Produced by David Widger (Illustrated HTML version)


A TRAMP ABROAD

By Mark Twain
(Samuel L. Clemens)

First published in 1880


Part 4.


CHAPTER XXII
[The Black Forest and Its Treasures]

From Baden-Baden we made the customary trip into the
Black Forest. We were on foot most of the time. One cannot
describe those noble woods, nor the feeling with which they
inspire him. A feature of the feeling, however, is a deep
sense of contentment; another feature of it is a buoyant,
boyish gladness; and a third and very conspicuous feature
of it is one's sense of the remoteness of the work-day
world and his entire emancipation from it and its affairs.

Those woods stretch unbroken over a vast region;
and everywhere they are such dense woods, and so still,
and so piney and fragrant. The stems of the trees are trim
and straight, and in many places all the ground is hidden
for miles under a thick cushion of moss of a vivid green color,
with not a decayed or ragged spot in its surface, and not
a fallen leaf or twig to mar its immaculate tidiness.
A rich cathedral gloom pervades the pillared aisles;
so the stray flecks of sunlight that strike a trunk
here and a bough yonder are strongly accented,
and when they strike the moss they fairly seem to burn.
But the weirdest effect, and the most enchanting is that
produced by the diffused light of the low afternoon sun;
no single ray is able to pierce its way in, then, but the
diffused light takes color from moss and foliage,
and pervades the place like a faint, greet-tinted mist,
the theatrical fire of fairyland. The suggestion of mystery
and the supernatural which haunts the forest at all times
is intensified by this unearthly glow.

We found the Black Forest farmhouses and villages
all that the Black Forest stories have pictured them.
The first genuine specimen which we came upon was
the mansion of a rich farmer and member of the Common
Council of the parish or district. He was an important
personage in the land and so was his wife also,
of course. His daughter was the "catch" of the region,
and she may be already entering into immortality as the
heroine of one of Auerbach's novels, for all I know.
We shall see, for if he puts her in I shall recognize her
by her Black Forest clothes, and her burned complexion,
her plump figure, her fat hands, her dull expression,
her gentle spirit, her generous feet, her bonnetless head,
and the plaited tails of hemp-colored hair hanging down
her back.

The house was big enough for a hotel; it was a hundred
feet long and fifty wide, and ten feet high, from ground
to eaves; but from the eaves to the comb of the mighty roof
was as much as forty feet, or maybe even more. This roof
was of ancient mud-colored straw thatch a foot thick,
and was covered all over, except in a few trifling spots,
with a thriving and luxurious growth of green vegetation,
mainly moss. The mossless spots were places where
repairs had been made by the insertion of bright new
masses of yellow straw. The eaves projected far down,
like sheltering, hospitable wings. Across the gable that
fronted the road, and about ten feet above the ground,
ran a narrow porch, with a wooden railing; a row of
small windows filled with very small panes looked upon
the porch. Above were two or three other little windows,
one clear up under the sharp apex of the roof.
Before the ground-floor door was a huge pile of manure.
The door of the second-story room on the side of the house
was open, and occupied by the rear elevation of a cow.
Was this probably the drawing-room? All of the front
half of the house from the ground up seemed to be
occupied by the people, the cows, and the chickens,
and all the rear half by draught-animals and hay.
But the chief feature, all around this house, was the big
heaps of manure.

We became very familiar with the fertilizer in the Forest.
We fell unconsciously into the habit of judging of a man's
station in life by this outward and eloquent sign.
Sometimes we said, "Here is a poor devil, this is manifest."
When we saw a stately accumulation, we said, "Here is
a banker." When we encountered a country-seat surrounded
by an Alpine pomp of manure, we said, "Doubtless a duke
lives here."

The importance of this feature has not been properly
magnified in the Black Forest stories. Manure is evidently
the Black-Forester's main treasure - his coin, his jewel,
his pride, his Old Master, his ceramics, his bric-a-brac,
his darling, his title to public consideration,
envy, veneration, and his first solicitude when he gets
ready to make his will. The true Black Forest novel,
if it is ever written, will be skeletoned somewhat in this way:

SKELETON FOR A BLACK FOREST NOVEL

Rich old farmer, named Huss. Has inherited great wealth
of manure, and by diligence has added to it. It is
double-starred in Baedeker. [1] The Black forest artist
paints it - his masterpiece. The king comes to see it.
Gretchen Huss, daughter and heiress. Paul Hoch,
young neighbor, suitor for Gretchen's hand - ostensibly;
he really wants the manure. Hoch has a good many cart-loads
of the Black Forest currency himself, and therefore is a
good catch; but he is sordid, mean, and without sentiment,
whereas Gretchen is all sentiment and poetry.
Hans Schmidt, young neighbor, full of sentiment,
full of poetry, loves Gretchen, Gretchen loves him.
But he has no manure. Old Huss forbids him in the house.
His heart breaks, he goes away to die in the woods,
far from the cruel world - for he says, bitterly, "What is man,
without manure?"

1. When Baedeker's guide-books mention a thing and put
two stars (**) after it, it means well worth visiting.
M.T.

[Interval of six months.]

Paul Hoch comes to old Huss and says, "I am at last
as rich as you required - come and view the pile."
Old Huss views it and says, "It is sufficient - take
her and be happy," - meaning Gretchen.

[Interval of two weeks.]

Wedding party assembled in old Huss's drawing-room. Hoch
placid and content, Gretchen weeping over her hard fate.
Enter old Huss's head bookkeeper. Huss says fiercely,
"I gave you three weeks to find out why your books
don't balance, and to prove that you are not a defaulter;
the time is up - find me the missing property or you go
to prison as a thief." Bookkeeper: "I have found it."
"Where?" Bookkeeper (sternly - tragically): "In the bridegroom's
pile! - behold the thief - see him blench and tremble!"
[Sensation.] Paul Hoch: Lost, lost!" - falls over the cow
in a swoon and is handcuffed. Gretchen: "Saved!" Falls
over the calf in a swoon of joy, but is caught in the arms
of Hans Schmidt, who springs in at that moment. Old Huss:
"What, you here, varlet? Unhand the maid and quit the place."
Hans (still supporting the insensible girl): "Never! Cruel
old man, know that I come with claims which even you
cannot despise."

Huss: "What, YOU? name them."

Hans: "Listen then. The world has forsaken me, I forsook
the world, I wandered in the solitude of the forest,
longing for death but finding none. I fed upon roots,
and in my bitterness I dug for the bitterest,
loathing the sweeter kind. Digging, three days agone,
I struck a manure mine! - a Golconda, a limitless Bonanza,
of solid manure! I can buy you ALL, and have mountain
ranges of manure left! Ha-ha, NOW thou smilest a smile!"
[Immense sensation.] Exhibition of specimens from the mine.
Old Huss (enthusiastically): "Wake her up, shake her up,
noble young man, she is yours!" Wedding takes place on
the spot; bookkeeper restored to his office and emoluments;
Paul Hoch led off to jail. The Bonanza king of the Black
Forest lives to a good old age, blessed with the love of his
wife and of his twenty-seven children, and the still sweeter
envy of everybody around.

We took our noon meal of fried trout one day at the Plow Inn,
in a very pretty village (Ottenhoefen), and then went into
the public room to rest and smoke. There we found nine
or ten Black Forest grandees assembled around a table.
They were the Common Council of the parish. They had
gathered there at eight o'clock that morning to elect
a new member, and they had now been drinking beer four
hours at the new member's expense. They were men of fifty
or sixty years of age, with grave good-natured faces,
and were all dressed in the costume made familiar to us
by the Black Forest stories; broad, round-topped black felt
hats with the brims curled up all round; long red waistcoats
with large metal buttons, black alpaca coats with the
waists up between the shoulders. There were no speeches,
there was but little talk, there were no frivolities;
the Council filled themselves gradually, steadily, but surely,
with beer, and conducted themselves with sedate decorum,
as became men of position, men of influence, men of manure.

We had a hot afternoon tramp up the valley, along the grassy
bank of a rushing stream of clear water, past farmhouses,
water-mills, and no end of wayside crucifixes and saints
and Virgins. These crucifixes, etc., are set up in
memory of departed friends, by survivors, and are almost
as frequent as telegraph-poles are in other lands.

We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck;
we traveled under a beating sun, and always saw the shade
leave the shady places before we could get to them.
In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike
a piece of road at its time for being shady. We had a
particularly hot time of it on that particular afternoon,
and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact
that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides
above our heads were even worse off than we were.
By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable
glare and heat any longer; so we struck across the ravine
and entered the deep cool twilight of the forest, to hunt
for what the guide-book called the "old road."

We found an old road, and it proved eventually to be the
right one, though we followed it at the time with the conviction
that it was the wrong one. If it was the wrong one there
could be no use in hurrying; therefore we did not hurry,
but sat down frequently on the soft moss and enjoyed
the restful quiet and shade of the forest solitudes.
There had been distractions in the carriage-road
- school-children, peasants, wagons, troops of
pedestrianizing students from all over Germany
- but we had the old road to ourselves.

Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious
ant at his work. I found nothing new in him - certainly
nothing to change my opinion of him. It seems to me that
in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely
overrated bird. During many summers, now, I have watched him,
when I ought to have been in better business, and I have
not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any
more sense than a dead one. I refer to the ordinary ant,
of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful
Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies,
hold slaves, and dispute about religion. Those particular
ants may be all that the naturalist paints them,
but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.
I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest-working
creature in the world - when anybody is looking - but his
leather-headedness is the point I make against him.
He goes out foraging, he makes a capture, and then what
does he do? Go home? No - he goes anywhere but home.
He doesn't know where home is. His home may be only
three feet away - no matter, he can't find it. He makes
his capture, as I have said; it is generally something
which can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else;
it is usually seven times bigger than it ought to be;
he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it;
he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts;
not toward home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly
and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful
of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and instead
of going around it, he climbs over it backward dragging
his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side,
jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes,
moistens his hands, grabs his property viciously, yanks it
this way, then that, shoves it ahead of him a moment,
turns tail and lugs it after him another moment, gets madder
and madder, then presently hoists it into the air and goes
tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed;
it never occurs to him to go around it; no, he must climb it;
and he does climb it, dragging his worthless property
to the top - which is as bright a thing to do as it would
be for me to carry a sack of flour from Heidelberg to Paris
by way of Strasburg steeple; when he gets up there he
finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory glance
at the scenery and either climbs down again or tumbles down,
and starts off once more - as usual, in a new direction.
At the end of half an hour, he fetches up within six inches
of the place he started from and lays his burden down;
meantime he has been over all the ground for two yards around,
and climbed all the weeds and pebbles he came across.
Now he wipes the sweat from his brow, strokes his limbs,
and then marches aimlessly off, in as violently a hurry
as ever. He does not remember to have ever seen it before;
he looks around to see which is not the way home, grabs his
bundle and starts; he goes through the same adventures he
had before; finally stops to rest, and a friend comes along.
Evidently the friend remarks that a last year's grasshopper
leg is a very noble acquisition, and inquires where he
got it. Evidently the proprietor does not remember
exactly where he did get it, but thinks he got it "around
here somewhere." Evidently the friend contracts to help
him freight it home. Then, with a judgment peculiarly
antic (pun not intended), then take hold of opposite ends
of that grasshopper leg and begin to tug with all their
might in opposite directions. Presently they take a rest
and confer together. They decide that something is wrong,
they can't make out what. Then they go at it again,
just as before. Same result. Mutual recriminations follow.
Evidently each accuses the other of being an obstructionist.
They lock themselves together and chew each other's jaws
for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till
one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs.
They make up and go to work again in the same old insane way,
but the crippled ant is at a disadvantage; tug as he may,
the other one drags off the booty and him at the end of it.
Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his shins
bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way.
By and by, when that grasshopper leg has been dragged
all over the same old ground once more, it is finally
dumped at about the spot where it originally lay,
the two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and decide
that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property
after all, and then each starts off in a different
direction to see if he can't find an old nail or something
else that is heavy enough to afford entertainment and at
the same time valueless enough to make an ant want to own it.

There in the Black Forest, on the mountainside,
I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this
with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight.
The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist.
He had a round body the size of a pea. The little ant
- observing that I was noticing - turned him on his back,
sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him into the air and
started vigorously off with him, stumbling over little pebbles,
stepping on the spider's legs and tripping himself up,
dragging him backward, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him
up stones six inches high instead of going around them,
climbing weeds twenty times his own height and jumping
from their summits - and finally leaving him in the middle
of the road to be confiscated by any other fool of an
ant that wanted him. I measured the ground which this
ass traversed, and arrived at the conclusion that what he
had accomplished inside of twenty minutes would constitute
some such job as this - relatively speaking - for a man;
to wit: to strap two eight-hundred-pound horses together,
carry them eighteen hundred feet, mainly over (not around)
boulders averaging six feet high, and in the course
of the journey climb up and jump from the top of one
precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred
and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down,
in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them,
and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for
vanity's sake.

Science has recently discovered that the ant does not
lay up anything for winter use. This will knock him
out of literature, to some extent. He does not work,
except when people are looking, and only then when the
observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be
taking notes. This amounts to deception, and will injure
him for the Sunday-schools. He has not judgment enough
to know what is good to eat from what isn't. This amounts
to ignorance, and will impair the world's respect for him.
He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again.
This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact
is established, thoughtful people will cease to look
up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle him.
His vaunted industry is but a vanity and of no effect,
since he never gets home with anything he starts with.
This disposes of the last remnant of his reputation
and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent,
since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him
any more. It is strange, beyond comprehension, that so
manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so
many nations and keep it up so many ages without being
found out.

The ant is strong, but we saw another strong thing,
where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular
power before. A toadstool - that vegetable which springs
to full growth in a single night - had torn loose and
lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice
its own bulk into the air, and supported it there,
like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools,
with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose.
But what good would it do?

All our afternoon's progress had been uphill. About five
or half past we reached the summit, and all of a sudden
the dense curtain of the forest parted and we looked
down into a deep and beautiful gorge and out over a
wide panorama of wooded mountains with their summits
shining in the sun and their glade-furrowed sides dimmed
with purple shade. The gorge under our feet - called
Allerheiligen - afforded room in the grassy level at its
head for a cozy and delightful human nest, shut away
from the world and its botherations, and consequently
the monks of the old times had not failed to spy it out;
and here were the brown and comely ruins of their church
and convent to prove that priests had as fine an instinct
seven hundred years ago in ferreting out the choicest
nooks and corners in a land as priests have today.

A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives
a brisk trade with summer tourists. We descended
into the gorge and had a supper which would have been
very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.
The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything
else if left to their own devices. This is an argument
of some value in support of the theory that they were
the original colonists of the wild islands of the coast
of Scotland. A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked
upon one of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle
savages rendered the captain such willing assistance
that he gave them as many oranges as they wanted.
Next day he asked them how they liked them. They shook
their heads and said:

"Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn't
things for a hungry man to hanker after."

We went down the glen after supper. It is beautiful - a
mixture of sylvan loveliness and craggy wildness.
A limpid torrent goes whistling down the glen, and toward
the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between lofty
precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls.
After one passes the last of these he has a backward
glimpse at the falls which is very pleasing - they rise
in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and glittering cascades,
and make a picture which is as charming as it is unusual.


CHAPTER XXIII
[Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]

We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in
one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out
the next morning after breakfast determined to do it.
It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest
summer weather for it. So we set the pedometer and then
stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through
the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath
of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing
we might never have anything to do forever but walk
to Oppenau and keep on doing it and then doing it over again.

Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie
in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.
The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by,
and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active;
the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon
a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace
to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes
from the talk. It is no matter whether one talks wisdom
or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment
lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping
of the sympathetic ear.

And what motley variety of subjects a couple of people will
casually rake over in the course of a day's tramp! There
being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order,
and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single
topic until it grows tiresome. We discussed everything
we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes,
that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free,
boundless realm of the things we were not certain about.

Harris said that if the best writer in the world once got
the slovenly habit of doubling up his "haves" he could
never get rid of it while he lived. That is to say,
if a man gets the habit of saying "I should have liked
to have known more about it" instead of saying simply
and sensibly, "I should have liked to know more about it,"
that man's disease is incurable. Harris said that his sort
of lapse is to be found in every copy of every newspaper
that has ever been printed in English, and in almost all
of our books. He said he had observed it in Kirkham's
grammar and in Macaulay. Harris believed that milk-teeth
are commoner in men's mouths than those "doubled-up haves." [1]

1. I do not know that there have not been moments in the
course of the present session when I should have been
very glad to have accepted the proposal of my noble friend,
and to have exchanged parts in some of our evenings
of work. - [From a Speech of the English Chancellor
of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]

That changed the subject to dentistry. I said I believed
the average man dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation,
and that he would yell quicker under the former operation
than he would under the latter. The philosopher Harris
said that the average man would not yell in either case
if he had an audience. Then he continued:

"When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac,
we used to be brought up standing, occasionally, by an
ear-splitting howl of anguish. That meant that a soldier
was getting a tooth pulled in a tent. But the surgeons
soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry.
There never was a howl afterward - that is, from the man
who was having the tooth pulled. At the daily dental
hour there would always be about five hundred soldiers
gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental chair
waiting to see the performance - and help; and the moment
the surgeon took a grip on the candidate's tooth and began
to lift, every one of those five hundred rascals would
clap his hand to his jaw and begin to hop around on one
leg and howl with all the lungs he had! It was enough
to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous
unanimous caterwaul burst out! With so big and so derisive
an audience as that, a suffer wouldn't emit a sound though
you pulled his head off. The surgeons said that pretty
often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst
of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out,
after the open-air exhibition was instituted."

Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death,
death suggested skeletons - and so, by a logical process
the conversation melted out of one of these subjects
and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up
Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he
had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.
When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,
a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad
countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,
and without removing his hands from the depths
of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin
of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged
about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf,
stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip
against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans,
aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth,
laid him low, and said with composure:

"Whar's the boss?"

"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious
bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face
with his eye.

"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"

"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"

"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git
a show somers if I kin, 'taint no diffunce what - I'm strong
and hearty, and I don't turn my back on no kind of work,
hard nur soft."

"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"

"Well, I don't re'ly k'yer a durn what I DO learn,
so's I git a chance fur to make my way. I'd jist as soon
learn print'n's anything."

"Can you read?"

"Yes - middlin'."

"Write?"

"Well, I've seed people could lay over me thar."

"Cipher?"

"Not good enough to keep store, I don't reckon,
but up as fur as twelve-times-twelve I ain't no slouch.
'Tother side of that is what gits me."

"Where is your home?"

"I'm f'm old Shelby."

"What's your father's religious denomination?"

"Him? Oh, he's a blacksmith."

"No, no - I don't mean his trade. What's his RELIGIOUS
DENOMINATION?"

"OH - I didn't understand you befo'. He's a Freemason."

"No, no, you don't get my meaning yet. What I mean is,
does he belong to any CHURCH?"

"NOW you're talkin'! Couldn't make out what you was a-tryin'
to git through yo' head no way. B'long to a CHURCH! Why,
boss, he's ben the pizenest kind of Free-will Babtis'
for forty year. They ain't no pizener ones 'n what HE is.
Mighty good man, pap is. Everybody says that. If they
said any diffrunt they wouldn't say it whar _I_ wuz
- not MUCH they wouldn't."

"What is your own religion?"

"Well, boss, you've kind o' got me, there - and yit
you hain't got me so mighty much, nuther. I think 't
if a feller he'ps another feller when he's in trouble,
and don't cuss, and don't do no mean things, nur noth'n'
he ain' no business to do, and don't spell the Saviour's
name with a little g, he ain't runnin' no resks - he's
about as saift as he b'longed to a church."

"But suppose he did spell it with a little g - what then?"

"Well, if he done it a-purpose, I reckon he wouldn't
stand no chance - he OUGHTN'T to have no chance, anyway,
I'm most rotten certain 'bout that."

"What is your name?"

"Nicodemus Dodge."

"I think maybe you'll do, Nicodemus. We'll give you
a trial, anyway."

"All right."

"When would you like to begin?"

"Now."

So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this
nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat off
and hard at it.

Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest
from the street, was a deserted garden, pathless,
and thickly grown with the bloomy and villainous "jimpson"
weed and its common friend the stately sunflower.
In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged
little "frame" house with but one room, one window, and no
ceiling - it had been a smoke-house a generation before.
Nicodemus was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bedchamber.

The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus,
right away - a butt to play jokes on. It was easy to see
that he was inconceivably green and confiding. George Jones
had the glory of perpetrating the first joke on him;
he gave him a cigar with a firecracker in it and winked
to the crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept
away the bulk of Nicodemus's eyebrows and eyelashes.
He simply said:

"I consider them kind of seeg'yars dangersome," - and
seemed to suspect nothing. The next evening Nicodemus
waylaid George and poured a bucket of ice-water over him.

One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy
"tied" his clothes. Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom's
by way of retaliation.

A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later - he
walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night,
with a staring handbill pinned between his shoulders.
The joker spent the remainder of the night, after church,
in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on
the cellar door till toward breakfast-time to make sure
that the prisoner remembered that if any noise was made,
some rough treatment would be the consequence. The cellar
had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed
with six inches of soft mud.

But I wander from the point. It was the subject of
skeletons that brought this boy back to my recollection.
Before a very long time had elapsed, the village smarties
began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not having
made a very shining success out of their attempts on the
simpleton from "old Shelby." Experimenters grew scarce
and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue.
There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare
Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it.
He had a noble new skeleton - the skeleton of the late
and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village
drunkard - a grisly piece of property which he had bought
of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,
under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in
the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty
dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably
hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.
The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in Nicodemus's
bed!

This was done - about half past ten in the evening.
About Nicodemus's usual bedtime - midnight - the village
jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson
weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.
They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the
long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt,
and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly
back and forth, and wheezing the music of "Camptown Races"
out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing
against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top,
and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles,
five pounds of "store" candy, and a well-gnawed slab of
gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.
He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three
dollars and was enjoying the result!

Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were
drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard
a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside. We saw men
and women standing away up there looking frightened,
and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering
down the steep slope toward us. We got out of the way,
and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.
He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him
to do but trust to luck and take what might come.

When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is
no stopping till the bottom is reached. Think of people
FARMING on a slant which is so steep that the best you can
say of it - if you want to be fastidiously accurate - is,
that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite
so steep as a mansard roof. But that is what they do.
Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg
were stood up "edgeways." The boy was wonderfully jolted up,
and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from
small stones on the way.

Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone,
and by that time the men and women had scampered down
and brought his cap.

Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring
cottages and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted,
and stared at, and commiserated, and water was
brought for him to drink and bathe his bruises in.
And such another clatter of tongues! All who had seen
the catastrophe were describing it at once, and each
trying to talk louder than his neighbor; and one youth
of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill,
called attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us,
and thus triumphantly showed exactly how the thing had been done.


Harris and I were included in all the descriptions;
how we were coming along; how Hans Gross shouted;
how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter coming like
a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way,
and let him come; and with what presence of mind we
picked him up and brushed him off and set him on a rock
when the performance was over. We were as much heroes
as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized;
we were taken with Peter and the populace to Peter's
mother's cottage, and there we ate bread and cheese,
and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a most
sociable good time; and when we left we had a handshake
all around, and were receiving and shouting back LEB'
WOHL's until a turn in the road separated us from our
cordial and kindly new friends forever.

We accomplished our undertaking. At half past eight
in the evening we stepped into Oppenau, just eleven
hours and a half out of Allerheiligen - one hundred
and forty-six miles. This is the distance by pedometer;
the guide-book and the Imperial Ordinance maps make
it only ten and a quarter - a surprising blunder,
for these two authorities are usually singularly accurate
in the matter of distances.


CHAPTER XXIV
[I Protect the Empress of Germany]

That was a thoroughly satisfactory walk - and the only
one we were ever to have which was all the way downhill.
We took the train next morning and returned to Baden-Baden
through fearful fogs of dust. Every seat was crowded, too;
for it was Sunday, and consequently everybody was taking
a "pleasure" excursion. Hot! the sky was an oven - and
a sound one, too, with no cracks in it to let in any air.
An odd time for a pleasure excursion, certainly!

Sunday is the great day on the continent - the free day,
the happy day. One can break the Sabbath in a hundred
ways without committing any sin.

We do not work on Sunday, because the commandment forbids it;
the Germans do not work on Sunday, because the commandment
forbids it. We rest on Sunday, because the commandment
requires it; the Germans rest on Sunday because the
commandment requires it. But in the definition
of the word "rest" lies all the difference. With us,
its Sunday meaning is, stay in the house and keep still;
with the Germans its Sunday and week-day meanings seem
to be the same - rest the TIRED PART, and never mind the
other parts of the frame; rest the tired part, and use
the means best calculated to rest that particular part.
Thus: If one's duties have kept him in the house all the week,
it will rest him to be out on Sunday; if his duties
have required him to read weighty and serious matter all
the week, it will rest him to read light matter on Sunday;
if his occupation has busied him with death and funerals
all the week, it will rest him to go to the theater Sunday
night and put in two or three hours laughing at a comedy;
if he is tired with digging ditches or felling trees
all the week, it will rest him to lie quiet in the house
on Sunday; if the hand, the arm, the brain, the tongue,
or any other member, is fatigued with inanition,
it is not to be rested by added a day's inanition;
but if a member is fatigued with exertion, inanition is
the right rest for it. Such is the way in which the Germans
seem to define the word "rest"; that is to say, they rest
a member by recreating, recuperating, restore its forces.
But our definition is less broad. We all rest alike
on Sunday - by secluding ourselves and keeping still,
whether that is the surest way to rest the most of us
or not. The Germans make the actors, the preachers,
etc., work on Sunday. We encourage the preachers,
the editors, the printers, etc., to work on Sunday,
and imagine that none of the sin of it falls upon us;
but I do not know how we are going to get around the fact
that if it is wrong for the printer to work at his trade
on Sunday it must be equally wrong for the preacher to
work at his, since the commandment has made no exception
in his favor. We buy Monday morning's paper and read it,
and thus encourage Sunday printing. But I shall never do
it again.

The Germans remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy,
by abstaining from work, as commanded; we keep it
holy by abstaining from work, as commanded, and by
also abstaining from play, which is not commanded.
Perhaps we constructively BREAK the command to rest,
because the resting we do is in most cases only a name,
and not a fact.

These reasonings have sufficed, in a measure, to mend
the rent in my conscience which I made by traveling to
Baden-Baden that Sunday. We arrived in time to furbish
up and get to the English church before services began.
We arrived in considerable style, too, for the landlord
had ordered the first carriage that could be found,
since there was no time to lose, and our coachman was
so splendidly liveried that we were probably mistaken
for a brace of stray dukes; why else were we honored
with a pew all to ourselves, away up among the very elect
at the left of the chancel? That was my first thought.
In the pew directly in front of us sat an elderly lady,
plainly and cheaply dressed; at her side sat a young
lady with a very sweet face, and she also was quite
simply dressed; but around us and about us were clothes
and jewels which it would do anybody's heart good to
worship in.

I thought it was pretty manifest that the elderly lady
was embarrassed at finding herself in such a conspicuous
place arrayed in such cheap apparel; I began to feel sorry
for her and troubled about her. She tried to seem very busy
with her prayer-book and her responses, and unconscious
that she was out of place, but I said to myself, "She is
not succeeding - there is a distressed tremulousness
in her voice which betrays increasing embarrassment."

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