 VIII. Wild Life I obtained my first view of the great Mississippi and of the practical working of lynch law at the same time. The night of our advent at Cairo was lit up by the fires of an execution. A negro, it seems, was the owner, or lessee, of an old wharf-boat, which had been moored to the levee of that town, and which he had turned to the uses of a gambling saloon. People who had been enticed into it had never been seen or heard of afterward. The vigilance committee, then governing Cairo, had frequently endeavored to lay hold of the negro and bring him to trial, but he had secret passages from one part of the wharf-boat to the other, by which he always eluded his pursuers. Having no doubt that he was guilty of several murders, the vigilantes on the night of our arrival had come down to the levee, two or three hundred strong, armed, equipped, and determined to make the wretch surrender. In answer to their summons they received nothing but insults from the negro, still out of sight and secure in one of his hiding-places. At a given signal the wharf-boat was set on fire and cut adrift, and as it floated out into the current, the vigilantes surrounded it in small boats with their rifles ready and pointed to prevent the escape of their victim. When the wharf-boat was well into the stream, the negro appeared boldly at the place which, in the middle of all river-craft of that kind, is left open for the reception and discharge of freight. And now a scene occurred so sensationally dramatic, so easily adaptable to the stage of these latter days, that I would not dare to relate it for truth if I had not witnessed it with my own eyes. The negro was not discovered till he had rolled a large keg of powder into the middle of the open space, just mentioned, as he stood in the light of his burning craft. It could be seen by the people in the small boats in the river that he had a cocked musket with the muzzle plunged into the peg of the powder. Then the negro dared them to come on and take him, pouring upon them at the same time such horrible oaths and curses as have rarely come from the lips of man. The small boats kept a proper distance now, their occupants caring only to prevent his escape into the water. As the flames grew thicker around him there the negro stood, floating down into the darkness that enveloped the majestic river, with his cocked musket still in the keg of powder and cursing and defying his executioners. He was game to the last, we heard the explosion down the stream and saw the wharf-boat sink. The next day I spoke with the leader of the band in the small boats, a short, fiery little man with a piercing eye. He said that he had not the heart to shoot the nigger, because he showed such pluck. He even confessed that for the same reason he felt almost sorry for the victim after the explosion had blown him into eternity. We saw indeed a great deal of wildlife in the country we visited, for we steamed thousands of miles on the western and southern rivers. We went, for instance, the entire navigable lengths of the Cumberland and Tennessee. Our advertising agent had a little boat of his own in which he preceded us. The palace and Raymond would sometimes run their noses upon the banks of some of these rivers where there was not a habitation in view, and by the hour of the exhibition the boats and shore would be thronged with people. In some places on the Mississippi, especially in Arkansas, men would come in with pistols sticking out of their coat pockets, or with long bowy knives protruding from the legs of their boots. The manager had provided for these savage people, for every member of the company was armed and, at a given signal, stood on the defensive. We had a giant for a doorkeeper, who was known in one evening to kick downstairs as many as five of these bush-whackers with drawn knives in their hands. There were two other persons, employed ostensibly as ushers, but really to fight the wild man of the rivers. These two gentlemen were members of the New York Prize Ring, one of whom I believe went to England with Heenan at the time of the International Mill, and whose name I saw in a New York paper the other day as the trainer of a pugilistic celebrity of the present time. The honest fellows scorned to use anything but their fists in preserving order, and it is strange, considering the number of deadly weapons drawn on them, that they never received anything worse than a few scratches. Nor did they, indeed, ever leave their antagonists with anything worse than a broken head, except in a solitary case, which befell at a backwards landing on the Upper Mississippi, where a person who had made an unprovoked attack on the boats was left for dead upon the bank, as we pushed out into the stream. We never heard whether he lived or died. Besides these pugilists we had in our company other celebrities, for instance the amiable and gentlemanly David Reed, whose character song of Sally Come Up made such a furror, not long ago in New York, and I believe throughout the country. His picture is to be seen at all the music stores. One other of our company has since had his name and exploits telegraphed to the remotest ends of the earth. I remember to have read of him myself in a little German newspaper on the banks of the Danube. This was Professor Low, the balloonist, laid of the army of the Potomac. I doubt much whether the professor had dipped very deeply into aeronautics at that time. He was an ingenious, odd sort of Yankee with his long hair braided and hanging in two tails down his back. His wife, formerly a Paris danseuse, was my instructor in the Terpsichorian art. By the aid of a little whip, which she insisted was essential to success, she taught me to go through all the posturings and pirouettes of the operatic ballet girls. I was forced often to remonstrate against the ardor with which she applied her whip to a toe or finger of mine that would get perversely out of the line of beauty. Professor Low and Madame, his wife, conducted the performances of the invisible lady, a contrivance that may not be familiar to all my readers. A hollow brass ball with four trumpets protruding from it is suspended inside of a hollow railing. Questions put by the bystanders are answered through a tube by a person in the apartment beneath. The imaginations of the spectators make the sounds seem to issue from the brass ball. It used to be amusing to stand by and listen to the answers of the invisible lady, alias Madame Low, whose English was drolly mixed up with her own vernacular. But if the responses were sometimes unintelligible, this only added to the mystery and success of the brazen oracle. The Professor was passionately fond of game. He was struck with the abundance of turkeys in one of the southern states where we chanced to be, and, throwing his gun across his shoulder, sallied forth to bring some of them down. He returned shortly with two large black birds, which he exhibited about the decks, amid the grins and suppressed laughter of the crew. It was not till the Professor took his game into the kitchen to have it dressed for dinner that he was informed, not only that his birds were not turkeys at all, but that he had been breaking one of the statutes of the State, which prohibits, under pecuniary penalty, the killing of turkey buzzards. The Professor had a young bear, which he bought for twenty dollars at some one of our stopping places. Now this was the most mischievous cub that I ever happened to see, to say nothing of the number of stuffed snakes and pelicans which he devoured, or tore to pieces. The degree of havoc he could make in a trunk of wigs in stage wardrobe was something just simply astounding. I have known him to eat up, or at least cause to vanish, in the space of a single riotous hour, all that was necessary to the artistic make-up of three old men, a half-dozen plantation darkies, and I know not how many shaker women. That was the time when he plundered a large property-box. That bear was chained and whipped, and made sick by the necessary poisons of taxidermy, but he bore all with perfect cheerfulness. Three days after a contest with a stuffed animal he was always more playful than ever. There was something very ludicrous in the good-natured leer he put on when the Professor was experimenting upon some new way of confining him. As soon as the people were well asleep, if the bear chanced to have any curiosity about the contents of a lady's band-box in some remote state-room, or about the quality of the pantry man's supply of sugar, he was always sure to break loose and confiscate on his return any odd pair of pantaloons or boots that a sleeper had unconsciously exposed before retiring. Thus it happened that young Bruin had his enemies. He had his friends, too, and I was one of them, for there was something very lovable about that bear after all. He was so rollicking, and his black hide from the burnished peak of his jolly nose to the end of the stub of his syncopated tail did so seem to gleam in the light of hearty good fellowship. He was especially irresistible when anyone took notice of him in his penal exile, away off in the dim region of the gas machine. Then he would lie over on his young back and invite his friend to a romp in a manner that showed hospitality in every movement of his chubby paws. Or, if in the mood to receive his visitor open-armed, he would rise courteously on his hind feet, his tongue hanging lackadaisically out of one side of his mouth, and his roguish eyes assisting the smile which spread from ear to ear, and he would, in short, look as amiably foolish and sheepish as people are said to look who are about to indulge in a hug. If his chain interfered with him at these receptions, and it often did, he would turn his droll orbs a scant upon it, apparently in the same sort of playful humor that human prisoners so often indulge in at the expense and to the ridicule of their bolts and bars. Indeed, the young rascal always carried a human sympathy with him. By his admirers, at least, some ameliorating circumstance was sure to be found in all his most daring and damaging exploits. There were some, I believe, who tried to excuse even what I shall now have to mention as the crowning atrocity of his life. The plea of his apologists was his manifest freedom from any shade of theological bias, as proved by the calmly ludicrous deliberation of the deed itself. I will not express an opinion, although there is not the least doubt in my mind that the doors of the waxwork cases should have been more securely fastened. I will merely say that there was something very grave and candid with all in his manner when caught in the very act of scalping one of the twelve apostles. This feat aroused his enemies to the highest pitch of indignation, and they clamored for vengeance on Professor Lowe's bear. The Cubs' friends, however, did not desert him in the hour of his evil report, and so, at last, a Guelph and Gibilin division ran through the whole company. The manager, treasurer, cook, pantry man, such gentlemen as had been left to make their breakfast toilets without boots or other more necessary articles of apparel, and all the ladies, even to Madame Lowe herself, were of the anti-bear party. All the performers, except those who had been ravished of wigs and tights, or other miscellaneous pieces of wardrobe, the engineer of the gas machine, which furnished light for the whole establishment, all the prize fighters, and, in a word, all the reckless characters of the two boats, headed by the determined Professor himself, marched, as I may say, figuratively, under the banner of the bear. The factions were about equally divided, and equally impressed with the merit of their respective causes. We of the bear party, however, had one manifest advantage. The captain of the boats, jolly old William McCracken, as fat as he was jolly and as honest as he was fat, was on our side. Such a state of feeling could not, as may be well imagined, exist for any long time among so many people, and in the narrow limits of those two boats, without some act of aggression from one side or the other, and it came. One of the prize fighters, perhaps in simple defiance to the opposition, and perhaps in a burst of honest sympathy with the cub himself, I cannot say which, for he was of my party, perloined from the dressing-room and presented to young Bruin, in his durance, a pair of cast-off pantaloons in which a certain minstrel was in the habit of performing his great act of the comb solo. Of course the actor was indignant, and whether in bodily fear of the prize fighter or believing what he said, maintained that the infernal bear had been loose again, and vowed that he would have his life. The act of the prize fighter was certainly ill-advised and hazardous, not merely to the pantaloons, but to the bear himself. I mention it as only one more instance of the danger in which one stands from his own friends, especially if he chants to be at all prominent in times of great partisan strife. The cub's enemies now clamored more loudly than ever against him, stoutly asserting that chains and gas-rooms were not strong enough to hold him, and the ladies were still more sure that he would bite. One young mother, I remember, related that she had heard of a well-authenticated instance wherein a single bear, I think she said, had come out of the woods and massacred and devoured forty children. In the middle of the night after the presentation of the pantaloons, a disguised band, headed, it was afterwards supposed, by the comb soloist himself, stealthily gained the prison of the bear, broke his chain, and threw him overboard. The next morning triumph was in the faces of the opposition, and surprise and grief in the hearts of Professor Lowe and his liegemen. Of course no one knew how or when the bear had disappeared. Gradually the grins of the anti-bears widened into laughter. Then they spoke to one another for our benefit in those peculiar gybing tones, which may be called audible grins. Then their assides became soliloquy, and finally straight dialogue addressed by victorious Montague's to aggrieved Capulence. Our side manifestly having the worst of it, our feeble retorts were soon drowned in the Iotriumfee torrent of our enemies and the bears. At last when the exulting taunts of the opposition were at their height, the Professor discovered his bear sitting very quietly and philosophically on the rudder of the palace, to which he had swum and up which he had clambered, when thrown into the river in the night. A boat was sent after him straight away, and for a time the thunderstruck anti-bear party were crushed. Ruins receptions that day were more popular with his friends, if possible, than they had ever been before. He was more than a hero now, he was a martyr. A ponderous padlock was found and placed upon the door of the gas room, and the real leader of our party was considered safe. Yet there was something ominously silent about the opposition for the next week. They made very few threats, but there was plainly murder in their thoughts. I make, of course, no account of those ignoble attempts of his foes to prove that the Cub, notwithstanding our defensive vigilance, had once more gone into the cases. These tentative frauds defeated themselves from the very wantonness in which they were conceived. It was out of all reason to suppose that a bear would have placed the hat of the inebriate Tam O'Shanta upon the head of the noble Helen Mar. And it was still more out of reason and unnatural to think him guilty of so arranging the waxen father of his country, George Washington, that he should be discovered the next morning astride the stuffed alligator in the exact plight of that famous traveler Captain Waterman. These things were, in truth, too preposterous to be entertained for a moment. If the Lady Helen had been robbed of her back hair, it was argued, or if the hilarious reptile had been rent limb from limb, or the meditative George Washington had been jerked out of his top boots and left prostrate in his case, with bald head and torn garments, there would have been a smack of probability and of ursine humor and prowess in the deeds. No, there was something too absurd and human about these frauds, and it was a minor triumph for us when they were traced shortly afterward by the irate manager to a party of late wasseleers in the drinking saloon of the museum. I suppose we grew careless in our manifest ascendancy, for one morning at a landing in a wild, thick-wooded country a hunter came on board with bare meat to sell, and by a strange fatality almost the first man he accosted as a probable purchaser was Professor Low himself. This reminded the great erinot of his own animal which he had not yet visited that morning. While the professor was absent at the gas room one of the opposition came up and purchased what the hunter had to sell and bore it to the kitchen, exchanging by the by very significant glances with those of his party he met on the way. In a moment more the professor was back, in earnest conversation with the hunter, and it spread like wildfire over the two boats that the cub was gone for good this time, or rather that he was cooking for dinner. The hunter told his honest story of how he had been awakened by his dogs in the middle of the night, and had pursued and shot the bear. There were a dozen different traces going to show that the prisoner of the gas room had been released by human hands and pursued on the shore with sticks and clubs. It never transpired exactly who were the perpetrators of the foul deed. Our party, I need scarcely add, were utterly nonplussed and demoralized, while the opposition were considerably elate, and these latter bent upon the additional cannibalism of devouring their arch-enemy had him served up at table before our face and eyes. But when each of our party had scornfully refused at partake of our deceased friend, and when the plates of the opposition were helped bountifully, even to those of the ladies, to whose credit, be it said, that they turned their faces while they passed their plates, a partisan of the late cub arose from his seat and made a few remarks. In a quiet but forcibly specific way he called the attention of the banqueters to the amount of stuffed specimens they were about to entertain with their bear meat, and ended by congratulating them upon the intimate knowledge of taxidermy and natural history which would likely be the result. I think I never knew a speech to make so powerful in effect, the opposition party almost to a man, and certainly to each individual woman, left the table. The remains of the unfortunate bear were removed and tenderly consigned to the river, and his faithful friends ate their dinners in a final triumph that was half assured and all melancholy. CHAPTER IX The Performer Socially In his social relations a performer, like many another great man or woman, is libel to mistakes of head and heart. It is a pretty generally known fact, for instance, that the most famous tenor of our day is so careful of his gloves as to fly into a towering rage with any lady who touches them with more than her fingertips in the most impassioned duets. And a very celebrated prima donna who takes the world captive as much by the exceeding loveliness of her person and manner, as by her wonderful voice, is in the habit of beating her maid abominably two or three times a week. It would indeed be an acute analysis which should determine just what it is in the higher walks of music that makes the lives of its special votaries so strikingly inharmonious. He or she who has known of an operatic company wherein the four leading persons were on speaking terms with one another, off the stage, has known a remarkable fact in the history of that peculiar class. Of these and of the dramatic profession proper I would perhaps have no right to speak here were it not for the fact that, in my time at least, there was a sort of fraternity among all people who appeared before footlights. I do not know whether the members of cork opera associate with the better class of actors at this day, but I think they do not. I would venture to assert, however, that among the lower orders of actors, minstrels, and circus writers, there ever will be such a spirit of bohemianism, such a touch of hearty, reckless good-nature, as will always make their whole world kin. Indeed, an honest old professional friend of mine, whom I met last winter, spoke of lecturing as the show business. There may have been more or less of truth in his remark. This, at least, is no time or place to discuss the question, but there was, indubitably, in this extending of the right hand of fellowship from the side show to the Lyceum, a fine illustration of the Catholic spirit which links the profession together. Jealousy may be set down as the chief failing of the whole race, high or low. I have known men whose names have made some noise in the world to measure with straws the comparative sizes of the letters in which they were announced on a poster. But among minstrels, especially, a thorough worldliness and boon companionship enable them generally to be civil to one another, whatsoever their private feelings. An old showman, at least, comes to look upon the quiet ways of ordinary life with that same kind of longing romantic interest with which a certain species of imaginative youth are always looking upon the impossible glory of travelling with a show. A droll sighing for a rural pursuit seems to be the most common form taken by the romance of your veteran itinerant. Yet, oddly enough, there is scarcely any one whom he holds personally in such ridiculous contempt, as he does the honest farmer. The vow which the old sailor in the folxel is forever making to go to see no more is rarely remembered over three days on land, and so it is with the cognate ideal which floats in the queer imagination of the old showman. I never knew but three or four who attained anything like the realisation of their romantic purpose, Daniel Emmett, the author, I believe, of old Dan Tucker, Jordan, and many of the best known of the earlier Negro melodies, did, toward the close of his life, so far reach the fleeting object of his bucolic ambition as to have a large, well-filled chicken coop in the backyard of a rented house in the suburbs of a great city. This sentimental regard for nature was vented by the members of the first companies with which I travelled in fishing and camping parties along the borders of the inland lakes. They would swallow most execrable, amateur cooking during the day, but a night with beetles and mosquitoes would, as a general thing, drive them back willing captives into the arms of a feat civilization. On the floating palace nature seemed to have taken us so closely to her bosom, in the wild laps of those majestic rivers, that the romantic instinct of the oldest showman expressed itself oftenest in lazy expeditions to trap mockingbirds, or in listlessly dropping a line into the stream for catfish and soft-shelled turtles. The ladies of the profession are sometimes given to gossip and backbiting in as great a degree at least, as are the gentlemen. Jealousy may be as rife on a Mississippi showboat as in the anti-chamber of any court in Europe. I have known a danseuse to furnish boys with clandestine bouquets to throw on the stage when she appeared. Not that she cared at all for the praise or blame of the audience, but that she did care to crush a clever arrival. In our company on board the palace and the Raymond we had strange contrasts in human nature. It would happen, for instance, that the man who could not sleep without snoring would be placed in the same state-room with the man who could not sleep within hearing of the most distant snore. The man who could not eat pork was seated at table just opposite the man who doted on it. We had one gentleman, the fleshy bass-singer already mentioned, who spent all his leisure in catching mockingbirds, and another who passed his spare hours in contriving new and undiscoverable ways of letting these birds escape from the cages. There were on board ladies who had seen more prosperous days, when they were the chief attractions at the theatres of London, Paris, and New York, according to their own stories. Other ladies who had never associated with such vulgar people before, other ladies who hoped they would die if they did not leave the company at the very next landing, but never left. And yet other ladies, I am rejoiced to add, who were lovely in nature and deed, kind mothers and faithful wives, whose strength of character and ready cheerfulness tended as far as possible to restore the social equilibrium. In the course of the long association grotesque friendship sprang up. The man who played the bass-drum was the bosom companion of the man who had charge of the machine for making the gas, which supplied the two boats. The pretty man of the establishment, the who played the chimes on the top of the museum, and the piano in the concert room, at present, a popular composer at St. Louis, this young gentleman who broke all the hearts of the country girls that came into the show, was the inseparable friend of the pilot, a great gruff, warm-hearted fellow who steered the raiment from the corners of his eyes and swore terribly at snags. The man who dusted down Tamashanter and the twelve apostles in wax and had a special care of the stuffed birds, giraffes and alligators, was on most intimate terms with the cook. The youngest of the ladies who hoped to die if they didn't go ashore at the next landing, and never went, or died either, for that matter, while she was, or pretended to be, desperately in love with the treasurer of the company, a thin, irascible old fellow with a bald head. On the arrival of another dancers in the company, the two dancers, who were before deadly enemies, became sworn friends and confidants, united in their jealousy and hatred of the newcomer. The lady who was loudest in proclaiming that she had never before associated with such low people as the performers on board of these boats seemed to enjoy herself most, and indeed spent most of her time in the Society of Bridget, the Irish laundry woman of the establishment, who on one occasion, after excessive stimulus, came very near hanging herself overboard to dry instead of a calico dress. As a general thing, however, the ladies, performers, and crew of our boats were not so quarrelsome as I have seen a set of cabin passengers on a sea voyage between America and Europe, or especially on the three weeks passage to or from California. When I consider that there were so many of us together in this narrow compass for nearly a year, it seems to me strange indeed that there was not more bad blood excited. Madame Olinza was, I believe, the name of the Polish lady who walked on a tightrope from the floor of one end of the museum up to the roof of the farthest gallery. This kind of perilous ascension and suspension was something new in the country then. It was before the time of Blondin, and Madame used to produce a great sensation. Now it may be interesting to the general reader to learn that this tightrope walker was one of the most exemplary, domestic little bodies imaginable. She and her husband had a large stateroom on the upper deck of the Raymond, and she was always there with her child when released from her public duties. One afternoon the nurse happened to bring the child into the museum when Madame Olinza was on the rope, and out of the vast audience that little face was recognized by the fond mother and her attention so distracted that she lost her balance, dropped her pole, and fell. Catching the rope with her hands, however, in time to break her fall, she escaped fortunately without the least injury. But ever after that her child was kept out of the audience while she was on the rope. End of Chapter 9. The Performer, Socially. Vagabond Adventures by Ralph Keeler. Book II. Three years as a Negro minstrel. CHAPTER X. Adieu to the stage. Going up the Mississippi from Cairo we passed one Sunday the old French town of Cape Gerardo, Missouri, and its Roman Catholic College on the river bank. The boys were out on the lawn under the trees, and I became as envious of their lot as ever I had been before of a man who worked on a steamboat or who danced in the minstrels. I suddenly resolved that I would go to that college. We did not stop at Cape Gerardo till I returned down the river some weeks afterward. Then I went boldly up and sought an interview with the president of the institution. I found him to be a kindly-mannered priest who encouraged me in my ambition. He told me it would be well to save up more money than I then had, and that he would do all he could for me. I returned to the palace and immediately gave warning that I proposed to leave as soon as someone could be got to fill my place. It struck me as somewhat odd that it was six months from that date before I could get away. It has been explained to me since. The fact is I received what, as a boy, I thought a good salary, but nothing like what I earned. It took two men afterwards to fill my place. I have been told since that more than a year before that time and prior to this last engagement the late E. P. Christie had written for me from New York, but that the letter had been intercepted by those who's interested then was that I should not know my own value in the profession. I used to see that my name was larger than almost any other on the bills, but was led to believe that it was because I was a boy and not likely to excite the jealousy of the other members of the company. It may not be very soothing to my vanity, but dwelling upon these things dispassionately I have my honest doubts now whether I was not always a greater success as an advertisement than as a performer. I was promised at New Orleans that if I would go over to Galveston, Texas with the minstrel troop I should certainly be allowed to retire from public life. So we left the palace and the Raymond at the levee of the former city and took passage in the regular steamship crossing the gulf to Galveston. We performed there two or three weeks with great success. Few minstrels then had wandered that way, and thus it happened that my farewell appearance as a dancer was greeted with a crowded house, except as a poor lecturer I have never been on the stage since I left Galveston. Still resolved to go to college at Cape Girardeau I returned to New Orleans and took passage to Cairo on the steamer L. M. Kennett. Barney Williams and his wife were on board during the tedious voyage, but I suppose they have long since forgotten all about the urchin who surprised and bored them with his minute knowledge of the early history of the country through which we passed. The river above Cairo, very much to my sorrow, was frozen over, for it was midwinter. There was no alternative for me but to proceed to Cape Girardeau by land—a long, difficult and expensive journey in those times. After a great deal of trouble and some danger I arrived at the gates of the college and proceeded directly to the room of the President. The kindly face that I remembered so well again beamed upon me, as I stood before him, and said that I had come to stay a year at least at his school. At his good-natured question as to how much money I had, I emptied my pocket of just thirty-five dollars in gold. That was the sum to which the unforeseen expenses of my long journey had reduced me. The President, being aware that the river was frozen so that I could not get away, even if I had had money enough to go with, and having much greater discretionary power than the Presidents of our Protestant colleges, told me that I might stay. At the end of my year the river was again frozen and the good President was again prevailed upon to keep me till the close of that college term, which would be in the middle of the ensuing summer. So I was, for sixteen months in all, a student in St. Vincent's College. Most of the students were the sons of French planters of Louisiana, and the institution was more French than English. Things were ordered very much as they are in the religious houses of Europe. We slept in large dormitories and ate in a refectory, some one reading aloud the while, from an English or a French book. The college had its own tailors and shoemakers, and by the favour of the President, who seemed to take a great liking to me, my credit was made good for anything I wanted, and I was provided for as well as the richest of them. The instructors were all priests and generally good men. They never required me to change my religion or to conform more than externally to their worship. I applied myself so zealously to study that, at the expiration of my sixteen months, I was nearly prepared to enter Kenyon College, in which I spent the next four years. The President of St. Vincent's, Fr. Stephen V. Ryan, has since met the recognition which his piety and abilities so justly deserved. He is now the venerable Roman Catholic Bishop of Buffalo, and it is with no little pride that I still class him among my most valued and constant friends. When I came to leave St. Vincent's, I drew out a deposit which I had in a bank in Toledo, and gave it into the hands of the college treasurer, reserving for myself only what I thought would be enough to take me back to Ohio. As good luck would have it, the little steamer Banjo, a showboat belonging to Dr. Spalding, the manager of the floating palace, was advertised to be at Cape Girardeau, the week in which I proposed to leave there. Seeing the names of some of my old comrades on the bills, I waited to meet them. They generously made me bring my trunk on board and have a free ride to St. Louis, or if I chose, to Alton, where I was to take the cars for Chicago. The remembrance of this trip up the river with these jovial, reckless souls has made it my duty always to defend my old associates when I hear the censure heaped on them by inconsiderate ignorance or blind prejudice, and I take my final leave of the show business and of show people in no better way, I think, than in relating an incident which occurred on this little steamer. On the afternoon before our arrival at Alton, as I was sitting on the deck by the side of one of the performers, Mr. Edwin Davis, who had been a member of our company on the floating palace, he asked me to let him see my money, adding that I might have had imposed upon me some of the Wildcat bills than a float. Taking out all I had, I placed it in his hands, he counted it and scrutinized it thoroughly, and folding it up carefully, returned it to me with a remark that my bills were all good. I had no occasion to use my money till I came to pay my railway fare at Alton when I discovered that my wealth had increased by nearly half. He had indeed been a better judge than myself of my necessities, for with his generous addition I had barely enough to take me to my destination. I met Mr. Davis in New York years afterward, and offered him the sum he had added to mine, but could not prevail upon him to take it, and this is the way he stated his reason. No, it does not belong to me. Keep it, you, till you see some poor fellow as much in need of it as you were then on the Mississippi, and give it to him. CHAPTER I. Starting on a Cattle-Train. I cannot tell when the idea of going abroad first came into my mind, but in a little journal kept in my thirteenth year while travelling with the Minstrels I find the fact that I was going to Europe alluded to as a matter of which there was not the shadow of a doubt. There is a jolly sort of beggar in San Francisco who says, Hope is worth twenty-five dollars a month. It must be that I shared with him his principal income during the four years of college life which almost immediately succeeded my wanderings as a Minstrel, and which launched me again on the world at twenty. What else besides the hope of continental travel sustained me during those four years I cannot now say. My pecuniary resources for that whole period were so small that they have tapered entirely out of my remembrance. Leaving college I had served, I recollect, but a few months in the Post Office of Toledo, Ohio, when I took a deliberate account of my savings one morning and was gratified. I found in my possession too large a sum to permit of deferring the realization of my long cherished dream another day. Counting my money over and over I could make no less of it than one hundred and eighty-one dollars in new United States Treasury notes, when I resigned mine office, not with the heartbroken feeling of Richelieu in the play, but still, like him, with the lingering cares of Europe on my mind. Not the smallest fraction of this vast sum I had resolved should be squandered on the ephemeral railroads of our younger civilization. My Treasury notes were to be dedicated, green, votive offerings on the older shrongings of our race. But the city of Toledo is situated about seven hundred miles from the sea, and it now became an interesting question how this distance was to be compassed for nothing. To a good-natured friend of mine in one of the railroad offices I explained at considerable length, and with no lack I flatter myself of boyish eloquence, the great advantage that would accrue to me from a residence in Europe which the liberality of the companies in the matter of furnishing passes would tend to prolong. I think he became my convert, for he came to me several hours afterward with a long face, and gave me to understand that the railroad officials were in the habit of building no dreams of aesthetics that were not founded on a ground plan of dollars and cents. At this I became, I do not know which to say, desperately vindictive or vindictively desperate. Anyway, the unfeeling conduct of those corporations induced, then and there, a state of mind which led me into an adventure the least calculated, probably, of any in this history to establish my claims as a moral hero. The next morning I brought my trunk down to the depot and had it checked through to New York. The rules seemed not to have been so strictly observed then as they are now. The baggage-master in this instance, at least, taking for granted that I had already secured my ticket, did not ask me to show it, and I was at liberty to stroll about the station all day listlessly. Just before dusk a cattle-train arrived from the west and brought with it a lucky thought. I scanned the faces of the drovers till I found one that looked benevolent, and the owner of it I engaged in conversation. He was going on east with his cattle the next morning, and I made a plain statement of my case to him. When I had done, he patted me on the back in such a cordial and stalwart manner that, as soon as I could get my breath, I took it all as a good augury. And so it was. I wish I could reproduce more of the dialogue which took place between this honest Westerner and myself at that first interview. Some of it, at least, I never shall forget. It impressed me as so extraordinary at the time. I can, however, convey no idea of the contrast between his mild, kindly face and his harsh, bovine voice. It may help you to a kind of silhouette view of the situation if you will take the pains to imagine the frequent excursions of my puzzled attention from his face to his voice, during the scene which immediately followed. He had given me to understand that he had eight carloads of livestock and that he was entitled to a drover's pass for every four carloads. Then he suddenly paused, thrust both hands into the pockets of his long-skirted coat, and, feeling about in those spacious alcoves for a silent moment, as if in search of something, he asked in an abrupt base which seemed to issue from the depths of the coat-tails themselves, how are you on cattle? That was before the days of Mr. Berg and his excellent society. But having consulted the speaker's benevolent face and not his voice as the last authority on the meaning of his question, I answered that I was very kind to cattleism general thing. That, he assured me, was not exactly what he meant. He wanted to know whether I had ever done any droving, on my intimating that, although I had not had much experience, I was perfectly willing to be of service—never mind, never mind, he said—but can you play cards? No, was my ingenuous reply. Now, that's bad. And he scratched his head vigorously. Can you smoke, then? A little, faltered I. My new-made friend seemed much pleased by this response and continued, all right, you just get a lot of clay-pipes and some tobacco, and I'll get you a pass. As I was turning in utter bewilderment to have his strange prescription filled, I say, oh, looky here, he said, take off all that nice harness, or you can't pass for no cattleman. I'll lend you some old clothes and a pair of big boots. These stock conductors is right pierced there, and you'll have to smoke a heap and lay around careless in the caboose, or they'll find you out. The next morning I took my seat in what he called the caboose—a sort of passenger car at the end of the train. When we had been under way about an hour, the burden of my own conscience, or of my friend's boots, or the contemplation of my unsightly disguise, or the amount of tobacco I had smoked, made me deathly sick, which, on the whole, was a rather fortunate circumstance. It explained to the conductor why I did not get out at the weigh stations to tend my cattle, and it also enabled me to hide my face from the conductor to whom I happened to be known. I found, as most boys do, that I could smoke better the farther I got from home. What with stopping to let our cattle rest and other delays, it took us nearly a week to reach New York. But before three days had passed I could perform the astonishing feat of putting my friend's boots out of the car window and of smoking serenely the while, without touching my pipe with my hands. All the hotels at which we stopped along the route seemed, like the creameries of Paris, to exalt in the importance of a specialité, and that was that they were supported almost entirely by drovers, and assumed, without a single exception that I can call to mind, the device and title of the Bull's Head. There was a smack of old times in the homely comforts, as well as in the moderate charges of these quiet taverns. My expenses, on the whole journey from Toledo to the Sea, were, if I recollect to write, a little over three dollars. CHAPTER II TAKING TO EUROPEAN WAYS At New York I found that I should be obliged to pay a hundred and thirty for exchange on my money. This I did after buying a through third class ticket to London for thirty-three dollars in currency. My memories of a steerage passage across the Atlantic are rather vivid than agreeable. Among all my fellow passengers in that unsavory precinct I found only one philosopher. He was a British officer who took a third class ticket that he might spend the difference between that and a cabin fare for English porter, which he imbibed from morning to night. He announced as his firm belief, after much observation upon the high cheekbones of our countrymen, that the Americans in a few years would denigrate to Indians, the natural human types of this continent. It was during the World's Fair that I arrived in London. My whole life there might be written down under the general title of The Adventures of a Straw Hat. For the one which I wore was the signal for all the sharpers of that great city to practice their arts upon me. They took me for some country youths, come up to see the exhibition, and the number of skittle-allies and thief-dens into which they enticed me was, to say the least, remarkable. Through the friendly advice of a police detective I was finally prevailed upon to purchase a new English hat, and with this, as a sort of aegis, I passed out of the British dominions, without being robbed, and indeed without much of which to be robbed. At Paris I witnessed the magnificent fete of the emperor, and took the third-class cars for Strasbourg and Heidelberg. At this latter city, with a sum equal to nearly eighty dollars in gold, I proposed for an indefinite series of years to become a student of the far-famed Carl Rupert University. I was not happy in Heidelberg therefore till I had experienced the mystery of academic matriculation. All I can recall of that long ceremony now is that I had the honour of shaking hands. Sancte d'Athicoe d'Extra policitus est is the language in which my diploma speaks of me, commemorating, I believe, that impressive moment, over my passport with a large, moustached German official, and that I furthermore had the privilege of paying a fee of eleven guldens and twenty-six Kreuzers, a little over four-and-a-half dollars. After much search and many unintelligible appeals in bad German, through well-nigh every dingy street of Heidelberg, I finally secured a room for two guldens, eighty cents a month, and such a room. It was on the story next to the clouds. It seemed to be cut into the high gable of the grey, old German house by some freak or afterthought of the architect. It was reached by interminable staircases and through a long hall or passageway whose unplastered walls were hung with a rubbish of many generations. It was just large enough to permit of my turning around, after furnishing nooks and corners for a bed, bookcase, washstand, and small semi-circular table. But all was neat and clean, for my room was subject, like the rest of the German world, to the regular Saturday's inundation of soap and water. Directly opposite on the other side of the narrow street, but far, far below, was the shop of a sausage-maker. If I had been an enthusiast in mechanics, I should have found much consolation in this fact, as well as a great deal, to lead hope on, because a sausage-maker's apprentice is really, if not perpetual motion itself, a strong inductive argument in favour of its future discovery. The one to whom I have alluded kept up a continual hacking, day and night, weekday and Sunday. The sound of his meat-axe met my ears the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. It was, in fact, my matten and my angelous bell. But by a principle of compensation, which is one of the kindliest things in nature, this little nook had advantages of which prouder apartments could not boast. I never had, before or since, a room in which I could apply myself to study so assiduously or with so great a zest. It seemed to be haunted with the great spirits of those who have trimmed their lamps in garrets and left the world better for their toils. This may have been a boyish hallucination, but I shall always believe that the most glorious view of the famous Heidelberg Castle, the Malkenkirr, and the lofty peak of the Kaiserstuhl is to be had from the one narrow window of my aerial niche in the dark German gable. The old castle frowned down upon me from the frow of the mountain just above my head, and often, of an evening, have I leaned upon my little windowsill and gazed up at its ruined battlements and ivy mantel towers. As they grew dimmer and grayer in the waning light, the wrents and seams of centuries disappeared, and the palace of the old electors used to stand before me in its ancient pride. It may not be generally known that the day laborer of America has better food and more of it than many a wealthy burger of Central Europe, only the very few in Germany, can indulge in beef steaks for breakfast. I soon learned to conform myself to the cup of coffee and piece of dry bread of the German's morning repast. But as I became better acquainted and gradually more impecunious, I left the café where I had before, partaken of these luxuries, and betook myself to a baker's shop, where a breakfast of the same kind was furnished me in company with market women and others, for four Creutzers, about three cents. If I could sometimes have wished for a more liberal allowance of sugar in my coffee, in this humble refectory, I never could complain of a lack of sweetness in the morning gossip of the baker's red-cheeked daughter. The search for the very cheapest place to get my dinner was not the work of one day, or unattended with some difficulty and much skirmishing. I betook myself of my sausage-making friend across the way. Indeed, it was a long while before I became so used to the staccato music of his meat-axe as to keep from thinking of him most of the time. Engaged as he was in the active production of food, he must certainly, I argued, know something of cheap dinners. I therefore made a dissent on the meat-shop one day. No notice whatever was taken of my knock, so pushing the door open I stood before a dwarfed, long-apronned, pale-faced boy who turned his hungry eyes upon me, but did not cease his hacking. I launched forth in the kind, I may say the peculiar kind, of colloquial German I had learned in my three-week sojourn in his country. After I had talked some time, the boy, giving no rest to his meat-axe, but every once in a while, looking furtively over his shoulder, asked, Do you want any vast sausage? No, no. And I began again in my original German, and explained at greater length that I was in search of a place to get a cheap dinner. The boy laid down his meat-axe, eyed me a few seconds in awful silence, then glanced apprehensively over his shoulder, took up his meat-axe again, and went to work more lustily than ever. There was this much about it. Either the boy was deaf, or we stood somewhat in the relation of the two English girls in Hood's story. He could speak German, and did not understand it, and I could understand German, and not speak it. Still rather pleased than otherwise at such a chance to air my newly acquired speech, and on the whole not a little gratified with my quick mastery of the language, I began in a higher key, and approaching nearer and nearer, demanded in the sausage-maker's ear whether he knew of a place to get a cheap dinner. Down went the meat-axe again, and with eyes and mouth wide open, the boy stood speechless before me. Thus we were both innately staring at each other when the back door flew open, and a burly lump of tumoured humanity stumbled through it with a curse, wanting to know why the boy was not at work. The poor apprentice caught up his cleaver again, and I faced the man who had just entered. "'Do you want any vast?' he asked. "'No, no.' And I went over the whole story once more with such perpiscuity, as shipwrecked patients would naturally inspire in a person thoroughly at sea in a language. In the thick of my oration I detected a cloudy gleam of intelligence spreading itself over the red face of my hearer. My eloquence had touched him at last. I had not quite reached my peroration when—' "'Doch!' interrupted my fat friend as he pulled me briskly to the door. "'You'll see that shop, three houses farther down the street?' "'Yes,' said I. "'You are sure you'll see the right one?' "'Yes, yes. Well, you go right down there. There is a Frenchman down there. His wife is from Italy. I think maybe he can understand the Russian language. I can't.' It was at that moment I think I learned to make the distinction between the degrees of benefit one derives from a book knowledge of language. It may help you to understand others, but it can hardly be said to help others understand you. While on this subject I may be pardoned, I hope, for telling of the more expeditious way I adopted to acquire the other modern tongues, which my subsequent poverty, rather than any extraordinary ambition induced me to learn, in order to preserve the disguise of which I shall tell you presently. On going into an unfamiliar country for the first time I shut myself up in some cheap garret with a grammar, for a couple of weeks. Then I sallied forth with a pocket dictionary, and captured some worthless young fellow without friends or employment. To this luckless person I cleaved without mercy. I followed him, if I could not make him follow me, everywhere, and talked at him, and made him talk. I argued with him over his three Sous, worth of chocolate, if we were in France, or over his boiled beans and olive oil, if we were in Italy. I asked him questions about everything if we walked together in the streets. And, by the way, is it not truly wonderful how much one has to say when he has a difficulty in saying it? You may have noticed that a man who stutters, or has a hair-lip, is always talking. He who learns a new language is invariably troubled with the same fruitless suggestiveness, and often, too, with a more distressful execution. If, therefore, the patience of my friendless tutor would sometimes flag, I would attempt to make him understand my glowing accounts of the comparative wealth of such vagrants as he was in my own prosperous poor man's country, advising him to immigrate. This occasionally would have the effect of restoring him to a feeble interest in life. But, if he would still persist in his low spirits, and find himself on the verge of asking me why I did not myself go back to my El Dorado of Good for Nothings, where he, no doubt, hardly wished me, then, at that last critical stage of his gloom, I would soothe and cheer him with a penny-cigar. Generally speaking, this will not fail thoroughly to overcome your old world vagabond. He will talk, and even listen after that. The only difficulty is to know just when to administer to him the cigar. He must not be pampered or spoiled by undue indulgence and luxury. At first, when I commenced my experiments on these unfortunate beings, and I could see them wince under my laceration of their helpless mother tongue, I had slight qualms of conscience. Learning to quiet these at last, however, I fastened myself on the most intelligent vagrant at hand, with an almost faultless pre-calculation of my man, and subjected him to my tortures with a triumphant sense of virtue in the act, far transcending, I fancy, that experience by your enthusiastic savants, when substantiating some pet theory on a living criminal. Nothing I am sure ever before impressed me so highly with the modest merit that may lie concealed in vagrancy. It would be positively surprising to any one who has not enjoyed the advantage of this desperate method of mastering the colloquial speech of a country, if I should tell how soon I was enabled by it to drop my humble tutor, and, moving out of his neighborhood to some other city in the same state, to utilize and practice upon more pretending persons in a higher grade of society. CHAPTER III. STUDENT LIFE AND WANDERINGS. But I must get back to Heidelberg, where the sympathetic reader will not, I trust, have imagined that I went all this time without dinners, because the search for one, which should be the ultimatouli of cheapness, was embarrassing and adventurous. I found a place at last where a homely abundant midday meal was furnished me in a private family for one golden and twenty-six Creutzers per week, a fraction over eight cents a day. My supper I took at a gast house and company with some theological students at the cost of about four cents. Many of my countrymen who have spent large sums in endeavouring to live cheaply in the same city will, of course, believe nothing of this. They have paid dearly for the privilege of being Americans. They date their experiences from hotels supplied with waiters who speak our language, and have dealt at shops on whose windows they have seen blazoned in golden letters English spoken. They have, in reality, paid the teacher who taught these waiters and those shopkeepers to murder our own vernacular. By matriculating at the great University of Heidelberg I became endowed with all the time-honoured privileges of students. I could not be arrested or taken through the streets if I had been guilty of an ordinary crime. I could not be confined in a common prison or go to a common hospital, the University having those institutions for its own particular benefit. And poverty seemed there to have lost its curse. The very fact of my being a student put me on a social scale above that of the wealthy merchant. This, however, may have been only in the estimation of the collegians themselves. A fellow student thought some of going to America and propounded the following question. But when I arrive I shall not have any money, and I shall know nothing of the language of the country. What shall I do? Go to work, said I. What? Manual labor? I am too aristocratic. That young man, let me add, was then living on an income of one hundred and ten dollars a year. The German student must have a pipe, a beer, and a life of pleasure at whatever sacrifice. If he is rich he pays some attention to his personal appearance. You will see him adorned with boots of immense length, core caps and ribbons, the number of his duels scored on his red face in ungainly sword-scars, and followed by a retinue of Santicurists in the shape of great ugly worthless dogs. His life is a continued sacrifice to the merry gods. He is rarely seen at lectures. Indeed there is one society or club at the university, the first article of whose constitution reads, No member shall at any time, or on any pretense whatever, after matriculation, be seen in the university building. On the other hand, if the student is poor, he pays very slight attention to what he wears. He does not the last, however, devote a great portion of his time to beer, tobacco, and the pursuit of pleasure. You will see him at the most frequented beer-houses every night. If you go to the opera, you will observe him also stalking thither, shiveringly, through the wind, his tight pantaloons striking his crane-like legs about midships between his feet and knees, and his shoulders shrugged up in the vain attempt to get more warmth out of an extremely short coat. He looks more like the impersonation of famine striding about men, than the good honest-hearted fellow that he is. For with all his faults, as our more puritanical education may lead us to call them, the German student is an honest, generous, noble-hearted fellow. He sees beyond the smoke of his own pipe, and has deeper thoughts than those inspired by beer. His heart swells beyond the bounds of his petty state. His sympathies are as broad as the old German empire. It is too true, perhaps, that when in mature manhood he becomes angeshdelta in some life-office in the gift of his little prince, his liberalism slumbers or dies out. But that does not affect the sincerity of his youthful sentiment. I am sure that I never spoke with one of them on the subject who had not some dream of a great united Germany. There was no more interested watcher of our late civil strife than the German student. He felt that the battle then waging for the right of self-government had a connection with his hopes for the future of his own severed land. Germany's wrongs and the sigh for universal liberty are the burden of his many songs. No higher and no more appropriate eulogy on the German student can be pronounced than to say that, in his university days at least, he is true to the spirit of one of his most beautiful and most popular melodies, to the bold deed, the free word, the generous action, woman's love, and the fatherland. By the laws of German universities, a matriculated student is not obliged to pay for more than the lectures of one professor during a semester. That is, six months. I managed, therefore, to pay for the cheapest, and attended as many more as I liked. So about ten dollars a year were my collegiate expenses. To confess the truth, my calendar and that of the university did not always agree. I often took vacations in session time, in the shape of long excursions on foot, and sometimes disappeared from Heidelberg for weeks together. My house-frau, she that received the princely income of eighty cents a month for my room, at first showed symptoms of anxiety about me, but she soon learned to be surprised at no wild freak of her aerial lodger. By these tours on foot, the only philosophical way of traveling, and by the occasional aid of the cheap third-class cars of that country, I visited all parts of Germany, and learned more of the language, character, and habits of its odd, warm-souled people than I ever could have learned at the great hotels and in the first-class railway carriages. During the long vacations, and especially after leaving Heidelberg altogether, I extended my explorations into remotor parts, into the Tyrol, Switzerland, Italy, and France. I traveled in a way in which probably no American has ever traveled before, or since, namely, disguised as a Handvicksborsche, a wandering tradesman. Anyone who has been in Europe will not ask why a stranger in that land should need to pass himself off as a poor native, if he wants to save money. On the Continent, as a general rule, a man in broadcloth, not personally known to the shop or hotelkeeper, pays two prices, or as a person speaking English, even if clad infusion pays three prices. And I should like to see him help himself. The English language has come to be mistaken for a gold mine all through Europe. These wandering tradesmen, these Handvicksborschen, let me say, for they are unknown to nations under free constitutional governments, are a sort of fossil remains of feudalism. They are young fellows, half journeymen, half apprentices, who are obliged to wander for two or three years from city to city, working at their trades. They finally return to their homes, weary and poor, having learned little but the rough side of the world, to make what is called their masterpiece. If this pass muster, they are entitled to style themselves masters of their trades. They grow out of that old illiberal principle which compels the son to follow in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather. Yet for all the narrow minded enactments and regulations to crush their spirit and make them miserable, they always walk on the sunny side of nature. They are a jovial set of vagabonds, who have rarely the chance to be dishonest if they had the inclination. Disguised in the blouse of their class, something like our western warmest, except that it is of thin blue stuff, I have spent many a happy hour toiling along the same road with them, listening to their stories and merry songs. If I meet one of them on the highway, he stops, offers me his hand, and exchanges a kindly word. He takes out his pipe, asks me to fill mine from his tobacco pouch, and tells me all he knows of the road passed over. He never lodges in a city unless he has work there. The village inn is his castle. Here he obtains his bed at night and his breakfast in the morning for seven Kreuzers, not quite five cents, and trudges on, smoking and singing, through all Europe. This is the Handwerksbursche, poor but merry, the night errant of the bundle and staff, the troubadour and menacinger of the nineteenth century. In Switzerland, for instance, where almost everyone travels as a pedestrian, and where hundreds of our countrymen every year blister their inexperienced feet at the rates of from ten to thirty francs a day, I have journeyed sumptuously, thanks to my disguise, for thirty sous. When addressed in French, if my broken speech was noticed, it was supposed that I was from one of the German cantons, and in the same manner, if my bad German was detected, I was set down as from one of the French cantons. This gratuitous naturalization on one day and ex-patriation on the next had no bad effect whatever on my health, whereas it had the best possible result on my purse. My blouse was a protection, not only to the respectable suit of clothes which I wore under it, but against all the impositions practiced upon travelers. When I arrived at a large city or watering place, I generally hired a little room for a week, found a cheap place to get my meals, and after settling prices for everything in advance, divested myself of my disguise, and did the galleries and promenades to the accompaniment of kid-gloves and immaculate linen. But the glory of pedestrianism is not in cities. It is in the broad highway, on the banks of mighty rivers, or in the narrow footpath winding over mountains. There is such pleasure and pride in the consciousness that one can go where and when one will, without waiting on coaches or trains. Thirty, forty or fifty good miles left behind in one day, by the means of locomotion, nature has given to every one, are not only a consolation to sleep upon at a village inn, but make the sleep sounder and sweeter. I defy any man not to be proud of his strength when he finds, as almost every one will after a little practice, that he can make thirty miles on foot, day after day, with perfect ease. It is, however, just to state that village inns are not always paradises. The hostess sometimes has more lodgers in her beds than she receives money for, but a practiced eye generally detects such places at a glance, and rarely exposes the body to their perils. Every village has at least one respectable inn. Before my personal history had taught me this wisdom by excruciating example, I had good reason to believe that the tortures of the Wiengericht, the old secret tribunal of Germany, were not the things of the past which the world thought them. I had frequent occasion too for what might be called an equanimity of stomach. I arrived one evening, for instance, at a small desolate village in the remote eastern part of Bavaria near the Austrian border. I was weary and hungry, but before my host of the inn would have anything to do with me, he sent me on a wild chase through innumerable narrow crooked alleys in search of the Burgamaster to deliver my passport into his hands and obtain his gracious permission to remain overnight in the place. The entrance to the mansion of that dignitary was through a cattle-yard. He had probably never before in his life heard of the language of my passport, but that did not prevent his looking at it with an official air of infinite wisdom. I returned to the inn at last fortified with the requisite credentials. The hostess now appeared and asked me what I would eat, addressing me familiarly in the second person singular. Her long, lank frame was attired in the abominable costume of the Bavarian peasantry. I could compare her to nothing but a giant specimen of the Hungarian heron, which I need hardly say is not a pretty bird. The same room served as parlour and kitchen. I sat patiently and watched her kindling the fire in the great earthen stove, indulging my mind, as hungry people are want to do, with rich visions of imaginary banquets. What was my horror to see her take the eggs, which I had ordered, break them one by one into her greasy leathern apron, and commence beating them vigorously with a pewter spoon. As soon as I recovered my presence of mind I considered the folly of remonstrating with her, and with a great effort I mildly remarked that she had misunderstood me. I wanted my eggs boiled. By this stratagem I preserved my disguise, and achieved a cleanly meal in defiance of the leathern apron. CHAPTER IV A FIGHT WITH FAMON In the meantime the condition of my finances was becoming hourly more desperate. I had written to innumerable American newspapers offering to produce a letter a day for five dollars a week, and making all sorts of struggling tenders of brainwork, from which, as a general rule, I heard nothing at all. At last Christmas came, and found me back at Heidelberg utterly penniless, over five thousand miles from home, in a country where, for a stranger to obtain work was simply hopeless. Since the boys in that densely populated land have to pay for the privilege of learning to carry bundles—a pursuit which is there for three years a necessary introduction to becoming a salesman of the smallest wares—to obtain a situation as beggar was still more hopeless, the competition of native dwarves and cripples being altogether too powerful for an able-bodied alien. So here was the end of my one hundred and eighty-one dollars in currency. I had made what is called the tour of Europe, and I now had the prospect of immediate starvation for my pains. And yet that Christmas day was, by all odds, the happiest day of my life. For just at fifteen minutes past eleven o'clock a.m., the postman knocked at the door and handed me very unexpectedly a letter containing about twenty-five dollars in our money. It came from an American paper to which I had written at least twenty letters for publication, and twenty-five letters asking for money, so it was undoubtedly the twenty-five dunning letters that were paid for, and I shall never be so rich or happy again. So much has been written about the holidays in Germany that I cannot be expected to say anything new on the subject. It may, however, have been forgotten by some that the Weihnachten of the Fatherland commenced on what we call Christmas Eve. This is the great night for children. It is their feast. It is the time they have been looking forward to with such wild, glad, gorgeous anticipation. It is the night of the Christmas tree, and in all Germany there is no child so poor as not to get something from its green boughs. Besides this night, Christmas has two whole days, to which, respectively, there seems to be a logical apportionment of two very important kinds of enjoyment. The first day is assigned to boundless eating, and the second, mildly speaking, to getting drunk. And it is due to the zeal of the southern Germans, at least, to say that they observe this order of ceremonies with scrupulous exactness. Now it may be sentimental, or something worse, but I confess I like to dwell upon the time when twenty-five dollars made me perfectly happy. Memory, you may have observed, has a way of painting frescoes with the clouds of distant skies that are even prettier than the lay figures and life-forms which served for the real models. It was, for instance, a quiet little scene of domestic joy, that Christmas of my student life in Germany, yet, somehow, it has grouped itself in my remembrance like the masterpiece of Cornelius, the largest fresco of them all. Frau Hirtl was the domestic little body of whom I rented my airy apartment. Frau Linana was her rosy daughter, and this little sun-beam in the house was the only child of the family that I had ever seen. Though many and many a time the name of Carl, the only son and brother, was upon their lips. Carl was a Handwerksbursche, one of those houseless tradesmen before dwelt upon, and on this Christmas Carl was expected home from his long, long wanderings. The illuminated tree on the night before had been laden with many a gift of affectionate remembrance for the absent Carl. As we sat down to the Christmas dinner there was a vacant place at the table, and in the hearts of the disappointed mother and sister they could not touch a morsel. Are you sure he will come, Mama? asked the little Anna after a long silence. Yes, my child, unless something has happened, for the way is long from Frankfurt, and the poor boy's feet must be sore with his long, long journey. What, Mama, if he shouldn't come? Frau Hirtl's face became very pale, whether at the little Anna's question were at the sudden ringing of the shop bell as the door swung open and shut. The next instant Carl was in the middle of the room, his pack and staff fell at his feet, and Frau Hirtl and the Fraulein Anna sprang into his arms. It was not the merry dinner that succeeded, or the glue-vine that made the evening glad, but this one picture which dwells most in my memory, the joy that shone on the care-worn and dust-stained face of the returned wanderer, reflected in those of his mother and sister as they stood in that long embrace, has no parallel that I know of in the history of the return of exiled kings. With my twenty-five dollars I lived cheaper than ever, and for some months longer continued my studies at the university, but one morning I received a letter from the same generous American newspaper in closing a draft for fifty dollars, together with a very earnest request that the editor should hear no more from me on any account whatever. This good fortune was too much for my mental equilibrium. Heidelberg was too small for me. I started the next day for a trip down the Rhine, deck passage. At Rotterdam I betook myself again to the third-class cars, and then occasionally to the bundle and staff. Thus I went through Holland and Belgium, walking leisurely one day over the historic dead of Waterloo. Arriving finally at Paris I resolved there to take up my residence. By means of a cheap lodging in the old Latin quarter and of a cheaper restaurant on the Boulevard Sevastopol I managed to subsist for several months. It was here in Paris that I first met my good friend George Alfred Townsend, the well-known War Correspondent. To him I was afterward indebted for a short romantic sketch of my life, in which he says, I believe, among other complementary things, that the faculty of Heidelberg gave me my tuition for nothing, but that I would not stay with them and study, because I thought it too dear. But seriously I owe Mr. Townsend a real debt of gratitude, for it was he who suggested that I should write an account of certain of my experiences for one of the London magazines. After the questionable success of my multifarious attempts with American newspapers I trembled at the temerity of the idea. Yet my money was becoming daily and by no means beautifully less. Neither Mr. Townsend nor anybody else but myself was aware that, at the time of his suggestion, my cash capital consisted of one gold napoleon, a silver five-frank piece, and some three or four sous, and even this sum had dwindled considerably before I could muster courage to make the attempt. At last, in a fit of desperation, I sat down one morning with the equivalent of about two dollars in my pocket, and commenced my article. In three days more it was on its way to London with an enclosure of British stamps, enough to pay for the letter which should tell me whether it was accepted or rejected. I shall not dwell longer than I can help upon the painful suspense of the succeeding five or six days, though I do not remember now my grounds for expecting an answer in so short a period. Up to that time I will venture to say there was not a happier person in the gay capital of France than I had been, for it is one of the peculiar charms of Paris that it affords abundant amusement for him who spends forty francs a month, as I did, or forty thousand a month, as some do. I cannot explain now any more than you can believe in my happiness then. I know only that the beautiful city was delightful and that I was delighted. The palaces, the galleries, the gardens, the parks, the music, and the wonderful diorama of the evening boulevards were free, as free to me, the vagabond stranger, as they were to the greatest prince. And I had the additional, though not necessarily comfortable, assurance that I always carried away from them a better appetite for the next meal than did even his inscrutable majesty the emperor himself. But now that I had the growing cares of authorship on my mind it dwelt more and more upon me the waning discs of my frank pieces, as they swelled for a time elusively into sous, and then tapered into sentine, and disappeared from my gaze for ever. At this period I found myself occasionally strolling down to the Seine, and looking over from Paul Neuf, at the flood below, swollen with the late rains, and listening to the strange sound it made in the wake of the old stone arches as it rushed on toward the morgue, the famous Dead House, where hundreds of suicides are displayed every year. Have you ever heard the last bubbling groan of a drowning man? If you have, you will understand the feeling with which, after listening long and steadily to the low rumble of the eddying water, I have received the impression more than once on that old bridge that I heard the same fatal gurgling sound in the river beneath. And you will understand the feeling also, I think, with which, at such times, I cast a hasty glance at the morgue not far distant, and hurried on to the more cheerful neighbourhood of the Garden of the Tuileries. I would not have you believe that the idea of suicide ever crossed my mind. I merely went and looked into the Seine on that queer, unexplained principle which impels miserable people, the world over, to haunt wharves and bridges, and to gaze listlessly into water. I have sometimes thought, when I saw servant-girls and others out of employ looking, for instance, from the bridge of boats at Mannheim into the Rhine, as into the window of an intelligence-office. I have sometimes thought, I say, that if dogs do go mad from gazing into water, as I think was once believed, they are very miserable dogs, and very much disgusted with the world before they do it. One day, the fourth of my suspense, if I remember, when I was more despondent and hungry than usual, I went and looked in through the grating of the morgue itself. If I had ever had the least thought of throwing myself into the Seine, this horrible sight would have cured me as thoroughly of it as it did of my appetite for the rest of that day. I feel some diffidence about mentioning a plan, happily abandoned, as you shall see, before put into further execution, which suggested itself to my mind during that hungry week, namely, to visit the morgue once a day for purposes of economy. But luckily I discovered about this time that the smoking of cigarettes made of cheap French tobacco would perform the same service of taking away the appetite, and I adopted the latter more agreeable means to that end. The fifth and sixth days after sending my article I did scarcely anything but wait about the office for my letter. Finally a note arrived from Paternoster Row, with just one line of the worst penmanship in it that has ever yet met my eyes, and the painful suspense was only intensified. The writer evidently said something about my article, but what? I despaired of making out. I took the note to my friends and they were divided about it. Some said that the article was rejected, and some that it was accepted. The majority, however, favored the latter opinion, to which at last myself was brought, and I was happy. Not long afterward I received a draft from the publishers for a sum which seemed to me at that time almost fabulous for the amount of work done. After a hearty meal, and as soon as I had time to think, I considered my fortune made. I was now arrived at the appalling dignity of—magazinist—contributed to the widest circulated periodical in the language. I packed my trunk immediately, and started for Italy. Vagabond Adventures by Ralph Keeler Book III The Tour of Europe for $181 in Currency Chapter 5 The Conclusion I stayed at Florence all winter, living on the cheapest of food, indeed, but with the very best of company. I haunted the galleries and studios so much that the artist took me for a devotee of art, and never asked me how I lived. At dusk it was my custom to steal away toward my dinner, passing Michael Angelo's David, forever about to throw the stone across the famous old piazza, and gliding down a by-street till I came to the market. There, in a little cook-shop amid the filth and noise of the very raggedest of Florence, I partook of my macaroni, or, if I was fastidious, of my boiled beans and olive oil for seven centesimi—one cent and two-fifths of a cent. My bread made of chestnuts for two centesimi—two-fifths of a cent, and my half glass of wine for seven centesimi—my dinner with a scrap of meat averaging five cents, and rarely exceeding ten. My glass of wine may be considered an extravagance. It was not. I could stand the bustle, the uncleanness, and even the staring at a passably well-dressed person in such an unaccustomed place, but I could not stand the positive amazement expressed by young men and old women, old men and young women, beggars and organ artists the day when I omitted wine. It was too much for endurance. Public opinion was against me. I pretended to have forgotten to order my wine and turned off the whole affair with a laugh. Many and many a time I have seen a poor old creature, who was often my next neighbour at table, pay two centesimi for bread and seven centesimi for wine, and that was her whole meal. This experience has always helped me to believe the account of that strange incident in the history of the Florentines, given, I think, by Machiavelli, in which it is related that during the Republican days of Florence, when there was a hostile army making an in-road on their territories, the dowdy Republicans, having gone out to meet it, lay encamped some time not far from Luca, and that suddenly, when the enemy was almost upon them, they revolted, turned around, and marched home again, to let their territory and the fortunes of their city take care of themselves, because the Florentine army had, unfortunately, got out of wine. Sometimes I spent my evenings at the café, where I always took my breakfast, and where for three soldi, three cents, invested in coffee or chocolate, I could sit as long as I liked, reading the papers or listening to the talk of my artist friends. It was always cheaper for me to go to the opera, taking a very high seat, by the way, than to have a light and a fire in my room. I have seen an opera with a hundred or more people on the stage at a time, in a theatre as large as, and some say larger than, there is in London or Paris, and all it cost me was eight cents. Thus I lived on in the city of art and olives, when my money began to give out again. I thought I would condescend to transmit another article to the London magazine which had made my fortune before. I transmitted another article, and at the time, when I ought to have heard from it, I was reduced to the sum of forty francs. Receiving at last an envelope with the Paternoster mark upon it, I restrained my joy, and opened it leisurely, making merely the mental resolution that I would dine and state that day, for this was a longer article than the first one, and the sum which it would bring must be simply enormous. Then I proceeded to read the following letter. Dear sir, your article entitled, Blank, is respectfully declined. This time starvation was sure. But I had set my heart on seeing Rome. I thought there would be a sort of melancholy satisfaction in having visited the capital of the ancient world before going to any other new one. I therefore took the next open-topped car for the seashore, having previously put my first rough draft of my unfortunate article into a new wrapper, and shipped it off to the editor of a less pretending periodical published at Edinburgh. I do not remember how or why, but the night after I left Florence I had to lie over at Pisa, where I came near being robbed of what little money I had, at a miserable cheap trattoria not far from the famous Leaning Tower. I found a fierce mustached bandit of a fellow in my room in the middle of the night, stealthily approaching the head of my bed, and scared him away, I shall always believe, by the bad Anglo-Italian in which I expressed my sense of surprise and concern at his untimely and extraordinary conduct. Two days afterward I took a fourth class, that is, deck passage, on the French steamer sailing down the Mediterranean from Leghorn. I stayed a week at Rome, and came very near staying much longer. It was, indeed, by a miraculous chance that I ever left the eternal city. I had not money enough to pay the pontifical tax on departing travellers. It is too long a story to tell here, but I slipped through the fingers of the police, and arriving at Leghorn again I had not the ten cents to pay the boatman to take me ashore from the steamer. My trunk, by the way, I had left at Leghorn before starting for Rome, so that was out of danger and came properly to hand afterward. As my lucky star would have it an American bark was lying at anchor in the bay. It was the first time I had seen the star-spangled banner for two years, and I flew to it for protection. I directed the boatman to take me to the American ship. Standing in the bow of the smaller craft, as soon as she reached the greater one, I sprang up the side, and the boatman sprang after me. He detained half of my coat, but I reached the deck where I kept him at bay with a belaying pin till someone on the ship was roused, for it was early in the morning. The ten cents were paid over to the clamorous Italian by a hearty tar who was moved to see an American in distress, where his mainsail carried away! I think that is the way the tar phrased it. The captain of the ship was a warm-hearted old fellow from down in Maine. He offered to take me home before I asked him. I had a boyish love of independence and proposed to work. He said he wouldn't be bothered with me. He would take me as his only passenger. We settled the matter at last by my contracting grandly to owe him fifty dollars in green-backs. Our vessel was about twenty years old, and laden with rags and great blocks of marble. We had a terrible storm in the Mediterranean in which we came near going down. The old craft seemed, however, to have some secret understanding with fate. For having shifted her cargo, she floated, well nigh on her beam ends, the rest of that desolate ten weeks through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. I arrived at Boston finally without assent. I had directed that all letters should be forwarded from my address at Florence to the care of the merchant to whom our ship was consigned. That was my surprise, then, to be handed by that gentleman an envelope and closing a draft on London in pay for the almost forgotten article, which I had sent in sheer desperation, if not in comprehensive revenge, to that Edinburgh magazine. Green-backs were then at their heaviest discount and English exchange at its highest premium, and thus it happened that I sold my draft for American money enough to pay the good-hearted captain and the patriotic tar, and take me back to Toledo, my starting place, after an absence of over two years, at the total expense of a little more than three hundred dollars. Here at the proper end of my pilgrimage and of this book, while I am figuratively taking off my sandal-shoon and hanging up my pilgrim staff, let me say that, although I did not set out with any higher purpose than to tell just such a story as I might tell under oath, still I think I discern in these European adventures what I may term an ex-postfacto moral. Let not the reader, however, practice and amuse his ingenuity by attempting to detect this in the earlier chapters of the present work, or by any manner of means in the pilgrim himself, for, personally, he feels as free from a moral as any pilgrim he has ever seen has been free from superfluous linen. While, therefore, I would not advise any young man to follow directly in my footsteps, yet I hope I have shown that there are means and modes of travel unknown to the guidebooks, that there are cheap ways for the student and man of limited means to see and learn much from little money. The sight of a sunrise from the rigi is certainly more than compensation for putting up with a poor breakfast, and the candid traveller, however light his purse, needs never return dyspeptic or misanthropic. Pure air and hearty exercise in the Alps and on the Danube cannot fail to do him physical good. While he will find, in the human nature with which he comes in contact in every land, the sum of the good invariably preponderating over that of the evil.