 47 We spent a few pleasant restful days at Geneva, that delightful city where accurate timepieces are made for all the rest of the world, but whose own clocks never give the correct time of day by any accident. Geneva is filled with pretty shops, and the shops are filled with the most enticing Jim Crackery, but if one enters one of these places he is at once pounced upon and followed up and so persecuted to buy this, that and the other thing, that he is very grateful to get out again, and is not at all apt to repeat his experiment. The shopkeepers of the smaller sort in Geneva are as troublesome and persistent as are the salesmen of that monster hive in Paris, the Grand Magin d'Helure, an establishment where ill-mannered pestering, pursuing, and insistence have been reduced to a science. In Geneva prices in the smaller shops are very elastic—that is, another bad feature—I was looking in at a window at a very pretty string of beads suitable for a child. I was only admiring them. I had no use for them. I hardly ever wear beads. The shopwoman came out and offered them to me for thirty-five francs. I said it was cheap, but I did not need them. Ah! but, monsieur, they are so beautiful!" I confessed it, but said they were not suitable for one of my age and simplicity of character. She darted in and brought them out and tried to force them into my hand, saying, Ah! but only see how lovely they are! Surely, monsieur will take them. Monsieur shall have them for thirty francs. There, I have said it. It is a loss, but one must live. I dropped my hands and tried to move her to respect my unprotected situation, but no. She dangled the beads in the sun before my face, exclaiming, Ah! monsieur, cannot resist them! She hung them on my coat-button, folded her hand resignedly, and said, Gone! for thirty francs! The lovely things! It is incredible, but the good God will sanctify the sacrifice to me. I removed them gently, returned them, and walked away, shaking my head and smiling a smile of silly embarrassment while the passers-by halted to observe. The woman, leaned out of her door, shook the beads, and screamed out to me, Monsieur shall have them for twenty-eight! I shook my head. Twenty-seven! It is a cruel loss! It is ruined! But take them only, take them! I still retreated, still wagging my head. Moldier! They shall even go for twenty-six! There! I have said it. Come!" I wagged another negative. A nurse and a little English girl had been near me, and were following me now. The shopwoman ran to the nurse, thrust the beads into her hands, and said, Monsieur shall have them for twenty-five. Take them to the hotel. He shall send me the money to-morrow, next day, when he likes. Then to the child, when thy father sends me the money, come, thou also, my angel, and thou shall have something oh so pretty! I was thus providentially saved. The nurse refused the beads squarely and firmly, and that ended the matter. The sights of Geneva are not numerous. I made one attempt to hunt up the houses once inhabited by those two disagreeable people, Rousseau and Calvin, but I had no success. Then I concluded to go home. I found it was easier to propose to do that than to do it. For that town is a bewildering place. I got lost in a tangle of narrow and crooked streets and stayed lost for an hour or two. Finally I found a street which looked somewhat familiar, and said to myself, Now I am at home, my judge! But I was wrong. This was Hell Street. Presently I found another place which had a familiar look and said to myself, Now I am at home, sure. It was another error. This was Purgatory Street. After a little I said, Now I've got the right place anyway. No, this is Paradise Street. I'm further from home than I was in the beginning. Those were queer names. Calvin was the author of them, likely. Hell and Purgatory fitted those two streets like a glove, but the Paradise appeared to be sarcastic. I came out on the lakefront at last, and then I knew where I was. I was walking along before the glittering jewelry shops when I saw a curious performance. A lady passed by, and a trim dandy lounged across the walk in such an apparently carefully timed way as to bring himself exactly in front of her when she got to him. He made no offer to step out of the way. He did not apologize. He did not even notice her. She had to stop still and let him lounge by. I wondered if he had done that piece of brutality purposely. He strolled to a chair and seated himself at a small table. Two or three other males were sitting at similar tables, sipping sweetened water. I waited. Presently a youth came by, and this fellow got up and served him the same trick. Still it did not seem possible that anyone could do such a thing deliberately. To satisfy my curiosity I went around the block and sure enough as I approached at a good round speed he got up and lounged lazily across my path, fouling my course exactly at the right moment to receive all my weight. This proved that his previous performances had not been accidental but intentional. I saw that dandy's curious game played afterward in Paris, but not for amusement, not with a motive of any sort indeed, but simply from a selfish indifference to other people's comfort and rights. One does not see it as frequently in Paris as he might expect to, for there the law says in effect it is the business of the weak to get out of the way of the strong. We find a cab man if he runs over a citizen. Paris finds the citizen for being run over. At least so everybody says. But I saw something which caused me to doubt. I saw a horseman run over an old woman one day. The police arrested him and took him away. That looked as if they meant to punish him. It will not do for me to find merit in American manners, for are they not the standing but for the jests of critical and polished Europe? Still, I must venture to claim one little matter of superiority in our manners. A lady may traverse our streets all day, going and coming as she chooses, and she will never be molested by any man. But if a lady unattended walks abroad in the streets of London even at noonday, she will be pretty likely to be accosted and insulted, and not by drunken sailors, but by men who carry the look and wear the dress of gentlemen. It is maintained that these people are not gentlemen, but are a lower sort disguised as gentlemen. The case of Colonel Valentine Baker obstructs that argument, for a man cannot become an officer in the British army except he hold the rank of gentleman. This person, finding himself alone in a railway compartment with an unprotected girl, but it is an atrocious story, and doubtless the reader remembers it well enough. London must have been more or less accustomed to Bakers, and the ways of Bakers else London would have been offended and excited. Baker was imprisoned in a parlor, and he could not have been more visited or more overwhelmed with attentions if he had committed six murders, and then, while the gallows was preparing, got religion after the manner of the Holy Charles peace of saintly memory. Arkansas! It seems a little indelicate to be trumpeting forth our own superiorties, and comparisons are always odious, but still Arkansas would certainly have hanged Baker. I do not say she would have tried him first, but she would have hanged him anyway. Even the most degraded woman can walk our streets unmolested, her sex and her weakness being her sufficient protection. She will encounter less polish than she would in the old world, but she will run across enough humanity to make up for it. The music of a donkey awoke us early in the morning, and we rose up and made ready for a pretty formidable walk to Italy, but the road was so level that we took the train. We lost a good deal of time by this, but it was no matter. We were not in a hurry. We were four hours going to Chambéry. The Swiss trains go upward of three miles an hour in places, but they are quite safe. That aged French town of Chambéry was as quaint and crooked as Heilbrunn. A drowsy, reposeful quiet reigned in the back streets, which made strolling through them very pleasant, barring the almost unbearable heat of the sun. In one of these streets, which was eight feet wide, gracefully curved and built up with small antiquated houses, I saw three fat hogs lying asleep, and a boy, also asleep, taking care of them. From queer, old-fashioned windows along the curve projected boxes of bright flowers, and over the edge of one of these boxes hung the head and shoulders of a cat, asleep. The five sleeping creatures were the only living things visible in that street. There was not a sound. Absolute stillness prevailed. It was Sunday. One is not used to such dreamy Sundays on the Continent. In our part of the town it was different that night. A regiment of brown and battered soldiers had arrived home from Algiers, and I judged they got thirsty on the way. They sang and drank till dawn, in the pleasant open air. We left for Turin at ten in the next morning by a railway which was profusely decorated with tunnels. We forgot to take a lantern along. Consequently we missed all the scenery. Our compartment was full, a ponderous, toe-headed Swiss woman who put on many fine lady ears, but was evidently more used to washing linen than wearing it, sat in a corner seat and put her legs across into the opposite one, propping them intermediately with her upended valise. In the seat thus pirated sat two Americans, greatly incommodated by that woman's majestic coffin-clad feet. One of them begged politely to remove them. She opened her wide eyes and gave him a stare, but answered nothing. By and by he proffered his request again with great respectfulness. She said, in good English and in a deeply offended tone, that she had paid her passage and was not going to be bullied out of her rights by ill-bred foreigners, even if she was alone and unprotected. But I have rights also, madam. My ticket entitles me to a seat, but you are occupying half of it. I will not talk with you, sir. What right have you to speak to me? I do not know you. One would know you came from a land where there are no gentlemen. No gentleman would treat a lady as you have treated me. I come from a region where a lady would hardly give me the same provocation. You have insulted me, sir. You have intimated that I am not a lady, and I hope I am not one after the pattern of your country. I beg that you will give yourself no alarm on that head, madam, but at the same time I must insist, always respectfully, that you let me have my seat. Here the fragile laundress burst into tears and sobs. I never was so insulted before. Never! Never! It is shameful! It is brutal! It is base! To bully and abuse an unprotected lady who has lost the use of her limbs, and cannot put her feet to the floor without agony. Good heavens, madam! Why didn't you say that, that the first? I offer a thousand pardons, and I offer them most sincerely. I did not know. I could not know. Anything was the matter. You are most welcome to the seat and would have been from the first if I had only known. I am truly sorry it all happened, I do assure you. But he couldn't get a word of forgiveness out of her. She simply sobbed and sniffed in a subdued but wholly unappeasable way for two long hours. Meantime, crowding the man more than ever with her undertaker furniture, and paying no sort of attention to his frequent and humble little efforts to do something for her comfort. Then the train halted at the Italian line, and she hopped up and marched out of the car with as firm a leg as any washerwoman of all her tribe, and how sick I was to see how she had fooled me. Turin is a very fine city. In the manner of roominess it transcends anything that was ever dreamed of before, I fancy. It sits in the midst of a vast dead level, and one is obliged to imagine that land may be had for the asking, and no taxes to pay, so lavishly do they use it. The streets are extravagantly wide, the paved squares are prodigious, the houses are huge and handsome, and compacted into uniform blocks that stretch away as straight as an arrow into the distance. The sidewalks are about as wide as ordinary European streets, and are covered over with a double arcade supported on great stone piers or columns. One walks from one end to the other of these spacious streets under shelter all the time, and all his course is lined with the prettiest of shops and the most inviting dining houses. There is a wide and lengthy court glittering with the most wickedly enticing shops which is roofed with glass, high aloft overhead, and paved with soft-toned marbles laid in graceful figures, and at night when the place is brilliant with gas and populous with a sauntering and chatting and laughing multitude of pleasure-seekers, it is a spectacle we're seeing. Everything is on a large scale. The public buildings, for instance, and they are architecturally imposing too, as well as large. The big squares have big bronze monuments in them. At the hotel they gave us rooms that were alarming for size and parlor to match. It was well the weather required no fire in the parlor, for I think one might as well have tried to warm a park. The place would have a warm look, though in any weather, for the window curtains were of red silk damask, and the walls were covered with the same fire-hued goods. So also were the four sofas and the brigade of chairs. The furniture, the ornaments, the chandeliers, the carpets were all new and bright and costly. We did not need a parlor at all, but they said it belonged to the two bedrooms, and we might use it if we chose. Since it was to cost nothing, we were not averse to using it, of course. Turin must surely read a good deal, for it has more bookstores to the square rod than any other town I know of, and it has its own share of military folk. The Italian officers' uniforms are very much the most beautiful I have ever seen, and, as a general thing, the men in them were as handsome as the clothes. They were not large men, but they had fine forms, fine features, rich olive complexions, and lustrous black eyes. For several weeks I had been culling all the information I could about Italy from tourists. The tourists were all agreed upon one thing—one must expect to be cheated at every turn by the Italians. I took an evening walk in Turin, and presently came across a little Punch and Judy show in one of the great squares. Twelve or fifteen people constituted the audience. This miniature theatre was not much bigger than a man's coffin stood on end. The upper part was open and displayed a tinseled parlor, a good-sized handkerchief would have answered for a drop curtain. The footlights consisted of a couple of candle-ends an inch long. Various mannequins the size of dolls appeared on the stage and made long speeches at each other, gesticulating a good deal, and they generally had a fight before they got through. They were worked by strings from above, and the illusion was not perfect. For one saw not only the strings, but the brawny hand that manipulated them, and the actors and actresses all talked in the same voice, too. The audience stood in front of the theatre and seemed to enjoy the performance heartily. When the play was done, a youth in his shirt sleeves started around with a small copper saucer to make a collection. I did not know how much to put in, but thought I would be guided by my predecessors. Unluckily I only had two of these, and they did not help me much because they did not put in anything. I had no Italian money, so I put in a small Swiss coin worth about ten cents. The youth finished his collection trip and emptied the result on the stage. He had some very animated talk with a concealed manager, then he came working his way through the little crowd, seeking me, I thought. I had a mind to slip away, but concluded I wouldn't. I would stand my ground, and confront the villainy, whatever it was. The youth stood before me, and held up that Swiss coin, sure enough, and said something. I did not understand him, but I judged he was requiring Italian money of me. The crowd gathered close to listen. I was irritated and said in English, of course. I know it's Swiss, but you'll take that or none. I haven't any other. He tried to put the coin in my hand and spoke again. I drew my hand away and said, No, sir. I know all about you people. You can't play any of your fraudful tricks on me. If there is a discount on that coin, I am sorry, but I am not going to make it good. I noticed that some of the audience didn't pay you anything at all. You let them go without a word. But you come after me because you think I am a stranger and will put up with an extortion rather than have a scene. But you are mistaken this time. You'll take that Swiss money or none. The youth stood there with the coin in his fingers, nonplussed and bewildered. Of course, he had not understood a word. An English-speaking Italian spoke up now and said, You are misunderstanding the boy. He does not mean any harm. He did not suppose you gave him so much money purposely, so he hurried back to return you the coin lest you might get away before you discovered your mistake. Take it and give him a penny. That will make everything smooth again. I probably blushed then, for there was occasion. Through the interpreter I begged the boy's pardon, but I nobly refused to take back the ten cents. I said I was accustomed to squandering large sums in that way. It was the kind of person I was. Then I retired to make a note to the effect that in Italy persons connected with the drama do not cheat. The episode with the showman reminds me of a dark chapter in my history. I once robbed an aged and blind beggar woman of four dollars in a church. It happened this way. When I was out with the innocence abroad the ship stopped in the Russian port of Odessa and I went ashore with others to view the town. I got separated from the rest and wandered about alone until late in the afternoon when I entered a Greek church to see what it was like. When I was ready to leave I observed two wrinkled old women standing stiffly upright against the inner wall near the door with their brown palms open to receive alms. I contributed to the nearer one and passed out. I had gone fifty yards perhaps when it occurred to me that I must remain ashore all night as I had heard that the ship's business would carry her away at four o'clock and keep her away until morning. It was a little after four now. I had come ashore with only two pieces of money, both about the same size but differing largely in value. One was a French gold piece worth four dollars, the other a Turkish coin worth two cents and a half. With a sudden and horrified misgiving I put my hand in my pocket now and sure enough I fetched out that Turkish penny. Here was a situation. A hotel would require pay in advance. I must walk the street all night and perhaps be arrested as a suspicious character. There was but one way out of the difficulty. I flew back to the church and softly entered. There stood the old woman yet in the palm of the nearest one still lay my gold piece. I was grateful. I crept close, feeling unspeakably mean. I got my Turkish penny ready and was extending a trembling hand to make the nefarious exchange when I heard a cough behind me. I jumped back as if I had been accused and stood quaking while a worshipper entered and passed up the aisle. I was there a year trying to steal that money—that is, it seemed a year though, of course, it must have been much less. The worshippers went and came. There were hardly ever three in the church at once, but there was always one or more. Every time I tried to commit my crime somebody came in or somebody started out and I was prevented, but at last my opportunity came. For one moment there was nobody in the church but the two beggar women and me. I whipped the gold piece out of the poor old pauper's palm and dropped my Turkish penny in its place. Poor old thing, she murmured her thanks. They smote me to the heart. Then I sped away in a guilty hurry, and even when I was a mile from the church I was still glancing back every moment to see if I was being pursued. That experience has been of priceless value and benefit to me, for I resolved then that as long as I lived I would never again rob a blind beggar woman in a church, and I have always kept my word. The most permanent lessons and morals are those which come not of booky teaching, but of experience. End of Chapter 47 In Milan we spent most of our time in the vast and beautiful arcade, or gallery, or whatever it is called. Blocks of tall, new buildings of the most sumptuous sort, rich with decoration and graced with statues. The streets between these blocks roofed over with glass at a great height. The pavements, all of smooth and variegated marble, arranged in tasteful patterns. Little tables all over these marble streets, people sitting at them, eating, drinking or smoking, crowds of other people strolling by, such is the arcade. I should like to live in it all the time. The windows of the sumptuous restaurant stand open, and one breakfasts there, and enjoys the passing show. We wandered all over the town, enjoying whatever was going on in the streets. We took one omnibus ride, and as I did not speak Italian, and could not ask the price, I held out some copper coins to the conductor, and he took two. Then he went and got his tariff card and showed me that he had taken only the right sum. So I made a note. Italian omnibus conductors do not cheat. Near the cathedral I saw another instance of probity. An old man was peddling dolls and toy fans. Two small American children bought fans, and one gave the old man a franc and three copper coins, and both started away. But they were called back, and the franc and one of the coppers were restored to them. Hence it is plain that in Italy, parties connected with the drama and with the omnibus and toy interests, do not cheat. The stocks of goods in the shops were not extensive generally. In the vestibule of what seemed to be a clothing store, we saw eight or ten wooden dummies grouped together, clothed in woollen business suits, and each marked with its price. One suit was marked forty-five francs—nine dollars. Harris stepped in and said he wanted a suit like that. Nothing easier. The old merchant dragged in the dummy, brushed him off with a broom, stripped him, and shipped the clothes to the hotel. He said he did not keep two suits of the same kind in stock, but manufactured a second when it was needed to reclose the dummy. In another quarter we found six Italians engaged in a violent quarrel. They danced fiercely about, justiculating with their heads, their arms, their legs, their whole bodies. They would rush forward occasionally with a sudden access of passion and shake their fists in each other's very faces. We lost half an hour there, waiting to help cord up the dead. But they finally embraced each other affectionately, and the trouble was over. The episode was interesting, but we could not have afforded all the time to it if we had known nothing was going to come of it but a reconciliation. Note made, in Italy, people who quarrel cheat the spectator. We had another disappointment afterward. We approached a deeply interested crowd, and in the midst of it found a fellow wildly chattering and gesticulating over a box on the ground which was covered with a piece of old blanket. Every little while he would bend down and take hold of the edge of the blanket with the extreme tips of his fingertips, as if to show there was no deception, chattering away all the while. But always, just as I was expecting to see a wonder feet of leisure domain, he would let go the blanket and rise to explain further. However, at last he uncovered the box, and got out a spoon with a liquid in it, and held it fair and frankly around for people to see that it was all right, and he was taking no advantage. His chatter became more excited than ever. I supposed he was going to set fire to the liquid and swallow it, so I was greatly wrought up and interested. I got a scent ready in one hand and a floor and in the other, intending to give him the former, if he survived, and the latter, if he killed himself. For his loss would be my gain in the literary way, and I was willing to pay a fair price for the item. But this imposter ended his intensely moving performance by simply adding some powder to the liquid, and polishing the spoon. Then he held it aloft, and he could not have shown a wilder exaltation if he had achieved an immortal miracle. The crowd applauded in a gratified way, and it seemed to me that history speaks the truth, when it says these children of the South are easily entertained. We spent an impressive hour in the noble cathedral, where long shafts of tinted light were cleaving through the solemn dimness from the lofty windows and falling on a pillar here, a picture there, and a kneeling worshipper yonder. The organ was muttering, sensors were swinging, candles were glinting on the distant altar, and robed priests were filing silently past them. The scene was one to sweep all frivolous thoughts away, and steep the soul in a holy calm. A trim young American lady paused a yard or two from me, fixed her eyes on the mellow sparks flaking the far-off altar, bent her head reverently a moment, then straightened up, kicked her train into the air with her heel, caught it deftly in her hand, and marched briskly out. We visited the picture-galleries and the other regulation sights of Milan, not because I wanted to write about them again, but to see if I had learned anything in twelve years. I afterward visited the great galleries of Rome and Florence for the same purpose. I found I had learned one thing. When I wrote about the old masters before, I said the copies were better than the originals. That was a mistake of large dimensions. The old masters were still unpleasing to me, but they were truly divine-contrasted with the copies. The copy is to the original, as the pallid, smart, inane, new waxwork group is to the vigorous, earnest, dignified group of living men and women whom it professes to duplicate. There is a mellow richness, a subdued color in the old pictures, which is to the eye what muffled and mellowed sound is to the ear. That is the merit which is most loudly praised in the old picture, and is the one which the copy most conspicuously lacks, and which the copyist must not hope to compass. It was generally conceded by the artist with whom I talked, that that subdued splendor, that mellow richness, is imparted to the picture by age. Then why should we worship the old master for it, who didn't impart it, instead of worshiping old time who did? Perhaps the picture was a clanging bell, until time muffled it and sweetened it. In conversation with an artist in Venice I asked, what is it that people see in the old masters? I have been in the Doge's palace, and I saw several acres of very bad drawing, very bad perspective, and very incorrect proportions. Paul Veronesi's dogs do not resemble dogs, all the horses look like bladders on legs. One man had a right leg on the left side of his body. In the large picture where the Emperor Barbarossa is prostrate before the Pope, there are three men in the foreground who are over thirty feet high, if one may judge by the size of a kneeling little boy in the center of the foreground, and according to the same scale the Pope is seven feet high, and the Doge is a shrivel dwarf of four feet. The artist said, yes, the old masters often drew badly, they did not care much for truth and exactness in minor details, but after all, in spite of bad drawing, bad perspective, bad proportions, and a choice of subjects which no longer appeal to people as strongly as they did three hundred years ago, there is something about their pictures which is divine, something which is above and beyond the art of any epoch since, something which would be the despair of artists, but that they never hoped or expect to attain it, and therefore do not worry about it. That is what he said, and he said what he believed, and not only believed, but felt. Reasoning, especially reasoning without technical knowledge, must be put aside in cases of this kind. It cannot assist the inquirer. It will lead him in the most logical progression to what in the eyes of artists would be a most illogical conclusion. Thus, bad drawing, bad proportion, bad perspective, indifference to truthful detail, color which gets its merit from time and not from the artist, these things constitute the old master. Conclusion? The old master was a bad painter, the old master was not an old master at all, but an old apprentice. Your friend, the artist, will grant your premises, but deny your conclusion. He will maintain that, notwithstanding this formidable list of confessed defects, there is still a something that is divine and unapproachable about the old master, and that there is no arguing the fact away by any system of reasoning whatsoever. I can believe that. There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail. He would say, of one of these women, this chin is too short, this nose is too long, this forehead is too high, this hair is too red, this complexion is too pallid, the perspective of the entire composition is incorrect. Conclusion? The woman is not beautiful. But her nearest friend might say and say truly, your premises are right, your logic is faultless, but your conclusion is wrong nevertheless, she is an old master, she is beautiful, but only to such as know her, it is a beauty which cannot be formulated, but it is there just the same. I found more pleasure in contemplating the old masters this time than I did when I was in Europe in former years, but still it was a calm pleasure, there was nothing overheated about it. When I was in Venice before, I think I found no picture which stirred me much, but this time there were two which enticed me to the Doge's palace day after day, and kept me there hours at a time. One of these was Tintoretto's three-acre picture in the Great Council Chamber. When I saw it twelve years ago I was not strongly attracted to it, the guide told me it was an insurrection in heaven, but this was an error. The movement of this great work is very fine. There are ten thousand figures, and they are all doing something. There is a wonderful go to the whole composition. Some of the figures are driving headlong downward with clasped hands, others are swimming through the cloud shoals, some on their faces, some on their backs. Great processions of bishops, martyrs, and angels are pouring swiftly centerward from various outline directions. Everywhere is enthusiastic joy. There is rushing movement everywhere. There are fifteen or twenty figures scattered here and there with books, but they cannot keep their attention on their reading. They offer the books to others, but no one wishes to read now. The lion of St. Mark is there with his book, St. Mark is there with his pen uplifted. He and the lion are looking each other earnestly in the face, disputing about the way to spell a word. The lion looks up in rapt admiration while St. Mark spells. This is wonderfully interpreted by the artist. It is the master stroke of this incomparable painting. Figure ten. I visited the place daily, and never grew tired of looking at that grand picture. As I have intimated, the movement is almost unimaginably vigorous. The figures are singing, hosanna-ing, and many are blowing trumpets. So vividly as noise suggested that spectators who become absorbed in the picture almost always fall to shouting comments in each other's ears, making ear trumpets of their curved hands, fearing they may not otherwise be heard. One often sees a tourist, with the eloquent tears pouring down his cheeks, funnel his hands at his wife's ear, and hears him roar through them, oh, to be there and at rest! None but the supremely great in art can produce effects like these with the silent brush. Twelve years ago I could not have appreciated this picture. One year ago I could not have appreciated it. My study of art in Heidelberg has been a noble education to me. All that I am today in art I owe to that. The other great work which fascinated me was Bassano's immortal hair-trunk. This is in the chamber of the Council of Ten. It is one of the three forty-foot pictures which decorate the walls of the room. The composition of this picture is beyond praise. The hair-trunk is not hurled at the stranger's head, so to speak, as the chief feature of an immortal work so often is. No, it is carefully guarded from prominence. It is subordinated. It is restrained. It is most deftly and cleverly held in reserve. It is most cautiously and ingeniously led up to by the master, and consequently when the spectator reaches it at last, he is taken unawares, he is unprepared, and it bursts upon him with a stupefying surprise. One is lost in wonder at all the thought and care which this elaborate planning must have cost. A general glance at the picture could never suggest that there was a hair-trunk in it. The hair-trunk is not mentioned in the title even, which is Pope Alexander III and the Doge Ziani, the conqueror of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. You see, the title is actually utilized to help divert attention from the trunk. Thus, as I say, nothing suggests the presence of the trunk by any hint, yet everything studedly leads up to it step by step. Let us examine into this, and observe the exquisitely artful artlessness of the plan. At the extreme left end of the picture are a couple of women, one of them with a child looking over her shoulder at a wounded man sitting with bandaged head on the ground. These people seem needless, but no, they are there for a purpose. One cannot look at them without seeing the gorgeous procession of grandees, bishops, albediers, and banner-bearers which is passing along behind them. One cannot see the procession without feeling the curiosity to follow it and learn with her it is going. It leads him to the Pope, in the center of the picture, who is talking with the bonnetless Doge, talking tranquilly too, although within twelve feet of them a man is beating a drum, and not far from the drummer two persons are blowing horns, and many horsemen are plunging and rioting about. Indeed, twenty-two feet of this great work is all a deep and happy holiday serenity and Sunday school procession, and then we come suddenly upon eleven and one-half feet of turmoil and racket and insubordination. This latter state of things is not an accident, it has its purpose. But for it one would linger upon the Pope and the Doge, thinking them to be the motive and supreme feature of the picture, whereas one is drawn along almost unconsciously to see what the trouble is about. Now at the very end of this riot, within four feet of the end of the picture, and fully thirty-six feet from the beginning of it, the hair-trunk bursts with an electrifying suddenness upon the spectator, in all its matchless perfection, and the great master's triumph is sweeping and complete. From that moment no other thing in those forty feet of canvas has any charm. One sees the hair-trunk and the hair-trunk only, and to see it is to worship it. Bassano even placed objects in the immediate vicinity of the supreme feature whose pretended purpose was to divert attention from it yet a little longer, and thus delay and augment the surprise. For instance, to the right of it he has placed a stooping man with a cap so red that it is sure to hold the eye for a moment. To the left of it, some six feet away, he has placed a red-coated man on an inflated horse, and that coat plucks your eye to that locality the next moment. Then, between the trunk and the red horseman, he has intruded a man, naked to his waist, who is carrying a fancy flower sack on the middle of his back instead of on his shoulder. This admirable feet interests you, of course, keeps you at bay a little longer, like a sock or a jacket thrown to the pursuing wolf, but at last, in spite of all distractions and detentions, the eye of even the most dull and heedless spectator is sure to fall upon the world's masterpiece, and in that moment he totters to his chair or leans upon his guide for support. Descriptions of such a work as this must necessarily be imperfect. Yet they are of value. The top of the trunk is arched. The arch is a perfect half-circle in the Roman style of architecture, for in the then rapid decadence of Greek art the rising influence of Rome was already beginning to be felt in the art of the Republic. The trunk is bound or bordered with leather all around where the lid joins the main body. Many critics consider this leather too cold in tone, but I consider this its highest merit, since it was evidently made so to emphasize, by contrast, the impassioned fervor of the hasp. The highlights in this part of the work are cleverly managed. The motif is admirably subordinated to the ground tints, and the technique is very fine. The brass nail-heads are in the purest style of the early Renaissance. The strokes here are very firm and bold. Every nail-head is a portrait. The handle, on the end of the trunk, has evidently been retouched, I think, with a piece of chalk, but one can still see the inspiration of the old master in the tranquil, almost too tranquil, hang of it. The hair of this trunk is real hair, so to speak. White in patches, brown in patches. The details are finally worked out. The repose, proper to hair, in a recumbent and inactive attitude, is charmingly expressed. There is a feeling about this part of the work which lifts it to the highest altitudes of art. The sense of sordid realism vanishes away. One recognizes that there is soul here. View this trunk, as you will. It is a gem. It is a marvel. It is a miracle. Some of the effects are very daring, approaching even to the boldest flights of the Rococo, the Sirocco, and the Byzantine schools. Yet the master's hand never falters. It moves on, calm, majestic, confident. And with that art which conceals art, it finally casts over the tout ensemble by mysterious methods of its own. A subtle something which refines, dues, etherealizes the arid components, and endures them with the deep charm and gracious witchery of poesy. Among the art treasures of Europe there are pictures which approach the hair-trunk. There are two which may be said to equal it possibly, but there is none that surpasses it. So perfect is the hair-trunk that it moves even persons who ordinarily have no feeling for art. When an eerie baggage-master saw it two years ago, he could hardly keep from checking it. And once, when a customs-inspector was brought into its presence, he gazed upon it in silent rapture for some moments, then slowly and unconsciously placed one hand behind him with the palm uppermost, and got out his chalk with the other. These facts speak for themselves. CHAPTER 49 One lingers about the cathedral a good deal in Venice. There is a strong fascination about it, partly because it is so old, and partly because it is so ugly. Too many of the world's famous buildings fail of one chief virtue, Harmony. They are made up of a methodless mixture of the ugly and the beautiful. This is bad. It is confusing. It is unrestful. One has a sense of uneasiness, of distress, without knowing why. But one is calm before St. Mark's. One is calm within it. One would be calm on top of it, calm in the cellar. For its details are masterfully ugly. No misplaced and impertinent beauties are intruded anywhere, and the consequent result is a grand, harmonious whole of soothing, entrancing, tranquilizing, soul-satisfying ugliness. One's admiration of a perfect thing always grows, never declines, and this is the surest evidence to him that it is perfect. St. Mark's is perfect. To me it soon grew to be so nobly, so augustly ugly, that it was difficult to stay away from it, even for a little while. Every time its squat domes disappeared from my view, I had a despondent feeling. Whenever they reappeared I felt an honest rapture. I have not known any happier hours than those I daily spent in front of Florians, looking across the great square at it. Propped on its long row of low, thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast, warty bug taking a meditative walk. St. Mark's is not the oldest building in the world, of course, but it seems the oldest, and looks the oldest, especially inside. When the ancient mosaics in its walls become damaged, they are repaired, but not altered. The grotesque old pattern is preserved. Antiquity has a charm of its own, and to smarten it up would only damage it. One day I was sitting on a red marble bench in the vestibule looking up at an ancient piece of apprentice work in mosaic, illustrative of the command to �multiply and replenish the earth.� The cathedral itself had seemed very old, but this picture was illustrating a period in history which made the building seem young by comparison. But I presently found an antique which was older than either the battered cathedral or the data signed to the piece of history. It was a spiral-shaped fossil as large as the crown of a hat. It was embedded in the marble bench, and had been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth. Contrasted with the inconceivable antiquity of this modest fossil, those other things were flippantly modern, jejun, mere matters of day before yesterday. The sense of the oldness of the cathedral vanished away under the influence of this truly venerable presence. St. Mark's is monumental. It is an imperishable remembrancer of the profound and simple piety of the Middle Ages. Whoever could ravish a column from a pagan temple did it and contributed his swag to this Christian one. So this feign is upheld by several hundred acquisitions procured in that peculiar way. In our day it would be immoral to go on the highway to get bricks for a church, but it was no sin in the old times. St. Mark's was itself the victim of a curious robbery once. The thing is set down in the history of Venice, but it might be smuggled into the Arabian Nights and not seem out of place there. Nearly four hundred and fifty years ago a Candian named Stamato in the suite of a prince of the House of Este was allowed to view the riches of St. Mark's. His sinful eye was dazzled and he hid himself behind an altar with an evil purpose in his heart, but a priest discovered him and turned him out. Afterward he got in again by false keys this time. He went there night after night and worked hard and patiently all alone, overcoming difficulty after difficulty with his toil, and at last succeeded in removing a great brick of the marble panelling which walled the lower part of the treasury. This block he fixed so that he could take it out and put it in at will. After that, for weeks, he spent all his midnight in his magnificent mine, inspecting it in security, gloating over its marvels and his leisure, and all was slipping back to his obscure lodgings before dawn with a duke's ransom under his cloak. He did not need to grab, haphazard, and run. There was no hurry. He could make deliberate and well considered selections. He could consult his aesthetic tastes. One comprehends how undisturbed he was and how safe from any danger of interruption when it is stated that he even carried off a unicorn's horn a mere curiosity which would not pass through the igress entire, but had to be sawn in two, a bit of work which cost him hours of tedious labour. He continued to store up his treasure at home until his occupation lost the charm of novelty and became monotonous. Then he ceased from it, contented. Well, he might be, for his collection, raised to modern values, represented nearly fifty million dollars. He could have gone home much the richest citizen of his country, and it might have been years before the plunder was missed. But he was human. He could not enjoy his delight alone. He must have somebody to talk about it with. So he exacted a solemn oath from a Candian noble named Crioni, then led him to his lodgings and nearly took his breath away with a sight of his glittering horde. He detected a look in his friend's face which excited his suspicion, and was about to slip a stiletto into him when Crioni saved himself by explaining that that look was only an expression of supreme and happy astonishment. Stamato made Crioni a present of one of the state's principal jewels, a huge carbuncle, which afterward figured in the ducal cap of state, and the pair parted. Crioni went at once to the palace, denounced the criminal, and handed over the carbuncle as evidence. Stamato was arrested, tried, and condemned, with the old-time Venetian promptness. He was hanged between the two great columns in the piazza, with a gilded rope out of the compliment to his love of gold, perhaps. He got no good of his booty at all. It was all recovered. In Venice we had a luxury which very seldom fell to our lot on the continent, a home dinner with a private family. If one could always stop with private families when traveling, Europe would have a charm which it now lacks. As it is, one must live in the hotels, of course, and that is a sorrowful business. A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away and eventually die. He would have to do without his accustomed morning meal. That is too formidable a change altogether. He would necessarily suffer from it. He could get the shadow, the sham, the base counterfeit of that meal, but it would do him no good, and money could not buy the reality. To particularize, the average American simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beef steak. Well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotelkeeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel. The milk used for it is what the French call Christian milk, milk which has been baptized. After a few months' acquaintance with European coffee, one's mind weakens and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed. Next comes the European bread, fair enough, good enough, after a fashion, but cold, cold and tough and unsympathetic, and never any change, never any variety, always the same tiresome thing. Next the butter, the sham and tasteless butter. No salt in it, and made of goodness knows what. Then there is the beef steak. They have it in Europe, but they don't know how to cook it. Neither will they cut it right. It comes on the table in a small round pewter platter. It lies in the center of this platter, in a bordering bed of grease-soaked potatoes. It is the size, shape, and thickness of a man's hand with the thumb and fingers cut off. It is a little overdone. It is rather dry. It tastes pretty insipidly. It rouses no enthusiasm. Imagine a poor exile contemplating that inert thing, and imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land and setting before him a mighty porter-house steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle, dusted with a fragrant pepper, enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness, the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy archipelagoed with mushrooms, a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an outlying district of this ample county of beef steak, the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place. And imagine that the angel also adds a great cup of American homemade coffee with a cream froth on top, some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh, some smoking hot biscuits, a plate of hot buckwheat cakes with transparent syrup, could words describe the gratitude of this exile? The European dinner is better than the European breakfast, but it has its faults and inferiorities. It does not satisfy. He comes to the table eager and hungry. He swallows his soup. There is an undefinable lack about it somewhere. Thinks the fish is going to be the thing he wants, eats it and isn't sure. Thinks the next dish is perhaps the one that will hit the hungry place, tries it, and is conscious that there was something wanting about it also. And thus he goes on, from dish to dish, like a boy after a butterfly which just misses getting caught every time it alights, but somehow doesn't get caught after all, and at the end the exile and the boy have feared about a like. The one is full but grievously unsatisfied. The other has had plenty of exercise, plenty of interest, and a fine lot of hopes, but he hasn't got any butterfly. There is here and there an American who will say he can remember rising from a European table d'hote perfectly satisfied, but we must not overlook the fact that there is also here and there an American who will lie. The number of dishes is sufficient, but then it is such a monotonous variety of unstriking dishes. It is an inane, dead level of fair to middling. There is nothing to accent it. Perhaps if the roast of mutton or of beef, a big generous one, were brought on the table and carved in full view of the client, that might give the right sense of earnestness and reality to the thing. But they don't do that. They pass the sliced meat around on a dish, and so you are perfectly calm. It does not stir you in the least. Now a vast roast turkey stretched on the broad of his back, with his heels in the air and the rich juices oozing from his fat sides, but I may as well stop there, for they would not know how to cook him. They can't even cook a chicken, respectively, and as for carving it, they do that with a hatchet. This is about the customary table d'hote bill in the summer. Soup, characterless. Fish, soul, salmon or whiting, usually tolerably good. Roast, mutton or beef, tasteless, and some last year's potatoes. A pâté or some other made dish, usually good, considering. One vegetable, brought on in state and all alone, usually in sipped lentils or string beans or indifferent asparagus. Roast chicken, as tasteless as paper. Meta salad, tolerably good. Decade strawberries or cherries. Sometimes the apricots and figs are fresh, but this is no advantage as these fruits are of no account anyway. The grapes are generally good, and sometimes there is a tolerably good peach, by mistake. The variations of the above bill are trifling, after a fortnight one discovers that the variations are only apparent, not real. In the third week you get what you had the first, and in the fourth week you get what you had the second. Three or four months of this weary sameness will kill the robustest appetite. It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one, a modest private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive, as follows. Radishes, baked apples with cream. Fried oysters, stewed oysters, frogs. American coffee with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, southern style. Porterhouse steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, southern style. Hot wheat bread, southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Beer maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points on half-shell. Cherry stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clams soup. Philadelphia terrapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell northern style. Soft shell crabs. Connecticut shod. Baltimore perch. Brook trout from Sierra Nevada's. Lake trout from Tahoe. Sheephead and croakers from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce, celery. Roast wild turkey, woodcock. Canvas back duck from Baltimore. Prairie liens from Illinois. Missouri partridges broiled. Possum, coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, southern style. Hominy, boiled onions, turnips. Pumpkin, squash, asparagus. Butterbeams, sweet potatoes. Lettuce, succotash, string beans. Mash potatoes, ketchup. Boiled potatoes in their skins. New potatoes minus the skins. Early rose potatoes. Roasted in the ashes, southern style served hot. Sliced tomatoes with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn on the ear. Hot cornpone with shitlands, southern style. Hot hoe cake, southern style. Hot egg bread, southern style. Hot light bread, southern style. Butter milk, iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, southern style. Peach cobbler, southern style. Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry. Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries, which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice water, not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator. Americans intending to spend a year or so in European hotels will do well to copy this bill and carry it along. They will find it an excellent thing to get up an appetite with in the dispiriting presence of the squalid tabledote. Foreigners may not enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange, for tastes are made, not borne. I might glorify my bill-affair until I was tired, but after all the Scotchman would shake his head and say, Where is your haggis? and the Fijian would sigh and say, Where is the missionary? I have a neat talent in matters pertaining to nourishment. This is met with professional recognition. I have often furnished recipes for cookbooks. Here are some designs for pies and things, which I recently prepared for a friend's projected cookbook, but as I forgot to furnish diagrams and perspectives, they had to be left out, of course. Recipes for an ash cake. Take a lot of water, and add to it a lot of coarse Indian meal, and about a quarter of a lot of salt. Mix well together, knead into the form of a pwn, and let the pwn stand a while, not on its edge, but the other way. Rake away a place among the embers, lay it there, and cover it an inch deep with hot ashes. When it is done, remove it, blow off all the ashes but one layer, butter that one, and eat. NB. No household should ever be without this talisman. It has been noticed that traps never return for another ash cake. Recipe for New England Pie. To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows. Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bulletproof dough. Work this into the form of a disk with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch. Toughen and kiln dry in a couple of days in a mild but unvarying temperature. Construct a cover for this readout in the same way and of the same material. Fill with stewed dried apples, aggravate with cloves, lemon peel, and slabs of citron. Add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy. Recipe for German Coffee. Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil. Rub a chicory berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former into the water. Continue the boiling and evaporation until the intensity of the flavor and aroma of the coffee and the chicory has been diminished to a proper degree. Then set aside to cool. Now unharness the remains of a once cow from the plow, insert them in a hydraulic press, and when you shall have acquired a teaspoon of that pale blue juice, which a German superstition regards as milk, modify the malignancy of its strength in a bucket of tepid water and ring up the breakfast. Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against overexcitement. To carve fouls in the German fashion, use a club and avoid the joints. End of Chapter 49. This is Chapter 50 of A Tramp Abroad. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain Chapter 50 Titian Bad and Titian Good. I wonder why some things are. For instance, art is allowed as much indecent license today as in earlier times, but the privileges of literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed within the past 80 or 90 years. Fielding and Smollett could portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language. We have plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed to approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech. But not so with art. The brush may still deal freely with any subject, however revolting or indelicate. It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every pore to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation has been doing with the statues. These works, which had stood in innocent nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of them. Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps. Nobody can help noticing it now. The fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous. But the comical thing about it all is that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid marble, which would still be cold and unsuggestive without the sham and ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm blood paintings which do really need it have in no case been furnished with it. At the door of the Uffizi in Florence one is confronted by statues of a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated grime. They hardly suggest human beings, yet these ridiculous creatures have been thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious generation. You enter and proceed to that most visited little gallery that exists in the world, the Tribune, and there against the wall without obstructing rag or leaf. You may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses, Titian's Venus. It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed. No, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe that attitude there would be a fine howl, but there the Venus lies for anybody to gloat over that wants to, and there she has a right to lie for she is a work of art, and art has its privileges. I saw young girls stealing furtive glances at her, I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly at her. I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her, just to see what a holy indignation I could stir up in the world, just to hear the unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness and all that. The world says that no worded description of a moving spectacle is a hundredth part as moving as the same spectacle seen with one's own eyes. Yet the world is willing to let its son and its daughter and itself look at Titian's beast, but won't stand a description of it in words, which shows that the world is not as consistent as it might be. There are pictures of nude women which suggest no impure thought, I am well aware of that. I am not railing at such. What I am trying to emphasize is the fact that Titian's Venus is very far from being one of that sort. Without any question it was painted for a baño and it was probably refused because it was a trifle too strong. In truth it is too strong for any place, but a public art gallery. Titian has two venuses in the Tribune. Persons who have seen them will easily remember which one I am referring to. In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood, carnage, oozing brains, putrefaction, pictures portraying intolerable suffering, pictures alive with every conceivable horror wrought out in dreadful detail, and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every day and publicly exhibited without a growl from anybody, for they are innocent, they are inoffensive, being works of art. But suppose a literary artist ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate description of one of these grisly things. The critics would skin him alive. Well, let it go it cannot be helped. Art retains her privileges. Literature has lost hers. Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores and the consistencies of it. I haven't got the time. Titian's Venus defiles and disgraces the Tribune. There is no softening that fact, but his Moses glorifies it. The simple truthfulness of its noble work wins the heart and the applause of every visitor, be he learned or ignorant. After wearying oneself with the acres of stuffy, sappy, expressionless babies that populate the canvases of the old masters of Italy, it is refreshing to stand before this peerless child and feel that thrill which tells you you are at last in the presence of the real thing. This is a human child. This is genuine. You have seen him a thousand times. You have seen him just as he is here. And you confess without reserve that Titian was a master. The doll faces of other painted babes may mean one thing, they may mean another, but with the Moses the case is different. The most famous of all the art critics has said there is no room for doubt here, plainly this child is in trouble. I consider that the Moses has no equal among the works of the old masters, except it be the divine hair-trunk of Bassano. I feel sure that if all the other old masters were lost, and only these two preserved, the world would be the gainer by it. My sole purpose in going to Florence was to see this immortal Moses, and by good fortune I was just in time, for they were already preparing to remove it to a more private and better protected place, because a fashion of robbing the great galleries was prevailing in Europe at the time. I got a capable artist to copy the picture. Panamaker, the engraver of Dore's books, engraved it for me, and I have the pleasure of laying it before the reader in this volume. We took a turn to Rome and some other Italian cities, then to Munich and then to Paris, partly for exercise, but mainly because these things were in our projected program, and it was only right that we should be faithful to it. From Paris I branched out and walked through Holland and Belgium, procuring an occasional lift by rail or canal when tired, and I had a tolerably good time of it by and large. I worked Spain and other regions through agents to save time and shoe leather. We crossed to England, and then made the homeward passage in the Cunarder Gallia, a very fine ship. I was glad to get home, immeasurably glad—so glad, in fact, that it did not seem possible that anything could ever get me out of the country again. I had not enjoyed a pleasure abroad which seemed to me to compare with the pleasure I felt in seeing New York harbor again. Europe has many advantages which we have not, but they do not compensate for a good many still more valuable ones which exist nowhere but in our own country. Then we are such a homeless lot when we are over there. So are Europeans themselves, for that matter. They live in dark and chilly, vast tombs—costly enough maybe, but without conveniences. To be condemned to live as the average European family lives would make life a pretty heavy burden to the average American family. On the whole, I think that short visits to Europe are better for us than long ones. The former preserve us from becoming Europeanized. They keep our pride of country intact, and at the same time they intensify our affection for our country and our people, whereas long visits have the effect of dulling those feelings, at least in the majority of cases. I think that one who mixes much with Americans long resident abroad must arrive at this conclusion. End of Chapter 50 This is Section 51 of A Tramp Abroad. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain. Section 51. Appendix A. The Portier. Appendix. Nothing gives such weight and dignity to a book as an appendix. Herodotus. Appendix A. The Portier. Omar Kayam, the poet-prophet of Persia, writing more than eight hundred years ago, has said, In the four parts of the earth are many that are able to write learned books, many that are able to lead armies, and many also that are able to govern kingdoms and empires. But few there be that can keep a hotel. A word about the European Hotel Portier. He is a most admirable invention, a most valuable convenience. He always wears a conspicuous uniform. He can always be found when he is wanted, for he sticks closely to his post at the front door. He is as polite as a duke. He speaks four to ten languages. He is your surest help and refuge in time of trouble or perplexity. He is not the clerk, he is not the landlord. He ranks above the clerk and represents the landlord who has seldom seen. Instead of going to the clerk for information as we do at home, you go to the Portier. It is the pride of our average hotel clerk to know nothing whatever. It is the pride of the Portier to know everything. You ask the Portier at what hours the trains leave, he tells you instantly. Or you ask him who is the best physician in town, or what is the hack tariff, or how many children the mayor has, or what days the galleries are open, and whether a permit is required, and where you are to get it, and what you must pay for it. Or when the theatres open and close what the plays are to be and the price of seats, or what is the newest thing in hats, or how the bills of mortality average, or who struck Billy Patterson. Does not matter what you ask him, in nine cases out of ten he knows, and in the tenth case he will find out for you before you can turn around three times. There is nothing he will not put his hand to. Suppose you tell him you wish to go from Hamburg to Peking by way of Jericho and are ignorant of roots and prices. The next morning he will hand you a piece of paper with the whole thing worked out on it to the last detail. Before you have been long on European soil you find yourself still saying you are relying on Providence, but when you come to look closer you will see that in reality you are relying on the Portier. He discovers what is puzzling you, or what is troubling you, or what your need is, before you can get the half of it out, and he promptly says, leave that to me. Consequently you easily drift into the habit of leaving everything to him. There is a certain embarrassment about applying to the average American hotel clerk a certain hesitancy, a sense of insecurity against rebuff. But you feel no embarrassment in your intercourse with the Portier. He receives your propositions with an enthusiasm which cheers and plunges into their accomplishment with an alacrity which almost inebriates. The more requirements you pile upon him the better he likes it. Of course the result is that you cease from doing anything for yourself. He calls a hack when you want one, puts you into it, tells the driver wither to take you, receives you like a long lost child when you return, sends you about your business, does all the quarreling with the hack man himself, and pays him his money out of his own pocket. He sends for your theatre tickets and pays for them. He sends for any possible article you can require, be it a doctor or an elephant or a postage stamp, and when you leave at last you will find a subordinate seated with a cab driver who will put you in your railway compartment, buy your tickets, have your baggage weighed, bring you the printed tags, and tell you everything is in your bill and paid for. At home you get such a labyrinth, excellent and willing service as this only in the best hotels of our large cities. But in Europe you get it in the mere back country towns just as well. What is the secret of the Portier's devotion? It is very simple. He gets fees and no salary. His fee is pretty closely regulated too. If you stay a week you give him five marks, a dollar and a quarter, or about eighteen cents a day. If you stay a month you reduce this average somewhat. If you stay two or three months or longer you cut it down half or even more than half. If you stay only one day you give the Portier a mark. The head-waiter's fee is a shade less than the Portier's. The boot, who not only blocks your boots and brushes your clothes, but is usually the porter and handles your baggage, gets a somewhat smaller fee than the head-waiter. The chamber maid's fee ranks below that of the boot's. You fee only these four and no one else. A German gentleman told me that when he remained a week in a hotel he gave the Portier five marks, the head-waiter four, the boot's three, and the chamber maid two, and if he stayed three months he divided ninety marks among them in about the above proportions. Ninety marks makes twenty-two dollars and fifty cents. None of these fees are ever paid until you leave the hotel, though it be a year, except one of these four servants should go away in the meantime. In that case he will be sure to come and bid you good-bye and give you the opportunity to pay him what is fairly coming to him. It is considered very bad policy to fee a servant while you are still to remain longer in the hotel, because if you gave him too little he might neglect you afterward, and if you gave him too much he might neglect somebody else to attend to you. It is considered best to keep his expectations on a string until your stay is concluded. I do not know whether hotel servants in New York get any wages or not, but I do know that in some of the hotels there the feeing system in Vogue is a heavy burden. The waiter expects a quarter at breakfast and gets it. You have a different waiter at luncheon, and so he gets a quarter. Your waiter at dinner is another stranger. Consequently he gets a quarter. The boy who carries your satchel to your room and lights your gas fumbles around and hangs around insignificantly, and you fee him to get rid of him. Now you may ring for ice-water, and ten minutes later for a lemonade, and ten minutes afterward for a cigar, and buy and buy for a newspaper, and what is the result? Why, a new boy has appeared every time and fooled and fumbled around until you have paid him something. Suppose you boldly put your foot down and say it is the hotel's business to pay its servants. You will have to ring your bell ten or fifteen times before you get a servant there, and when he goes off to fill your order he will grow old and infirm before you see him again. You may struggle nobly for twenty-four hours, maybe, if you are an adamantine sort of person, but in the meantime you will have been so wretchedly served and so insolently that you will haul down your colors and go to impoverishing yourself with fees. It seems to me that it would be a happy idea to import the European feeing system into America. I believe it would result in getting even the bells of the Philadelphia hotels answered, and cheerful service rendered. The greatest American hotels keep a number of clerks and a cashier, and pay them salaries which mount up to a considerable total in the course of a year. The great Continental hotels keep a cashier on a trifling salary, and a portier who pays the hotel a salary. By the latter system both the hotel and the public save money and are better served than by our system. One of our consuls told me that a portier of a great Berlin hotel paid five thousand dollars a year for his position, and yet cleared six thousand dollars for himself. The position of portier in the chief hotels of Saratoga, Long Branch, New York, and similar centers of resort would be one which the holder could afford to pay even more than five thousand dollars for, perhaps. When we borrowed the feeing fashion from Europe a dozen years ago, the salary system ought to have been discontinued, of course. We might make this correction now, I should think, and we might add the portier too. Since I first began to study the portier, I have had opportunities to observe him in the chief cities of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and the more I have seen of him, the more I have wished that he might be adopted in America, and become there, as he is in Europe, the stranger's guardian angel. Yes, what was true eight hundred years ago is just as true today. Few there be that can keep a hotel. Perhaps it is because the landlords and their subordinates have in too many cases taken up their trade without first learning it. In Europe the trade of hotel keeper is taught. The apprentice begins at the bottom of the ladder and masters the several grades one after the other. Just as in our country printing offices, the apprentice first learns how to sweep out and bring water, then learns to roll, then to sort pie, then to set type, and finally rounds and completes his education with job work and press work. So the landlord apprentice serves as call-boy, then as under-waiter, then as a parlor-waiter, then as head-waiter, in which position he often has to make out all the bills, then as clerk or cashier, then as portier. His trade is learned now, and by and by he will assume the style and dignity of landlord, and be found conducting a hotel of his own. Now in Europe the same as in America, when a man has kept a hotel so thoroughly well during a number of years as to give it a great reputation, he has his reward. He can live prosperously on that reputation. He can let his hotel run down to the last degree of shabbiness, and yet have it full of people all the time. For instance, there is the Hotel de Ville in Milan. It swarms with mice and fleas, and if the rest of the world were destroyed it could furnish dirt enough to start another one with. The food would create an insurrection in a poor house, and yet, if you go outside to get your meals, that hotel makes up its losses by overcharging you on all sorts of trifles, and without making any denials or excuses about it either. But the Hotel de Ville's old, excellent reputation still keeps its dreary rooms crowded with travellers who would be elsewhere if they had only some wise friend to warn them. End of Section 51, Appendix A. This is Section 52 of A Tramp Abroad. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain, Section 52, Appendix B, Heidelberg Castle. Heidelberg Castle must have been very beautiful before the French battered and bruised and scorched it two hundred years ago. The stone is brown, with a pinkish tint, and does not seem to stain easily. The dainty and elaborate ornamentation upon its two chief fronts is as delicately carved as if it had been intended for the interior of a drawing-room rather than for the outside of a house. Many fruit and flower clusters, human heads, and grim, projecting lion's heads, are still as perfect in every detail as if they were new. But the statues, which are ranked between the windows, have suffered. These are life-sized statues of old-time emperors, electors, and similar grandees, clad in mail and bearing ponderous swords. Some have lost an arm, some ahead, and one poor fellow is chopped off at the middle. There is a saying that if a stranger will pass over the drawbridge and walk across the court to the castle front without saying anything, he can make a wish and it will be fulfilled. But they say that the truth of this thing has never had a chance to be proved, for the reason that before any stranger can walk from the drawbridge to the appointed place, the beauty of the palace front will extort an exclamation of delight from him. A ruin must be rightly situated to be effective. This one could not have been better placed. It stands upon a commanding elevation. It is buried in green woods. There is no level ground about it, but, on the contrary, there are wooded terraces upon terraces, and one looks down through shining leaves into profound chasms and abysses, where twilight rains and the sun cannot intrude. Nature knows how to garnish a ruin to get the best effect. One of these old towers is split down the middle and one half has tumbled aside. It tumbled in such a way as to establish itself in a picturesque attitude. Then all it lacked was a fitting drapery, and nature has furnished that. She has robed the rugged mass in flowers and verger and made it a charm to the eye. The standing half exposes its arched and cavernous rooms to you like open, toothless mouths. There, too, the vines and flowers have done their work of grace. The rear portion of the tower has not been neglected, either, but is closed with a clinging garment of polished ivy which hides the wounds and stains of time. Even the top is not left bare, but is crowned with a flourishing group of trees and shrubs. Miss Fortune has done for this old tower what it has done for the human character sometimes—improved it. A gentleman remarked one day that it might have been fine to live in the castle in the day of its prime, but that we had one advantage which its vanished inhabitants lacked—the advantage of having a charming ruin to visit and muse over. But that was a hasty idea. Those people had the advantage of us. They had the fine castle to live in, and they could cross the Rhine Valley and muse over the stately ruin of trifles besides. The trifles people, in their day, five hundred years ago, could go and muse over majestic ruins that have vanished now to the last stone. There have always been ruins, no doubt, and there have always been pensive people to sigh over them and asses to scratch upon them their names and the important date of their visit. Within a hundred years after Adam left Eden, the guide probably gave the usual general flourished with his hand and said, Place where the animals were named, ladies and gentlemen, place where the tree of the forbidden fruit stood, exact spot where Adam and Eve first met, and here, ladies and gentlemen, adorned and hallowed by the names and addresses of three generations of tourists, we have the crumbling remains of Cain's altar, fine old ruin. Then no doubt he taxed them a shackle of peace and let them go. An illumination of Heidelberg Castle is one of the sights of Europe. The castle's picturesque shape, its commanding situation, midway up the steep and wooded mountainside, its vast size, these features combined to make an illumination a most effective spectacle. It is necessarily an expensive show and consequently rather infrequent. Therefore, whenever one of these exhibitions is to take place, the news goes about in the papers and Heidelberg is sure to be full of people on that night. I and my agent had one of these opportunities and improved it. About half past seven on the appointed evening we crossed the lower bridge, with some American students in a pouring rain, and started up the road which borders the Neuneheim side of the river. This roadway was densely packed with carriages and foot passengers, the former of all ages and the latter of all ages in both sexes. This black and solid mass was struggling painfully onward through the slop, the darkness, and the deluge. We waited along for three quarters of a mile and finally took up a position in an unsheltered beer-garden directly opposite the castle. We could not see the castle or anything else for that matter, but we could dimly discern the outlines of the mountain over the way through the pervading blackness and knew whereabouts the castle was located. We stood on one of the hundred benches in the garden under our umbrellas. The other ninety-nine were occupied by standing men and women, and they also had umbrellas. All the region round about, and up and down the river road, was a dense wilderness of humanity, hidden under an unbroken pavement of carriage-tops and umbrellas. Thus we stood during two drenching hours. No rain fell on my head, but the converging whale-bone points of a dozen neighboring umbrellas poured little cooling streams of water down my neck, and sometimes into my ears, and thus kept me from getting hot and impatient. I had the rheumatism, too, and had heard that this was good for it. Afterward, however, I was led to believe that the water treatment is not good for rheumatism. There were even little girls in that dreadful place. A man held one in his arms just in front of me, for as much as an hour, with umbrella-dripping soaking into her clothing all the time. In the circumstances two hours was a good while for us to have to wait, but when the illumination did at last come, we felt repaid. It came unexpectedly, of course, things always do that have been long looked and longed for, with a perfectly breathtaking suddenness, several masked sheaves of very colored rockets were vomited skyward out of the black throats of the castle towers, accompanied by a thundering crash of sound, and instantly every detail of the prodigious ruin stood revealed against the mountainside and glowing with an almost intolerable splendor of fire and color. For some little time the whole building was a blinding crimson mass. The towers continued to spout thick columns of rockets aloft, and overhead the sky was radiant with arrowy bolts which clove their way to the zenith paused, curved gracefully downward, then burst into brilliant fountain sprays of richly colored sparks. The red fires died slowly down within the castle and presently the shell grew nearly black outside. The angry glare that shone out through the broken arches and innumerable sashless windows now reproduced the aspect which the castle must have borne in the old time, when the French spoilers saw the monster bonfire which they had made there fading and spoiling toward extinction. While we still gazed and enjoyed, the ruin was suddenly enveloped in rolling and rumbling volumes of vaporous green fire, then in dazzling purple ones, then a mixture of many colors followed, then drowned the great fabric in its blended splendors. Meantime the nearest bridge had been illuminated, and from several rafts anchored in the river, meteor showers of rockets, Roman candles, bombs, serpents, and Catherine wheels were being discharged in wasteful profusion into the sky, a marvelous sight indeed to a person as little use to such spectacles as I was. For a while the whole region about us seemed as bright as day, and yet the rain was falling in torrents all the time. The evening's entertainment presently closed, and we joined the innumerable caravan of half-drowned strangers and waited home again. The castle grounds are very ample and very beautiful, and as they joined the hotel grounds with no fences to climb, but only some nobly shaded stone stairways to descend, we spent a part of nearly every day in idling through their smooth walks and leafy groves. There was an attractive spot among the trees, where were a great many wooden tables and benches, and there one could sit in the shade and pretend to sip at his foamy beaker of beer while he inspected the crowd. I say pretend because I only pretended to sip without really sipping. That is, the polite way. When you are ready to go you empty the beaker at a draft. There was a brass band, and it furnished excellent music every afternoon. Sometimes so many people came that every seat was occupied, every table filled, and never a rough in the assemblage all nicely dressed fathers and mothers, young gentlemen and ladies and children, and plenty of university students and glittering officers, with here and there a gray professor, or a peaceful old lady with her knitting, and all was a sprinkling of gawky foreigners. Everybody had his glass of beer before him, or his cup of coffee, or his bottle of wine, or his hot cutlet and potatoes. Young ladies chatted, or fanned themselves, or wrought at their crocheting or embroidering. The students fed sugar to their dogs, or discussed duels, or illustrated new fencing tricks with their little canes, and everywhere was comfort and enjoyment, and everywhere peace and good will to men. The trees were jubilant with birds, and the paths with rollicking children. One could have a seat in that place and plenty of music any afternoon for about eight cents, or a family ticket for the season for two dollars. For a change when you wanted one you could stroll to the castle and burl among its dungeons, or climb about its ruined towers, or visit its interior shows, the great Heidelberg Tun, for instance. Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, History says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality outside any day free of expense. What could this cask have been built for? The more one studies over that, the more uncertain and unhappy he becomes. Some historians say that thirty couples, some say thirty thousand couples, can dance on the head of this cask at the same time. Even this does not seem to me to account for the building of it. It does not even throw light on it. A profound and scholarly Englishman, a specialist, who had made the great Heidelberg Tun his sole study for fifteen years, told me he had at last satisfied himself that the ancients built it to make German cream in. He said that the average German cow yielded from one to two and a half teaspoons of milk when she was not worked in the plow or the hay wagon for more than eighteen or nineteen hours a day. This milk was very sweet and good, and a beautiful transparent bluish tint, but in order to get cream from it, in the most economical way, a peculiar process was necessary. Now, he believed that the habit of the ancients was to collect several milkings in a teacup, pour it into the great tun, fill up with water, and then skim off the cream from time to time, as the needs of the German empire demanded. This began to look reasonable. It certainly began to account for the German cream which I had encountered and marveled over in so many hotels and restaurants, but a thought struck me. Why did not each ancient dairyman take his own teacup of milk and his own cask of water and mix them without making a government matter of it? Where would he get a cask large enough to contain the right proportion of water? Very true. It was plain that the Englishmen had studied the matter from all sides. Still, I thought I might catch him on one point, so I asked him why the modern empire did not make the nation's cream in the Heidelberg tun, instead of leaving it to rot away unused. But he answered as one prepared, A patient and diligent examination of the modern German cream had satisfied me that they do not use the great tun now, because they have got a bigger one hid away somewhere. Either that is the case, or they empty the spring milkings into the mountain torrents and then skim the rye in all summer. There is a museum of antiquities in the castle, and among its most treasured relics are ancient manuscripts connected with German history. There are hundreds of these, and their dates stretch back through many centuries. One of them is a decree signed and sealed by the hand of a successor of Charlemagne in the year 896. A signature made by a hand which vanished out of this life nearly a thousand years ago is a more impressive thing than even a ruined castle. Luther's wedding-ring was shown me, also a fork belonging to a time anterior to our era, and an early bootjack, and there was a plaster cast of the head of a man who was assassinated about sixty years ago. The stab wounds in the face were duplicated with unpleasant fidelity. One or two real hairs still remained sticking in the eyebrows of the cast. That trifle seemed to almost change the counterfeit into a corpse. There are many aged portraits, some valuable, some worthless, some of great interest, some of none at all. I bought a couple, one a gorgeous duke of the olden time, and the other a comely blue-eyed damsel, a princess, maybe. I bought them to start a portrait gallery of my ancestors with. I paid a dollar and a half for the duke, and a half for the princess. One can lay in ancestors at even cheaper rates than these in Europe if he will mouse among old picture shops and look out for chances. End of Section 52, Appendix B. This is Section 53 of A Tramp Abroad. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain. Section 53, Appendix C. The College Prison. It seems that the student may break a good many of the public laws without having to answer to the public authorities. His case must come before the university for trial and punishment. If a policeman catches him in an unlawful act and proceeds to arrest him, the offender proclaims that he is a student and perhaps shows his matriculation card, whereupon the officer asks for his address, then goes his way and reports the matter at headquarters. If the offence is one over which the city has no jurisdiction, the authorities report the case officially to the university and give themselves no further concern about it. The university court send for the student, listen to the evidence, and pronounce judgment. The punishment usually inflicted is imprisonment in the university prison. As I understand it, a student's case is often tried without his being present at all. Then something like this happens. A constable in the service of the university visits the lodgings of the said student, Knox, is invited to come in, does so, and says politely, If you please, I am here to conduct you to prison. Ah, says the student, I was not expecting it. What have I been doing? Two weeks ago the public piece had the honour to be disturbed by you. It is true I had forgotten it. Very well, I have been complained of, tried and found guilty, is that it? Exactly. You are sentenced to two days solitary confinement in the college prison, and I am sent to fetch you. Student, oh, I can't go today. Officer, if you please, why? Student, because I've got an engagement. Officer, tomorrow, then, perhaps. Student, no, I'm going to the opera tomorrow. Officer, could you come Friday? Student, reflectively. Let me see. Friday, Friday, I don't seem to have anything on hand. Friday, Officer. Then, if you please, I will expect you on Friday. Student. All right, I'll come around Friday. Officer, thank you. Good day, sir. Student, good day. So on Friday the student goes to the prison of his own accord and is admitted. It is questionable if the world's criminal history can show a custom more odd than this. Nobody knows, now, how it originated. There have always been many noblemen among the students, and it is presumed that all students are gentlemen. In the old times it was usual to mar the convenience of such folk as little as possible. Perhaps this indulgent custom owes its origin to this. One day I was listening to some conversation upon this subject when an American student said that for some time he had been under sentence for a slight breach of the peace and had promised the constable that he would presently find an unoccupied day and but take himself to prison. I asked the young gentleman to do me the kindness to go to jail as soon as he conveniently could so that I might try to get in there and visit him and see what college captivity was like. He said he would appoint the first day he could spare. His confinement was to endure twenty-four hours. He shortly chose his day and sent me word. I started immediately. When I reached the university place I saw two gentlemen talking together, and as they had portfolios under their arms I judged they were tutors or elderly students, so I asked them in English to show me the college jail. I had learned to take it for granted that anybody in Germany who knows anything knows English, so I had stopped afflicting people with my German. These gentlemen seemed a trifle amused and a trifle confused too, but one of them said he would walk around the corner with me and show me the place. He asked me why I wanted to get in there and I said to see a friend, and for curiosity. He doubted if I would be admitted but volunteered to put in a word or two for me with the custodian. He rang the bell, a door opened, and we stepped into a paved way and then up into a small living-room where we were received by a hearty and good-natured German woman of fifty. She threw up her hands with a surprised, ah, Gott, Herr Professor! and exhibited a mighty deference for my new acquaintance. By the sparkle in her eye I judged she was a good deal amused too. The Herr Professor talked to her in German, and I understood enough of it to know that he was bringing very plausible reasons to bear for admitting me. They were successful. So the Herr Professor received my earnest thanks and departed. The old dame got her keys, took me up two or three flights of stairs, unlocked a door, and we stood in the presence of the criminal. Then she went into a jolly and eager description of all that had occurred downstairs and what the Herr Professor had said, and so forth and so on. Plainly she regarded it as quite a superior joke that I had way-laid a Professor and employed him in so odd a service. But I wouldn't have done it if I had known he was a Professor. Therefore my conscience was not disturbed. Now the dame left us to ourselves. The cell was not a roomy one. Still it was a little larger than an ordinary prison cell. It had a window of good size, iron grated, a small stove, two wooden chairs, two oaken tables, very old and most elaborately carved with names, mottos, faces, armorial bearings, etc., the work of several generations of imprisoned students, and a narrow wooden bed-stead with a villainous straw mattress but no sheets, pillows, blankets, or coverlets. For these the student must furnish at his own cost if he wants them. There was no carpet, of course. The ceiling was completely covered with names, dates, and monograms, done with candle-smoke. The walls were thickly covered with pictures and portraits in profile, some done with ink, some with soot, some with a pencil, and some with red, blue, and green chalks. And whenever an inch or two of space had remained between the pictures, the captives had written plaintive verses or names and dates. I do not think I was ever in a more elaborately frescoed apartment. Against the wall hung a placard containing the prison laws. I made a note of one or two of these. For instance, the prisoner must pay, for the privilege of entering, a sum equivalent to twenty cents of our money, for the privilege of leaving, when his term had expired, twenty cents, for every day spent in the prison, twelve cents, for fire and light, twelve cents a day. The jailer furnishes coffee, mornings, for a small sum. Dinners and suppers may be ordered from outside if the prisoner chooses, and he is allowed to pay for them too. Here and there on the walls appear the names of American students, and in one place the American arms and motto were displayed in colored chalks. With the help of my friend I translated many of the inscriptions. Some of them were cheerful, others the reverse. I will give the reader a few specimens. In my tenth semester, my best one, I am cast here through the complaints of others. Let those who follow me take warning. Which is to say, he had a curiosity to know what prison life was like, so he made a breach in some law and got three days for it. It is more than likely that he never had the same curiosity again. Translation. 74. Which means that Count Bismarck, son of the great statesman, was a prisoner two days in 1874. Translation. Many people in this world have caught it heavier than for the same indiscretion. This one is terse, I translate. I wish the sufferer had explained a little more fully, a four week term is a rather serious matter. There were many uncomplementary references on the walls to a certain unpopular dignitary. One sufferer had got three days for not saluting him, another had here two days slept and three nights lain awake. On account of this same Dr. K., in one place was a picture of Dr. K. hanging on a gallows. Here and there lonesome prisoners had eased the heavy time by altering the records left by predecessors, leaving the name-standing and the date and length of the captivity, they had erased the description of the misdemeanor and written in its place, in starring capitals, for theft, or for murder, or some other gaudy crime. In one place all by itself stood this blood-curdling word. Rache. Note one. Revenge. End of note one. There was no name signed and no date. It was an inscription well calculated to pique curiosity. One would greatly like to know the nature of the wrong that had been done and what sort of vengeance was wanted and whether the prisoner ever achieved it or not. But there was no way of finding out these things. Occasionally a name was followed simply by the remark, Two Days, for Disturbing the Peace, and without comment upon the justice or injustice of the sentence. In one place was a hilarious picture of a student of the green cap-core with a bottle of champagne in each hand, and below was the legend, These Make an Evil Fate Endurable. There were two prison cells, and neither had space left on walls or ceiling for another name or portrait or picture. The inside surfaces of the two doors were completely covered with carte visite of former prisoners ingeniously led into the wood and protected from dirt and injury by glass. I very much wanted one of the sorry old tables which the prisoners had spent so many years in ornamenting with their pocket knives, but red tape was in the way. The custodian could not sell one without an order from a superior, and that superior would have to get it from his superior, and this one would have to get it from a higher one, and so on, up and up, until the faculty should sit on the matter and deliver final judgment. The system was right, and nobody could find fault with it. But it did not seem justifiable to bother so many people, so I proceeded no further. It might have cost me more than I could afford, anyway, for one of those prison tables, which was at the time in a private museum in Heidelberg, was afterward sold at auction for two hundred and fifty dollars. It was not worth more than a dollar, or possibly a dollar and a half, before the captive students began their work on it. Persons who saw it at the auction said it was so curiously and wonderfully carved that it was worth the money that was paid for it. Among them, many who have tasted the college prison's dreary hospitality, was a lively young fellow from one of the southern states of America, whose first years' experience of German university life was rather peculiar. The day he arrived in Heidelberg, he enrolled his name on the college books, and was so elated with the fact that his dearest hope had found fruition, and he was actually a student of the old and renowned university, that he set to work that very night to celebrate the event by a grand lark in company with some other students. In the course of his lark he managed to make a wide breach in one of the university's most stringent laws. Sequel, before noon next day, he was in the college prison, booked for three months. The twelve long weeks dragged slowly by, and the day of deliverance came at last. A great crowd of sympathizing fellow students received him with a rousing demonstration as he came forth, and of course there was another grand lark, in the course of which he managed to make a wide breach of the city's most stringent laws. Sequel, before noon next day, he was safe in the city lock-up, booked for three months. This second tedious captivity drew to an end in the course of time, and again a great crowd of sympathizing fellow students gave him a rousing reception as he came forth. But his delight in his freedom was so boundless that he could not proceed soberly and calmly, but must go hopping and skipping and jumping down the sleety street from sheer excess of joy. Sequel, he slipped and broke his leg, and actually lay in the hospital during the next three months. When he at last became a free man again, he said he believed he would hunt up a brisker seat of learning. The Heidelberg lectures might be good, but the opportunities of attending them were too rare, the educational process too slow. He said he had come to Europe with the idea that the acquirement of an education was only a matter of time, but if he had averaged the Heidelberg system correctly, it was rather a matter of eternity.