A Tramp Abroad - The Original Classic Edition. Twain Mark
filled with all sorts of birds and animals, glass-eyed, ably stuffed, and set
up in the most natural eloquent and dramatic attitudes. The moment we were abed, the rain cleared away and the moon came out. I dozed off to sleep while contemplating a great white stuffed owl which was looking intently down on me from a high perch with the air of a person who thought he had met me before, but could not make out for certain.
But young Z did not get off so easily. He said that as he was sinking deliciously to sleep, the moon lifted away the shadows and developed a huge cat, on a bracket, dead and stuffed, but crouching, with every muscle tense, for a spring, and with its glittering glass eyes aimed
straight at him. It made Z uncomfortable. He tried closing his own eyes, but that did not answer, for a natural instinct kept making him open them again to see if the cat was still getting ready to launch at
him--which she always was. He tried turning his back, but that was a failure; he knew the sinister eyes were on him still. So at last he had
to get up, after an hour or two of worry and experiment, and set the cat
out in the hall. So he won, that time.
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CHAPTER XVIII
[The Kindly Courtesy of Germans]
In the morning we took breakfast in the garden, under the trees, in the delightful German summer fashion. The air was filled with the fragrance of flowers and wild animals; the living portion of the menagerie of the "Naturalist Tavern" was all about us. There were great cages populous with fluttering and chattering foreign birds, and other great cages and greater wire pens, populous with quadrupeds, both native and foreign. There were some free creatures, too, and quite sociable ones they were. White rabbits went loping about the place, and occasionally came and sniffed at our shoes and shins; a fawn, with a red ribbon on its neck, walked up and examined us fearlessly; rare breeds of chickens and doves begged for crumbs, and a poor old tailless raven hopped about with
a humble, shamefaced mein which said, "Please do not notice my exposure--think how you would feel in my circumstances, and be charitable." If he was observed too much, he would retire behind something and stay there until he judged the party's interest had found another object. I never have seen another dumb creature that was
so morbidly sensitive. Bayard Taylor, who could interpret the dim reasonings of animals, and understood their moral natures better than most men, would have found some way to make this poor old chap forget his troubles for a while, but we have not his kindly art, and so had to
leave the raven to his griefs.
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After breakfast we climbed the hill and visited the ancient castle of Hirschhorn, and the ruined church near it. There were some curious old bas-reliefs leaning against the inner walls of the church--sculptured
lords of Hirschhorn in complete armor, and ladies of Hirschhorn in the picturesque court costumes of the Middle Ages. These things are suffering damage and passing to decay, for the last Hirschhorn has been dead two hundred years, and there is nobody now who cares to preserve the family relics. In the chancel was a twisted stone column, and the captain told us a legend about it, of course, for in the matter of
legends he could not seem to restrain himself; but I do not repeat his tale because there was nothing plausible about it except that the Hero wrenched this column into its present screw-shape with his hands --just one single wrench. All the rest of the legend was doubtful.
But Hirschhorn is best seen from a distance, down the river. Then the clustered brown towers perched on the green hilltop, and the old battlemented stone wall, stretching up and over the grassy ridge and disappearing in the leafy sea beyond, make a picture whose grace and beauty entirely satisfy the eye.
We descended from the church by steep stone stairways which curved this way and that down narrow alleys between the packed and dirty tenements of the village. It was a quarter well stocked with deformed, leering, unkempt and uncombed idiots, who held out hands or caps and begged piteously. The people of the quarter were not all idiots, of course, but
all that begged seemed to be, and were said to be.
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I was thinking of going by skiff to the next town, Necharsteinach; so I
ran to the riverside in advance of the party and asked a man there if
he had a boat to hire. I suppose I must have spoken High German--Court German--I intended it for that, anyway--so he did not understand me. I turned and twisted my question around and about, trying to strike that man's average, but failed. He could not make out what I wanted. Now Mr. X arrived, faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way: "Can man boat get here?"
The mariner promptly understood and promptly answered. I can comprehend why he was able to understand that particular sentence, because by mere accident all the words in it except "get" have the same sound and the
same meaning in German that they have in English; but how he managed to understand Mr. X's next remark puzzled me. I will insert it, presently.
X turned away a moment, and I asked the mariner if he could not find
a board, and so construct an additional seat. I spoke in the purest German, but I might as well have spoken in the purest Choctaw for all the good it did. The man tried his best to understand me; he tried, and kept on trying, harder and harder, until I saw it was really of no use, and said:
"There, don't strain yourself--it is of no consequence."
Then X turned to him and crisply said: "MACHEN SIE a flat board."
I wish my epitaph may tell the truth about me if the man did not answer
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up at once, and say he would go and borrow a board as soon as he had lit
the pipe which he was filling.
We changed our mind about taking a boat, so we did not have to go. I have given Mr. X's two remarks just as he made them. Four of the five words in the first one were English, and that they were also German was only accidental, not intentional; three out of the five words in the
second remark were English, and English only, and the two German ones did not mean anything in particular, in such a connection.
X always spoke English to Germans, but his plan was to turn the sentence wrong end first and upside down, according to German construction, and sprinkle in a German word without any essential meaning to it, here and there, by way of flavor. Yet he always made himself understood. He could make those dialect-speaking raftsmen understand him, sometimes, when even young Z had failed with them; and young Z was a pretty good German scholar. For one thing, X always spoke with such confidence--perhaps
that helped. And possibly the raftsmen's dialect was what is called
PLATT-DEUTSCH, and so they found his English more familiar to their ears than another man's German. Quite indifferent students of German can read Fritz Reuter's charming platt-Deutch tales with some little facility
because many of the words are English. I suppose this is the tongue
which our Saxon ancestors carried to England with them. By and by I will inquire of some other philologist.
However, in the mean time it had transpired that the men employed to calk the raft had found that the leak was not a leak at all, but only
a crack between the logs--a crack that belonged there, and was not
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dangerous, but had been magnified into a leak by the disordered
imagination of the mate. Therefore we went aboard again with a good degree of confidence, and presently got to sea without accident. As we swam smoothly along between the enchanting shores, we fell to swapping notes about manners and customs in Germany and elsewhere.
As I write, now, many months later, I perceive that each of us, by observing and noting and inquiring, diligently and day by day, had
managed to lay in a most varied and opulent stock