Chapter III (1)

Dear People,--I couldn't give you a better illustration of what happens to you in foreign countries when you pin your faith on people who are said to "speak English here," than by giving you the tale of how I went from Copenhagen to Lubeck. To begin with, I explained to the porter of the König von Denmark Hotel, who is one of the English-speaking _attachés_ of that very good hotel, that I wished, in going to Lubeck, to avoid water as much as possible. I endeavored to convey to him that my horror of it was in fact hydrophobic, and that I could go miles out of my way to escape it. He understood me perfectly, he said; and he explained to me a fine route by which I was to cross island after island by rail, have only short intervals of water between, and come comfortably to Lubeck by eight in the evening, provided I would leave Copenhagen at 6.45 in the morning, which I was only too happy to do for the sake of escaping a long steamboat journey. So I arranged everything to that end; explained to the one waiter who spoke English that I must have breakfast on the table at 5.40, as I was to leave the house at 6.15. He understood perfectly, he said. (I also commissioned him to buy a pound of grapes for my lunch-basket; the relevancy of this will appear later.) I then carefully explained to the worthy old lady who had promised for a small consideration to take me to Munich, that she must be on the spot at six, with her luggage; and that she was on no account to bring anything to lift in her hands, because my own hand-luggage would be all she could well handle. Then I asked for my bill, that it might be settled the night beforehand, to have nothing on hand in the morning but to get off. This was doubly important, as the landlord had promised to change my Danish money into German money for me,--the Danish bankers having no German money. They so hate Germany that they consider it a disgrace, I believe, even to handle marks and pfennigs. The clerk, who also "speaks English," said he understood me perfectly; so I went upstairs cheerful and at ease in my mind. In half an hour my bill arrived; and I sent down by the waiter, who spoke "a leetle" English, five hundred Danish crowns to pay my bill, and have four hundred crowns returned to me in marks. Waited one hour, no money; rang, same waiter appeared.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, it have gone out; it will soon return. He is not here."

Waited half an hour longer; rang again.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, strachs. He shall all right, strachs."

"But I am very tired; I wish to go to bed."

"Yees, it shall be kommen."

Waited another half-hour,--it was now quarter of eleven; wrote on a bit of paper, "I have gone to bed; cannot take the money to-night. Have it ready for me at six in the morning." Rang, and gave it to the waiter, ejaculating, "Bureau;" and pointing downstairs, shut the door on him and went to bed. The last thing I heard from him, as I shut the door, was, "Strachs, strachs!" That means "Immediately;" and there is a Norwegian proverb that "when the Norwegian says 'Strachs,' he will be with you in half an hour."

At twenty-five minutes before six I was in the dining-room, bonneted, all ready; no sign or symptom of breakfast. I went to the little room beyond, where the waiters are to be found. There was the one who speaks least English. "Oh, goodness!" said I, "where _is_ Wilhelm?" Wilhelm being the one mainstay of the establishment in the matter of English, and the one who had waited upon me during all my stay.

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm here; soon will be kommen."

"But I must have my breakfast; I leave the house in half an hour."

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm is not yet. He sleeps." And the good-natured little fellow darted off to call him. Poor Wilhelm had indeed overslept; but he appeared in a miraculously short time, got my breakfast together by bits, got the money from the clerk, and did his best to explain to me how it was that a given sum of money was at once more and less in marks than it was in kroner. I crammed it all into my pocket, and ran downstairs to find--no old lady; her "knapsack" on the driver's seat, but she herself not there. Four different people said something to me about it, and I could not understand one word they said; so I stepped into the carriage, sat down, and resigned myself to whatever was coming next. After about ten minutes she appeared, breathless, coming down the stairs of the hotel. She had mounted to my room, and, unmindful of the significant fact that the door was wide open and all my luggage gone, had been waiting there for me. This augured well for the journey! However, there was no time for misgivings; and we drove off at a tearing rate, late for the train. Suddenly I spied a most disreputable-looking parcel on the seat,--large, clumsy, done up in an old dirty calico curtain, from which a few brass rings were still hanging.

"What is that?" I exclaimed.

"Only my best gown, ma'am, and my velvet cloak. I couldn't disgrace you, ma'am."

"Disgrace me!" thought I. "I was never before disgraced by such a bundle."

"But I told you to bring nothing whatever to carry in your hands," I said; "you must put that into your knapsack. My roll and basket are all you can possibly lift."

"Oh, ma'am, it would ruin it to put it in the knapsack. I'm not a rich lady, like you, ma'am; it's all I've got: but I'd not like to disgrace you. I was out last night trying to hire a small trunk to bring; but you wouldn't believe it, ma'am, they wanted eight kroner down for the deposit for the value of it. But I'll not disgrace you, ma'am, and I'll forget nothing. I've a good head at counting. You'll see I'll not overlook anything."

"Never mind," I said; "you must wear your cloak [she had on only a little thin, clinging, black crape shawl,--the most pitiful of garments, and no more protection than a pocket-handkerchief against cold], and the dress must go into the knapsack at Lubeck. I will put it into my own roll as soon as we are in the cars."

At the station--luckily, as I thought--the ticket-seller spoke English, and replied readily to my inquiry for a ticket to Lubeck, _by rail_, "Yes, by Kiel." Then there came a man who wanted three kroner more because my trunk was heavy, and another who wanted a few pfennigs for having helped the first one lift it. I tried for a minute to count out the sum he had mentioned, and then I said, "Oh, good gracious, take it all!" emptying the few little coppers and tiny silver bits--which I knew must be, all told, not a quarter of a dollar--into his hand. He said something which, in my innocence, I supposed was thanks, but Brita told me afterwards that he was a "fearfully rough man, and what he said was to call me a 'damned German devil!' You see, ma'am, they all hate the Germans so, and hearing me speak English, he thought it was German. The French, too, ma'am,--they hate the Germans too. They say that Sara Bernhardt,--I dare say you've seen her, ma'am,--they say she nearly starved herself all in her travelling through Germany, because she wouldn't eat the German food."

At the train to see me off were two dear warm-hearted Danish women,--mother and daughter,--to whom I had brought a letter from friends in America. With barely time to thank them and say good-by, I and my old lady and her bundle and my own three parcels were all hustled into a carriage, the door slammed and locked, and we were off. Then I sank back and considered the situation. I had fancied that all that was necessary was to have a person who could speak,--that if I had but a tongue at my command, it would answer my purposes almost as well in another person's head as in my own. But I was fast learning my mistake. This good old woman, who had never been out of Denmark in her life, had no more idea which way to turn or what to do in a railway station than a baby. The first five minutes of our journey had shown that. She stood, bundles in hand, her bonnet falling off the back of her head, her crape shawl clinging limp to her figure; her face full of nervous uncertainty,--the very ideal of a bewildered old woman, such as one always sees at railway stations. The thought of being taken charge of, all the way from Copenhagen to Munich, by this type of elderly female, was, at the outset, awful; but very soon the comical side of it came over me so thoroughly that I began to think it would, on the whole, be more entertaining.

When she had told me the day before, as we were driving about in Copenhagen, that she had never in her life been out of Denmark, though she was sixty-four years old, I said, "Really that is a strange thing,--for you to be taking your first journey at that age."

"Oh, well, ma'am," she said, "I'm such a child of Nature that I shall enjoy it as much as if I were younger, and I've all the Danish history, ma'am, at my tongue's end, ma'am. There's nothing I can't tell you, ma'am. Though we've been very hard-working, I've always been one that was for making all I could: and I've been with my children at their lessons always,--we gave them all good schooling; and I've a volume of Danish poetry I've written, ma'am,--a volume _that_ thick," marking off at least two inches on her finger.

"Danish?" said I. "Why did you not write it in English?"

"Well, ma'am, being raised here, the Danish tongue is more my own, much as I spoke English always till my parents died; but I'll write some in English for you, ma'am, before we part."

So I had for the third time alighted on a poet. "Birds of a feather," thought I to myself; but it really is extraordinary. Norwegian, Dane--I wonder, if I take a German maid to carry me to Oberammergau, if she also will turn out "a child of Nature" and a scribbler of verses.

The way from Copenhagen southward and westward by land is delightful. It plunges immediately into a rich farming-country, level as an Illinois prairie, and with comfortable farm-houses set in enclosures of trees, as they are there; and I presume for the same reason,--to break the force of the winds which might sweep from one end of Denmark to the other, without so much as a hillock to stay them: no fences, only hedges, and great tracts without even a hedge, marked off and divided by differing colors from the different crops. The second crop of clover was in full flower; acres of wheat or barley, just being sheaved; wagons piled full, rolling down shaded roads with long lines of trees on each side. Roeskilde, Ringsted, Soro,--three towns, but seemingly only one great farm, for seventeen miles out of Copenhagen. Then we began to smell the salt water, and to get a fresh breeze in at the windows; and presently we came to Kosör, where we were to take boat. A big man in uniform stood at the door of the station, looked at our tickets, said "Kiel," and waved his hand toward a little steamer lying at the dock.

"They say they fear it will be rough, ma'am, as the wind is from the southeast," said the old lady.

"Oh, well," said I, "it is only an hour and a half across. We cross the Big Belt to Nyborg."

She accepted my statement as confidingly as a child, and we made ourselves comfortable on the upper deck. It was half-past nine o'clock. I took out my guide-book and studied up the descriptions of the different towns we were to pass through after our next landing. A green dome-like island came into sight, with a lighthouse on top, looking like the stick at the top of a haystack. "That's in the middle of the Belt, ma'am," said Brita. "In the winter many's the time the passengers across here have to land there and stay a day, or maybe two; and sometimes they come on the ice-boats. Very dangerous they are; they pull them on the ice, and if the ice breaks, jump in and row them."

It seemed to me that we were bearing strangely to the south: land was disappearing from view; the waves grew bigger and higher; spray dashed on the deck; white-caps tossed in all directions.

"I believe we are going out to sea," said I.

"It does look like it, ma'am," replied the "child of Nature." "Shall I go and ask?"

"Yes," I replied, "go and ask." She returned with consternation in every line of her aged face.

"Oh, ma'am, it's strange they should have told you so wrong. We're on this boat till four in the afternoon."

And so we were, and a half-hour to boot, owing to the southeast wind which was dead ahead all the way. Everybody was ill,--my poor old protectress most of all, and for the first time in her life.

"Oh, ma'am, I did not think it could be like this," she gasped. "I never did feel so awful." I sat grimly still in one spot on the deck all that day. What a day it was! About noon it occurred to me that some grapes would be a relief to my misery. Opening the basket and taking out the bag in which the English-speaking waiter had told me were my grapes, I put in my hand and drew out--a hard, corky, tasteless pear! Thanks to the southeast wind, we came a half-hour late to Kiel, and thereby missed the train to Lubeck which we should have taken, waited two hours and a half in the station, and then had to take three different trains one after the other, and pay an extra fare on each one; how we ever stumbled through I don't know, but we did, and at half-past eleven we were in Lubeck, safe and sound, and not more than three quarters dead! and I shall laugh whenever I think of it as long as I live.

Lubeck is an old town, well worth several days' study; and the Stadt Hamburg is a comfortable house to sleep and be fed in. You can have a mutton-chop there, and that is a thing hard to find in Germany; and you can have your mutton-chop brought to you by an "English-speaking" waiter who speaks English; and you may have it delicately served in your own room, or in a pretty dining-room, or on a front porch, walled in thick by oleander-trees, ten and fifteen feet high,--a lustrous wall of green, through which you have glimpses of such old gables and high peaked roofs, red-tiled, and scooped into queer curves, as I do not know elsewhere except in Nuremberg. It all dates back to 1100 and 1200, and thereabouts,--which does not sound so very old to you when you have just come from Norway, where a thing is not ancient unless it dates back to somewhere near Christ's time; but for a mediæval town, Lubeck has a fine flavor of antiquity about it. It has some splendid old gateways, and plenty of old houses, two-thirds roof, one-third gable, and four-fifths dormer-window, with door-posts and corners carved in the leisurely way peculiar to that time. Really, one would think a man must have his house ordered before he was born, to have got it done in time to die in, in those days. I have speculated very much about this problem, and it puzzles me yet. So many of these old houses look as if it must have taken at least the years of one generation to have made the carvings on them; perhaps the building and ornamentation of the house was a thing handed down from father to son and to son's son, like famous games of chess. Nothing less than this seems to me to explain the elaboration of fine hand-wrought decorations in the way of carving and tapestries, which were the chief splendors of splendid living in those old times. There is a room in the Merchants' Exchange in Lubeck, which is entirely walled and ceiled with carved wood-work taken out of an ancient house belonging to one of Lubeck's early burgomasters. These carvings were done in 1585 by "an unknown master," and were recently transferred to this room to preserve them. The panels of wood alternate with panels of exquisitely wrought alabaster; two rows of these around the room. There were old cupboard doors, now firmly fastened on the wall, never to swing again; and one panel, with a group of wood-carvers at work, said--or guessed--to be the portraits of the carver and his assistants. The old shutters are there,--each decorated with a group, or single figure,--every face as expressive as if it were painted in oil by a master's hand. Every inch of the wall is wrought into some form of decorations; the ceiling is carved into great squares, with alabaster knobs at the intersections; a superb chandelier of ancient Venetian glass hangs in the middle; and the new room stands to-day exactly as the old one stood in the grand old burgomaster's day. It is kept insured by the Merchants' Guild for $30,000, but twice that sum could not replace it. The Merchants' Guild of Lubeck must contain true art-lovers; a large room opening from this one has also finely carved walls, and a frieze of the old burgomasters' portraits, and another fine Venetian glass chandelier, two centuries old. Through the window I caught a glimpse of a spiral stair outside the building; it wound in short turns, and the iron balustrade was a wall of green vines; it looked like the stair to the chamber of a princess, but it was only the outside way to another room where the Merchants held their sittings.

The largest of the Lubeck churches is the Church of Saint Mary. This was built so big, it is said, simply to outdo the cathedral in size, the Lubeck citizens being determined to have their church bigger than the bishop's. The result is three hundred and thirty-five feet of a succession of frightful rococo things, enough to drive the thought of worship out of any head that has eyes in it. The exterior is fine, being of the best style of twelfth-century brick-work, and there are some fine and interesting things to be seen inside; but the general effect of the interior is indescribably hideous, with huge grotesque carvings in black and white marble and painted wood, at every pillar of the arches. In one of the chapels is a series of paintings, ascribed to Holbein,--"The Dance of Death." It is a ghastly picture, with a certain morbid fascination about it,--a series of fantastic figures, alternating with grim skeleton figures of Death. The emperor, the pope, the king and queen, the law-giver, the merchant, the peasant, the miser,--all are there, hand in hand with the grim, grappling, leaping skeleton, who will draw them away. Under each figure is a stanza of verse representing his excuse for delay, his reply to Death,--all in vain. This chapel had the most uncanny fascination to my companion.

"Oh, ma'am! oh, indeed, ma'am, it is too true!" she exclaimed, walking about, and peering through her spectacles at each motto. "It is all the same for the pope and the emperor. Death calls us all; and we all would like to stay a little longer."

By a fine bronze reclining statue of one of the old bishops she lingered. "Is it not wonderful, ma'am, the pride there is in this poor world?" she said. The reflection seemed to me a very just one, as I too looked at the old man lying there in his mitre, with the sacred wafer ostentatiously held in one hand, and his crosier in the other; every inch of him, and of the great bronze slab on which he lay, wrought as exquisitely as the finest etching.

At twelve o'clock every day a crowd gathers in this church to see a procession of little figures come out of the huge clock; the Lubeck people, it seems, never tire of this small miracle. It must be acknowledged that it is a droll sight: but one would think, seeing that there are only forty thousand people in the town, that there would now and then be a day without a crowd; yet the sacristan said, that, rain or shine, every day, the little chapel was full at the striking of the first stroke of twelve. The show is on the back of the clock, which detracts very much from its effect. At the instant of twelve a tiny white statue lifted its arm, struck a hammer on the bell twelve times; at the first stroke a door opened, and out came a procession of eight figures, called the Emperor and the Electors; each glided around the circle, paused in the middle, made a jerky bow to the figure of Christ in the centre, and then disappeared in a door in the other side, which closed after them. The figures seemed only a few inches tall at that great height; and the whole thing like part of a Punch and Judy show, and quite in keeping with the rococo ornaments on the pillars. But the crowd gazed as devoutly as if it had been the elevation of the Host itself; and I hurried away, fearing that they might resent the irreverent look on my countenance.

There are some carved brass tablets which are superb, and a curious old altar-piece, with doors opening after doors, like a succession of wardrobes, one inside the other, the first doors painted on the inside, the second also painted, and disclosing, on being opened, a series of wonderful wood carvings of Scriptural scenes, these opening out again and showing still others; a fine canopy of wrought wood above them, as delicate as filigree. These are disfigured, as so many of the exquisite wood carvings of this time are, by being painted in grotesque colors; but the carving is marvellous. The thing that interested me most in this church was a tiny little stone mouse carved at the base of one of the pillars. You might go all your life to that church and never see it. I searched for it long before I found it. It is a tiny black mouse gnawing at the root of an oak; and some old stone-worker put it in there six hundred years ago, because it was the ancient emblem of the city. There was also a line of old saints and apostles carved on the ends of the pews, that were fine; a Saint Christopher with the child on his shoulder that I would have liked to filch and carry away.

In the Jacobi Kirche--a church not quite so old--is a remarkable old altar, which a rich burgomaster hit on the device of bestowing on the church and immortalizing his own family in it at the same time. To make it all right for the church, he had the scene of the crucifixion carved in stone for the centre; then on the doors, which must be thrown back to show this stone carving, he had himself and his family painted. And I venture to say that the event justifies his expectations; for one looks ten minutes at the burgomaster's sons and daughters and wife for one at the stone carving inside. It is a family group not to be forgotten,--the burgomaster and his five sons behind him on one door, and his wife with her five daughters in front of her on the other door. They are all kneeling, so as to seem to be adoring the central figures,--all but the burgomaster's wife, who stands tall and stately, stiff in gold brocade, with a missal in one hand and a long feather in the other; a high cap of the same brocade, flying sleeves at the shoulder, and a long bodice in front complete the dame's array. Three of the daughters wear high foolscaps of white; white robes trimmed with ermine, falling from the back of the neck, thrown open to show fine scarlet gowns, with bodices laced over white, and coming down nearly to their knees in front. Two little things in long-sleeved dark-green gowns--"not out" yet, I suppose--kneel modestly in front; and a nun and a saint or a Virgin Mary are thrown into the group to make it holy. The burgomaster is in a black fur-trimmed robe, kneeling with a book open before him,--the very model of a Pharisee at family prayers,--his five sons kneeling behind him in scarlet robes trimmed with dark fur.

The sacristan said something in German to Brita, which she instantly translated to me as "Oh, ma'am, to think of it! They're all buried here under our very feet, ma'am,--the whole family! And they'd to leave all that finery behind them, didn't they, ma'am?" The thought of their actual dust being under our feet at that moment seemed to make the family portraits much more real. I dare say that burgomaster never did anything worthy of being remembered in all his life; but he has hit on a device which will secure him and his race a place in the knowledge of men for centuries to come.

In the Rathhaus--which is one of the quaintest buildings in Lubeck--there is an odd old chimney-piece. It is downstairs, in what one would call vaults, except that they are used for the rooms of a restaurant. It has been for centuries a Lubeck custom that when a couple have been married in the Church of Saint Mary (which adjoins the Rathhaus), they should come into this room to drink their first winecup together; and, by way of giving a pleasant turn to things for the bridegroom, the satirical old wood-carvers wrought a chimney-piece for this room with a cock on one side, a hen on the other, the Israelitish spies bearing the huge bunch of the over-rated grapes of Eshcol between them, and in the centre below it this motto: "Many a man sings loudly when they bring him his bride. If he knew what they brought him, he might well weep." It is an odd thing how universally, when this sort of slur upon marriage is aimed at, it is the man's disappointment which is set forth or predicted, and not the woman's. It is a very poor rule, no doubt; but it may at least be said to "work both ways." There used to be an underground passage-way by which they came from the church into this room, but it is shut up now. While we sat waiting in the outer hall upstairs for the janitor to come and show us this room, a bridal couple came down and passed out to their carriage,--plain people of the working class. She wore a black alpaca gown, and had no bridal sign or symptom about her, except the green myrtle wreath on her head. But few brides look happier than she did.

The Rathhaus makes one side of the Market-place, which was, like all market-places, picturesque at eleven in the morning, dirty and dismal at four in the afternoon. I drove through it several times in the course of the forenoon; and at last the women came to know me, and nodded and smiled as we passed. Their hats were wonderful to see,--cocked up on top of a neat white cap, with its frill all at the back and none in front; the hats shaped--well, nobody could say how they were shaped--like _half_ a washbowl bent up, with the little round centre rim left in behind! I wonder if that gives an idea to anybody who has not seen the hat. The real wonder, however, was not in the shape, but in the material. They are made of wood,--actually of wood,--split up into the finest threads, and sewed like straw; and the women make them themselves. All the vegetable women had theirs bound with bright green, with long green loops hanging down behind; but the fishwomen had theirs bound with narrow black binding round the edge, lined with purple calico, and with black ribbon at the back. Finally, after staring a dozen of the good souls out of countenance looking at their heads, I bought one of the bonnets outright! It was the cleanest creature ever seen that sold it to me. She pulled it off her head, and sold it as readily as she would have sold me a dozen eels out of her basket; and I carried it on my arm all the way from Lubeck to Cassel, and from Cassel to Munich, to the great bewilderment of many railway officials and travellers. Before I had concluded my bargain there was a crowd ten deep all around the carriage. Everybody--men, women, children--left their baskets and stalls, and came to look on. I believe I could have bought the entire wardrobe of the whole crowd, if I had so wished,--so eager and pleased did they look, talking volubly with each other, and looking at me. It was a great occasion for Brita, who harangued them all by instalments from the front seat, and explained to them that the bonnet was going all the way to America, and that her "lady" had a great liking for all "national" things, which touched one old lady's patriotism so deeply that she pulled off her white cap and offered it to me, making signs that my wooden bonnet was incomplete without the cap, as it certainly was. On Brita's delicately calling her attention to the fact that her cap was far from clean, she said she would go home and wash it and flute it afresh, if the lady would only buy it; and three hours later she actually appeared with it most exquisitely done up, and not at all dear for the half-dollar she asked for it. After buying this bonnet I drove back to the hotel with it, ate my lunch in the oleander-shaded porch, and then set off again to see the cathedral. This proved to me a far more interesting church than Saint Mary's, though the guide-books say that Saint Mary's is far the finer church of the two. There is enough ugliness in both of them, for that matter, to sink them. But in the cathedral there are some superb bronzes and brasses, and a twisted iron railing around the pulpit, which is so marvellous in its knottings and twistings that a legend has arisen that the devil made it.

"How very much they seem to have made of the devil in the olden time, ma'am, do they not?" remarked Brita, entirely unconscious of the fact that she was philosophizing; "wherever we have been, there have been so many things named in his honor!"

The clock in this church has not been deemed worthy of mention in the guide-books; but it seemed to me far more wonderful than the one at Saint Mary's. I shall never forget it as long as I live; in fact, I fear I shall live to wish I could. The centre of the dial plate is a huge face of gilt, with gilt rays streaming out from it; two enormous eyes in this turn from side to side as the clock ticks, right, left, right, left, so far each time that it is a squint,--a horrible, malignant, diabolical squint. It seems almost irreverent even to tell you that this is to symbolize the never-closing eye of God. The uncanny fascination of these rolling eyes cannot be described. It is too hideous to look at, yet you cannot look away. I sat spellbound in a pew under it for a long time. On the right hand of the clock stands a figure representing the "Genius of Time." This figure holds a gold hammer in its hand, and strikes the quarter-hours. On the other side stands Death,--a naked skeleton,--with an hour-glass. At each hour he turns his hour-glass, shakes his head, and with a hammer in his right hand strikes the hour. I heard him strike "three," and I confess a superstitious horror affected me. The thought of a congregation of people sitting Sunday after Sunday looking at those rolling eyes, and seeing that skeleton strike the hour and turn his hour-glass, is monstrous. Surely there was an epidemic in those middle ages of hideous and fantastic inventions. I am not at all sure that it has not stamped its impress on the physiognomy of the German nation. I never see a crowd of Germans at a railway station without seeing in dozens of faces resemblance to ugly gargoyles. And why should it not have told on them? The women of old Greece brought forth beautiful sons and daughters, it is said, because they looked always on beautiful statues and pictures. The German women have been for a thousand years looking at grotesque and leering or coarse and malignant gargoyles carved everywhere,--on the gateways of their cities, in their churches, on the very lintels of their houses. Why should not the German face have been slowly moulded by these prenatal influences?

Above this malevolent clock was a huge scaffold beam, crossing the entire width of the church, and supporting four huge figures, carved with some skill; the most immodest Adam and Eve I ever beheld; a bishop and a Saint John and a Mary,--these latter kneeling in adoration of a crucifixion above. The whole combination--the guilty Adam and Eve, the pompous bishop, the repulsive crucifixion, the puppet clock with its restless eyes and skeleton, and the loud tick-tock, tick-tock, of the pendulum,--all made up a scene of grotesqueness and irreverence mingled with superstition and devotion, such as could not be found anywhere except in a German church of the twelfth century. It was a relief to turn from it and go into the little chapel, where stands the altar-piece made sacred as well as famous by the hands of that tender spiritual painter, Memling. These altar-pieces look at first sight so much like decorated wardrobes that it is jarring. I wish they had fashioned them otherwise. In this one, for instance, it is almost a pain to see on the outside doors of what apparently is a cupboard one of Memling's angels (the Gabriel) and the Mary listening to his message. Throwing these doors back, you see life-size figures of four saints,--John, Jerome, Blasius, and Ægidius. The latter is a grand dark figure, with a head and face to haunt one. Opening these doors again, you come to the last,--a landscape with the crucifixion in the foreground, and other scenes from the Passion of the Saviour. This is less distinctively Memling-like; in fact, the only ones of them all which one would be willing to say positively no man's hand but Memling's had touched, are the two tender angels in white on the outside shutters.

We left Lubeck very early in the morning. As we drove to the station, the milkmen and milkwomen were coming in, in their pretty carts, full of white wooden firkins, brass bound, with queer long spouts out on one side; brass measures of different sizes, and brass dippers, all shining as if they had been fresh scoured that very morning, made the carts a pretty spectacle. And the last thing of all which I stopped to look at in Lubeck was the best of all,--an old house with a turreted bay-window on the corner, and this inscription on the front between the first and second stories of the house:--

"North and south, the world is wide:
East and west, home is best."

It was in Platt Deutsch; and oddly enough, the servant of the house, who was at the door, did not know what it meant; and the first two men we asked did not know what it meant,--stared at it stupidly, shrugged their shoulders, and shook their heads. It was a lovely motto for a house, but not a good one for wanderers away from home to look at. It brought a sudden sense of homesickness, like an odor of a flower or a bar of music which has an indissoluble link with home.

It took a whole day to go from Lubeck to Cassel, but the day did not seem long. It was a series of pictures, and poor Brita's raptures over it all were at once amusing and pathetic. As soon as we began to see elevated ground, she became excited. "Oh, oh, ma'am," she exclaimed, "talk about scenery in Denmark! It is too flat. I am so used to the flat country, the least hill is beautiful." "Do you not call this grand?" she would say, at the sight of a hill a hundred or two feet high. It was a good lesson of the meaning of the word _relative_. After all, one can hardly conceive what it must be to live sixty-four years on a dead level of flatness. A genuine mountain would probably be a terror to a person who had led such a life. Brita's face, when I told her that I lived at the foot of mountains more than twelve times as high as any she had seen, was a study for incredulity and wonder. I think she thought I was lying. It was the hay harvest. All the way from Lubeck to Cassel were men and women, all hard at work in the fields; the women swung their scythes as well as the men, but looked more graceful while raking. Some wore scarlet handkerchiefs over their heads, some white; all had bare legs well in sight. At noon we saw them in groups on the ground, and towards night walking swiftly along the roads, with their rakes over their shoulders. I do not understand why travellers make such a to-do always about the way women work in the fields in Germany. I am sure they are far less to be pitied than the women who work in narrow, dark, foul streets of cities; and they look a thousand times healthier. Our road lay for many hours through a beautiful farm country: red brick houses and barns with high thatched roofs, three quarters of the whole building being thatched roof; great sweeps of meadow, tracts of soft pines, kingdoms of beeches,--the whole forest looking like a rich yellow brown moss in the distance, and their mottled trunks fairly shining out in the cross sunbeams, as if painted; wide stretches of brown opens, with worn paths leading off across them; hedges everywhere, and never a fence or a wall; mountain-ash trees, scarlet full; horse-chestnuts by orchards; towns every few minutes, and our train halting at them all long enough for the whole town to make up their minds whether they could go or not, pack their bags, and come on board; bits of marsh, with labyrinths of blue water in and out in it, so like tongues of the sea that, forgetting where I was, I said, "I wonder if that is fresh water." "It must be, ma'am," replied the observant Brita, "inasmuch as the white lilies are floating beautiful and large in it."

"Oh," she suddenly ejaculated, "how strange it was! Napoleon III. he thought he would get a good bit of this beautiful Germany for a birthday present, and be in Berlin on his birthday; and instead of that the Prussians were in Berlin on his birthday."

At Lüneburg we came into the heather. I thought I knew heather, but I was to discover my mistake. All the heather of my life heretofore--English, Scotch, Norwegian--had been no more than a single sprig by the side of this. "The dreary Lüneburg Heath," the discriminating Baedeker calls it. The man who wrote that phrase must have been not only color-blind, he must have been color-dead! If a mountain is "dreary" when it turns purple pink or pink purple five minutes before the rising sun is going to flash full on its eastern front, then the Lüneburg Heath is "dreary." Acres of heather, miles of heather; miles after miles, hour after hour, of swift railroad riding, and still heather! The purple and the pink and the browns into which the purple and pink blended and melted, shifted every second, and deepened and paled in the light and the shadow, as if the earth itself were gently undulating. Two or three times, down vistas among the low birches, I saw men up to their knees in the purple, apparently reaping it with a sickle. A German lady in the car explained that they cut it to strew in the sheep-stalls for the sheep to sleep on, and that the sheep ate it: bed, bed-blanket, and breakfast all in one! Who would not be a sheep? Here and there were little pine groves in this heath; the pine and the birch being the only trees which can keep any footing against heather when it sets out to usurp a territory, and even they cannot grow large or freely. Three storks rose from these downs as we passed, and flew slowly away, their great yellow feet shining as if they had on gold slippers.

"The country people reckon it a great blessing, ma'am, if a stork will build its nest on their roof," said Brita. "I dare say it is thought so in America the same." "No, Brita, we have no storks in America," I said. "I dare say some other bird, then, you hold the same," she replied, in a tone so taking it for granted that no nation of people could be without its sacred domestic bird that I was fain to fall back on the marten as our nearest approach to such a bird; and I said boastfully that we built houses for them in our yards, that they never built on roofs.

At Celle, when she caught sight of the castle where poor Caroline Matilda died, she exclaimed, "Oh, ma'am, that is where our poor queen died. It was the nasty Queen Dowager did it; it was, indeed, ma'am. And the king had opened the ball with her that very night that he signed the order to send her away. They took her in her ball-dress, just as she was. If they had waited till morning the Danes would have torn her out of the wagon, for they worshipped her. She screamed for her baby, and they just tossed it to her in the wagon; and she was only twenty."

Pages of guide-book could not have so emphasized the tragedy of that old gray castle as did Brita's words and her tearful eyes, and "nasty old Queen Dowager." I suppose the truth will never be known about that poor young queen; history whiffles round so from century to century that it seems hardly worth while to mind about it. At any rate, it can't matter much to either Caroline or Struensee, her lover, now.

Cassel at nine o'clock. Friendly faces and voices and hands, and the very air of America in every room. It was like a dream; and like a dream vanished, after twenty-four hours of almost unceasing talk and reminiscence and interchange. "Blessings brighten," even more than "when they take their flight," when they pause in their flight long enough for us to come up with them and take another look at them.

Cassel is the healthiest town in all Germany; and when you see it you do not wonder. High and dry and clear, and several hundred feet up above the plain, it has off-looks to wide horizons in all directions. To the east and south are beautiful curves of high hills, called mountains here; thickly wooded, so that they make solid spaces of color, dark green or purple or blue, according to the time calendar of colors of mountains at a distance. (They have their time-tables as fixed as railway trains, and much more to be depended on.) There is no town in Germany which can compare with Cassel as a home for people wishing to educate children cheaply and well, and not wishing to live in the fashions and ways and close air of cities. It has a picture-gallery second to only one in Germany; it has admirable museums of all sorts; it has a first-rate theatre; good masters in all branches of study are to be had at low rates; living is cheap and comfortable (for Germany). The water is good; the climate also (for Germany); and last, not least, the surrounding country is full of picturesque scenery,--woods, high hills, streams; just such a region as a lover of Nature finds most repaying and enjoyable. In the matter of society, also, Cassel is especially favored, having taken its tone from the days of the Electors, and keeping still much of the old fine breeding of culture and courtesy.

It is a misfortune to want to go from Cassel to Munich in one day. It can be done; but it takes fourteen hours of very hard work,--three changes,--an hour's waiting at one place, and half an hour at another, and the road for the last half of the day so rough that it could honestly be compared to nothing except horseback riding over bowlders at a rapid rate. This is from Gemunden to Munich: if there is any other way of getting there, I think nobody would go by this; so I infer that there is not. You must set off, also, at the unearthly hour of 5 A.M.,--an hour at which all virtues ooze out of one; even honesty out of cabmen, as I found at Cassel, when a man to whom I had paid four marks--more than twice the regular fare--for bringing us a five minutes' distance to the railway station, absolutely had the face to ask three marks more. Never did I so long for a command of the German tongue. I only hope that the docile Brita translated for me literally what I said, as I handed him twelve cents more, with, "I gave one dollar because you had to get up so early in the morning. You know very well that even half that sum is more than the price at ordinary times. I will give you this fifty pfennigs for yourself, and not another pfennig do you get!" I wish that the man that invented the word _pfennig_ had to "do a pour of it for one tousand year," as dear old Dr. Pröhl said of the teapot that would not pour without spilling. I think it is the test-word of the German language. The nearest direction I could give for pronouncing it would be: fill your mouth with hasty-pudding, then say _purr-f-f-f-f-f_, and then gulp the pudding and choke when you come to the _g_,--that's a _pfennig_; and the idea of such a name as that for a contemptible thing of which it takes one hundred to make a quarter of a dollar! They do them up in big nickel pieces too,--heavy, and so large that in the dark you always mistake them for something else. Ten hundredths of a quarter!--you could starve with your purse loaded down with them.

In the station, trudging about as cheerily as if they were at home, was a poor family,--father, mother, and five little children,--evidently about to emigrate. Each carried a big bundle; even the smallest toddler had her parcel tied up in black cloth with a big cord. The mother carried the biggest bundle of all,--a baby done up in a bedquilt, thick as a comforter; the child's head was pinned in tight as its feet,--not one breath of air could reach it.

"Going to America, ma'am," said Brita, "I think they must be. Oh, ma'am, there was five hundred sailed in one ship for America, last summer,--all to be Mormons; and the big fellow that took them, with his gold spectacles, I could have killed him. They'll be wretched enough when they come to find what they've done. Brigham Young's dead, but there must be somebody in his place that's carrying it on the same. They'd not be allowed to stay in Denmark, ma'am,--oh, no, they've got to go out of the country."

All day again we journeyed through the hay harvest,--the same picturesque farm-houses, with their high roofs thatched or dark-tiled, their low walls white or red or pink, marked off into odd-shaped intervals by lattice-work of wood; no fences, no walls; only the coloring to mark divisions of crops. Town after town snugged round its church; the churches looked like hens with their broods gathered close around them, just ready to go under the wings. We had been told that we need not change cars all the way to Munich; so, of course, we had to change three times,--bundled out at short notice, at the last minute, to gather ourselves up as we might. In one of these hurried changes I dropped my stylographic pen. Angry as I get with the thing when I am writing with it, my very heart was wrung with sorrow at its loss. Without much hope of ever seeing it again, I telegraphed for it. The station-master who did the telegraphing was profoundly impressed by Brita's description of the "wonderful instrument" I had lost. "A self-writing pen,"--she called it. I only wish it were! "You shall hear at the next station if it has been found," he said. Sure enough, at the very next station the guard came to the door. "Found and will be sent," he said; and from that on he regarded me with a sort of awe-stricken look whenever he entered the car. I believe he considered me a kind of female necromancer from America! and no wonder, with two self-writing pens in my possession, for luckily I had my No. 2 in my travelling-bag to show as sample of what I had lost.

At Elm we came into a fine hilly region,--hills that had to be tunnelled or climbed over by zigzags; between them were beautiful glimpses of valleys and streams. Brita was nearly beside herself, poor soul! Her "Oh's" became something tragic. "Oh, ma'am, it needs no judge to see that God has been here!" she cried. "We must think on the Building-Master when we see such scenery as this."

As we came out on the broader plains, the coloring of the villages grew colder; unlatticed white walls, and a colder gray to the roofs, the groups of houses no longer looked like crowds of furry creatures nestled close for protection. Some rollicking school girls, with long hair flying, got into our carriage, and chattered, and ate cake, and giggled; the cars rocked us to and fro on our seats as if we were in a saddle on a run-away horse in a Colorado cañon. All the rough roads I have ever been on have been smooth gliding in comparison with this. At nine o'clock, Munich, and a note from the dear old "Fraulein" to say that her house was full, but she had rooms engaged for me near by. The next day I went to see her, and found her the same old inimitable dear as ever,--the eyes and the smile not a day older, and the drollery and the mimicry all there; but, alas! old age has come creeping too close not to hurt in some ways, and an ugly rheumatism prevents her from walking and gives her much pain. I had hoped she could go to Oberammergau with me; but it is out of the question. At night she sent over to me the loveliest basket of roses and forget-me-nots and mignonette, with a card, "Good-night, my dear lady,--I kiss you;" and I am not too proud to confess that I read it with tears in my eyes. The dear, faithful, loving soul!

THE VILLAGE OF OBERAMMERGAU.