, and places of the most childish amusements. There is
an odd liking for the simple among these people. In front of the booths,
drums were beaten and instruments played in bewildering discord. Actors
in paint and tights stood without to attract the crowd within. On one
low balcony, a copper-colored man, with a huge feather cap and the
traditional dress of the American savage, was beating two drums; a
burnt-cork black man stood beside him; while on the steps was a woman,
in hat and shawl, making an earnest speech to the crowd. In another
place, where a crazy band made furious music, was an enormous “go-round”
 of wooden ponies, like those in the Paris gardens, only here, instead
of children, grown men and women rode the hobby-horses, and seemed
delighted with the sport. In the general Babel, everybody was
good-natured and jolly. Little things suffice to amuse the lower
classes, who do not have to bother their heads with elections and mass
meetings.

In front of the cathedral is the well, and the fine canopy of iron-work,
by Quentin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, some of whose pictures we
saw in the Museum, where one sees, also some of the finest pictures
of the Dutch school,--the “Crucifixion” of Rubens, the “Christ on the
Cross” of Vandyke; paintings also by Teniers, Otto Vennius, Albert Cuyp,
and others, and Rembrandt's portrait of his wife,--a picture whose sweet
strength and wealth of color draws one to it with almost a passion of
admiration. We had already seen “The Descent from the Cross” and “The
Raising of the Cross” by Rubens, in the cathedral. With all his power
and rioting luxuriance of color, I cannot come to love him as I do
Rembrandt. Doubtless he painted what he saw; and we still find the
types of his female figures in the broad-hipped, ruddy-colored women of
Antwerp. We walked down to his house, which remains much as it was two
hundred and twenty-five years ago. From the interior court, an entrance
in the Italian style leads into a pleasant little garden full of old
trees and flowers, with a summer-house embellished with plaster casts,
and having the very stone table upon which Rubens painted. It is a quiet
place, and fit for an artist; but Rubens had other houses in the city,
and lived the life of a man who took a strong hold of the world.




AMSTERDAM

The rail from Antwerp north was through a land flat and sterile. After
a little, it becomes a little richer; but a forlorner land to live in I
never saw. One wonders at the perseverance of the Flemings and Dutchmen
to keep all this vast tract above water when there is so much good solid
earth elsewhere unoccupied. At Moerdjik we changed from the cars to a
little steamer on the Maas, which flows between high banks. The water
is higher than the adjoining land, and from the deck we look down upon
houses and farms. At Dort, the Rhine comes in with little promise of
the noble stream it is in the highlands. Everywhere canals and ditches
dividing the small fields instead of fences; trees planted in straight
lines, and occasionally trained on a trellis in front of the houses,
with the trunk painted white or green; so that every likeness of nature
shall be taken away. From Rotterdam, by cars, it is still the same. The
Dutchman spends half his life, apparently, in fighting the water. He has
to watch the huge dikes which keep the ocean from overwhelming him,
and the river-banks, which may break, and let the floods of the Rhine
swallow him up. The danger from within is not less than from without.
Yet so fond is he of his one enemy, that, when he can afford it, he
builds him a fantastic summer-house over a stagnant pool or a slimy
canal, in one corner of his garden, and there sits to enjoy the aquatic
beauties of nature; that is, nature as he has made it. The river-banks
are woven with osiers to keep them from washing; and at intervals on the
banks are piles of the long withes to be used in emergencies when the
swollen streams threaten to break through.

And so we come to Amsterdam, the oddest city of all,--a city wholly
built on piles, with as many canals as streets, and an architecture so
quaint as to even impress one who has come from Belgium. The whole
town has a wharf-y look; and it is difficult to say why the tall brick
houses, their gables running by steps to a peak, and each one leaning
forward or backward or sideways, and none perpendicular, and no two on a
line, are so interesting. But certainly it is a most entertaining place
to the stranger, whether he explores the crowded Jews' quarter, with its
swarms of dirty people, its narrow streets, and high houses hung with
clothes, as if every day were washing-day; or strolls through the
equally narrow streets of rich shops; or lounges upon the bridges, and
looks at the queer boats with clumsy rounded bows, great helms' painted
in gay colors, with flowers in the cabin windows,--boats where families
live; or walks down the Plantage, with the zoological gardens on the one
hand and rows of beer-gardens on the other; or round the great docks;
or saunters at sunset by the banks of the Y, and looks upon flat North
Holland and the Zuyder Zee.

The palace on the Dam (square) is a square, stately edifice, and the
only building that the stranger will care to see. Its interior is richer
and more fit to live in than any palace we have seen. There is nothing
usually so dreary as your fine Palace. There are some good frescoes,
rooms richly decorated in marble, and a magnificent hall, or ball-room,
one hundred feet in height, without pillars. Back of it is, of course,
a canal, which does not smell fragrantly in the summer; and I do not
wonder that William III. and his queen prefer to stop away. From the top
is a splendid view of Amsterdam and all the flat region. I speak of it
with entire impartiality, for I did not go up to see it. But better
than palaces are the picture-galleries, three of which are open to the
sightseer. Here the ancient and modern Dutch painters are seen at their
best, and I know of no richer feast of this sort. Here Rembrandt is
to be seen in his glory; here Van der Helst, Jan Steen, Gerard Douw,
Teniers the younger, Hondekoeter, Weenix, Ostade, Cuyp, and other names
as familiar. These men also painted what they saw, the people, the
landscapes, with which they were familiar. It was a strange pleasure to
meet again and again in the streets of the town the faces, or types of
them, that we had just seen on canvas so old.

In the Low Countries, the porters have the grand title of
commissionaires. They carry trunks and bundles, black boots, and act as
valets de place. As guides, they are quite as intolerable in Amsterdam
as their brethren in other cities. Many of them are Jews; and they have
a keen eye for a stranger. The moment he sallies from his hotel, there
is a guide. Let him hesitate for an instant in his walk, either to look
at something or to consult his map, or let him ask the way, and he will
have a half dozen of the persistent guild upon him; and they cannot
easily be shaken off. The afternoon we arrived, we had barely got into
our rooms at Brack's Oude Doelan, when a gray-headed commissionaire
knocked at our door, and offered his services to show us the city. We
deferred the pleasure of his valuable society. Shortly, when we came
down to the street, a smartly dressed Israelite took off his hat to us,
and offered to show us the city. We declined with impressive politeness,
and walked on. The Jew accompanied us, and attempted conversation, in
which we did not join. He would show us everything for a guilder an
hour,--for half a guilder. Having plainly told the Jew that we did not
desire his attendance, he crossed to the other side of the street, and
kept us in sight, biding his opportunity. At the end of the street, we
hesitated a moment whether to cross the bridge or turn up by the broad
canal. The Jew was at our side in a moment, having divined that we were
on the way to the Dam and the palace. He obligingly pointed the way,
and began to walk with us, entering into conversation. We told him
pointedly, that we did not desire his services, and requested him to
leave us. He still walked in our direction, with the air of one much
injured, but forgiving, and was more than once beside us with a piece of
information. When we finally turned upon him with great fierceness,
and told him to begone, he regarded us with a mournful and pitying
expression; and as the last act of one who returned good for evil,
before he turned away, pointed out to us the next turn we were to make.
I saw him several times afterward; and I once had occasion to say to
him, that I had already told him I would not employ him; and he always
lifted his hat, and looked at me with a forgiving smile. I felt that
I had deeply wronged him. As we stood by the statue, looking up at the
eastern pediment of the palace, another of the tribe (they all speak a
little English) asked me if I wished to see the palace. I told him I
was looking at it, and could see it quite distinctly. Half a dozen more
crowded round, and proffered their aid. Would I like to go into the
palace? They knew, and I knew, that they could do nothing more than go
to the open door, through which they would not be admitted, and that I
could walk across the open square to that, and enter alone. I asked the
first speaker if he wished to go into the palace. Oh, yes! he would like
to go. I told him he had better go at once,--they had all better go
in together and see the palace,--it was an excellent opportunity. They
seemed to see the point, and slunk away to the other side to wait for
another stranger.

I find that this plan works very well with guides: when I see one
approaching, I at once offer to guide him. It is an idea from which he
does not rally in time to annoy us. The other day I offered to show a
persistent fellow through an old ruin for fifty kreuzers: as his price
for showing me was forty-eight, we did not come to terms. One of the
most remarkable guides, by the way, we encountered at Stratford-on-Avon.
As we walked down from the Red Horse Inn to the church, a full-grown boy
came bearing down upon us in the most wonderful fashion. Early rickets,
I think, had been succeeded by the St. Vitus' dance. He came down upon
us sideways, his legs all in a tangle, and his right arm, bent and
twisted, going round and round, as if in vain efforts to get into his
pocket, his fingers spread out in impotent desire to clutch something.
There was great danger that he would run into us, as he was like a
steamer with only one side-wheel and no rudder. He came up puffing and
blowing, and offered to show us Shakespeare's tomb. Shade of the
past, to be accompanied to thy resting-place by such an object! But he
fastened himself on us, and jerked and hitched along in his side-wheel
fashion. We declined his help. He paddled on, twisting himself into
knots, and grinning in the most friendly manner. We told him to begone.
“I am,” said he, wrenching himself into a new contortion, “I am what
showed Artemus Ward round Stratford.” This information he repeated again
and again, as if we could not resist him after we had comprehended that.
We shook him off; but when we returned at sundown across the fields,
from a visit to Anne Hathaway's cottage, we met the sidewheeler
cheerfully towing along a large party, upon whom he had fastened.

The people of Amsterdam are only less queer than their houses. The
men dress in a solid, old-fashioned way. Every one wears the straight,
high-crowned silk hat that went out with us years ago, and the cut of
clothing of even the most buckish young fellows is behind the times.
I stepped into the Exchange, an immense interior, that will hold five
thousand people, where the stock-gamblers meet twice a day. It was very
different from the terrible excitement and noise of the Paris Bourse.
There were three or four thousand brokers there, yet there was very
little noise and no confusion. No stocks were called, and there was no
central ring for bidding, as at the Bourse and the New York Gold Room;
but they quietly bought and sold. Some of the leading firms had desks
or tables at the side, and there awaited orders. Everything was
phlegmatically and decorously done.

In the streets one still sees peasant women in native costume. There was
a group to-day that I saw by the river, evidently just crossed over from
North Holland. They wore short dresses, with the upper skirt looped up,
and had broad hips and big waists. On the head was a cap with a fall of
lace behind; across the back of the head a broad band of silver (or tin)
three inches broad, which terminated in front and just above the ears in
bright pieces of metal about two inches square, like a horse's blinders,
Only flaring more from the head; across the forehead and just above
the eyes a gilt band, embossed; on the temples two plaits of hair in
circular coils; and on top of all a straw hat, like an old-fashioned
bonnet stuck on hindside before. Spiral coils of brass wire, coming to a
point in front, are also worn on each side of the head by many. Whether
they are for ornament or defense, I could not determine.

Water is brought into the city now from Haarlem, and introduced into the
best houses; but it is still sold in the streets by old men and women,
who sit at the faucets. I saw one dried-up old grandmother, who sat in
her little caboose, fighting away the crowd of dirty children who tried
to steal a drink when her back was turned, keeping count of the pails of
water carried away with a piece of chalk on the iron pipe, and trying to
darn her stocking at the same time. Odd things strike you at every turn.
There is a sledge drawn by one poor horse, and on the front of it is a
cask of water pierced with holes, so that the water squirts out and wets
the stones, making it easier sliding for the runners. It is an ingenious
people!

After all, we drove out five miles to Broek, the clean village; across
the Y, up the canal, over flatness flattened. Broek is a humbug, as
almost all show places are. A wooden little village on a stagnant canal,
into which carriages do not drive, and where the front doors of the
houses are never open; a dead, uninteresting place, neat but not
specially pretty, where you are shown into one house got up for the
purpose, which looks inside like a crockery shop, and has a stiff
little garden with box trained in shapes of animals and furniture. A
roomy-breeched young Dutchman, whose trousers went up to his neck, and
his hat to a peak, walked before us in slow and cow-like fashion, and
showed us the place; especially some horrid pleasure-grounds, with an
image of an old man reading in a summer-house, and an old couple in
a cottage who sat at a table and worked, or ate, I forget which, by
clock-work; while a dog barked by the same means. In a pond was a wooden
swan sitting on a stick, the water having receded, and left it high and
dry. Yet the trip is worth while for the view of the country and
the people on the way: men and women towing boats on the canals; the
red-tiled houses painted green, and in the distance the villages, with
their spires and pleasing mixture of brown, green, and red tints, are
very picturesque. The best thing that I saw, however, was a traditional
Dutchman walking on the high bank of a canal, with soft hat, short pipe,
and breeches that came to the armpits above, and a little below the
knees, and were broad enough about the seat and thighs to carry his no
doubt numerous family. He made a fine figure against the sky.




COLOGNE AND ST. URSULA

It is a relief to get out of Holland and into a country nearer to hills.
The people also seem more obliging. In Cologne, a brown-cheeked girl
pointed us out the way without waiting for a kreuzer. Perhaps the women
have more to busy themselves about in the cities, and are not so
curious about passers-by. We rarely see a reflector to exhibit us to the
occupants of the second-story windows. In all the cities of Belgium
and Holland the ladies have small mirrors, with reflectors, fastened
to their windows; so that they can see everybody who passes, without
putting their heads out. I trust we are not inverted or thrown out
of shape when we are thus caught up and cast into my lady's chamber.
Cologne has a cheerful look, for the Rhine here is wide and promising;
and as for the “smells,” they are certainly not so many nor so vile as
those at Mainz.

Our windows at the hotel looked out on the finest front of the
cathedral. If the Devil really built it, he is to be credited with one
good thing, and it is now likely to be finished, in spite of him. Large
as it is, it is on the exterior not so impressive as that at Amiens;
but within it has a magnificence born of a vast design and the most
harmonious proportions, and the grand effect is not broken by any
subdivision but that of the choir. Behind the altar and in front of the
chapel, where lie the remains of the Wise Men of the East who came to
worship the Child, or, as they are called, the Three Kings of Cologne,
we walked over a stone in the pavement under which is the heart of Mary
de Medicis: the remainder of her body is in St. Denis near Paris. The
beadle in red clothes, who stalks about the cathedral like a converted
flamingo, offered to open for us the chapel; but we declined a sight of
the very bones of the Wise Men. It was difficult enough to believe they
were there, without seeing them. One ought not to subject his faith to
too great a strain at first in Europe. The bones of the Three Kings,
by the way, made the fortune of the cathedral. They were the greatest
religious card of the Middle Ages, and their fortunate possession
brought a flood of wealth to this old Domkirche. The old feudal lords
would swear by the Almighty Father, or the Son, or Holy Ghost, or by
everything sacred on earth, and break their oaths as they would break
a wisp of straw: but if you could get one of them to swear by the Three
Kings of Cologne, he was fast; for that oath he dare not disregard.

The prosperity of the cathedral on these valuable bones set all the
other churches in the neighborhood on the same track; and one can
study right here in this city the growth of relic worship. But the most
successful achievement was the collection of the bones of St. Ursula and
the eleven thousand virgins, and their preservation in the church on the
very spot where they suffered martyrdom. There is probably not so large
a collection of the bones of virgins elsewhere in the world; and I am
sorry to read that Professor Owen has thought proper to see and say that
many of them are the bones of lower orders of animals. They are built
into the walls of the church, arranged about the choir, interred in
stone coffins, laid under the pavements; and their skulls grin at you
everywhere. In the chapel the bones are tastefully built into the wall
and overhead, like rustic wood-work; and the skulls stand in rows, some
with silver masks, like the jars on the shelves of an apothecary's shop.
It is a cheerful place. On the little altar is the very skull of
the saint herself, and that of Conan, her lover, who made the holy
pilgrimage to Rome with her and her virgins, and also was slain by the
Huns at Cologne. There is a picture of the eleven thousand disembarking
from one boat on the Rhine, which is as wonderful as the trooping of
hundreds of spirits out of a conjurer's bottle. The right arm of St.
Ursula is preserved here: the left is at Bruges. I am gradually getting
the hang of this excellent but somewhat scattered woman, and bringing
her together in my mind. Her body, I believe, lies behind the altar
in this same church. She must have been a lovely character, if Hans
Memling's portrait of her is a faithful one. I was glad to see here one
of the jars from the marriage-supper in Cana. We can identify it by a
piece which is broken out; and the piece is in Notre Dame in Paris.
It has been in this church five hundred years. The sacristan, a very
intelligent person, with a shaven crown and his hair cut straight across
his forehead, who showed us the church, gave us much useful information
about bones, teeth, and the remains of the garments that the virgins
wore; and I could not tell from his face how much he expected us to
believe. I asked the little fussy old guide of an English party who had
joined us, how much he believed of the story. He was a Protestant, and
replied, still anxious to keep up the credit of his city, “Tousands is
too many; some hundreds maybe; tousands is too many.”




A GLIMPSE OF THE RHINE

You have seen the Rhine in pictures; you have read its legends. You
know, in imagination at least, how it winds among craggy hills of
splendid form, turning so abruptly as to leave you often shut in with no
visible outlet from the wall of rock and forest; how the castles, some
in ruins so as to be as unsightly as any old pile of rubbish, others
with feudal towers and battlements, still perfect, hang on the crags, or
stand sharp against the sky, or nestle by the stream or on some lonely
island. You know that the Rhine has been to Germans what the Nile was
to the Egyptians,--a delight, and the theme of song and story. Here the
Roman eagles were planted; here were the camps of Drusus; here Caesar
bridged and crossed the Rhine; here, at every turn, a feudal baron, from
his high castle, levied toll on the passers; and here the French found a
momentary halt to their invasion of Germany at different times. You can
imagine how, in a misty morning, as you leave Bonn, the Seven Mountains
rise up in their veiled might, and how the Drachenfels stands in new and
changing beauty as you pass it and sail away. You have been told that
the Hudson is like the Rhine. Believe me, there is no resemblance; nor
would there be if the Hudson were lined with castles, and Julius Caesar
had crossed it every half mile. The Rhine satisfies you, and you do not
recall any other river. It only disappoints you as to its “vine-clad
hills.” You miss trees and a covering vegetation, and are not enamoured
of the patches of green vines on wall-supported terraces, looking from
the river like hills of beans or potatoes. And, if you try the Rhine
wine on the steamers, you will wholly lose your faith in the vintage. We
decided that the wine on our boat was manufactured in the boiler.

There is a mercenary atmosphere about hotels and steamers on the Rhine,
a watering-place, show sort of feeling, that detracts very much from
one's enjoyment. The old habit of the robber barons of levying toll on
all who sail up and down has not been lost. It is not that one actually
pays so much for sightseeing, but the charm of anything vanishes when it
is made merchandise. One is almost as reluctant to buy his “views” as he
is to sell his opinions. But one ought to be weeks on the Rhine before
attempting to say anything about it.

One morning, at Bingen,--I assure you it was not six o'clock,--we took
a big little rowboat, and dropped down the stream, past the Mouse Tower,
where the cruel Bishop Hatto was eaten up by rats, under the
shattered Castle of Ehrenfels, round the bend to the little village of
Assmannshausen, on the hills back of which is grown the famous red
wine of that name. On the bank walked in line a dozen peasants, men and
women, in picturesque dress, towing, by a line passed from shoulder to
shoulder, a boat filled with marketing for Rudesheim. We were bound
up the Niederwald, the mountain opposite Bingen, whose noble crown of
forest attracted us. At the landing, donkeys awaited us; and we began
the ascent, a stout, good-natured German girl acting as guide and
driver. Behind us, on the opposite shore, set round about with a wealth
of foliage, was the Castle of Rheinstein, a fortress more pleasing in
its proportions and situation than any other. Our way was through the
little town which is jammed into the gorge; and as we clattered up
the pavement, past the church, its heavy bell began to ring loudly for
matins, the sound reverberating in the narrow way, and following us
with its benediction when we were far up the hill, breathing the fresh,
inspiring morning air. The top of the Niederwald is a splendid forest of
trees, which no impious Frenchman has been allowed to trim, and cut into
allees of arches, taking one in thought across the water to the
free Adirondacks. We walked for a long time under the welcome shade,
approaching the brow of the hill now and then, where some tower or
hermitage is erected, for a view of the Rhine and the Nahe, the villages
below, and the hills around; and then crossed the mountain, down through
cherry orchards, and vine yards, walled up, with images of Christ on
the cross on the angles of the walls, down through a hot road where wild
flowers grew in great variety, to the quaint village of Rudesheim, with
its queer streets and ancient ruins. Is it possible that we can have too
many ruins? “Oh dear!” exclaimed the jung-frau as we sailed along the
last day, “if there is n't another castle!”




HEIDELBERG

If you come to Heidelberg, you will never want to go away. To arrive
here is to come into a peaceful state of rest and content. The great
hills out of which the Neckar flows, infold the town in a sweet
security; and yet there is no sense of imprisonment, for the view is
always wide open to the great plains where the Neckar goes to join the
Rhine, and where the Rhine runs for many a league through a rich and
smiling land. One could settle down here to study, without a desire to
go farther, nor any wish to change the dingy, shabby old buildings of
the university for anything newer and smarter. What the students can
find to fight their little duels about I cannot see; but fight they do,
as many a scarred cheek attests. The students give life to the town.
They go about in little caps of red, green, and blue, many of them
embroidered in gold, and stuck so far on the forehead that they require
an elastic, like that worn by ladies, under the back hair, to keep
them on; and they are also distinguished by colored ribbons across the
breast. The majority of them are well-behaved young gentlemen, who carry
switch-canes, and try to keep near the fashions, like students at home.
Some like to swagger about in their little skull-caps, and now and then
one is attended by a bull-dog.

I write in a room which opens out upon a balcony. Below it is a garden,
below that foliage, and farther down the town with its old speckled
roofs, spires, and queer little squares. Beyond is the Neckar, with the
bridge, and white statues on it, and an old city gate at this end, with
pointed towers. Beyond that is a white road with a wall on one side,
along which I see peasant women walking with large baskets balanced on
their heads. The road runs down the river to Neuenheim. Above it on
the steep hillside are vineyards; and a winding path goes up to
the Philosopher's Walk, which runs along for a mile or more, giving
delightful views of the castle and the glorious woods and hills back
of it. Above it is the mountain of Heiligenberg, from the other side
of which one looks off toward Darmstadt and the famous road, the
Bergstrasse. If I look down the stream, I see the narrow town, and the
Neckar flowing out of it into the vast level plain, rich with grain
and trees and grass, with many spires and villages; Mannheim to the
northward, shining when the sun is low; the Rhine gleaming here and
there near the horizon; and the Vosges Mountains, purple in the last
distance: on my right, and so near that I could throw a stone into them,
the ruined tower and battlements of the northwest corner of the castle,
half hidden in foliage, with statues framed in ivy, and the garden
terrace, built for Elizabeth Stuart when she came here the bride of the
Elector Frederick, where giant trees grow. Under the walls a steep
path goes down into the town, along which little houses cling to the
hillside. High above the castle rises the noble Konigstuhl, whence the
whole of this part of Germany is visible, and, in a clear day, Strasburg
Minster, ninety miles away.

I have only to go a few steps up a narrow, steep street, lined with the
queerest houses, where is an ever-running pipe of good water, to which
all the neighborhood resorts, and I am within the grounds of the castle.
I scarcely know where to take you; for I never know where to go myself,
and seldom do go where I intend when I set forth. We have been here
several days; and I have not yet seen the Great Tun, nor the inside of
the show-rooms, nor scarcely anything that is set down as a “sight.”
 I do not know whether to wander on through the extensive grounds, with
splendid trees, bits of old ruin, overgrown, cozy nooks, and seats
where, through the foliage, distant prospects open into quiet retreats
that lead to winding walks up the terraced hill, round to the open
terrace overlooking the Neckar, and giving the best general view of
the great mass of ruins. If we do, we shall be likely to sit in some
delicious place, listening to the band playing in the “Restauration,”
 and to the nightingales, till the moon comes up. Or shall we turn into
the garden through the lovely Arch of the Princess Elizabeth, with its
stone columns cut to resemble tree-trunks twined with ivy? Or go rather
through the great archway, and under the teeth of the portcullis, into
the irregular quadrangle, whose buildings mark the changing style and
fortune of successive centuries, from 1300 down to the seventeenth
century? There is probably no richer quadrangle in Europe: there is
certainly no other ruin so vast, so impressive, so ornamented with
carving, except the Alhambra. And from here we pass out upon the broad
terrace of masonry, with a splendid flanking octagon tower, its base
hidden in trees, a rich facade for a background, and below the town the
river, and beyond the plain and floods of golden sunlight. What shall we
do? Sit and dream in the Rent Tower under the lindens that grow in its
top? The day passes while one is deciding how to spend it, and the sun
over Heiligenberg goes down on his purpose.




ALPINE NOTES

ENTERING SWITZERLAND BERNE ITS BEAUTIES AND BEARS

If you come to Bale, you should take rooms on the river, or stand on the
bridge at evening, and have a sunset of gold and crimson streaming down
upon the wide and strong Rhine, where it rushes between the houses built
plumb up to it, or you will not care much for the city. And yet it is
pleasant on the high ground, where are some stately buildings, and where
new gardens are laid out, and where the American consul on the Fourth
of July flies our flag over the balcony of a little cottage smothered
in vines and gay with flowers. I had the honor of saluting it that day,
though I did not know at the time that gold had risen two or three per
cent. under its blessed folds at home. Not being a shipwrecked sailor,
or a versatile and accomplished but impoverished naturalized citizen,
desirous of quick transit to the land of the free, I did not call upon
the consul, but left him under the no doubt correct impression that he
was doing a good thing by unfolding the flag on the Fourth.

You have not journeyed far from Bale before you are aware that you are
in Switzerland. It was showery the day we went down; but the ride
filled us with the most exciting expectations. The country recalled
New England, or what New England might be, if it were cultivated and
adorned, and had good roads and no fences. Here at last, after the dusty
German valleys, we entered among real hills, round which and through
which, by enormous tunnels, our train slowly went: rocks looking out
of foliage; sweet little valleys, green as in early spring; the dark
evergreens in contrast; snug cottages nestled in the hillsides, showing
little else than enormous brown roofs that come nearly to the ground,
giving the cottages the appearance of huge toadstools; fine harvests of
grain; thrifty apple-trees, and cherry-trees purple with luscious fruit.
And this shifting panorama continues until, towards evening, behold, on
a hill, Berne, shining through showers, the old feudal round tower and
buildings overhanging the Aar, and the tower of the cathedral over all.
From the balcony of our rooms at the Bellevue, the long range of the
Bernese Oberland shows its white summits for a moment in the slant
sunshine, and then the clouds shut down, not to lift again for two days.
Yet it looks warmer on the snow-peaks than in Berne, for summer sets in
in Switzerland with a New England chill and rigor.

The traveler finds no city with more flavor of the picturesque and
quaint than Berne; and I think it must have preserved the Swiss
characteristics better than any other of the large towns in Helvetia.
It stands upon a peninsula, round which the Aar, a hundred feet below,
rapidly flows; and one has on nearly every side very pretty views of
the green basin of hills which rise beyond the river. It is a most
comfortable town on a rainy day; for all the principal streets have
their houses built on arcades, and one walks under the low arches, with
the shops on one side and the huge stone pillars on the other. These
pillars so stand out toward the street as to give the house-fronts a
curved look. Above are balconies, in which, upon red cushions, sit the
daughters of Berne, reading and sewing, and watching their neighbors;
and in nearly every window are quantities of flowers of the most
brilliant colors. The gray stone of the houses, which are piled up
from the streets, harmonizes well with the colors in the windows and
balconies, and the scene is quite Oriental as one looks down, especially
if it be upon a market morning, when the streets are as thronged as
the Strand. Several terraces, with great trees, overlook the river, and
command prospects of the Alps. These are public places; for the city
government has a queer notion that trees are not hideous, and that a
part of the use of living is the enjoyment of the beautiful. I saw an
elegant bank building, with carved figures on the front, and at
each side of the entrance door a large stand of flowers,--oleanders,
geraniums, and fuchsias; while the windows and balconies above bloomed
with a like warmth of floral color. Would you put an American bank
president in the Retreat who should so decorate his banking-house? We
all admire the tasteful display of flowers in foreign towns: we go
home, and carry nothing with us but a recollection. But Berne has also
fountains everywhere; some of them grotesque, like the ogre that devours
his own children, but all a refreshment and delight. And it has also its
clock-tower, with one of those ingenious pieces of mechanism, in which
the sober people of this region take pleasure. At the hour, a procession
of little bears goes round, a jolly figure strikes the time, a cock
flaps his wings and crows, and a solemn Turk opens his mouth to announce
the flight of the hours. It is more grotesque, but less elaborate, than
the equally childish toy in the cathedral at Strasburg.

We went Sunday morning to the cathedral; and the excellent woman who
guards the portal--where in ancient stone the Last Judgment is enacted,
and the cheerful and conceited wise virgins stand over against the
foolish virgins, one of whom has been in the penitential attitude
of having a stone finger in her eye now for over three hundred
years--refused at first to admit us to the German Lutheran service,
which was just beginning. It seems that doors are locked, and no one
is allowed to issue forth until after service. There seems to be an
impression that strangers go only to hear the organ, which is a sort of
rival of that at Freiburg, and do not care much for the well-prepared
and protracted discourse in Swiss-German. We agreed to the terms of
admission; but it did not speak well for former travelers that the woman
should think it necessary to say, “You must sit still, and not talk.” It
is a barn-like interior. The women all sit on hard, high-backed benches
in the center of the church, and the men on hard, higher-backed benches
about the sides, inclosing and facing the women, who are more directly
under the droppings of the little pulpit, hung on one of the pillars,--a
very solemn and devout congregation, who sang very well, and paid strict
attention to the sermon.

I noticed that the names of the owners, and sometimes their
coats-of-arms, were carved or painted on the backs of the seats, as
if the pews were not put up at yearly auction. One would not call it a
dressy congregation, though the homely women looked neat in black waists
and white puffed sleeves and broadbrimmed hats.

The only concession I have anywhere seen to women in Switzerland, as
the more delicate sex, was in this church: they sat during most of the
service, but the men stood all the time, except during the delivery of
the sermon. The service began at nine o'clock, as it ought to with us in
summer. The costume of the peasant women in and about Berne comes nearer
to being picturesque than in most other parts of Switzerland, where it
is simply ugly. You know the sort of thing in pictures,--the broad hat,
short skirt, black, pointed stomacher, with white puffed sleeves, and
from each breast a large silver chain hanging, which passes under the
arm and fastens on the shoulder behind,--a very favorite ornament. This
costume would not be unbecoming to a pretty face and figure: whether
there are any such native to Switzerland, I trust I may not be put upon
the witness-stand to declare. Some of the peasant young men went
without coats, and with the shirt sleeves fluted; and others wore
butternut-colored suits, the coats of which I can recommend to those who
like the swallow-tailed variety. I suppose one would take a man into
the opera in London, where he cannot go in anything but that sort. The
buttons on the backs of these came high up between the shoulders, and
the tails did not reach below the waistband. There is a kind of rooster
of similar appearance. I saw some of these young men from the country,
with their sweethearts, leaning over the stone parapet, and looking into
the pit of the bear-garden, where the city bears walk round, or sit on
their hind legs for bits of bread thrown to them, or douse themselves in
the tanks, or climb the dead trees set up for their gambols. Years
ago they ate up a British officer who fell in; and they walk round now
ceaselessly, as if looking for another. But one cannot expect good taste
in a bear.

If you would see how charming a farming country can be, drive out on the
highway towards Thun. For miles it is well shaded with giant trees of
enormous trunks, and a clean sidewalk runs by the fine road. On either
side, at little distances from the road, are picturesque cottages and
rambling old farmhouses peeping from the trees and vines and flowers.
Everywhere flowers, before the house, in the windows, at the railway
stations. But one cannot stay forever even in delightful Berne, with its
fountains and terraces, and girls on red cushions in the windows, and
noble trees and flowers, and its stately federal Capitol, and its bears
carved everywhere in stone and wood, and its sunrises, when all the
Bernese Alps lie like molten silver in the early light, and the clouds
drift over them, now hiding, now disclosing, the enchanting heights.




HEARING THE FREIBURG ORGAN--FIRST SIGHT OF LAKE LEMAN

Freiburg, with its aerial suspension-bridges, is also on a peninsula,
formed by the Sarine; with its old walls, old watch-towers, its piled-up
old houses, and streets that go upstairs, and its delicious cherries,
which you can eat while you sit in the square by the famous linden-tree,
and wait for the time when the organ will be played in the cathedral.
For all the world stops at Freiburg to hear and enjoy the great
organ,--all except the self-satisfied English clergyman, who says he
does n't care much for it, and would rather go about town and see
the old walls; and the young and boorish French couple, whose refined
amusement in the railway-carriage consisted in the young man's catching
his wife's foot in the window-strap, and hauling it up to the level of
the window, and who cross themselves and go out after the first tune;
and the two bread-and-butter English young ladies, one of whom asks the
other in the midst of the performance, if she has thought yet to
count the pipes,--a thoughtful verification of Murray, which is very
commendable in a young woman traveling for the improvement of her little
mind.

One has heard so much of this organ, that he expects impossibilities,
and is at first almost disappointed, although it is not long in
discovering its vast compass, and its wonderful imitations, now of a
full orchestra, and again of a single instrument. One has not to wait
long before he is mastered by its spell. The vox humana stop did not
strike me as so perfect as that of the organ in the Rev. Mr. Hale's
church in Boston, though the imitation of choir-voices responding to the
organ was very effective. But it is not in tricks of imitation that this
organ is so wonderful: it is its power of revealing, by all its compass,
the inmost part of any musical composition.

The last piece we heard was something like this: the sound of a bell,
tolling at regular intervals, like the throbbing of a life begun; about
it an accompaniment of hopes, inducements, fears, the flute, the violin,
the violoncello, promising, urging, entreating, inspiring; the
life beset with trials, lured with pleasures, hesitating, doubting,
questioning; its purpose at length grows more certain and fixed, the
bell tolling becomes a prolonged undertone, the flow of a definite life;
the music goes on, twining round it, now one sweet instrument and now
many, in strife or accord, all the influences of earth and heaven and
the base underworld meeting and warring over the aspiring soul; the
struggle becomes more earnest, the undertone is louder and clearer;
the accompaniment indicates striving, contesting passion, an agony of
endeavor and resistance, until at length the steep and rocky way is
passed, the world and self are conquered, and, in a burst of triumph
from a full orchestra, the soul attains the serene summit. But the rest
is only for a moment. Even in the highest places are temptations. The
sunshine fails, clouds roll up, growling of low, pedal thunder is heard,
while sharp lightning-flashes soon break in clashing peals about the
peaks. This is the last Alpine storm and trial. After it the sun bursts
out again, the wide, sunny valleys are disclosed, and a sweet evening
hymn floats through all the peaceful air. We go out from the cool church
into the busy streets of the white, gray town awed and comforted.

And such a ride afterwards! It was as if the organ music still
continued. All the world knows the exquisite views southward from
Freiburg; but such an atmosphere as we had does not overhang them many
times in a season. First the Moleross, and a range of mountains bathed
in misty blue light,--rugged peaks, scarred sides, white and tawny at
once, rising into the clouds which hung large and soft in the blue; soon
Mont Blanc, dim and aerial, in the south; the lovely valley of the River
Sense; peasants walking with burdens on the white highway; the quiet and
soft-tinted mountains beyond; towns perched on hills, with old castles
and towers; the land rich with grass, grain, fruit, flowers; at
Palezieux a magnificent view of the silver, purple, and blue mountains,
with their chalky seams and gashed sides, near at hand; and at length,
coming through a long tunnel, as if we had been shot out into the air
above a country more surprising than any in dreams, the most wonderful
sight burst upon us,--the low-lying, deep-blue Lake Leman, and
the gigantic mountains rising from its shores, and a sort of mist,
translucent, suffused with sunlight, like the liquid of the golden wine
the Steinberger poured into the vast basin. We came upon it out of total
darkness, without warning; and we seemed, from our great height, to be
about to leap into the splendid gulf of tremulous light and color.

This Lake of Geneva is said to combine the robust mountain grandeur of
Luzerne with all the softness of atmosphere of Lake Maggiore. Surely,
nothing could exceed the loveliness as we wound down the hillside,
through the vineyards, to Lausanne, and farther on, near the foot of the
lake, to Montreux, backed by precipitous but tree-clad hills, fronted
by the lovely water, and the great mountains which run away south into
Savoy, where Velan lifts up its snows. Below us, round the curving bay,
lies white Chillon; and at sunset we row down to it over the bewitched
water, and wait under its grim walls till the failing light brings back
the romance of castle and prisoner. Our garcon had never heard of the
prisoner; but he knew about the gendarmes who now occupy the castle.




OUR ENGLISH FRIENDS

Not the least of the traveler's pleasure in Switzerland is derived from
the English people who overrun it: they seem to regard it as a kind
of private park or preserve belonging to England; and they establish
themselves at hotels, or on steamboats and diligences, with a certain
air of ownership that is very pleasant. I am not very fresh in my
geology; but it is my impression that Switzerland was created especially
for the English, about the year of the Magna Charta, or a little later.
The Germans who come here, and who don't care very much what they eat,
or how they sleep, provided they do not have any fresh air in diningroom
or bedroom, and provided, also, that the bread is a little sour, growl
a good deal about the English, and declare that they have spoiled
Switzerland. The natives, too, who live off the English, seem to
thoroughly hate them; so that one is often compelled, in self-defense,
to proclaim his nationality, which is like running from Scylla upon
Charybdis; for, while the American is more popular, it is believed that
there is no bottom to his pocket.

There was a sprig of the Church of England on the steamboat on Lake
Leman, who spread himself upon a center bench, and discoursed very
instructively to his friends,--a stout, fat-faced young man in a white
cravat, whose voice was at once loud and melodious, and whom our
manly Oxford student set down as a man who had just rubbed through the
university, and got into a scanty living.

“I met an American on the boat yesterday,” the oracle was saying to his
friends, “who was really quite a pleasant fellow. He--ah really was, you
know, quite a sensible man. I asked him if they had anything like this
in America; and he was obliged to say that they had n't anything like
it in his country; they really had n't. He was really quite a sensible
fellow; said he was over here to do the European tour, as he called it.”

Small, sympathetic laugh from the attentive, wiry, red-faced woman on
the oracle's left, and also a chuckle, at the expense of the American,
from the thin Englishman on his right, who wore a large white waistcoat,
a blue veil on his hat, and a face as red as a live coal.

“Quite an admission, was n't it, from an American? But I think they have
changed since the wah, you know.”

At the next landing, the smooth and beaming churchman was left by
his friends; and he soon retired to the cabin, where I saw him
self-sacrificingly denying himself the views on deck, and consoling
himself with a substantial lunch and a bottle of English ale.

There is one thing to be said about the English abroad: the variety
is almost infinite. The best acquaintances one makes will be
English,--people with no nonsense and strong individuality; and one gets
no end of entertainment from the other sort. Very different from the
clergyman on the boat was the old lady at table-d'hote in one of the
hotels on the lake. One would not like to call her a delightfully wicked
old woman, like the Baroness Bernstein; but she had her own witty and
satirical way of regarding the world. She had lived twenty-five years at
Geneva, where people, years ago, coming over the dusty and hot roads
of France, used to faint away when they first caught sight of the Alps.
Believe they don't do it now. She never did; was past the susceptible
age when she first came; was tired of the people. Honest? Why, yes,
honest, but very fond of money. Fine Swiss wood-carving? Yes. You'll get
very sick of it. It's very nice, but I 'm tired of it. Years ago, I sent
some of it home to the folks in England. They thought everything of it;
and it was not very nice, either,--a cheap sort. Moral ideas? I don't
care for moral ideas: people make such a fuss about them lately (this
in reply to her next neighbor, an eccentric, thin man, with bushy hair,
shaggy eyebrows, and a high, falsetto voice, who rallied the witty
old lady all dinner-time about her lack of moral ideas, and accurately
described the thin wine on the table as “water-bewitched”). Why did n't
the baroness go back to England, if she was so tired of Switzerland?
Well, she was too infirm now; and, besides, she did n't like to
trust herself on the railroads. And there were so many new inventions
nowadays, of which she read. What was this nitroglycerine, that exploded
so dreadfully? No: she thought she should stay where she was.

There is little risk of mistaking the Englishman, with or without his
family, who has set out to do Switzerland. He wears a brandy-flask, a
field-glass, and a haversack. Whether he has a silk or soft hat, he is
certain to wear a veil tied round it. This precaution is adopted when he
makes up his mind to come to Switzerland, I think, because he has read
that a veil is necessary to protect the eyes from the snow-glare. There
is probably not one traveler in a hundred who gets among the ice and
snow-fields where he needs a veil or green glasses: but it is well
to have it on the hat; it looks adventurous. The veil and the spiked
alpenstock are the signs of peril. Everybody--almost everybody--has an
alpenstock. It is usually a round pine stick, with an iron spike in one
end. That, also, is a sign of peril. We saw a noble young Briton on the
steamer the other day, who was got up in the best Alpine manner. He
wore a short sack,--in fact, an entire suit of light gray flannel, which
closely fitted his lithe form. His shoes were of undressed leather, with
large spikes in the soles; and on his white hat he wore a large quantity
of gauze, which fell in folds down his neck. I am sorry to say that
he had a red face, a shaven chin, and long side-whiskers. He carried a
formidable alpenstock; and at the little landing where we first saw
him, and afterward on the boat, he leaned on it in a series of the most
graceful and daring attitudes that I ever saw the human form assume. Our
Oxford student knew the variety, and guessed rightly that he was an army
man. He had his face burned at Malta. Had he been over the Gemmi? Or up
this or that mountain? asked another English officer. “No, I have not.”
 And it turned out that he had n't been anywhere, and did n't seem likely
to do anything but show himself at the frequented valley places. And
yet I never saw one whose gallant bearing I so much admired. We saw him
afterward at Interlaken, enduring all the hardships of that fashionable
place. There was also there another of the same country, got up for the
most dangerous Alpine climbing, conspicuous in red woolen stockings that
came above his knees. I could not learn that he ever went up anything
higher than the top of a diligence.




THE DILIGENCE TO CHAMOUNY

The greatest diligence we have seen, one of the few of the old-fashioned
sort, is the one from Geneva to Chamouny. It leaves early in the
morning; and there is always a crowd about it to see the mount and
start. The great ark stands before the diligence-office, and, for half
an hour before the hour of starting, the porters are busy stowing
away the baggage, and getting the passengers on board. On top, in the
banquette, are seats for eight, besides the postilion and guard; in the
coupe, under the postilion's seat and looking upon the horses, seats for
three; in the interior, for three; and on top, behind, for six or eight.
The baggage is stowed in the capacious bowels of the vehicle. At seven,
the six horses are brought out and hitched on, three abreast. We climb
up a ladder to the banquette: there is an irascible Frenchman, who gets
into the wrong seat; and before he gets right there is a terrible war
of words between him and the guard and the porters and the hostlers,
everybody joining in with great vivacity; in front of us are three quiet
Americans, and a slim Frenchman with a tall hat and one eye-glass. The
postilion gets up to his place. Crack, crack, crack, goes the whip; and,
amid “sensation” from the crowd, we are off at a rattling pace, the whip
cracking all the time like Chinese fireworks. The great passion of the
drivers is noise; and they keep the whip going all day. No sooner does a
fresh one mount the box than he gives a half-dozen preliminary snaps; to
which the horses pay no heed, as they know it is only for the driver's
amusement. We go at a good gait, changing horses every six miles, till
we reach the Baths of St. Gervais, where we dine, from near which we
get our first glimpse of Mont Blanc through clouds,--a section of a
dazzlingly white glacier, a very exciting thing to the imagination.
Thence we go on in small carriages, over a still excellent but more
hilly road, and begin to enter the real mountain wonders; until, at
length, real glaciers pouring down out of the clouds nearly to the road
meet us, and we enter the narrow Valley of Chamouny, through which we
drive to the village in a rain.

Everybody goes to Chamouny, and up the Flegere, and to Montanvert, and
over the Mer de Glace; and nearly everybody down the Mauvais Pas to the
Chapeau, and so back to the village. It is all easy to do; and yet
we saw some French people at the Chapeau who seemed to think they had
accomplished the most hazardous thing in the world in coming down the
rocks of the Mauvais Pas. There is, as might be expected, a great deal
of humbug about the difficulty of getting about in the Alps, and the
necessity of guides. Most of the dangers vanish on near approach. The
Mer de Glace is inferior to many other glaciers, and is not nearly so
fine as the Glacier des Bossons: but it has a reputation, and is easy of
access; so people are content to walk over the dirty ice. One sees it
to better effect from below, or he must ascend it to the Jardin to know
that it has deep crevasses, and is as treacherous as it is grand. And
yet no one will be disappointed at the view from Montanvert, of the
upper glacier, and the needles of rock and snow which rise beyond.

We met at the Chapeau two jolly young fellows from Charleston, S. C.
who had been in the war, on the wrong side. They knew no language but
American, and were unable to order a cutlet and an omelet for breakfast.
They said they believed they were going over the Tete Noire. They
supposed they had four mules waiting for them somewhere, and a guide;
but they couldn't understand a word he said, and he couldn't understand
them. The day before, they had nearly perished of thirst, because they
could n't make their guide comprehend that they wanted water. One
of them had slung over his shoulder an Alpine horn, which he blew
occasionally, and seemed much to enjoy. All this while we sit on a rock
at the foot of the Mauvais Pas, looking out upon the green glacier,
which here piles itself up finely, and above to the Aiguilles de Charmoz
and the innumerable ice-pinnacles that run up to the clouds, while our
muleteer is getting his breakfast. This is his third breakfast this
morning.

The day after we reached Chamouny, Monseigneur the bishop arrived there
on one of his rare pilgrimages into these wild valleys. Nearly all the
way down from Geneva, we had seen signs of his coming, in preparations
as for the celebration of a great victory. I did not know at first but
the Atlantic cable had been laid; or rather that the decorations were on
account of the news of it reaching this region. It was a holiday for
all classes; and everybody lent a hand to the preparations. First, the
little church where the confirmations were to take place was trimmed
within and without; and an arch of green spanned the gateway. At Les
Pres, the women were sweeping the road, and the men were setting small
evergreen-trees on each side. The peasants were in their best clothes;
and in front of their wretched hovels were tables set out with flowers.
So cheerful and eager were they about the bishop, that they forgot to
beg as we passed: the whole valley was in a fever of expectation. At one
hamlet on the mulepath over the Tete Noire, where the bishop was that
day expected, and the women were sweeping away all dust and litter
from the road, I removed my hat, and gravely thanked them for their
thoughtful preparation for our coming. But they only stared a little, as
if we were not worthy to be even forerunners of Monseigneur.

I do not care to write here how serious a drawback to the pleasures of
this region are its inhabitants. You get the impression that half of
them are beggars. The other half are watching for a chance to prey upon
you in other ways. I heard of a woman in the Zermatt Valley who refused
pay for a glass of milk; but I did not have time to verify the report.
Besides the beggars, who may or may not be horrid-looking creatures,
there are the grinning Cretins, the old women with skins of parchment
and the goitre, and even young children with the loathsome appendage,
the most wretched and filthy hovels, and the dirtiest, ugliest people in
them. The poor women are the beasts of burden. They often lead, mowing
in the hayfield; they carry heavy baskets on their backs; they balance
on their heads and carry large washtubs full of water. The more
appropriate load of one was a cradle with a baby in it, which seemed not
at all to fear falling. When one sees how the women are treated, he does
not wonder that there are so many deformed, hideous children. I think
the pretty girl has yet to be born in Switzerland.

This is not much about the Alps? Ah, well, the Alps are there. Go
read your guide-book, and find out what your emotions are. As I said,
everybody goes to Chamouny. Is it not enough to sit at your window, and
watch the clouds when they lift from the Mont Blanc range, disclosing
splendor after splendor, from the Aiguille de Goute to the Aiguille
Verte,--white needles which pierce the air for twelve thousand feet,
until, jubilate! the round summit of the monarch himself is visible, and
the vast expanse of white snow-fields, the whiteness of which is rather
of heaven than of earth, dazzles the eyes, even at so great a distance?
Everybody who is patient and waits in the cold and inhospitable-looking
valley of the Chamouny long enough, sees Mont Blanc; but every one
does not see a sunset of the royal order. The clouds breaking up and
clearing, after days of bad weather, showed us height after height,
and peak after peak, now wreathing the summits, now settling below or
hanging in patches on the sides, and again soaring above, until we had
the whole range lying, far and brilliant, in the evening light. The
clouds took on gorgeous colors, at length, and soon the snow caught the
hue, and whole fields were rosy pink, while uplifted peaks glowed red,
as with internal fire. Only Mont Blanc, afar off, remained purely white,
in a kind of regal inaccessibility. And, afterward, one star came out
over it, and a bright light shone from the hut on the Grand Mulets, a
rock in the waste of snow, where a Frenchman was passing the night on
his way to the summit.

Shall I describe the passage of the Tete Noire? My friend, it is
twenty-four miles, a road somewhat hilly, with splendid views of
Mont Blanc in the morning, and of the Bernese Oberland range in the
afternoon, when you descend into Martigny,--a hot place in the dusty
Rhone Valley, which has a comfortable hotel, with a pleasant garden, in
which you sit after dinner and let the mosquitoes eat you.




THE MAN WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH

It was eleven o'clock at night when we reached Sion, a dirty little town
at the end of the Rhone Valley Railway, and got into the omnibus for the
hotel; and it was also dark and rainy. They speak German in this part
of Switzerland, or what is called German. There were two very pleasant
Americans, who spoke American, going on in the diligence at half-past
five in the morning, on their way over the Simplex. One of them was
accustomed to speak good, broad English very distinctly to all races;
and he seemed to expect that he must be understood if he repeated his
observations in a louder tone, as he always did. I think he would force
all this country to speak English in two months. We all desired to
secure places in the diligence, which was likely to be full, as is
usually the case when a railway discharges itself into a postroad.

We were scarcely in the omnibus, when the gentleman said to the
conductor:

“I want two places in the coupe of the diligence in the morning. Can I
have them?”

“Yah” replied the good-natured German, who did n't understand a word.

“Two places, diligence, coupe, morning. Is it full?”

“Yah,” replied the accommodating fellow. “Hotel man spik English.”

I suggested the banquette as desirable, if it could be obtained, and the
German was equally willing to give it to us. Descending from the omnibus
at the hotel, in a drizzling rain, and amidst a crowd of porters
and postilions and runners, the “man who spoke English” immediately
presented himself; and upon him the American pounced with a torrent of
questions. He was a willing, lively little waiter, with his moony face
on the top of his head; and he jumped round in the rain like a parching
pea, rolling his head about in the funniest manner.

The American steadied the little man by the collar, and began, “I want
to secure two seats in the coupe of the diligence in the morning.”

“Yaas,” jumping round, and looking from one to another. “Diligence,
coupe, morning.”

“I--want--two seats--in--coupe. If I can't get them,
two--in--banquette.”

“Yaas banquette, coupe,--yaas, diligence.”

“Do you understand? Two seats, diligence, Simplon, morning. Will you get
them?”

“Oh, yaas! morning, diligence. Yaas, sirr.”

“Hang the fellow! Where is the office?” And the gentleman left the
spry little waiter bobbing about in the middle of the street, speaking
English, but probably comprehending nothing that was said to him. I
inquired the way to the office of the conductor: it was closed, but
would soon be open, and I waited; and at length the official, a stout
Frenchman, appeared, and I secured places in the interior, the only ones
to be had to Visp. I had seen a diligence at the door with three places
in the coupe, and one perched behind; no banquette. The office is
brightly lighted; people are waiting to secure places; there is the
usual crowd of loafers, men and women, and the Frenchman sits at his
desk. Enter the American.

“I want two places in coupe, in the morning. Or banquette. Two places,
diligence.” The official waves him off, and says something.

“What does he say?”

“He tells you to sit down on that bench till he is ready.”

Soon the Frenchman has run over his big waybills, and turns to us.

“I want two places in the diligence, coupe,” etc, etc, says the
American.

This remark being lost on the official, I explain to him as well as I
can what is wanted, at first,--two places in the coupe.

“One is taken,” is his reply.

“The gentleman will take two,” I said, having in mind the diligence in
the yard, with three places in the coupe.

“One is taken,” he repeats.

“Then the gentleman will take the other two.”

“One is taken!” he cries, jumping up and smiting the table,--“one is
taken, I tell you!”

“How many are there in the coupe?”

“TWO.”

“Oh! then the gentleman will take the one remaining in the coupe and the
one on top.”

So it is arranged. When I come back to the hotel, the Americans are
explaining to the lively waiter “who speaks English” that they are to
go in the diligence at half-past five, and that they are to be called at
half-past four and have breakfast. He knows all about it,--“Diligence,
half-past four breakfast, Oh, yaas!” While I have been at the
diligence-office, my companions have secured room and gone to them; and
I ask the waiter to show m to my room. First, however, I tell him that
we three two ladies and myself, who came together, are going in the
diligence at half-past five, and want to be called and have breakfast.
Did he comprehend?

“Yaas,” rolling his face about on the top of his head violently. “You
three gentleman want breakfast. What you have?”

I had told him before what we would I have, an now I gave up all hope of
keeping our parties separate in his mind; so I said, “Five persons want
breakfast at five o'clock. Five persons, five hours. Call all of them
at half-past four.” And I repeated it, and made him repeat it in English
and French. He then insisted on putting me into the room of one of the
American gentlemen and then he knocked at the door of a lady, who cried
out in indignation at being disturbed; and, finally, I found my room.
At the door I reiterated the instructions for the morning; and he
cheerfully bade me good-night. But he almost immediately came back, and
poked in his head with,--

“Is you go by de diligence?”

“Yes, you stupid.”

In the morning one of our party was called at halfpast three, and saved
the rest of us from a like fate; and we were not aroused at all, but
woke early enough to get down and find the diligence nearly ready, and
no breakfast, but “the man who spoke English” as lively as ever. And we
had a breakfast brought out, so filthy in all respects that nobody could
eat it. Fortunately, there was not time to seriously try; but we paid
for it, and departed. The two American gentlemen sat in front of the
house, waiting. The lively waiter had called them at half-past three,
for the railway train, instead of the diligence; and they had their
wretched breakfast early. They will remember the funny adventure with
“the man who speaks English,” and, no doubt, unite with us in
warmly commending the Hotel Lion d'Or at Sion as the nastiest inn in
Switzerland.




A WALK TO THE GORNER GRAT

When one leaves the dusty Rhone Valley, and turns southward from Visp,
he plunges into the wildest and most savage part of Switzerland, and
penetrates the heart of the Alps. The valley is scarcely more than a
narrow gorge, with high precipices on either side, through which the
turbid and rapid Visp tears along at a furious rate, boiling and leaping
in foam over its rocky bed, and nearly as large as the Rhone at the
junction. From Visp to St. Nicolaus, twelve miles, there is only a
mule-path, but a very good one, winding along on the slope, sometimes
high up, and again descending to cross the stream, at first by vineyards
and high stone walls, and then on the edges of precipices, but always
romantic and wild. It is noon when we set out from Visp, in true pilgrim
fashion, and the sun is at first hot; but as we slowly rise up the easy
ascent, we get a breeze, and forget the heat in the varied charms of the
walk.

Everything for the use of the upper valley and Zermatt, now a place of
considerable resort, must be carried by porters, or on horseback; and we
pass or meet men and women, sometimes a dozen of them together, laboring
along under the long, heavy baskets, broad at the top and coming
nearly to a point below, which are universally used here for carrying
everything. The tubs for transporting water are of the same sort. There
is no level ground, but every foot is cultivated. High up on the sides
of the precipices, where it seems impossible for a goat to climb, are
vineyards and houses, and even villages, hung on slopes, nearly up to
the clouds, and with no visible way of communication with the rest of
the world.

In two hours' time we are at Stalden, a village perched upon a rocky
promontory, at the junction of the valleys of the Saas and the Visp,
with a church and white tower conspicuous from afar. We climb up to the
terrace in front of it, on our way into the town. A seedy-looking priest
is pacing up and down, taking the fresh breeze, his broad-brimmed,
shabby hat held down upon the wall by a big stone. His clothes are worn
threadbare; and he looks as thin and poor as a Methodist minister in
a stony town at home, on three hundred a year. He politely returns our
salutation, and we walk on. Nearly all the priests in this region
look wretchedly poor,--as poor as the people. Through crooked, narrow
streets, with houses overhanging and thrusting out corners and gables,
houses with stables below, and quaint carvings and odd little windows
above, the panes of glass hexagons, so that the windows looked like
sections of honey-comb,--we found our way to the inn, a many-storied
chalet, with stairs on the outside, stone floors in the upper passages,
and no end of queer rooms; built right in the midst of other houses as
odd, decorated with German-text carving, from the windows of which the
occupants could look in upon us, if they had cared to do so; but they
did not. They seem little interested in anything; and no wonder, with
their hard fight with Nature. Below is a wine-shop, with a little side
booth, in which some German travelers sit drinking their wine, and
sputtering away in harsh gutturals. The inn is very neat inside, and we
are well served. Stalden is high; but away above it on the opposite side
is a village on the steep slope, with a slender white spire that rivals
some of the snowy needles. Stalden is high, but the hill on which it
stands is rich in grass. The secret of the fertile meadows is the most
thorough irrigation. Water is carried along the banks from the river,
and distributed by numerous sluiceways below; and above, the little
mountain streams are brought where they are needed by artificial
channels. Old men and women in the fields were constantly changing the
direction of the currents. All the inhabitants appeared to be porters:
women were transporting on their backs baskets full of soil; hay was
being backed to the stables; burden-bearers were coming and going upon
the road: we were told that there are only three horses in the place.
There is a pleasant girl who brings us luncheon at the inn; but the
inhabitants for the most part are as hideous as those we see all day:
some have hardly the shape of human beings, and they all live in the
most filthy manner in the dirtiest habitations. A chalet is a sweet
thing when you buy a little model of it at home.

After we leave Stalden, the walk becomes more picturesque, the
precipices are higher, the gorges deeper. It required some engineering
to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the
ravines. Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,--a very
considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white
church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable
heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with
nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the
gorge of the Visp. Switzerland may not have so much population to the
square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of
her square miles that would astonish some parts of the earth's
surface elsewhere. Farther on we saw a faint, zigzag footpath, that we
conjectured led to Emd; but it might lead up to heaven. All day we had
been solicited for charity by squalid little children, who kiss their
nasty little paws at us, and ask for centimes. The children of Emd,
however, did not trouble us. It must be a serious affair if they ever
roll out of bed.

Late in the afternoon thunder began to tumble about the hills, and
clouds snatched away from our sight the snow-peaks at the end of the
valley; and at length the rain fell on those who had just arrived and
on the unjust. We took refuge from the hardest of it in a lonely chalet
high up on the hillside, where a roughly dressed, frowzy Swiss, who
spoke bad German, and said he was a schoolmaster, gave us a bench in the
shed of his schoolroom. He had only two pupils in attendance, and I
did not get a very favorable impression of this high school. Its
master quite overcame us with thanks when we gave him a few centimes on
leaving. It still rained, and we arrived in St. Nicolaus quite damp.

There is a decent road from St. Nicolaus to Zermatt, over which go
wagons without springs. The scenery is constantly grander as we
ascend. The day is not wholly clear; but high on our right are the vast
snow-fields of the Weishorn, and out of the very clouds near it seems
to pour the Bies Glacier. In front are the splendid Briethorn, with its
white, round summit; the black Riffelhorn; the sharp peak of the little
Matterhorn; and at last the giant Matterhorn itself rising before us,
the most finished and impressive single mountain in Switzerland. Not
so high as Mont Blanc by a thousand feet, it appears immense in its
isolated position and its slender aspiration. It is a huge pillar of
rock, with sharply cut edges, rising to a defined point, dusted with
snow, so that the rock is only here and there revealed. To ascend it
seems as impossible as to go up the Column of Luxor; and one can believe
that the gentlemen who first attempted it in 1864, and lost their lives,
did fall four thousand feet before their bodies rested on the glacier
below.

We did not stay at Zermatt, but pushed on for the hotel on the top of
the Riffelberg,--a very stiff and tiresome climb of about three hours,
an unending pull up a stony footpath. Within an hour of the top, and
when the white hotel is in sight above the zigzag on the breast of the
precipice, we reach a green and widespread Alp where hundreds of cows
are feeding, watched by two forlorn women,--the “milkmaids all forlorn”
 of poetry. At the rude chalets we stop, and get draughts of rich, sweet
cream. As we wind up the slope, the tinkling of multitudinous bells from
the herd comes to us, which is also in the domain of poetry. All the way
up we have found wild flowers in the greatest profusion; and the higher
we ascend, the more exquisite is their color and the more perfect their
form. There are pansies; gentians of a deeper blue than flower ever was
before; forget-me-nots, a pink variety among them; violets, the Alpine
rose and the Alpine violet; delicate pink flowers of moss; harebells;
and quantities for which we know no names, more exquisite in shape and
color than the choicest products of the greenhouse. Large slopes are
covered with them,--a brilliant show to the eye, and most pleasantly
beguiling the way of its tediousness. As high as I ascended, I still
found some of these delicate flowers, the pink moss growing in profusion
amongst the rocks of the GornerGrat, and close to the snowdrifts.

The inn on the Riffelberg is nearly eight thousand feet high, almost two
thousand feet above the hut on Mount Washington; yet it is not so cold
and desolate as the latter. Grass grows and flowers bloom on its smooth
upland, and behind it and in front of it are the snow-peaks. That
evening we essayed the Gorner-Grat, a rocky ledge nearly ten thousand
feet above the level of the sea; but after a climb of an hour and a
half, and a good view of Monte Rosa and the glaciers and peaks of that
range, we were prevented from reaching the summit, and driven back by
a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next morning I started for the
GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk
sharply against the sky, except where fleecy clouds lightly draped it
and fantastically blew about it. As I ascended, and turned to look at
it, its beautifully cut peak had caught the first ray of the sun, and
burned with a rosy glow. Some great clouds drifted high in the air: the
summits of the Breithorn, the Lyscamm, and their companions, lay cold
and white; but the snow down their sides had a tinge of pink. When I
stood upon the summit of the Gorner-Grat, the two prominent silver peaks
of Monte Rosa were just touched with the sun, and its great snow-fields
were visible to the glacier at its base. The Gorner-Grat is a rounded
ridge of rock, entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The
panorama from it is unexcelled in Switzerland.

Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great waste
of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left sleeping
at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp. Lured on
by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the ridge, she had
climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and come to meet me.
She also had seen the great peaks lift themselves out of the gray dawn,
and Monte Rosa catch the first rays. We stood awhile together to see
how jocund day ran hither and thither along the mountain-tops, until
the light was all abroad, and then silently turned downward, as one goes
from a mount of devotion.




THE BATHS OF LEUK

In order to make the pass of the Gemmi, it is necessary to go through
the Baths of Leuk. The ascent from the Rhone bridge at Susten is full of
interest, affording fine views of the valley, which is better to look at
than to travel through, and bringing you almost immediately to the old
town of Leuk, a queer, old, towered place, perched on a precipice, with
the oddest inn, and a notice posted up to the effect, that any one who
drives through its steep streets faster than a walk will be fined five
francs. I paid nothing extra for a fast walk. The road, which is one of
the best in the country, is a wonderful piece of engineering, spanning
streams, cut in rock, rounding precipices, following the wild valley of
the Dala by many a winding and zigzag.

The Baths of Leuk, or Loeche-les-Bains, or Leukerbad, is a little
village at the very head of the valley, over four thousand feet above
the sea, and overhung by the perpendicular walls of the Gemmi, which
rise on all sides, except the south, on an average of two thousand
feet above it. There is a nest of brown houses, clustered together like
bee-hives, into which the few inhabitants creep to hibernate in the long
winters, and several shops, grand hotels, and bathing-houses open for
the season. Innumerable springs issue out of this green, sloping meadow
among the mountains, some of them icy cold, but over twenty of them hot,
and seasoned with a great many disagreeable sulphates, carbonates, and
oxides, and varying in temperature from ninety-five to one hundred and
twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Italians, French, and Swiss resort
here in great numbers to take the baths, which are supposed to be very
efficacious for rheumatism and cutaneous affections. Doubtless many of
them do up their bathing for the year while here; and they may need no
more after scalding and soaking in this water for a couple of months.

Before we reached the hotel, we turned aside into one of the
bath-houses. We stood inhaling a sickly steam in a large, close hall,
which was wholly occupied by a huge vat, across which low partitions,
with bridges, ran, dividing it into four compartments. When we entered,
we were assailed with yells in many languages, and howls in the common
tongue, as if all the fiends of the pit had broken loose. We took off
our hats in obedience to the demand; but the clamor did not wholly
subside, and was mingled with singing and horrible laughter. Floating
about in each vat, we at first saw twenty or thirty human heads. The
women could be distinguished from the men by the manner of dressing the
hair. Each wore a loose woolen gown. Each had a little table floating
before him or her, which he or she pushed about at pleasure. One wore
a hideous mask; another kept diving in the opaque pool and coming up to
blow, like the hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens; some were taking
a lunch from their tables, others playing chess; some sitting on the
benches round the edges, with only heads out of water, as doleful as
owls, while others roamed about, engaged in the game of spattering with
their comrades, and sang and shouted at the top of their voices. The
people in this bath were said to be second class; but they looked as
well and behaved better than those of the first class, whom we saw in
the establishment at our hotel afterward.

It may be a valuable scientific fact, that the water in these vats, in
which people of all sexes, all diseases, and all nations spend so many
hours of the twenty-four, is changed once a day. The temperature at
which the bath is given is ninety-eight. The water is let in at night,
and allowed to cool. At five in the morning, the bathers enter it, and
remain until ten o'clock,--five hours, having breakfast served to them
on the floating tables, “as they sail, as they sail.” They then have a
respite till two, and go in till five. Eight hours in hot water! Nothing
can be more disgusting than the sight of these baths. Gustave Dore
must have learned here how to make those ghostly pictures of the
lost floating about in the Stygian pools, in his illustrations of the
Inferno; and the rocks and cavernous precipices may have enabled him
to complete the picture. On what principle cures are effected in these
filthy vats, I could not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many
diseases meet and mingle in one swashing fluid, they neutralize each
other. It may be that the action is that happily explained by one of
the Hibernian bathmen in an American water-cure establishment. “You see,
sir,” said he, “that the shock of the water unites with the electricity
of the system, and explodes the disease.” I should think that the shock
to one's feeling of decency and cleanliness, at these baths, would
explode any disease in Europe. But, whatever the result may be, I am not
sorry to see so many French and Italians soak themselves once a year.

Out of the bath these people seem to enjoy life. There is a long
promenade, shaded and picturesque, which they take at evening, sometimes
as far as the Ladders, eight of which are fastened, in a shackling
manner, to the perpendicular rocks,--a high and somewhat dangerous
ascent to the village of Albinen, but undertaken constantly by peasants
with baskets on their backs. It is in winter the only mode Leukerbad
has of communicating with the world; and in summer it is the only way of
reaching Albinen, except by a long journey down the Dala and up another
valley and height. The bathers were certainly very lively and social at
table-d'hote, where we had the pleasure of meeting some hundred of
them, dressed. It was presumed that the baths were the subject of the
entertaining conversation; for I read in a charming little work which
sets forth the delights of Leuk, that La poussee forms the staple of
most of the talk. La poussee, or, as this book poetically calls it,
“that daughter of the waters of Loeche,” “that eruption of which we
have already spoken, and which proves the action of the baths upon the
skin,”--becomes the object, and often the end, of all conversation. And
it gives specimens of this pleasant converse, as:

“Comment va votre poussee?”

“Avez-vous la poussee?”

“Je suis en pleine poussee”

“Ma poussee s'est fort bien passee!”

Indeed says this entertaining tract, sans poussee, one would not be able
to hold, at table or in the salon, with a neighbor of either sex,
the least conversation. Further, it is by grace a la poussee that one
arrives at those intimacies which are the characteristics of the baths.
Blessed, then, be La poussee, which renders possible such a high society
and such select and entertaining conversation! Long may the bathers of
Leuk live to soak and converse! In the morning, when we departed for the
ascent of the Gemmi, we passed one of the bathing-houses. I fancied that
a hot steam issued out of the crevices; from within came a discord of
singing and caterwauling; and, as a door swung open, I saw that the
heads floating about on the turbid tide were eating breakfast from the
swimming tables.




OVER THE GEMMI

I spent some time, the evening before, studying the face of the cliff we
were to ascend, to discover the path; but I could only trace its zigzag
beginning. When we came to the base of the rock, we found a way cut, a
narrow path, most of the distance hewn out of the rock, winding upward
along the face of the precipice. The view, as one rises, is of
the break-neck description. The way is really safe enough, even on
mule-back, ascending; but one would be foolhardy to ride down. We met a
lady on the summit who was about to be carried down on a chair; and
she seemed quite to like the mode of conveyance: she had harnessed her
husband in temporarily for one of the bearers, which made it still more
jolly for her. When we started, a cloud of mist hung over the edge of
the rocks. As we rose, it descended to meet us, and sunk below, hiding
the valley and its houses, which had looked like Swiss toys from our
height. When we reached the summit, the mist came boiling up after us,
rising like a thick wall to the sky, and hiding all that great mountain
range, the Vallais Alps, from which we had come, and which we hoped
to see from this point. Fortunately, there were no clouds on the other
side, and we looked down into a magnificent rocky basin, encircled by
broken and overtopping crags and snow-fields, at the bottom of which was
a green lake. It is one of the wildest of scenes.

An hour from the summit, we came to a green Alp, where a herd of cows
were feeding; and in the midst of it were three or four dirty chalets,
where pigs, chickens, cattle, and animals constructed very much like
human beings, lived; yet I have nothing to say against these chalets,
for we had excellent cream there. We had, on the way down, fine views
of the snowy Altels, the Rinderhorn, the Finster-Aarhorn, a deep valley
which enormous precipices guard, but which avalanches nevertheless
invade, and, farther on, of the Blumlisalp, with its summit of
crystalline whiteness. The descent to Kandersteg is very rapid, and in
a rain slippery. This village is a resort for artists for its splendid
views of the range we had crossed: it stands at the gate of the
mountains. From there to the Lake of Thun is a delightful drive,--a rich
country, with handsome cottages and a charming landscape, even if the
pyramidal Niesen did not lift up its seven thousand feet on the edge
of the lake. So, through a smiling land, and in the sunshine after the
rain, we come to Spiez, and find ourselves at a little hotel on the
slope, overlooking town and lake and mountains.

Spiez is not large: indeed, its few houses are nearly all picturesquely
grouped upon a narrow rib of land which is thrust into the lake on
purpose to make the loveliest picture in the world. There is the old
castle, with its many slim spires and its square-peaked roofed tower;
the slender-steepled church; a fringe of old houses below on the lake,
one overhanging towards the point; and the promontory, finished by a
willow drooping to the water. Beyond, in hazy light, over the lucid
green of the lake, are mountains whose masses of rock seem soft and
sculptured. To the right, at the foot of the lake, tower the great snowy
mountains, the cone of the Schreckhorn, the square top of the Eiger, the
Jungfrau, just showing over the hills, and the Blumlisalp rising into
heaven clear and silvery.

What can one do in such a spot, but swim in the lake, lie on the shore,
and watch the passing steamers and the changing light on the mountains?
Down at the wharf, when the small boats put off for the steamer, one can
well entertain himself. The small boat is an enormous thing, after all,
and propelled by two long, heavy sweeps, one of which is pulled, and the
other pushed. The laboring oar is, of course, pulled by a woman; while
her husband stands up in the stern of the boat, and gently dips the
other in a gallant fashion. There is a boy there, whom I cannot make
out,--a short, square boy, with tasseled skull-cap, and a face that
never changes its expression, and never has any expression to change; he
may be older than these hills; he looks old enough to be his own father:
and there is a girl, his counterpart, who might be, judging her age by
her face, the mother of both of them. These solemn old-young people are
quite busy doing nothing about the wharf, and appear to be afflicted
with an undue sense of the responsibility of life. There is a
beer-garden here, where several sober couples sit seriously drinking
their beer. There are some horrid old women, with the parchment skin and
the disagreeable necks. Alone, in a window of the castle, sits a lady
at her work, who might be the countess; only, I am sorry, there is no
countess, nothing but a frau, in that old feudal dwelling. And there is
a foreigner, thinking how queer it all is. And while he sits there, the
melodious bell in the church-tower rings its evening song.




BAVARIA.


AMERICAN IMPATIENCE

We left Switzerland, as we entered it, in a rain,--a kind of double
baptism that may have been necessary, and was certainly not too heavy a
price to pay for the privileges of the wonderful country. The wind blew
freshly, and swept a shower over the deck of the little steamboat,
on board of which we stepped from the shabby little pier and town of
Romanshorn. After the other Swiss lakes, Constance is tame, except at
the southern end, beyond which rise the Appenzell range and the wooded
peaks of the Bavarian hills. Through the dash of rain, and under the
promise of a magnificent rainbow,--rainbows don't mean anything in
Switzerland, and have no office as weather-prophets, except to assure
you, that, as it rains to-day, so it will rain tomorrow,--we skirted the
lower bend of the lake,--and at twilight sailed into the little harbor
of Lindau, through the narrow entrance between the piers, on one of
which is a small lighthouse, and on the other sits upright a gigantic
stone lion,--a fine enough figure of a Bavarian lion, but with a
comical, wide-awake, and expectant expression of countenance, as if
he might bark right out at any minute, and become a dog. Yet in the
moonlight, shortly afterward, the lion looked very grand and stately,
as he sat regarding the softly plashing waves, and the high, drifting
clouds, and the old Roman tower by the bridge which connects the Island
of Lindau with the mainland, and thinking perhaps, if stone lions ever
do think, of the time when Roman galleys sailed on Lake Constance, and
when Lindau was an imperial town with a thriving trade.

On board the little steamer was an American, accompanied by two ladies,
and traveling, I thought, for their gratification, who was very anxious
to get on faster than he was able to do,--though why any one should
desire to go fast in Europe I do not know. One easily falls into the
habit of the country, to take things easily, to go when the slow German
fates will, and not to worry one's self beforehand about times and
connections. But the American was in a fever of impatience, desirous, if
possible, to get on that night. I knew he was from the Land of the Free
by a phrase I heard him use in the cars: he said, “I'll bet a dollar.”
 Yet I must flatter myself that Americans do not always thus betray
themselves. I happened, on the Isle of Wight, to hear a bland landlord
“blow up” his glib-tongued son because the latter had not driven a
stiffer bargain with us for the hire of a carriage round the island.

“Didn't you know they were Americans?” asks the irate father. “I knew it
at once.”

“No,” replies young hopeful: “they didn't say GUESS once.”

And straightway the fawning-innkeeper returns to us, professing, with
his butter-lips, the greatest admiration of all Americans, and the
intensest anxiety to serve them, and all for pure good-will. The English
are even more bloodthirsty at sight of a travelere than the Swiss,
and twice as obsequious. But to return to our American. He had all the
railway timetables that he could procure; and he was busily studying
them, with the design of “getting on.” I heard him say to his
companions, as he ransacked his pockets, that he was a mass of
hotel-bills and timetables. He confided to me afterward, that his wife
and her friend had got it into their heads that they must go both to
Vienna and Berlin. Was Berlin much out of the way in going from Vienna
to Paris? He said they told him it was n't. At any rate, he must
get round at such a date: he had no time to spare. Then, besides the
slowness of getting on, there were the trunks. He lost a trunk in
Switzerland, and consumed a whole day in looking it up. While the
steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout porters came
on board, and shouldered his baggage to take it ashore. To his
remonstrances in English they paid no heed; and it was some time before
they could be made to understand that the trunks were to go on to
Lindau. “There,” said he, “I should have lost my trunks. Nobody
understands what I tell them: I can't get any information.” Especially
was he unable to get any information as to how to “get on.” I confess
that the restless American almost put me into a fidget, and revived
the American desire to “get on,” to take the fast trains, make all the
connections,--in short, in the handsome language of the great West,
to “put her through.” When I last saw our traveler, he was getting his
luggage through the custom-house, still undecided whether to push on
that night at eleven o'clock. But I forgot all about him and his hurry
when, shortly after, we sat at the table-d'hote at the hotel, and the
sedate Germans lit their cigars, some of them before they had finished
eating, and sat smoking as if there were plenty of leisure for
everything in this world.




A CITY OF COLOR

After a slow ride, of nearly eight hours, in what, in Germany, is called
an express train, through a rain and clouds that hid from our view the
Tyrol and the Swabian mountains, over a rolling, pleasant country,
past pretty little railway station-houses, covered with vines, gay
with flowers in the windows, and surrounded with beds of flowers, past
switchmen in flaming scarlet jackets, who stand at the switches and
raise the hand to the temple, and keep it there, in a military salute,
as we go by, we come into old Augsburg, whose Confession is not so fresh
in our minds as it ought to be. Portions of the ancient wall remain, and
many of the towers; and there are archways, picturesquely opening from
street to street, under several of which we drive on our way to the
Three Moors, a stately hostelry and one of the oldest in Germany.

It stood here in the year 1500; and the room is still shown, unchanged
since then, in which the rich Count Fugger entertained Charles V. The
chambers are nearly all immense. That in which we are lodged is
large enough for Queen Victoria; indeed, I am glad to say that her
sleeping-room at St. Cloud was not half so spacious. One feels either
like a count, or very lonesome, to sit down in a lofty chamber, say
thirty-five feet square, with little furniture, and historical and
tragical life-size figures staring at one from the wall-paper. One
fears that they may come down in the deep night, and stand at the
bedside,--those narrow, canopied beds there in the distance, like the
marble couches in the cathedral. It must be a fearful thing to be a
royal person, and dwell in a palace, with resounding rooms and naked,
waxed, inlaid floors. At the Three Moors one sees a visitors' book,
begun in 1800, which contains the names of many noble and great people,
as well as poets and doctors and titled ladies, and much sentimental
writing in French. It is my impression, from an inspection of the book,
that we are the first untitled visitors.

The traveler cannot but like Augsburg at once, for its quaint houses,
colored so diversely and yet harmoniously. Remains of its former
brilliancy yet exist in the frescoes on the outside of the buildings,
some of which are still bright in color, though partially defaced. Those
on the House of Fugger have been restored, and are very brave pictures.
These frescoes give great animation and life to the appearance of a
street, and I am glad to see a taste for them reviving. Augsburg must
have been very gay with them two and three hundred years ago, when,
also, it was the home of beautiful women of the middle class, who
married princes. We went to see the house in which lived the beautiful
Agnes Bernauer, daughter of a barber, who married Duke Albert III. of
Bavaria. The house was nought, as old Samuel Pepys would say, only a
high stone building, in a block of such; but it is enough to make a
house attractive for centuries if a pretty woman once looks out of its
latticed windows, as I have no doubt Agnes often did when the duke and
his retinue rode by in clanking armor.

But there is no lack of reminders of old times. The cathedral, which was
begun before the Christian era could express its age with four figures,
has two fine portals, with quaint carving, and bronze doors of very old
work, whereon the story of Eve and the serpent is literally given,--a
representation of great theological, if of small artistic value. And
there is the old clock and watch tower, which for eight hundred years
has enabled the Augsburgers to keep the time of day and to look out over
the plain for the approach of an enemy. The city is full of fine
bronze fountains some of them of very elaborate design, and adding a
convenience and a beauty to the town which American cities wholly want.
In one quarter of the town is the Fuggerei, a little city by itself,
surrounded by its own wall, the gates of which are shut at night, with
narrow streets and neat little houses. It was built by Hans Jacob
Fugger the Rich, as long ago as 1519, and is still inhabited by indigent
Roman-Catholic families, according to the intention of its founder. In
the windows were lovely flowers. I saw in the street several of those
mysterious, short, old women,--so old and yet so little, all body and
hardly any legs, who appear to have grown down into the ground with
advancing years.

It happened to be a rainy day, and cold, on the 30th of July, when
we left Augsburg; and the flat fields through which we passed were
uninviting under the gray light. Large flocks of geese were feeding on
the windy plains, tended by boys and women, who are the living fences
of this country. I no longer wonder at the number of feather-beds at
the inns, under which we are apparently expected to sleep even in the
warmest nights. Shepherds with the regulation crooks also were watching
herds of sheep. Here and there a cluster of red-roofed houses were
huddled together into a village, and in all directions rose tapering
spires. Especially we marked the steeple of Blenheim, where Jack
Churchill won the name for his magnificent country-seat, early in the
eighteenth century. All this plain where the silly geese feed has been
marched over and fought over by armies time and again. We effect the
passage of, the Danube without difficulty, and on to Harburg, a little
town of little red houses, inhabited principally by Jews, huddled
under a rocky ridge, upon the summit of which is a picturesque medieval
castle, with many towers and turrets, in as perfect preservation as when
feudal flags floated over it. And so on, slowly, with long stops at many
stations, to give opportunity, I suppose, for the honest passengers to
take in supplies of beer and sausages, to Nuremberg.




A CITY LIVING ON THE PAST

Nuremberg, or Nurnberg, was built, I believe, about the beginning of
time. At least, in an old black-letter history of the city which I have
seen, illustrated with powerful wood-cuts, the first representation
is that of the creation of the world, which is immediately followed
by another of Nuremberg. No one who visits it is likely to dispute its
antiquity. “Nobody ever goes to Nuremberg but Americans,” said a cynical
British officer at Chamouny; “but they always go there. I never saw
an American who had n't been or was not going to Nuremberg.” Well, I
suppose they wish to see the oldest-looking, and, next to a true Briton
on his travels, the oddest thing on the Continent. The city lives in the
past still, and on its memories, keeping its old walls and moat entire,
and nearly fourscore wall-towers, in stern array. But grass grows in
the moat, fruit trees thrive there, and vines clamber on the walls. One
wanders about in the queer streets with the feeling of being transported
back to the Middle Ages; but it is difficult to reproduce the impression
on paper. Who can describe the narrow and intricate ways; the odd
houses with many little gables; great roofs breaking out from eaves to
ridgepole, with dozens of dormer-windows; hanging balconies of stone,
carved and figure-beset, ornamented and frescoed fronts; the archways,
leading into queer courts and alleys, and out again into broad streets;
the towers and fantastic steeples; and the many old bridges, with
obelisks and memorials of triumphal entries of conquerors and princes?

The city, as I said, lives upon the memory of what it has been, and
trades upon relics of its former fame. What it would have been without
Albrecht Durer, and Adam Kraft the stone-mason, and Peter Vischer the
bronze-worker, and Viet Stoss who carved in wood, and Hans Sachs the
shoemaker and poet-minstrel, it is difficult to say. Their statues are
set up in the streets; their works still live in the churches and city
buildings,--pictures, and groups in stone and wood; and their statues,
in all sorts of carving, are reproduced, big and little, in all the
shop-windows, for sale. So, literally, the city is full of the memory
of them; and the business of the city, aside from its manufactory of
endless, curious toys, seems to consist in reproducing them and their
immortal works to sell to strangers.

Other cities project new things, and grow with a modern impetus:
Nuremberg lives in the past, and traffics on its ancient reputation. Of
course, we went to see the houses where these old worthies lived, and
the works of art they have left behind them,--things seen and described
by everybody. The stone carving about the church portals and on side
buttresses is inexpressibly quaint and naive. The subjects are sacred;
and with the sacred is mingled the comic, here as at Augsburg, where
over one portal of the cathedral, with saints and angels, monkeys
climb and gibber. A favorite subject is that of our Lord praying in the
Garden, while the apostles, who could not watch one hour, are sleeping
in various attitudes of stony comicality. All the stone-cutters seem to
have tried their chisels on this group, and there are dozens of
them. The wise and foolish virgins also stand at the church doors in
time-stained stone,--the one with a perked-up air of conscious virtue,
and the other with a penitent dejection that seems to merit better
treatment. Over the great portal of St. Lawrence--a magnificent
structure, with lofty twin spires and glorious rosewindow is carved “The
Last Judgment.” Underneath, the dead are climbing out of their stone
coffins; above sits the Judge, with the attending angels. On the right
hand go away the stiff, prim saints, in flowing robes, and with palms
and harps, up steps into heaven, through a narrow door which St. Peter
opens for them; while on the left depart the wicked, with wry faces and
distorted forms, down into the stone flames, towards which the Devil is
dragging them by their stony hair.

The interior of the Church of St. Lawrence is richer than any other I
remember, with its magnificent pillars of dark red stone, rising and
foliating out to form the roof; its splendid windows of stained glass,
glowing with sacred story; a high gallery of stone entirely round the
choir, and beautiful statuary on every column. Here, too, is the famous
Sacrament House of honest old Adam Kraft, the most exquisite thing I
ever saw in stone. The color is light gray; and it rises beside one of
the dark, massive pillars, sixty-four feet, growing to a point, which
then strikes the arch of the roof, and there curls up like a vine to
avoid it. The base is supported by the kneeling figures of Adam Kraft
and two fellow-workmen, who labored on it for four years. Above is
the Last Supper, Christ blessing little children, and other beautiful
tableaux in stone. The Gothic spire grows up and around these, now and
then throwing out graceful tendrils, like a vine, and seeming to
be rather a living plant than inanimate stone. The faithful artist
evidently had this feeling for it; for, as it grew under his hands, he
found that it would strike the roof, or he must sacrifice something of
its graceful proportion. So his loving and daring genius suggested the
happy design of letting it grow to its curving, graceful completeness.

He who travels by a German railway needs patience and a full haversack.
Time is of no value. The rate of speed of the trains is so slow, that
one sometimes has a desire to get out and walk, and the stoppages at
the stations seem eternal; but then we must remember that it is a long
distance to the bottom of a great mug of beer. We left Lindau on one of
the usual trains at half-past five in the morning, and reached Augsburg
at one o'clock in the afternoon: the distance cannot be more than a
hundred miles. That is quicker than by diligence, and one has leisure
to see the country as he jogs along. There is nothing more sedate than
a German train in motion; nothing can stand so dead still as a German
train at a station. But there are express trains.

We were on one from Augsburg to Nuremberg, and I think must have run
twenty miles an hour. The fare on the express trains is one fifth higher
than on the others. The cars are all comfortable; and the officials,
who wear a good deal of uniform, are much more civil and obliging than
officials in a country where they do not wear uniforms. So, not swiftly,
but safely and in good-humor, we rode to the capital of Bavaria.




OUTSIDE ASPECTS OF MUNICH

I saw yesterday, on the 31st of August, in the English Garden, dead
leaves whirling down to the ground, a too evident sign that the summer
weather is going. Indeed, it has been sour, chilly weather for a week
now, raining a little every day, and with a very autumn feeling in
the air. The nightly concerts in the beer-gardens must have shivering
listeners, if the bands do not, as many of them do, play within doors.
The line of droschke drivers, in front of the post-office colonnade,
hide the red facings of their coats under long overcoats, and stand in
cold expectancy beside their blanketed horses, which must need twice
the quantity of black-bread in this chilly air; for the horses here eat
bread, like people. I see the drivers every day slicing up the black
loaves, and feeding them, taking now and then a mouthful themselves,
wetting it down with a pull from the mug of beer that stands within
reach. And lastly (I am still speaking of the weather), the gay military
officers come abroad in long cloaks, to some extent concealing their
manly forms and smart uniforms, which I am sure they would not do,
except under the pressure of necessity.

Yet I think this raw weather is not to continue. It is only a rough
visit from the Tyrol, which will give place to kinder influences. We
came up here from hot Switzerland at the end of July, expecting to find
Munich a furnace. It will be dreadful in Munich everybody said. So we
left Luzerne, where it was warm, not daring to stay till the expected
rival sun, Victoria of England, should make the heat overpowering. But
the first week of August in Munich it was delicious weather,--clear,
sparkling, bracing air, with no chill in it and no languor in it, just
as you would say it ought to be on a high, gravelly plain, seventeen
hundred feet above the sea. Then came a week of what the Muncheners call
hot weather, with the thermometer up to eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and
the white wide streets and gray buildings in a glare of light; since
then, weather of the most uncertain sort.

Munich needs the sunlight. Not that it cannot better spare it than grimy
London; for its prevailing color is light gray, and its many-tinted and
frescoed fronts go far to relieve the most cheerless day. Yet Munich
attempts to be an architectural reproduction of classic times; and, in
order to achieve any success in this direction, it is necessary to have
the blue heavens and golden sunshine of Greece. The old portion of
the city has some remains of the Gothic, and abounds in archways and
rambling alleys, that suddenly become broad streets and then again
contract to the width of an alderman, and portions of the old wall
and city gates; old feudal towers stand in the market-place, and faded
frescoes on old clock-faces and over archways speak of other days of
splendor.

But the Munich of to-day is as if built to order,--raised in a day
by the command of one man. It was the old King Ludwig I., whose
flower-wreathed bust stands in these days in the vestibule of the
Glyptothek, in token of his recent death, who gave the impulse for all
this, though some of the best buildings and streets in the city
have been completed by his successors. The new city is laid out on a
magnificent scale of distances, with wide streets, fine, open squares,
plenty of room for gardens, both public and private; and the art
buildings and art monuments are well distributed; in fact, many a
stately building stands in such isolation that it seems to ask
every passer what it was put there for. Then, again, some of the new
adornments lack fitness of location or purpose. At the end of the broad,
monotonous Ludwig Strasse, and yet not at the end, for the road runs
straight on into the flat country between rows of slender trees, stands
the Siegesthor, or Gate of Victory, an imitation of the Constantine
arch at Rome. It is surmounted by a splendid group in bronze, by
Schwanthaler, Bavaria in her war-chariot, drawn by four lions; and it is
in itself, both in its proportions and its numerous sculptural figures
and bas-reliefs, a fine recognition of the valor “of the Bavarian army,”
 to whom it is erected. Yet it is so dwarfed by its situation, that it
seems to have been placed in the middle of the street as an obstruction.
A walk runs on each side of it. The Propylaeum, another magnificent
gateway, thrown across the handsome Brienner Strasse, beyond the
Glyptothek, is an imitation of that on the Acropolis at Athens. It has
fine Doric columns on the outside, and Ionic within, and the pediment
groups are bas-reliefs, by Schwanthaler, representing scenes in modern
Greek history. The passageways for carriages are through the side
arches; and thus the “sidewalk” runs into the center of the street, and
foot-passers must twice cross the carriage-drive in going through the
gate. Such things as these give one the feeling that art has been forced
beyond use in Munich; and it is increased when one wanders through
the new churches, palaces, galleries, and finds frescoes so prodigally
crowded out of the way, and only occasionally opened rooms so overloaded
with them, and not always of the best, as to sacrifice all effect, and
leave one with the sense that some demon of unrest has driven painters
and sculptors and plasterers, night and day, to adorn the city at a
stroke; at least, to cover it with paint and bedeck it with marbles, and
to do it at once, leaving nothing for the sweet growth and blossoming of
time.

You see, it is easy to grumble, and especially in a cheerful, open,
light, and smiling city, crammed with works Of art, ancient and modern,
its architecture a study of all styles, and its foaming beer, said by
antiquarians to be a good deal better than the mead drunk in Odin's
halls, only seven and a half kreuzers the quart. Munich has so much,
that it, of course, contains much that can be criticised. The long, wide
Ludwig Strasse is a street of palaces,--a street built up by the old
king, and regarded by him with great pride. But all the buildings are
in the Romanesque style,--a repetition of one another to a monotonous
degree: only at the lower end are there any shops or shop-windows, and
a more dreary promenade need not be imagined. It has neither shade nor
fountains; and on a hot day you can see how the sun would pour into it,
and blind the passers. But few ever walk there at any time. A street
that leads nowhere, and has no gay windows, does not attract. Toward
the lower end, in the Odeon Platz, is the equestrian statue of Ludwig,
a royally commanding figure, with a page on either side. The street is
closed (so that it flows off on either side into streets of handsome
shops) by the Feldherrnhalle, Hall of the Generals, an imitation of the
beautiful Loggia dei Lanzi, at Florence, that as yet contains only two
statues, which seem lost in it. Here at noon, with parade of infantry,
comes a military band to play for half an hour; and there are always
plenty of idlers to listen to them. In the high arcade a colony of doves
is domesticated; and I like to watch them circling about and wheeling
round the spires of the over-decorated Theatine church opposite, and
perching on the heads of the statues on the facade.

The royal palace, near by, is a huddle of buildings and courts, that I
think nobody can describe or understand, built at different times and in
imitation of many styles. The front, toward the Hof Garden, a grassless
square of small trees, with open arcades on two sides for shops, and
partially decorated with frescoes of landscapes and historical subjects,
is “a building of festive halls,” a facade eight hundred feet long, in
the revived Italian style, and with a fine Ionic porch. The color is the
royal, dirty yellow.

On the Max Joseph Platz, which has a bronze statue of King Max, a seated
figure, and some elaborate bas-reliefs, is another front of the palace,
the Konigsbau, an imitation, not fully carried out, of the Pitti Palace,
at Florence. Between these is the old Residenz, adorned with fountain
groups and statues in bronze. On another side are the church and theater
of the Residenz. The interior of this court chapel is dazzling in
appearance: the pillars are, I think, imitation of variegated marble;
the sides are imitation of the same; the vaulting is covered with rich
frescoes on gold ground. The whole effect is rich, but it is not at all
sacred. Indeed, there is no church in Munich, except the old cathedral,
the Frauenkirche, with its high Gothic arches, stained windows, and
dusty old carvings, that gives one at all the sort of feeling that it is
supposed a church should give. The court chapel interior is boastingly
said to resemble St. Mark's, in Venice.

You see how far imitation of the classic and Italian is carried here
in Munich; so, as I said, the buildings need the southern sunlight.
Fortunately, they get the right quality much of the time. The
Glyptothek, a Grecian structure of one story, erected to hold the
treasures of classic sculpture that King Ludwig collected, has a
beautiful Ionic porch and pediment. On the outside are niches filled
with statues. In the pure sunshine and under a deep blue sky, its white
marble glows with an almost ethereal beauty. Opposite stands another
successful imitation of the Grecian style of architecture,--a building
with a Corinthian porch, also of white marble. These, with the
Propylaeum, before mentioned, come out wonderfully against a blue sky.
A few squares distant is the Pinakothek, with its treasures of old
pictures, and beyond it the New Pinakothek, containing works of modern
artists. Its exterior is decorated with frescoes, from designs by
Kaulbach: these certainly appear best in a sparkling light; though I am
bound to say that no light can make very much of them.

Yet Munich is not all imitation. Its finest street, the Maximilian,
built by the late king of that name, is of a novel and wholly modern
style of architecture, not an imitation, though it may remind some
of the new portions of Paris. It runs for three quarters of a mile,
beginning with the postoffice and its colonnades, with frescoes on
one side, and the Hof Theater, with its pediment frescoes, the largest
opera-house in Germany, I believe; with stately buildings adorned with
statues, and elegant shops, down to the swift-flowing Isar, which is
spanned by a handsome bridge; or rather by two bridges, for the Isar
is partly turned from its bed above, and made to turn wheels, and drive
machinery. At the lower end the street expands into a handsome platz,
with young shade trees, plats of grass, and gay beds of flowers. I look
out on it as I write; and I see across the Isar the college building
begun by Maximilian for the education of government officers; and I
see that it is still unfinished, indeed, a staring mass of brick, with
unsightly scaffolding and gaping windows. Money was left to complete
it; but the young king, who does not care for architecture, keeps only a
mason or two on the brick-work, and an artist on the exterior frescoes.
At this rate, the Cologne Cathedral will be finished and decay before
this is built. On either side of it, on the elevated bank of the river,
stretch beautiful grounds, with green lawns, fine trees, and well-kept
walks.

Not to mention the English Garden, in speaking of the outside aspects of
the city, would be a great oversight. It was laid out originally by the
munificent American, Count Rumford, and is called English, I suppose,
because it is not in the artificial Continental style. Paris has nothing
to compare with it for natural beauty,--Paris, which cannot let a tree
grow, but must clip it down to suit French taste. It is a noble park
four miles in length, and perhaps a quarter of that in width,--a park of
splendid old trees, grand, sweeping avenues, open glades of free-growing
grass, with delicious, shady walks, charming drives and rivers of water.
For the Isar is trained to flow through it in two rapid streams, under
bridges and over rapids, and by willow-hung banks. There is not wanting
even a lake; and there is, I am sorry to say, a temple on a mound, quite
in the classic style, from which one can see the sun set behind the many
spires of Munich. At the Chinese Tower two military bands play every
Saturday evening in the summer; and thither the carriages drive, and the
promenaders assemble there, between five and six o'clock; and while
the bands play, the Germans drink beer, and smoke cigars, and the
fashionably attired young men walk round and round the circle, and the
smart young soldiers exhibit their handsome uniforms, and stride about
with clanking swords.

We felicitated ourselves that we should have no lack of music when we
came to Munich. I think we have not; though the opera has only just
begun, and it is the vacation of the Conservatoire. There are first the
military bands: there is continually a parade somewhere, and the
streets are full of military music, and finely executed too. Then of
beer-gardens there is literally no end, and there are nightly concerts
in them. There are two brothers Hunn, each with his band, who, like the
ancient Huns, have taken the city; and its gardens are given over to
their unending waltzes, polkas, and opera medleys. Then there is the
church music on Sundays and holidays, which is largely of a military
character; at least, has the aid of drums and trumpets, and the whole
band of brass. For the first few days of our stay here we had rooms near
the Maximilian Platz and the Karl's Thor. I think there was some sort of
a yearly fair in progress, for the great platz was filled with temporary
booths: a circus had set itself up there, and there were innumerable
side-shows and lottery-stands; and I believe that each little shanty
and puppet-show had its band or fraction of a band, for there was never
heard such a tooting and blowing and scraping, such a pounding and
dinning and slang-whanging, since the day of stopping work on the Tower
of Babel. The circus band confined itself mostly to one tune; and as
it went all day long, and late into the night, we got to know it quite
well; at least, the bass notes of it, for the lighter tones came to us
indistinctly. You know that blurt, blurt, thump, thump, dissolute sort
of caravan tune. That was it.

The English Cafe was not far off, and there the Hunns and others also
made night melodious. The whole air was one throb and thrump. The only
refuge from it was to go into one of the gardens, and give yourself over
to one band. And so it was possible to have delightful music, and see
the honest Germans drink beer, and gossip in friendly fellowship and
with occasional hilarity. But music we had, early and late. We expected
quiet in our present quarters. The first morning, at six o'clock, we
were startled by the resonant notes of a military band, that set
the echoes flying between the houses, and a regiment of cavalry went
clanking down the street. But that is a not unwelcome morning serenade
and reveille. Not so agreeable is the young man next door, who gives
hilarious concerts to his friends, and sings and bangs his piano all day
Sunday; nor the screaming young woman opposite. Yet it is something to
be in an atmosphere of music.




THE MILITARY LIFE OF MUNICH

This morning I was awakened early by the strains of a military band. It
was a clear, sparkling morning, the air full of life, and yet the sun
showing its warm, southern side. As the mounted musicians went by, the
square was quite filled with the clang of drum and trumpet, which became
fainter and fainter, and at length was lost on the ear beyond the Isar,
but preserved the perfection of time and the precision of execution for
which the military bands of the city are remarkable. After the band came
a brave array of officers in bright uniform, upon horses that pranced
and curveted in the sunshine; and the regiment of cavalry followed, rank
on rank of splendidly mounted men, who ride as if born to the saddle.
The clatter of hoofs on the pavement, the jangle of bit and saber,
the occasional word of command, the onward sweep of the well-trained
cavalcade, continued for a long time, as if the lovely morning had
brought all the cavalry in the city out of barracks. But this is an
almost daily sight in Munich. One regiment after another goes over the
river to the drill-ground. In the hot mornings I used quite to pity
the troopers who rode away in the glare in scorching brazen helmets and
breastplates. But only a portion of the regiments dress in that absurd
manner. The most wear a simple uniform, and look very soldierly. The
horses are almost invariably fine animals, and I have not seen such
riders in Europe. Indeed, everybody in Munich who rides at all rides
well. Either most of the horsemen have served in the cavalry, or
horsemanship, that noble art “to witch the world,” is in high repute
here.

Speaking of soldiers, Munich is full of them. There are huge caserns
in every part of the city, crowded with troops. This little kingdom of
Bavaria has a hundred and twenty thousand troops of the line. Every man
is obliged to serve in the army continuously three years; and every man
between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five must go with his regiment
into camp or barrack several weeks in each year, no matter if the
harvest rots in the field, or the customers desert the uncared-for shop.
The service takes three of the best years of a young man's life. Most of
the soldiers in Munich are young one meets hundreds of mere boys in the
uniform of officers. I think every seventh man you meet is a soldier.
There must be between fifteen and twenty thousand troops quartered in
the city now. The young officers are everywhere, lounging in the
cafes, smoking and sipping coffee, on all the public promenades, in the
gardens, the theaters, the churches. And most of them are fine-looking
fellows, good figures in elegantly fitting and tasteful uniforms; but
they do like to show their handsome forms and hear their sword-scabbards
rattle on the pavement as they stride by. The beer-gardens are full of
the common soldiers, who empty no end of quart mugs in alternate pulls
from the same earthen jug, with the utmost jollity and good fellowship.
On the street, salutes between officers and men are perpetual,
punctiliously given and returned,--the hand raised to the temple, and
held there for a second. A young gallant, lounging down the Theatiner or
the Maximilian Strasse, in his shining and snug uniform, white kids, and
polished boots, with jangling spurs and the long sword clanking on the
walk, raising his hand ever and anon in condescending salute to a lower
in rank, or with affable grace to an equal, is a sight worth beholding,
and for which one cannot be too grateful. We have not all been created
with the natural shape for soldiers, but we have eyes given us that we
may behold them.

Bavaria fought, you know, on the wrong side at Sadowa; but the result of
the war left her in confederation with Prussia. The company is getting
to be very distasteful, for Austria is at present more liberal than
Prussia. Under Prussia one must either be a soldier or a slave, the
democrats of Munich say. Bavaria has the most liberal constitution in
Germany, except that of Wurtemberg, and the people are jealous of any
curtailment of liberty. It seems odd that anybody should look to the
house of Hapsburg for liberality. The attitude of Prussia compels all
the little states to keep up armies, which eat up their substance, and
burden the people with taxes. This is the more to be regretted now,
when Bavaria is undergoing a peaceful revolution, and throwing off the
trammels of galling customs in other respects.




THE EMANCIPATION OF MUNICH

The 1st of September saw go into complete effect the laws enacted in
1867, which have inaugurated the greatest changes in business and social
life, and mark an era in the progress of the people worthy of fetes
and commemorative bronzes. We heard the other night at the opera-house
“William Tell” unmutilated. For many years this liberty-breathing opera
was not permitted to be given in Bavaria, except with all the life of
it cut out. It was first presented entire by order of young King Ludwig,
who, they say, was induced to command its unmutilated reproduction at
the solicitation of Richard Wagner, who used to be, and very likely is
now, a “Red,” and was banished from Saxony in 1848 for fighting on the
people's side of a barricade in Dresden. It is the fashion to say of
the young king, that he pays no heed to the business of the kingdom. You
hear that the handsome boy cares only for music and horseback exercise:
he plays much on the violin, and rides away into the forest attended by
only one groom, and is gone for days together. He has composed an opera,
which has not yet been put on the stage. People, when they speak of him,
tap their foreheads with one finger. But I don't believe it. The same
liberality that induced him, years ago, to restore “William Tell” to the
stage has characterized the government under him ever since.

Formerly no one could engage in any trade or business in Bavaria without
previous examination before, and permission from, a magistrate. If a boy
wished to be a baker, for instance, he had first to serve four years
of apprenticeship. If then he wished to set up business for himself, he
must get permission, after passing an examination. This permission could
rarely be obtained; for the magistrate usually decided that there were
already as many bakers as the town needed. His only other resource was
to buy out an existing business, and this usually costs a good deal.
When he petitioned for the privilege of starting a bakery, all the
bakers protested. And he could not even buy out a stand, and carry it
on, without strict examination as to qualifications. This was the case
in every trade. And to make matters worse, a master workman could not
employ a journeyman out of his shop; so that, if a journeyman could
not get a regular situation, he had no work. Then there were endless
restrictions upon the manufacture and sale of articles: one person
could make only one article, or one portion of an article; one might
manufacture shoes for women, but not for men; he might make an article
in the shop and sell it, but could not sell it if any one else made it
outside, or vice versa.

Nearly all this mass of useless restriction on trades and business,
which palsied all effort in Bavaria, is removed. Persons are free
to enter into any business they like. The system of apprenticeship
continues, but so modified as not to be oppressive; and all trades are
left to regulate themselves by natural competition. Already Munich has
felt the benefit of the removal of these restrictions, which for nearly
a year has been anticipated, in a growth of population and increased
business.

But the social change is still more important. The restrictions upon
marriage were a serious injury to the state. If Hans wished to marry,
and felt himself adequate to the burdens and responsibilities of the
double state, and the honest fraulein was quite willing to undertake
its trials and risks with him, it was not at all enough that in the
moonlighted beergarden, while the band played, and they peeled the
stinging radish, and ate the Switzer cheese, and drank from one mug,
she allowed his arm to steal around her stout waist. All this love and
fitness went for nothing in the eyes of the magistrate, who referred the
application for permission to marry to his associate advisers, and they
inquired into the applicant's circumstances; and if, in their opinion,
he was not worth enough money to support a wife properly, permission was
refused for him to try. The consequence was late marriages, and fewer
than there ought to be, and other ill results. Now the matrimonial gates
are lifted high, and the young man has not to ask permission of any
snuffy old magistrate to marry. I do not hear that the consent of the
maidens is more difficult to obtain than formerly.

No city of its size is more prolific of pictures than Munich. I do not
know how all its artists manage to live, but many of them count upon the
American public. I hear everywhere that the Americans like this, and do
not like that; and I am sorry to say that some artists, who have done
better things, paint professedly to suit Americans, and not to express
their own conceptions of beauty. There is one who is now quite devoted
to dashing off rather lamp-blacky moonlights, because, he says, the
Americans fancy that sort of thing. I see one of his smirchy pictures
hanging in a shop window, awaiting the advent of the citizen of the
United States. I trust that no word of mine will injure the sale of the
moonlights. There are some excellent figure-painters here, and one can
still buy good modern pictures for reasonable prices.




FASHION IN THE STREETS

Was there ever elsewhere such a blue, transparent sky as this here
in Munich? At noon, looking up to it from the street, above the gray
houses, the color and depth are marvelous. It makes a background for the
Grecian art buildings and gateways, that would cheat a risen Athenian
who should see it into the belief that he was restored to his beautiful
city. The color holds, too, toward sundown, and seems to be poured, like
something solid, into the streets of the city.

You should see then the Maximilian Strasse, when the light floods the
platz where Maximilian in bronze sits in his chair, illuminates the
frescoes on the pediments of the Hof Theater, brightens the Pompeian
red under the colonnade of the post-office, and streams down the gay
thoroughfare to the trees and statues in front of the National Museum,
and into the gold-dusted atmosphere beyond the Isar. The street is
filled with promenaders: strangers who saunter along with the red book
in one hand,--a man and his wife, the woman dragged reluctantly past the
windows of fancy articles, which are “so cheap,” the man breaking his
neck to look up at the buildings, especially at the comical heads and
figures in stone that stretch out from the little oriel-windows in the
highest story of the Four Seasons Hotel, and look down upon the moving
throng; Munich bucks in coats of velvet, swinging light canes, and
smoking cigars through long and elaborately carved meerschaum holders;
Munich ladies in dresses of that inconvenient length that neither sweeps
the pavement nor clears it; peasants from the Tyrol, the men in black,
tight breeches, that button from the knee to the ankle, short jackets
and vests set thickly with round silver buttons, and conical hats with
feathers, and the women in short quilted and quilled petticoats, of
barrel-like roundness from the broad hips down, short waists ornamented
with chains and barbarous brooches of white metal, with the oddest
head-gear of gold and silver heirlooms; students with little red or
green embroidered brimless caps, with the ribbon across the breast, a
folded shawl thrown over one shoulder, and the inevitable switch-cane;
porters in red caps, with a coil of twine about the waist; young fellows
from Bohemia, with green coats, or coats trimmed with green, and green
felt hats with a stiff feather stuck in the side; and soldiers by
the hundreds, of all ranks and organizations; common fellows in blue,
staring in at the shop windows, officers in resplendent uniforms,
clanking their swords as they swagger past. Now and then, an elegant
equipage dashes by,--perhaps the four horses of the handsome young
king, with mounted postilions and outriders, or a liveried carriage of
somebody born with a von before his name. As the twilight comes on, the
shutters of the shop windows are put up. It is time to go to the opera,
for the curtain rises at half-past six, or to the beer-gardens, where
delicious music marks, but does not interrupt, the flow of excellent
beer.

Or you may if you choose, and I advise you to do it, walk at the same
hour in the English Garden, which is but a step from the arcades of the
Hof Garden,--but a step to the entrance, whence you may wander for miles
and miles in the most enchanting scenery. Art has not been allowed here
to spoil nature. The trees, which are of magnificent size, are left to
grow naturally;--the Isar, which is turned into it, flows in more
than one stream with its mountain impetuosity; the lake is gracefully
indented and overhung with trees, and presents ever-changing aspects of
loveliness as you walk along its banks; there are open, sunny meadows,
in which single giant trees or splendid groups of them stand, and walks
without end winding under leafy Gothic arches. You know already that
Munich owes this fine park to the foresight and liberality of an
American Tory, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford), born in Rumford, Vt.,
who also relieved Munich of beggars.

I have spoken of the number of soldiers in Munich. For six weeks the
Landwehr, or militia, has been in camp in various parts of Bavaria.
There was a grand review of them the other day on the Field of Mars, by
the king, and many of them have now gone home. They strike an unmilitary
man as a very efficient body of troops. So far as I could see, they were
armed with breech-loading rifles. There is a treaty by which Bavaria
agreed to assimilate her military organization to that of Prussia. It is
thus that Bismarck is continually getting ready. But if the Landwehr
is gone, there are yet remaining troops enough of the line. Their chief
use, so far as it concerns me, is to make pageants in the streets, and
to send their bands to play at noon in the public squares. Every day,
when the sun shines down upon the mounted statue of Ludwig I., in front
of the Odeon, a band plays in an open Loggia, and there is always a
crowd of idlers in the square to hear it. Everybody has leisure for that
sort of thing here in Europe; and one can easily learn how to be idle
and let the world wag. They have found out here what is disbelieved
in America,--that the world will continue to turn over once in about
twenty-four hours (they are not accurate as to the time) without their
aid. To return to our soldiers. The cavalry most impresses me; the
men are so finely mounted, and they ride royally. In these sparkling
mornings, when the regiments clatter past, with swelling music and
shining armor, riding away to I know not what adventure and glory, I
confess that I long to follow them. I have long had this desire; and the
other morning, determining to satisfy it, I seized my hat and went after
the prancing procession. I am sorry I did. For, after trudging after
it through street after street, the fine horsemen all rode through an
arched gateway, and disappeared in barracks, to my great disgust; and
the troopers dismounted, and led their steeds into stables.

And yet one never loses a walk here in Munich. I found myself that
morning by the Isar Thor, a restored medieval city gate. The gate is
double, with flanking octagonal towers, inclosing a quadrangle. Upon the
inner wall is a fresco of “The Crucifixion.” Over the outer front is a
representation, in fresco painting, of the triumphal entry into the city
of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria after the battle of Ampfing. On one
side of the gate is a portrait of the Virgin, on gold ground, and on
the other a very passable one of the late Dr. Hawes of Hartford, with
a Pope's hat on. Walking on, I came to another arched gateway and
clock-tower; near it an old church, with a high wall adjoining, whereon
is a fresco of cattle led to slaughter, showing that I am in the
vicinity of the Victual Market; and I enter it through a narrow, crooked
alley. There is nothing there but an assemblage of shabby booths and
fruit-stands, and an ancient stone tower in ruins and overgrown with
ivy.

Leaving this, I came out to the Marian Platz, where stands the column,
with the statue of the Virgin and Child, set up by Maximilian I. in 1638
to celebrate the victory in the battle which established the Catholic
supremacy in Bavaria. It is a favorite praying-place for the lower
classes. Yesterday was a fete day, and the base of the column and half
its height are lost in a mass of flowers and evergreens. In front is
erected an altar with a broad, carpeted platform; and a strip of
the platz before it is inclosed with a railing, within which are
praying-benches. The sun shines down hot; but there are several poor
women kneeling there, with their baskets beside them. I happen along
there at sundown; and there are a score of women kneeling on the hard
stones, outside the railing saying their prayers in loud voices. The
mass of flowers is still sweet and gay and fresh; a fountain with
fantastic figures is flashing near by; the crowd, going home to supper
and beer, gives no heed to the praying; the stolid droschke-drivers
stand listlessly by. At the head of the square is an artillery station,
and a row of cannon frowns on it. On one side is a house with a tablet
in the wall, recording the fact that Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden once
lived in it.

When we came to Munich, the great annual fair was in progress; and the
large Maximilian Platz (not to be confounded with the street of that
name) was filled with booths of cheap merchandise, puppet-shows, lottery
shanties, and all sorts of popular amusements. It was a fine time to
study peasant costumes. The city was crowded with them on Sunday;
and let us not forget that the first visit of the peasants was to the
churches; they invariably attended early mass before they set out upon
the day's pleasure. Most of the churches have services at all hours till
noon, some of them with fine classical and military music. One could not
but be struck with the devotional manner of the simple women, in their
queer costumes, who walked into the gaudy edifices, were absorbed in
their prayers for an hour, and then went away. I suppose they did
not know how odd they looked in their high, round fur hats, or their
fantastic old ornaments, nor that there was anything amiss in bringing
their big baskets into church with them. At least, their simple,
unconscious manner was better than that of many of the city people, some
of whom stare about a good deal, while going through the service, and
stop in the midst of crossings and genuflections to take snuff and pass
it to their neighbors. But there are always present simple and homelike
sort of people, who neither follow the fashions nor look round on them;
respectable, neat old ladies, in the faded and carefully preserved silk
gowns, such as the New England women wear to “meeting.”

No one can help admiring the simplicity, kindliness, and honesty of the
Germans. The universal courtesy and friendliness of manner have a very
different seeming from the politeness of the French. At the hotels in
the country, the landlord and his wife and the servant join in hoping
you will sleep well when you go to bed. The little maid at Heidelberg
who served our meals always went to the extent of wishing us a good
appetite when she had brought in the dinner. Here in Munich the people
we have occasion to address in the street are uniformly courteous. The
shop-keepers are obliging, and rarely servile, like the English. You
are thanked, and punctiliously wished the good-day, whether you purchase
anything or not. In shops tended by women, gentlemen invariably remove
their hats. If you buy only a kreuzer's worth of fruit of an old
woman, she says words that would be, literally translated, “I thank you
beautifully.” With all this, one looks kindly on the childish love the
Germans have for titles. It is, I believe, difficult for the German mind
to comprehend that we can be in good standing at home, unless we have
some title prefixed to our names, or some descriptive phrase added. Our
good landlord, who waits at the table and answers our bell, one of whose
tenants is a living baron, having no title to put on his doorplate under
that of the baron, must needs dub himself “privatier;” and he insists
upon prefixing the name of this unambitious writer with the ennobling
von; and at the least he insists, in common with the tradespeople, that
I am a “Herr Doctor.” The bills of purchases by madame come made out to
“Frau----, well-born.” At a hotel in Heidelberg, where I had registered
my name with that distinctness of penmanship for which newspaper men are
justly conspicuous, and had added to my own name “& wife,” I was not a
little flattered to appear in the reckoning as “Herr Doctor Mamesweise.”




THE GOTTESACKER AND BAVARIAN FUNERALS

To change the subject from gay to grave. The Gottesacker of Munich is
called the finest cemetery in Germany; at least, it surpasses them in
the artistic taste of its monuments. Natural beauty it has none: it is
simply a long, narrow strip of ground inclosed in walls, with straight,
parallel walks running the whole length, and narrow cross-walks; and
yet it is a lovely burial-ground. There are but few trees; but the whole
inclosure is a conservatory of beautiful flowers. Every grave is covered
with them, every monument is surrounded with them. The monuments are
unpretending in size, but there are many fine designs, and many finely
executed busts and statues and allegorical figures, in both marble and
bronze. The place is full of sunlight and color. I noticed that it was
much frequented. In front of every place of sepulcher stands a small urn
for water, with a brush hanging by, with which to sprinkle the
flowers. I saw, also, many women and children coming and going with
watering-pots, so that the flowers never droop for want of care. At the
lower end of the old ground is an open arcade, wherein are some effigies
and busts, and many ancient tablets set into the wall. Beyond this is
the new cemetery, an inclosure surrounded by a high wall of brick, and
on the inside by an arcade. The space within is planted with flowers,
and laid out for the burial of the people; the arcades are devoted to
the occupation of those who can afford costly tombs. Only a small number
of them are yet occupied; there are some good busts and monuments, and
some frescoes on the panels rather more striking for size and color than
for beauty.

Between the two cemeteries is the house for the dead. When I walked
down the long central alle of the old ground, I saw at the farther end,
beyond a fountain, twinkling lights. Coming nearer, I found that they
proceeded from the large windows of a building, which was a part of the
arcade. People were looking in at the windows, going and coming to and
from them continually; and I was prompted by curiosity to look within.
A most unexpected sight met my eye. In a long room, upon elevated biers,
lay people dead: they were so disposed that the faces could be seen; and
there they rested in a solemn repose. Officers in uniform, citizens in
plain dress, matrons and maids in the habits that they wore when living,
or in the white robes of the grave. About most of them were lighted
candles. About all of them were flowers: some were almost covered
with bouquets. There were rows of children, little ones scarce a span
long,--in the white caps and garments of innocence, as if asleep in beds
of flowers. How naturally they all were lying, as if only waiting to be
called! Upon the thumb of every adult was a ring in which a string was
tied that went through a pulley above and communicated with a bell in
the attendant's room. How frightened he would be if the bell should ever
sound, and he should go into that hall of the dead to see who rang! And
yet it is a most wise and humane provision; and many years ago, there
is a tradition, an entombment alive was prevented by it. There are three
rooms in all; and all those who die in Munich must be brought and laid
in one of them, to be seen of all who care to look therein. I suppose
that wealth and rank have some privileges; but it is the law that the
person having been pronounced dead by the physician shall be the same
day brought to the dead-house, and lie there three whole days before
interment.

There is something peculiar in the obsequies of Munich, especially in
the Catholic portion of the population. Shortly after the death, there
is a short service in the courtyard of the house, which, with the
entrance, is hung in costly mourning, if the deceased was rich. The body
is then carried in the car to the dead-house, attended by the priests,
the male members of the family, and a procession of torch-bearers, if
that can be afforded. Three days after, the burial takes place from the
dead-house, only males attending. The women never go to the funeral;
but some days after, of which public notice is given by advertisement,
a public service is held in church, at which all the family are present,
and to which the friends are publicly invited. Funeral obsequies are as
costly here as in America; but everything is here regulated and fixed by
custom. There are as many as five or six classes of funerals recognized.
Those of the first class, as to rank and expense, cost about a thousand
guldens. The second class is divided into six subclasses. The third is
divided into two. The cost of the first of the third class is about four
hundred guldens. The lowest class of those able to have a funeral
costs twenty-five guldens. A gulden is about two francs. There are
no carriages used at the funerals of Catholics, only at those of
Protestants and Jews.

I spoke of the custom of advertising the deaths. A considerable portion
of the daily newspapers is devoted to these announcements, which are
printed in display type, like the advertisements of dry-goods sellers
with you. I will roughly translate one which I happen to see just now.
It reads, “Death advertisement. It has pleased God the Almighty, in his
inscrutable providence, to take away our innermost loved, best husband,
father, grandfather, uncle, brother-in-law, and cousin, Herr---, dyer of
cloth and silk, yesterday night, at eleven o'clock, after three weeks
of severe suffering, having partaken of the holy sacrament, in his
sixty-sixth year, out of this earthly abode of calamity into the better
Beyond. Those who knew his good heart, his great honesty, as well as his
patience in suffering, will know how justly to estimate our grief.” This
is signed by the “deep-grieving survivors,”--the widow, son, daughter,
and daughter-in-law, in the name of the absent relatives. After the name
of the son is written, “Dyer in cloth and silk.” The notice closes with
an announcement of the funeral at the cemetery, and a service at the
church the day after. The advertisement I have given is not uncommon
either for quaintness or simplicity. It is common to engrave upon the
monument the business as well as the title of the departed.




THE OCTOBER FEST THE PEASANTS AND THE KING

On the 11th of October the sun came out, after a retirement of nearly
two weeks. The cause of the appearance was the c

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