A Tramp Abroad

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> A Tramp Abroad


"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." Presently the Savior's name was
mentioned, and in her flurry she lost her head completely, and rose and
courtesied, instead of making a slight nod as everybody else did. The
sympathetic blood surged to my temples and I turned and gave those fine
birds what I intended to be a beseeching look, but my feelings got the
better of me and changed it into a look which said, "If any of you pets
of fortune laugh at this poor soul, you will deserve to be flayed for
it." Things went from bad to worse, and I shortly found myself mentally
taking the unfriended lady under my protection. My mind was wholly upon
her. I forgot all about the sermon. Her embarrassment took stronger
and stronger hold upon her; she got to snapping the lid of her
smelling-bottle--it made a loud, sharp sound, but in her trouble she
snapped and snapped away, unconscious of what she was doing. The last
extremity was reached when the collection-plate began its rounds; the
moderate people threw in pennies, the nobles and the rich contributed
silver, but she laid a twenty-mark gold piece upon the book-rest before
her with a sounding slap! I said to myself, "She has parted with all her
little hoard to buy the consideration of these unpitying people--it is a
sorrowful spectacle." I did not venture to look around this time; but
as the service closed, I said to myself, "Let them laugh, it is their
opportunity; but at the door of this church they shall see her step into
our fine carriage with us, and our gaudy coachman shall drive her home."

Then she rose--and all the congregation stood while she walked down the
aisle. She was the Empress of Germany!

No--she had not been so much embarrassed as I had supposed. My
imagination had got started on the wrong scent, and that is always
hopeless; one is sure, then, to go straight on misinterpreting
everything, clear through to the end. The young lady with her imperial
Majesty was a maid of honor--and I had been taking her for one of her
boarders, all the time.

This is the only time I have ever had an Empress under my personal
protection; and considering my inexperience, I wonder I got through
with it so well. I should have been a little embarrassed myself if I had
known earlier what sort of a contract I had on my hands.

We found that the Empress had been in Baden-Baden several days. It is
said that she never attends any but the English form of church service.

I lay abed and read and rested from my journey's fatigues the remainder
of that Sunday, but I sent my agent to represent me at the afternoon
service, for I never allow anything to interfere with my habit of
attending church twice every Sunday.

There was a vast crowd in the public grounds that night to hear the band
play the "Fremersberg." This piece tells one of the old legends of the
region; how a great noble of the Middle Ages got lost in the mountains,
and wandered about with his dogs in a violent storm, until at last
the faint tones of a monastery bell, calling the monks to a midnight
service, caught his ear, and he followed the direction the sounds came
from and was saved. A beautiful air ran through the music, without
ceasing, sometimes loud and strong, sometimes so soft that it could
hardly be distinguished--but it was always there; it swung grandly along
through the shrill whistling of the storm-wind, the rattling patter of
the rain, and the boom and crash of the thunder; it wound soft and low
through the lesser sounds, the distant ones, such as the throbbing
of the convent bell, the melodious winding of the hunter's horn, the
distressed bayings of his dogs, and the solemn chanting of the monks;
it rose again, with a jubilant ring, and mingled itself with the country
songs and dances of the peasants assembled in the convent hall to
cheer up the rescued huntsman while he ate his supper. The instruments
imitated all these sounds with a marvelous exactness. More than one man
started to raise his umbrella when the storm burst forth and the sheets
of mimic rain came driving by; it was hardly possible to keep from
putting your hand to your hat when the fierce wind began to rage and
shriek; and it was NOT possible to refrain from starting when those
sudden and charmingly real thunder-crashes were let loose.

I suppose the "Fremersberg" is a very low-grade music; I know, indeed,
that it MUST be low-grade music, because it delighted me, warmed me,
moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that I was full of
cry all the time, and mad with enthusiasm. My soul had never had such a
scouring out since I was born. The solemn and majestic chanting of the
monks was not done by instruments, but by men's voices; and it rose
and fell, and rose again in that rich confusion of warring sounds, and
pulsing bells, and the stately swing of that ever-present enchanting
air, and it seemed to me that nothing but the very lowest of low-grade
music COULD be so divinely beautiful. The great crowd which the
"Fremersberg" had called out was another evidence that it was low-grade
music; for only the few are educated up to a point where high-grade
music gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be able
to enjoy it. I dislike the opera because I want to love it and can't.

I suppose there are two kinds of music--one kind which one feels, just
as an oyster might, and another sort which requires a higher faculty,
a faculty which must be assisted and developed by teaching. Yet if base
music gives certain of us wings, why should we want any other? But we
do. We want it because the higher and better like it. We want it without
giving it the necessary time and trouble; so we climb into that upper
tier, that dress-circle, by a lie; we PRETEND we like it. I know several
of that sort of people--and I propose to be one of them myself when I
get home with my fine European education.

And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull, Turner's "Slave
Ship" was to me, before I studied art. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art
up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of
pleasure as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year, when I was
ignorant. His cultivation enables him--and me, now--to see water in that
glaring yellow mud, and natural effects in those lurid explosions
of mixed smoke and flame, and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles
him--and me, now--to the floating of iron cable-chains and other
unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top
of the mud--I mean the water. The most of the picture is a manifest
impossibility--that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can
enable a man to find truth in a lie. But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do
it, and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it. A Boston
newspaper reporter went and took a look at the Slave Ship floundering
about in that fierce conflagration of reds and yellows, and said it
reminded him of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter
of tomatoes. In my then uneducated state, that went home to my
non-cultivation, and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye.
Mr. Ruskin would have said: This person is an ass. That is what I would
say, now. [1]

1. Months after this was written, I happened into the National
Gallery in London, and soon became so fascinated with the
Turner pictures that I could hardly get away from the place.
I went there often, afterward, meaning to see the rest
of the gallery, but the Turner spell was too strong;
it could not be shaken off. However, the Turners
which attracted me most did not remind me of the Slave Ship.

However, our business in Baden-Baden this time, was to join our courier.
I had thought it best to hire one, as we should be in Italy, by and by,
and we did not know the language. Neither did he. We found him at the
hotel, ready to take charge of us. I asked him if he was "all fixed." He
said he was. That was very true. He had a trunk, two small satchels,
and an umbrella. I was to pay him fifty-five dollars a month and railway
fares. On the continent the railway fare on a trunk is about the same
it is on a man. Couriers do not have to pay any board and lodging. This
seems a great saving to the tourist--at first. It does not occur to the
tourist that SOMEBODY pays that man's board and lodging. It occurs to
him by and by, however, in one of his lucid moments.



CHAPTER XXV [Hunted by the Little Chamois]

Next morning we left in the train for Switzerland, and reached Lucerne
about ten o'clock at night. The first discovery I made was that the
beauty of the lake had not been exaggerated. Within a day or two I made
another discovery. This was, that the lauded chamois is not a wild goat;
that it is not a horned animal; that it is not shy; that it does not
avoid human society; and that there is no peril in hunting it. The
chamois is a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed; you
do not have to go after it, it comes after you; it arrives in vast herds
and skips and scampers all over your body, inside your clothes; thus
it is not shy, but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man, on the
contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous, but neither
is it pleasant; its activity has not been overstated--if you try to put
your finger on it, it will skip a thousand times its own length at one
jump, and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights. A great deal
of romantic nonsense has been written about the Swiss chamois and the
perils of hunting it, whereas the truth is that even women and children
hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it; the hunting is
going on all the time, day and night, in bed and out of it. It is poetic
foolishness to hunt it with a gun; very few people do that; there is
not one man in a million who can hit it with a gun. It is much easier to
catch it than it is to shoot it, and only the experienced chamois-hunter
can do either. Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the
"scarcity" of the chamois. It is the reverse of scarce. Droves of one
hundred million chamois are not unusual in the Swiss hotels. Indeed,
they are so numerous as to be a great pest. The romancers always dress
up the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume, whereas the
best way to hunt this game is to do it without any costume at all. The
article of commerce called chamois-skin is another fraud; nobody could
skin a chamois, it is too small. The creature is a humbug in every
way, and everything which has been written about it is sentimental
exaggeration. It was no pleasure to me to find the chamois out, for he
had been one of my pet illusions; all my life it had been my dream to
see him in his native wilds some day, and engage in the adventurous
sport of chasing him from cliff to cliff. It is no pleasure to me to
expose him, now, and destroy the reader's delight in him and respect for
him, but still it must be done, for when an honest writer discovers an
imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from
its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would
render him unworthy of the public confidence.

Lucerne is a charming place. It begins at the water's edge, with a
fringe of hotels, and scrambles up and spreads itself over two or three
sharp hills in a crowded, disorderly, but picturesque way, offering
to the eye a heaped-up confusion of red roofs, quaint gables, dormer
windows, toothpick steeples, with here and there a bit of ancient
embattled wall bending itself over the ridges, worm-fashion, and here
and there an old square tower of heavy masonry. And also here and there
a town clock with only one hand--a hand which stretches across the dial
and has no joint in it; such a clock helps out the picture, but you
cannot tell the time of day by it. Between the curving line of hotels
and the lake is a broad avenue with lamps and a double rank of low shade
trees. The lake-front is walled with masonry like a pier, and has
a railing, to keep people from walking overboard. All day long the
vehicles dash along the avenue, and nurses, children, and tourists sit
in the shade of the trees, or lean on the railing and watch the schools
of fishes darting about in the clear water, or gaze out over the lake
at the stately border of snow-hooded mountains peaks. Little pleasure
steamers, black with people, are coming and going all the time; and
everywhere one sees young girls and young men paddling about in fanciful
rowboats, or skimming along by the help of sails when there is any wind.
The front rooms of the hotels have little railed balconies, where one
may take his private luncheon in calm, cool comfort and look down upon
this busy and pretty scene and enjoy it without having to do any of the
work connected with it.