Around the clock in Europe

AROUND THE CLOCK IN EUROPE

A Travel-Sequence

CHARLES FISH HOWELL

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HAROLD FIELD KELLOGG

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1912

The pages that follow should best account for themselves, of course, but for the satisfaction of those who very properly require some general conception of a project before definitely entering upon it, the author begs to say that he has here sought to visualize to the reader the appearance and the life of these cities at the hours indicated, and to preserve, as well, the distinctive atmosphere of each. He has endeavored to catch and present faithful impressions of the streets, their kaleidoscopic animation, and the activities and characteristics of the people; to touch the pen-pictures with a light overwash of the racial and national peculiarities that distinguish each, and to invest them with what insight, sympathy, and enthusiasm he is capable of. It is “fitting the scene with the apposite phrase,” as Mr. Howells has so aptly described the process and as he himself has so wonderfully exemplified it. A formidable undertaking? Indeed, yes; but there is the dictum of Mr. Browning that the purpose swells the account.

These, then, are impressionistic sketches. They are of the moment only. It has been sought, most of all, to give them just that character. They have been written as reflecting the probable observations and emotions of visitors of normal enthusiasm during these hours and in [x] these environs. Under such conditions, it is well to remember, every active mind has its sudden, drifting excursions afield; something in the visible, present surroundings whimsically invokes the subtle genii of Memory and Imagination, and one is whisked off in a breath, and without rhyme or reason, to the most ultimate and alluring Isles of Thought. These swift and scarcely accountable flights are the common experience of all travelers, and the author has felt it to be a part of his task to take proper cognizance of them.

Travel is generally conceded to be one of the most informing and diverting of engagements, and to gain in both particulars in proportion to the favorableness of the conditions under which it is prosecuted. It is, therefore, a satisfaction to be in position to afford readers advantages scarcely obtainable elsewhere. Discarding conventions of time and space, the author undertakes to give them twelve consecutive happy hours in Europe,—once around the clock,—always endeavoring to secure the most favorable union of hour and place. And though there may be dissent from his judgment concerning the superiority of this combination or that, there can hardly be two opinions as to the perfection of the transportation facilities. The latter eliminate time and space, and convey the reader from city to city and from point to point, with no discomfort or inconvenience whatever, and without the loss of so much as a tick of the watch.

With foot in the stirrup, it may be added that there has been an earnest desire to entertain those whom circumstances have hitherto kept at home, as also to revive to memory golden recollections for travelers who have already passed along these pleasant ways. What is here offered is just a new portfolio of sketches from Nature; the touch of another but reverent hand on the old and well-loved scenes. Surely there can be no better reason for any book than a desire to share with others the happiness experienced by

Up there on the gusty heights of Edinburgh no one ever inquires the time at one o’clock in the afternoon. Precisely at the second, a ball flutters to the top of the Nelson flagstaff on Calton Hill and a cannon booms from a battery at Castle Rock; and watches are then set by merchants all over town, by shepherds on the shaggy Pentland Hills, and sailors on ships in the lee of Leith. And one o’clock is the very best time Edinburgh could have fixed upon to encourage her people to look up and about and behold her at her finest. It is luncheon-hour, and when the sun is kindly, “Auld Reekie” is just about as garish and stimulating as it is possible for a town of such dignified traditions and questionable climate ever to become. The air freshens in from blustering Leith, and fair Princes Street wears its most beguiling smiles. One thrills with the joy of being alive in so brave and bonny a world, with the bluebells and heather of Old Scotland about him and this town of song and story at his feet. He gazes at the cheerful crowds moving[4] leisurely along the valley gardens elegant with statues and flowered lawns, or across at the frowzy heads in rickety garret windows away up among the palsied gables of ancient High Street, and he knows that over there is the Canongate of stern tradition and the storied St. Giles’ and black Holyrood, and beyond them he sees the Salisbury Crags, a gaunt palisade halfway up to lofty Arthur’s Seat. He has just arrived, perhaps, with the glow on his face of all he has read and heard of this famed place, and the bugles are singing on Castle Hill and the Edinburgh bells are ringing.

There is little opportunity for preliminary impressions while arriving. The train darts up a valley before you have finished with the suburban cottages of the laboring men, and with an ultimate shriek of relief abruptly dives into its cave, as it were, and deposits you unceremoniously in the esplanaded Waverley Station, with flowered walks above and a market just at hand. The wise traveler gathers up his luggage and fares eagerly forth to Princes Street, as a matter of course. There, on the way to his hotel, he finds a good part of Edinburgh idling pleasantly after luncheon, for Princes Street is the dear delight of the loiterer be he old or young, Robin or Jean. He is studied as he passes through the crowds, curiously, smilingly, critically, tolerantly. His clothing may excite disapproval, his baggage amusement, and his intentions speculation. [5]Curiosity “takes the air” at noon. Arrived in a moment at a Princes Street hotel and duly registered, he is handed a curious disk of white cardboard the size of an after-dinner coffee-cup’s top, upon which is blazoned the number of the room to which he has just been assigned. Preceded by a chambermaid gowned in black and aproned in white and followed by a porter with his traps, he advances grandly to his quarters, according to the tag, and hurries to a window for his first keen impression of the “Modern Athens.”

Just why it should be called an “Athens” would scarcely be apparent from a Princes Street hotel window. The literary rights to the title might be conceded, but the stranger will need to view the town from some neighboring height to appreciate the physical similarity between the two cities and to observe the suggestiveness of the Castle and the reminder of the Acropolis in the “ruin”-crowned summit of Calton Hill. What he does see from his window is sufficiently inspiring. At his feet stretches Princes Street which he has heard called the finest avenue in Europe, and along its other side terraces of vivid turf, set with shade trees and statues and flowered walks, drop down in graceful steps to the lawns in the bottom of the valley that was once the North Loch’s basin and where now, to Edinburgh’s chagrin, are the railroad tracks. Across these gardens vaults a boulevard styled “The Mound,” and on their farther side is the gray old Castle on its precipitous crag with a soft sweep of green braes at its base. On[6] the Castle side of the valley the far-famed High Street turns the venerable backs of its tall, tottering, weather-blackened rookeries on the frivolity of Princes Street, and scornfully gives its laundry to the breeze in hundreds of heaped and crooked gable-windows. Centuries before any of us were born those fantastic and whimsical family nests were lined up as we see them to-day. One could fancy them a row of colossal, prehistoric giraffes with their tails all our way, nibbling imaginary tree-tops on High Street. The stranger will lean out of his window and look down Princes Street and start with delight to see that “sublimest monument to a literary genius,” the lace-like Gothic spire to Scott, where, under a springing canopy of arches and aspiring needles studded with statues of the immortal characters he created, sits the great Sir Walter himself in snowy Carrara, with his favorite hound at his feet. And one’s heart warms to this romantic Edinburgh so beloved of him and of the fiery Burns, the passionate Chalmers, the gentle Allan Ramsay, and Jeffrey of the brilliant “far-darting” criticisms. Here, in their time, mused Robert Fergusson and David Livingstone and Smollett and Hume and Goldsmith and De Quincey and “Kit North” and Carlyle; and but yesterday has added the name of Stevenson, not the least loved of them all. What inspiration this region must have kindled to have given to Art such sons as Gordon, Drummond, Nasmyth, Wilkie, Raeburn,[7] and Faed! Could the roster of old Greyfriars Burying-Ground be called, one would marvel at the number of great names there memorialized that are familiar and beloved to the remotest, out-of-the-way corners of the earth. And so the new arrival closes his window more slowly than he raised it and steals reverently down into the street to meet this Edinburgh face to face.

You might think, to hear Americans talk at home, that every other Edinburgh man carries a dirk or a claymore under a tartan and wears a ferocious red beard like the pictures of Rob Roy; that people go about in plaid shawls and tam o’shanters, and that most society functions end up with a Highland fling. One may see at wayside railroad stations, as in our own country, wild, hair-blown lassies with flaming cheeks running in from the hills to have a look at the train; but with some such mild exception, if it is one, the Scots on their native heath are, of course, precisely what we are used to elsewhere. Types apart, the man of the streets of Edinburgh looks entirely familiar—shrewd and combative, rugged and perhaps hard, slouchy and indifferent in the matter of dress, hobnailed and be-capped. There is something tremendously genuine and wholesome about him. He is merry and brisk and lively, often; but you would not call him ever quite gay—at least with that sparkle that dances in the eyes you look into on the Paris boulevards. You could scarcely, for instance, imagine a Scotchman singing a barcarolle![8] Best of all they are honest and sincere, and one takes to them at once. Here are the lassies and laddies you have long sung about, fresh-faced and debonair. Cheerful fearlessness shines out of their frank blue eyes, and they look to dare all things and be utterly unafraid. The square foreheads of the older men, the austere cheek bones and strong chins, unscroll history to the observer and make him think of savage broils along the border, of fierce finish-fights throughout the wild Highlands, and of the deathless Grays of Waterloo. You may defeat a Scotchman, but he will never admit it, and if he is all-Scotch he will not even know it. They are brave, witty, and devoted, and many a person will take issue with Swift for finding their conversation “hardly tolerable,” and with Lamb for pronouncing their “tediousness provoking” and for giving them up in despair of ever learning to like them.

The new arrival plunges into Princes Street, accepts inspection good-naturedly, and soon feels entirely at home. He may even find the day bright and cheerful, in spite of apprehension over the dictum of Stevenson that this climate is “the vilest under heaven.” The street is quite unusual—one side a terraced valley, the other a splendid line of shops, clubs, and hotels, with gay awnings. Paris and London novelties fill the windows. A throng of vehicles bustles up and down—motor-busses, double-decked trolley cars, taxi-cabs, hired Victorias, two-wheeled carts, brewery wagons, station[9] lorries, tourists’ chars-à-bancs with drivers in scarlet liveries, private carriages and bicycles. The stream of people on either pavement is of the holiday cheeriness that comes with the luncheon recess from office and shop, though here and there one may occasionally discover some “sour-looking female in bombazine” that recalls R. L. S.’s “Mrs. McRankin” and who appears as ready as she to inquire whether we attend to our “releegion.” The restaurants are plying a brisk trade, contenting their tarrying guests, speeding the parting and hailing the coming. Whole coveys of pretty shop-girls with brilliant cheeks, wholesome and vivacious, come chattering and laughing out of tea- and luncheon-rooms and flutter back to work with frequent enthusiastic stops before alluring windows. Workmen in tweed caps and clerks in straw hats pass by, to or from their occupations, and always with lingering looks toward the Princes Street Gardens, so that one can accurately guess whether they are coming from or going to office by applying the reliable Shakespearean formula—

The air is rhythmic with the up-and-down slur of this speech of “aye” and “na.” Curious faces flash past. Threadbare lawyers argue pompously as they saunter back arm in arm toward Parliament Close, and the[10] ruddy-cheeked girls, by contrast, seem so distracting that a foreigner rages at the sentiment that “kissing is out of season when the gorse is out of bloom.” Occasionally, even at so early an hour, there is evidence of the passion for drink. “Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut” flashes to mind, and one fancies the unsteady ones are trying to hum, “We are na fou, we’re no that fou, but just a drappie in our ee.” When night comes on, sober men in the streets have reason to frown censoriously; and if it be a Saturday night, they may even feel lonesome.

A passing regiment is a welcome interruption and a brave spectacle. It is always hailed with shouts of joy. All Edinburgh turns in its bed Sunday mornings at nine to see the Black Watch come out from the Castle for “church parade” at St. Giles’s. Nothing stirs Princes Street on any week day like a military display. It is a thrilling moment to a stranger, perhaps, when he has his first glimpse of a young Tommy Atkins, and he stops stock-still to take in the bright scarlet, tailless jacket, the tight trousers, the “pill-box” perilously cocked over an ear, and the inevitable “swagger cane” with which he slaps his leg as he braves it along. But what is that to the passing of a company of Highlanders! Along they come, kilts and plaids, sporrans swinging, claymores rattling, and jolly Glengarry bonnets poised rakishly to the falling point. Ten pipers are droning and three drummers are pounding; and one watches, as they pass, for the holly sprig, or what-not, they wear in[11] their bonnets as a badge of the clan. The best show is made by the King’s Highlanders from up Balmoral way; and splendid they are in royal Stuart tartan, with the oak leaf and thistle in their bonnets and each man carrying a Lochaber axe. If there is anything more inspiriting than cheery bagpipe music at such a time, no one to laugh foolishly at it and every one to love it, and the men stepping proudly and the crowd applauding,—I, for one, do not know it.

Keenness of impressions, as we all know, may depend on the most trivial circumstances of time and place. I recall, for example, a sharp and thrilling musical experience in Scotland, with the instrument nothing more than the despised and humble mouth-organ. Perhaps it was the mood, perhaps the setting, perhaps the unexpectedness of it; there was so little and yet so much. At all events, I shall not soon forget the sparkle and stir of “The British Grenadiers” as it ripped the sharp night air of quiet Melrose to the approach of three English soldiers, one with the mouth-organ and the others whistling in time as they marched briskly along. I shall always remember the rhythmic beat of their feet as they swung across the murky, deserted square, the loudness, the thrill, and the lilt of that historic melody, and the flicker of a lamp in a window here and there and the pleasant sting of the keen night air.

There is no better place for a stranger to “get his bearings” in Edinburgh than out on that valley-spanning[12] boulevard they call “The Mound.” He then has the Old Town to one side and the New Town to the other, and on opposite corners, as if to maintain the balance, the Castle and Calton Hill. He also takes note of the several bridges that clamp the town together, as it were; and he may look down into the gardens before him and watch the children playing as far as the promenade-covered Waverley Station, or he may turn and look the other way and see quite as many more all the way along the pleasant green to the old battle-scarred West Kirk of St. Cuthbert’s where De Quincey lies in his quiet grave. Thus he will find himself of a sunny afternoon between the pleasant horns of a most agreeable dilemma. He must choose whether to spend his first hour in the New Town or the Old. If he remembers what Ruskin said he will fly from the New; but then he may go there, after all, if he recalls the opinion of the old skipper cited by Stevenson, whose most radiant conception of Paradise was “the New Town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a point free.” He must decide whether his present inclination is for latter-day city features, like conventional streets lined with substantial gray stone buildings looking all very much alike, for the fashionables of Charlotte Square and Moray Place and the bankers and brokers of St. Andrew Square, or the historic ground of crowded old High Street and the Castle and Holyrood. He would find in the New Town some old places, too, for it is one hundred and fifty years old,[13] and there are the literary associations of the last century and the house on Castle Street where Scott lived more than a quarter-century—“poor No. 39,” as he called it in his Journal—and wrote the early Waverley Novels, and rejoiced along with his mystified friends in the tremendous success of “The Great Unknown.” He would find it a rapidly modernizing city; no longer may the children salute the lamplighter on his nightly rounds with “Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamps!” But he would find the most interesting things there the oldest things, and they all in the Antiquarian Museum—and what a show! John Knox’s pulpit, the banners of the Covenanters, the “thumbikins” that “aided” confession and the guillotine “Maiden” that rewarded it, the pistols Robert Burns used as an exciseman, and the sea-chest and cocoanut cup of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe; and there, too, is Bonnie Prince Charlie’s blue ribbon of the Garter and the ring Flora Macdonald gave him when they parted. If historic paraphernalia is alluring, however, the scenes of its associations are much more so; and our friend would doubtless hesitate no longer, but turn to the Old Town and trudge up the steep way to the Castle.

and if the song had kept to geography it would probably have added, “And we’ll meet at the bonny Castle o’[14] Auld Reekie.” Such, at least, has been a Scotch custom for thirteen hundred years; and with every reason. Through the long and cruel centuries it has gathered to its flinty gray bosom memories of every possible phase of national mutation, desperate or glorious, gloomy or gay. One approaches it with awe. So long has it gripped the summit of that impregnable rock, half a thousand feet sheer on three of its sides, that it has blended into the life and color of its foundations, like a huge chameleon, until one could scarcely say where rock leaves off and castle begins. A stern and pitiless object, tolerating only here and there a grassy crevice at its base, and a clinging tree or two. In the great “historic mile” of High Street, lifting gradually from Holyrood to this rugged elevation, one feels the illusion of an enormous scornful finger extended dramatically westward toward the traditional rival, Glasgow. There is no need to see Highland regiments drilling on its broad esplanade, or to enter its sally-port or penetrate the dungeons in its rocky depths to have confidence that the royal regalia of “The Honours of Scotland” are safe enough here, on the red cushions in their iron cage. One enters, and there settles upon him a feeling of sharing in every grim tradition since the doughty days “when gude King Robert rang.” It is not a visit; it is an initiation.

Quite worthy of this savage stronghold is the inspiring outlook from its parapets over hills and rivers and storied glens. One turns impatiently from “Mons[15] Meg,” which may have been a big gun in some past day of little ones, to gaze afar over the carse of Stirling and the trailing silver links of the Forth to where the snow shines in the clefts of Ben Ledi, or out over the Pentland Hills where the “Sweet Singers” awaited the Judgment. The sportsman will think of the grouse-shooting at Loch Earn; the sentimentalist will reflect that when night settles over Aberdeenshire the pipers will strike up their strathspeys and there will be Scotch reels by torchlight. Scotland seems unrolled at your feet and Scottish songs rush to mind until you fairly bound the region in verse and story: To the north and northwest, “Bonnie Dundee,” the glens of “Clan Alpine’s warriors true,” Bannockburn and “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” and “The Banks of Allan Water”; to the north and east, the Firth of Forth where the fishwives’ “puir fellows darkle as they face the billows”; to the west and southwest, “The banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,” “Tam o’Shanter’s” land, “Sweet Afton” and “Bonnie Loch Leven” whence “the Campbells are comin’”; and to the south, “The braes of Yarrow,” “Norham’s castled steep, Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep, and Cheviot’s mountains lone,” and, most sung of all, “The Border”:—

The afternoon sun rests brightly on the pretty glen[16] in the foreground where lie the dismal, bat-flown ruins of Rosslyn Castle, loopholed for archers and shadowed in ancient yews that have overhung the Esk for a thousand years, and on the delicate chapel of stone-lace where the barons of Rosslyn await the Judgment in full armor with finger-tips joined in prayer. And there, too, are the cool, dark thickets of Hawthornden, recalling the ever-popular

One cannot forbear a smile as he surveys the noble bridge that spans the Forth and recalls the insistent pride of Edinburgh in the same. Here is an achievement over which all visitors are expected to exclaim in amazement—and engineers, I presume, invariably do. On this point your Edinburgh man is immovable. He scorns to elaborate and he will not descend to eulogy. He merely indicates it with a reverent inclination of the head, and turns and looks you in the eye; you are supposed to do the rest. Personally, while I give the great structure its dues, which are many, I like what flows under it more.

And there is one thing about the Forth that Edinburgh people never forget, nor do the visitors who find it out: “Caller herrin’!” It must have taxed the resources of even such a genius as Lady Nairne, whose home one may see if he looks beyond Holyrood to the villas of[17] Duddingston, to have written two such dissimilar songs as the heart-melting “Land o’ the Leal” and the cheery “Caller Herrin’.” There’s the king of all marketing songs. It really compels one to think with despair of what a dreary mockery life would be were this, of all harvests, to fail. For love of that song I could defend the Forth herring against all competitors whatsoever. Loch Fyne herring? Fair fish, yes; but really, now, you would hardly say they have that racy flavor we get in the Forth article. Caller salmon? Oh, pshaw, you are from Glasgow; you have been swearing by caller salmon for five hundred years; have it on your coat of arms; used to draw it on legal papers as other people do seals;—but, honestly, have you ever seen a salmon in the Clyde, anywhere near Glasgow, in all your life? And if you did, would you eat it? Certainly not! So “give over,” as they say in England. Certainly there never was such pathos and unction devoted to just such a subject. And the music, too! How it compels you with its appealing monotones and rebukes you with the brave huckster cries on high F! So when you are passing near Waverley Market and encounter one of the picturesque Scandinavian fishwives, who has trudged in with her “woven willow” from her little stone house at Newhaven with the patched roof and quaint fore-stairs, unless you are willing to buy a herring then and there and carry it around in your pocket, run for your life before she starts singing:—

To stroll down High Street is to unscroll Scottish history and survey Edinburgh of to-day at one and the same time. “Hie-gait,” as the old fellows still occasionally call it, is the “historic mile” par excellence of Scotland. In its independent fashion it assumes new names as it meanders along, first Castle Hill, then Lawnmarket, then High Street, and finally Canongate. Even the afternoon sun ventures guardedly among the nest of tall, gaunt lands that scowl at each other across its war-worn way. Bleak and glum to the peaked and gabled roofs, eight and ten stories above the sidewalk, they have resisted dry rot by a miracle of mortar and still hang together, doubtless to their own amazement, huddling a perfect enmeshment of tiny homes like some ingenious nest of boxes. It would be hard to imagine more drear and rickety domiciles or any more nervously overshadowed with an impending doom of dissolution. One looks anxiously about to see some venerable veteran give it up with a dismal, weary groan and collapse in a vast huddle of domestic wreckage. Fancy living[19] where you have to scale breakneck stairs to a dizzy height and then reach your remote eyrie by a trembling gangway over an air well! The closes or wynds that are engulfed among these flat-chested ancients are equally surprising. One passes in from the street through a dirty entrance with a worn stone sill and a rudely carven doorhead inscribed with Scriptural and moral injunctions, and finds himself in an inner court fronted by dirty doors and palsied windows full of frowzy women, a cobbled pavement littered with refuse and a patch of sky half-hidden by fragments of laundry. And, mind you, these retreats are not without pride of tradition; many of them have entertained riches and royalty—but that was not last week. Lady Jane Grey was once hidden in famous White Horse Close, which must have fallen further than Lucifer to reach its present condition. Douglas Tavern was in one of them, where Burns and his brethren of the “Crochallan Club” were wont to revel with “Rattlin’, roarin’ Willie, and amang guid companie.” Legends, of course, abound. There was the case of the two stubborn sisters who quarreled one night and never spoke to each other again, though they lived the remainder of their lives together in the selfsame room. There’s Scotch persistence! Deacon Brodie was another instance, the “Raffles” of his time. He it was who used to ply his nefarious trade by night on the friends who knew him by day as a highly respectable cabinet-worker; and if you look furtively aloft at some dusty,[20] closed shutter you can fancy the dark lantern glowing and the file rasping and the black mask drawn to his chin. Happily, they hanged him eventually; and, singularly enough, on the very gallows for which he had himself invented a very superior drop.

A close, therefore, is so cheerless a spot that you could not well be worse off if you were to dive down the steep, wet steps of a neighboring slit of an alley and come out on the old Grassmarket of sinister renown where they hanged the Covenanters of the Moss Hags. As you gaze about on this ill-omened slum, once the home of many a prosperous and respected “free burgess,” but now given over to drovers and visiting farmers, and peer suspiciously up the adjoining West Port where Burke and Hare conducted their murders to get bodies for the surgeons, you are very apt to beat a hurried retreat and cry out with Claverhouse, “Come, open the West Port and let me gang free!”

After one or two such explorations a stranger is content to pursue his investigation in the broad light of High Street. It seems delightful then to watch the barefooted boys in the street and the little girls in aprons and “pigtails.” And happily he may come across a shaggy steely-eyed old Highlander growling to a comrade in the guttural Gaelic, or perhaps a soldier in kilts and sporan. At this hour he will certainly see around Parliament Square groups of advocates and solicitors and “writers to the Signet,” and, it may be, some judge of[21] the “Inner House” or “Outer House,” and possibly the Lord President himself. Otherwise he can take note of the uninviting shop-windows and the piles of merchandise on the sidewalks, and find entertainment in such unfamiliar signs as “provisioners,” “spirit merchants,” “bootmakers,” “hairdressers,” etc., with prices set forth in shillings and pence, or rejoice in a hostelry with so unusual a name as “The Black Bull Lodgings for Travellers and Working Men.”

There are pleasant surprises. For instance, you find in the cobbled pavement the outline of a heart—and you do not have to be told that you are standing on the site of the terrible old Tolbooth prison, at the Heart of Midlothian. And what rushes to mind and displaces all other associations if not the fine story Sir Walter gave us under that name! Here, then, the Porteous mob swarmed and raged in its struggle to burn this savage Bastile, and here they tried and condemned poor Effie Deans and locked her up while the faithful Jeanie turned heaven and earth to save her, and the heart of old David broke. “The Heart of Midlothian!” Why, it is like being a boy all over again!

Encouraged by this discovery, like a man who has just found a gold-piece, you keep a sharp lookout on the pavements, and presently comes a second reward in the shape of a brass tablet in the ground marking the last resting-place of stern John Knox. “There!” say you; “Dr. Johnson said he ought to be buried in the public[22] road, and sure enough, he is!” What a man! He dared all things and feared nothing. How many a long discourse did Queen Mary herself supply him a topic for, and how often did he assail even her with personal rebukes and virulent public tirades! Thanks to the Free Church, his dwelling stands intact, farther down the street at the site of the Netherbow; and a fine specimen it is of sixteenth-century domestic Scotch architecture, with low ceilings and stairways scarce two feet wide—but, like its former austere tenant, narrow, cornery, and unpleasant. Implacable, unbending old John Knox! There is nothing in Browning more shuddering in imaginative flight than the quatrain:—

One makes a long stop before the far-famed church of St. Giles, half a thousand years old and the battle-ground of warring creeds. Its crown-shaped tower top is one of the familiar landmarks of Edinburgh. Within you may study to heart’s content the grim barrel vaulting and massive Norman piers and the tattered Scottish flags in the nave, but there is scope for many an agreeable thought outside if one conjures up the little luckenbooth shops that once clustered between its buttresses, and imagines Allan Ramsay in his funny nightcap selling wigs, or “Jingling Geordie” Heriot, of[23] “The Fortunes of Nigel,” gossiping with his friend King James VI over his jewelry counter. Nor would you forget Jenny Geddes and how she seized her stool in disgust when the Dean undertook to introduce the ritual, and let it fly at the good man’s head with the sizzling invective, “Deil colic the wame o’ ye! Would ye say mass i’ my lug!”

Old Tron Kirk, farther on, is still an active feature of Edinburgh life, and particularly on New Year’s Eve when the crowds rally here as the old year dies. Beyond it the Canongate extends itself in a rambling, happy-go-lucky fashion, lined with curious timber-fronted houses with “turnpike” stairs. It is like sitting down to “Humphrey Clinker” once more; or better still, perhaps, to the poems of Fergusson; and we smile at thoughts of the scowling, early-risen housewives of other days who would

But lingering along the Canongate is a negligible pleasure. There is nothing in the whole architectural world more jailish and pitiless than the gaunt Tolbooth and all its grim neighbors. It is as if the conception[24] of anything suggestive of beauty or ornamentation had been harshly repressed, and ugliness and the most naked utility sternly insisted upon. One may, however, if he is interested in slums, pause a moment to look down through the railings of the South Bridge on the screaming peddlers and flaunting shame of bedraggled Cowgate, and behold a district which stands to Edinburgh in the relative position of Rivington Street to New York, or Petticoat Lane to London, or Montmartre to Paris.

The end of the Canongate, a few steps farther on, debouches unexpectedly, and with a sudden unpreparedness for the stranger, on the great open square before Holyrood. There it stands, black and dismal; more like a prison than a palace! The Abbey ruins, in the rear, supply all the atmosphere of romance that the eye will get here. But the eye is better left as a secondary aid in comprehending Holyrood; history and imagination do the work. Cowering sorrowfully in its gloomy hollow, it has the look of a moody, forsaken thing brooding over a neglectful world. Its memories are of the dead. Its sole companionship is in the mosses and grassy aisles of the crumbling Abbey chapel, where lie the bones of Scottish royalty that ruled and reveled here its allotted time and left scarce a memory behind. It was here they slew Rizzio as he dined with Queen Mary; and perhaps that is romance enough.

The fumes and cobwebs of murky tradition dissipate[25] in the keen, vigorous air of Calton Hill. Breezes from over the level shore-sands of Leith taste sharp of salt and excite bracing thoughts of the sea. Like a map, the whole environ of Edinburgh lies exposed from the Pentlands to the Firth. There is the steepled city, rising over its ridges and dropping down its valleys like billows of a troubled ocean, and there, too, is the enveloping sweep of suburbs dotted with villas or cross-thatched with streets of workingmen’s cottages, and farther still the Meadows and their archery grounds, “the furzy hills of Braid” and their golf links, Blackford Hill whence “Marmion” and his bard looked down on “mine own romantic town,” and, on the southern horizon, the heathery Pentlands, low and shaggy, with the kine that graze over them low and shaggy too. To the northward, away beyond the cricket greens of Inverleith Park, the blue Firth sparkles in the offing, dotted with fleet steamers and the white spread sails of stately ships laying courses for the Baltic. In the distance, over Leith, looms the tall lighthouse of the Inchcape Rock that Southey made famous with a ballad. Beyond the west end of the city a wavy blue line marks the course seaward of the bustling little Water of Leith, where “David Balfour” kept tryst with “Alan Breck,” and many a sturdy little “brig” leaps across it as it hurries along, “brimmed,” wrote Stevenson, “like a cup with sunshine and the song of birds.” Still farther to the westward, where the old Queens Ferry Coach Road[26] appears as a faint white tracing, within many “a mile of Edinborough Town,” thin vapors of smoke rise from the chimneys of white cottages on peasant greens by brooksides; and one knows that the rowans there are white with bloom and the meadows flecked with daisies, and that bees are droning in the foxglove and blackbirds singing in the hawthorn.

Calton Hill itself scarcely improves on acquaintance, but loses rather. Its meagre scattering of monuments would barely excite a passing interest were it not for their conspicuous location and that suggestion of the Athenian Acropolis. A paltry array—a tall, ugly column to Nelson, a choragic monument like the one to Burns on a hillside near Holyrood, an old observatory with a brown tower and a new one with a colonnaded portico and a dome, and, most mentioned of all, the so-called “ruin” of the proposed national monument to the Scotch dead of Waterloo and the Peninsula, which got no farther than a row of columns and an entablature when funds failed and work stopped. Many a bitter shaft of scorn and mockery has this ill-starred undertaking pointed for the disparagers of Scotland. However, in its present condition it has done more than any other agency to stimulate the pleasant illusion of the “Modern Athens.” The hill itself is a favorite resort, lofty, and with a broad, rounded top. The eastern slopes are terraced and set with gardens, and the western and northern sides are steep verdant braes. One yields[27] the palm for reckless daring to Bothwell; not every one would care to speed a horse down such a course even to win attention from eyes so bright and important as Queen Mary’s.

It was on Calton Hill I had my first experience of the old school of Scotchmen, in the person of a dry and withered chip of Auld Reekie, combative, peppery, brusque and sententious, and abounding in that peculiar admixture of braggadocio and repression so characteristic of the class. He had evidently been nurtured from infancy on Allan Ramsay’s collection of Scotch proverbs, for he quoted them continually, giving the poet credit for their origin. He was sitting in the shade of Nelson’s column in shirt sleeves and cap, absorbed to all appearances in a copy of “The Scotsman,” though I suspect he had been regarding me for some while with quite as much curiosity as I now did him. He was a grim, self-contained old party, as dignified as the Lord Provost himself, with gray, shaggy eyebrows and a thin, wry mouth that gripped a cutty pipe; and he looked so much a part of the surroundings, so settled and weather-beaten, that one might almost have passed him over for some memorial carving or, at least, an “animated bust.” Him I beheld with vast inner delight and gingerly approached, giving “Good day” with all the cordiality in the world. The reward was a curt nod and a keen scrutiny from a pair of hard and twinkling blue eyes that had an appearance under the grizzled brows[28] of stars in a frosty sky. I observed upon the fineness of the day; he opined “There had been waur, no doot.” I noted what a capital spot it was for a quiet smoke; he allowed I might “gang far an’ find nane better.” Here I made proffer of a cigar and, presumably, with acceptable humility, for he took it with an “Ah, weel, I dinna mind,” of gloomy resignation—and so we got things going.

The conversation that followed I venture to give in some detail as illustrating, possibly, the peculiarities of a type to be encountered on every Edinburgh street corner—whimsical, conservative, witty, cautious in opinion, and surcharged with local pride.

“Aye, aye,” said he; “even a hard-workin’ one like mysel’, as Gude kens. But a bit smoke frae ane an’ twa o’ the day hurts naebody, I’m thinkin’; an’ auld Allan Ramsay was richt eneuch, ‘Light burdens break nae banes.’”

“Na, na. Ye’ll have heard tell the sayin’, ‘Remove an auld tree an’ it will wither.’”

“Aweel, aweel, a’body kens that. Ye’ll no so vera frequently see the bate o’ it, I’m thinkin’. Them that should ken the best say sae.”

“No more? It is small for its fame. Why, Glasgow must be three times as large,” I ventured, resolved to stir him up a little.

“Glesgie, is it! Think shame o’ yersel’, mon, to say the same! A grippie carlin, Glesgie! Waur than the auld wife o’ the sayin’, ‘She’ll keep her ain side o’ the hoose, and gang up an’ doon in yours.’ Ye canna nay-say me there. Gae wa’ wi’ ye!”

“But you must admit it is a great port. The receipts are enormous, I’m told.”

“Aye, an’ it’s muckle ye’ll be telt ye’ll never read in the Guid Buik! Port, are ye sayin’? Hae ye na thought o’ Leith? Or the bonny sands an’ gardens o’ Portobello? Or Granton, forbye, wi’ the three braw piers o’ the Duke o’ Buccleuch? Ye’ll no be kennin’ they’re a’ a part o’ Ed’nboro, maybe.”

“An’ what wad ye make o’ that? How ony mon in his senses could gang to think sic jowkery-packery wi’ the gran’ brewin’ ayont the Coogait is mair than ever I could win to understan’. It’s by-ordinar, fair! An’ dinna loup to deecesions frae the claver an’ lees aboot muckle things. ’Twas Allan Ramsay himsel’ said,[30] ‘Mony ane opens their pack an’ sells nae wares.’ It’s unco strange that a body should tak nae notice o’ the learnin,’ an’ the gran’ courts, an’ the three hunner congregeetions, an’ a’ the bonny kirks we hae in Ed’nboro, but must ever be spairin’ o’ the siller. Do ye think, noo, it’s sae vera wonderful to ‘Put twa pennies in a purse, an’ see them creep thegither’? Glesgie may ken a’ sic-like gear, I’m nae sayin’; but there’s no sae muckle worth in that, as ye’ll be findin’ oot, though ye read in the books til the morn’s mornin’. It’s a fair disgrace to hae sic thochts. Mon can sae nae mair.”

“It’s easy sayin’ sae. Muckle service is it! Gude kens a’ they learn there! Gin it’s cooleges ye’ll be admirin’, maybe ye’ll no be so vera well acquaint wi’ our ain toun? There’s nane in a’ Glesgie like the ane ye see the day. Mon, it’s fair dementit ye’ll be.”

It took time and diplomacy and many a round compliment on Edinburgh to bring him out of his sulk; but eventually he yielded.

“Aye,” said he, “I believe ye’ll be in the richt the noo. It’s gran’ up here, dinna misdoot it. Mony’s the braw sicht to be had, that’s a fac’, an’ I ken them a’ like the back o’ my hand. Sin lang afore yon trees were plantit, mare than ane fine dander hae I taen mysel’, bonny simmer days, lang miles o’er the heather. Ye’ll believe me, I’d gang hame and sleep soun’. It’s na sae pleesant, maybe, in winter, wi’ the dour haars an’ the fog an’ the[31] east winds. But I aye like it fine in simmer, wi’ a bit nip o’ wind betimes an’ then fair again. At the gloaming it’s quaiet an’ cauller, and then aiblins I bide a blink an’ hae a bit puff o’ my cutty, an’ syne I’ll gang to my bed wi’ an easy hairt. But, wheesht, mon! It’ll be twa o’ the day by the noo, I’m thinkin’? Is it so! Be gude to us! Weel, weel, I’ll gang my gait. I maunna be late to the wark; it’s a fearsome example to the laddies. ‘A scabbed sheep,’ says auld Allan, ‘smites the hale hirsel’.’ Guid day to ye; an’ keep awa’ frae Glesgie.” And with many a sigh and rheumatic hitch he shuffled off to the steps.

The old man was right. “Frae ane an’ twa o’ the day” a blither or more inspiring spot than Calton Hill would be hard to find. What more could possibly be desired, with a city so fair and famous at one’s feet and the air tonic with the sweetness of the heather and the brine of the sea! Fancy plays an amiable rôle and adds to one’s contentment with shadowy illusions of the Canongate of bygone days acclaiming Scotland’s kings and queens as they ride forth in pomp and pageantry, with trains of fierce clansmen from the furtherest Highlands, with pibrochs screaming, bonnets dancing, and axes and claymores rattling. And Montrose may pass with his Graham Cavaliers, or Argyle leading the Campbells of the Covenant. With our eyes on Holyrood, pathetic visions float before us of fair Mary of many sorrows, over whose gilded gloom the poets have loved[32] to linger. One moment she looms in the heroic martyrdom conceived by Schiller, and the next we see her as Swinburne did in “Chastelard,” with

Welcome apparitions of later days throng about us on the hill: Ramsay and his “Gentle Shepherd,” young Fergusson and his wild companions, Burns with his jovial cronies, the scholarly Jeffrey, the learned Hume, the inspired Sir Walter, the delightful revelers of the “Noctes Ambrosianæ,” the gentle Lady Nairne, the eager, brilliant Stevenson, and Dr. Brown with the faithful “Rab” and Ollivant with “Bob, Son of Battle.” The crisp sunshine lies golden on Princes Street and all her flowered terraces; it glints the grim redoubts of the Castle and lingers on the crooked gables of High Street. From the brown heather of the Pentlands to the distant sparkle of the Firth stretches a vigorous and comely land. What man so callous as to feel no joy in “Scotia’s Darling Seat”!

A table in the lively little Café de la Terrasse, up on the broad stone promenoir overhanging the Antwerp docks, is one place in a thousand for the man who is inclined toward any such unusual combination as a maximum of twentieth-century business activity in a setting of the Middle Ages. He is fortunate in locality and happy in surroundings. A Parisian waiter removes the remains of his light luncheon of a salad of Belgian greens fresh this morning from a trim truck garden beyond the ramparts, refills the thin tumbler to the taste of the guest with foaming local Orge or light Brussels Faro or the bitter product of Ghent or the flat, insipid stuff they boast about at Louvain, and supplies a light for an excellent cigar made here in Antwerp of the best growth of Havana. Supposing it to be two o’clock of the usual mottled, doubtful afternoon,—for Antwerp’s weather, like Antwerp’s history, is mingled sunshine and shadows,—the loiterer may look out at his ease on a notable and fascinating panorama. Beneath him and to either side extend miles of massive docks of ponderous masonry, upon and about which swarms an ant-like multitude of nimble and active longshoremen plying[36] a network of ropes and tackle, and directing the labors of vast, writhing derricks that toil like a mechanical Israel in bondage. Snuggling close to the grim granite walls are merchant mammoths from the ends of the earth, and into these, with the ease of a man stooping for a pin, gigantic steel arms sweep tons of casks and bales that they have lightly plucked out of long wharf trains lying alongside. There is a prodigious bustling of porters in long blue blouses, shouts and cries from the riverful of shipping, trampling of thousands of hobnailed shoes, and an incessant clatter of the wooden sabots of little Antwerp boys in peaked caps and baggy blue trousers and of little Antwerp girls in bright skirts and curious white headdress.

This sort of thing is proceeding for miles up and down the river front, and all through the intricate series of locks and bassins and canals that quadruple the wharfage of this rejuvenated old Flemish city. They are receiving whole argosies of raw material in the shape of hides, tobacco, and textiles, and are sending away fortunes in cut diamonds, delicate laces, linens, beer, sugar, and innumerable clever products of human hands from fragile glass to ponderous machinery. And they do it with more ease and, it seems necessary to add, with less profanity than any other port of Europe. What, then, could have possessed the genial Eugene Field to pass along that ancient slander on the excellent burghers of Flanders?

While I should not wish to take such extreme ground as that assumed, in another connection, by a New York police inspector, when he observed that “every one of them facts has been verified to be absolutely untrue,” still I must say that, as far as I could notice, there is nothing notable about the Flemish oath as employed to-day. Indeed, it is more than likely that one could pass a long and pleasant evening loitering among the tavernes and recreation haunts of the Belgian soldier and civilian and come across nothing more vocally spirited than robust guffaws, possibly punctuated discreetly, or heavy fists thundering the time as a couple of comrades scrape over the sanded floor in the contagious rhythm of that venerable and favorite waltz of the Netherlands,—

On the other hand, if, with this much of an excuse, a stranger should go exploring Antwerp between two and[38] three o’clock in quest of “verkoop men dranken” signs, he would be quite otherwise repaid in the discovery of charming huddled and crooked streets and a wealth of architectural quaintness and beauty. He would have no difficulty in finding tavernes and drinking-places, particularly along the river front, where they abound. As he passed them he would encounter robust whiffs of acrid and penetrating odors with tar and fish in the ascendancy, and catch glimpses of a wooden-shod peasantry fraternizing with evil-eyed “water-rats” and devouring vast quantities of salmon and sauerkraut washed down with ale and white beer. There is no charge now, as once there was, for noise made by patrons. The silk-fingered gentry overreached themselves here, for when, a number of years ago, they had carried the robbing of foreign sailors to the point of international notoriety, the authorities took a hand and devised a system of payment for Jack ashore; then the American and English ministers and consuls established and made popular the Sailors’ Bethel on the quay, with its clean and attractive reading- and amusement-rooms, and the Sailors’ Home on Canal de l’Ancre, where, for fifty-five cents a day, Jack can have a neat little room to himself and four excellent meals in the bargain. For these reasons among others, a visitor, even by night, finds much less of noise and revelry than he had anticipated, and beholds the thirsty Antwerpian content himself with a final “nip” at an estaminet or even make shift of a “nightcap”[39] of mineral water or black coffee at one or another of the city’s innumerable cafés. In these he will himself be welcome to read the news of the day in the columns of “Le Précurseur” or “De Nieuwe Gazet,” or, better still, in the venerable “Gazet van Gent,” one of the oldest of existing newspapers, with nearly two hundred and fifty years of publication behind it. The real drinking will have been in progress where the out-of-town people have been dining à prix fixe, and clinking their burgundy and claret glasses at the great hotels on the Quai Van Dyck, the Place de Meir, or the Place Verte. The palm should really go to the amusement seekers of the latter little square; for nothing this side the capacity of an archery club at a July kermess can compare with the thirst of the music lovers who throng the tables on the sidewalks before the restaurants and cafés of jolly Place Verte when the band is playing, on balmy summer evenings. Instead of dissipation, the man who explores Antwerp makes constant discovery of unanticipated delights. He observes about him in the surprising little streets of the old section an amazing collection of absurd roofs slanting steeply up for several stories, pierced with owl-like, staring, round windows; house fronts by the hundreds with denticulated gables stepping upward like staircases toward the sky; and pots of flowers and immaculate muslin curtains in tiny doll-house windows peering out from the most unexpected and impossible places away up among the eaves[40] and chimneys. He will catch an occasional glimpse of massive old four-poster beds with green curtains and yellow lace valances; of shining oak chests, and high-back chairs, and brown dining-rooms wainscoted in polished oak and most inviting with ponderous side-boards set with Delft platters and gleaming copper and pewter pieces. From time to time he will see large, cool living-rooms in which the father enjoys his paper and meerschaum pipe, while the placid-faced mother employs herself with lace or embroidery and the fair-haired daughter at the piano tells how

As I previously observed, there is no better place for a preliminary impression of Antwerp than along the docks. There one acquires some adequate idea of the amazing extent of its industrial operations and enjoys, at the same time, an extraordinary panorama of a river choked with shipping in the immediate foreground, and, on the opposite bank, the sombre redoubts of Tête de Flandre and Fort Isabelle keeping watch and ward over the flat little farms that extend seaward in fields of pale-green corn and barley. For any one who has done the proper amount of preparatory reading on Antwerp, it will inspire stirring thoughts of the musical, artistic, and martial career of this rare old Flemish town.

If the visitor be a lover of music—of Wagner’s music—the surrounding uproar and confusion will shortly fade into a charming reverie as he gazes far down the glittering zigzag of the Scheldt and some distant glimmer will take the form of the swan-boat of Lohengrin with the Grail knight leaning on his shining shield. The docks and quays will have disappeared, and in their place will once more lie the old low meadows, and, under the Oak of Justice, King Henry the Fowler will take seat on his throne with the nobles of Brabant ranged about him. Fair Elsa, charged with fratricide, moves slowly forward, sustained by her dream of a champion who is to come to her defense; and the heralds pace off the lists and appeal to the four quarters in the sonorous chant,—

And suddenly the peasants by the water’s edge cry out in amazement and point down the reaches of the river, and there comes glittering Lohengrin in the “shining armor” of Elsa’s dream. The champion steps ashore and gives no heed to the awe-hushed company until he has sung to his feathered steed what now every child in Germany could sing with him, “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan.” And then the contest rages and the false Frederick falls, and the royal cortège retires to the neighboring old fortress of the Steen. All[42] night the treacherous Ortrud and her defeated Frederick plot by the steps of yonder cathedral, and there, in the morning, Lohengrin weds Elsa and the immortal Wedding March welcomes the “faithful and true” back to their fortress home. The black night of mistrust and carnage follows, and when day dawns Lohengrin bids farewell to his suspicious bride in these green Scheldt meadows and sails sadly away in his resplendent boat drawn by the dove of the Grail.

On the other hand, if the visitor has a mind for history, he may scorn the pretty Grail story and look with stern eyes on this Scheldt and the battle-scarred city beside it, mindful of the deeds of blood and fire that fill the hypnotic pages of Schiller, Prescott, and Motley. The monk of St. Gall could have appropriately dedicated to the war-ravaged Antwerp of those days his solemn antiphonal “media vita in morte sumus.” The grim, turreted Steen, just at hand, recalls the bloody reign of Alva and how he condemned a whole people to death in an order of three lines. In its present rôle of museum it houses hundreds of implements of torture that once were drenched in the blood of the heroic burghers of Antwerp. Not all the horrors of the “Spanish Fury,” when eight thousand citizens of this town were butchered in three days, nor the stirring memory of the “French Fury,” with Antwerp triumphant, can dim the glory of the heroic resistance the “Sea Beggars” made to the advance of the Duke of Parma up the Scheldt.

From the cathedral tower one may see the little towns of Calloo and Oordam, on either bank of the river; it was between them that Parma built his bridge to obstruct navigation, and against it the men of Antwerp sent their famous fire-ships to open up a passage for the Zeelander allies. Gianibelli, who devised them, and whom Schiller styled “the Archimedes of Antwerp,” builded better than he knew, for with one ship he destroyed a thousand Spaniards and heaped up their defenses into a labyrinth of ruin. Could Antwerp have risen then above the clash of factions, there would have been no need later to tear down the dikes and present the strange spectacle of ships sailing over the land, and their story might have been as triumphant as Holland’s, and a united Netherlands have issued from those long wars with Spain.

Here where the visitor takes his afternoon ease many a brave pageant foregathered in the troubled, olden days. In the magic pages of old Van Meteren’s chronicles we see them pass again: Cold, gloomy, treacherous Philip stepping from his golden barge to walk under triumphal arches on a carpet of strewn roses, surrounded by magistrates and burghers splendid in ruffs and cramoisy velvet; later on, the Regent, Margaret of Parma, strident and gouty, whom Prescott has called “a man in petticoats”; and then the bloodthirsty Alva; then the dashing “Sword of Lepanto,” the brilliant and romantic Don John of Austria; next, the atrocious[44] Requesens; and, last of all, the revengeful Alexander of Parma. Hopeful, stolid, impassive Antwerp, ever the sheep for the shearers, ever believing that at last the worst was over, rejoices in her welcome to each as though the millennium had finally dawned on all her troubles and sets cressets to blazing in the cathedral tower and roasts whole oxen in the public squares.

The scream of a river siren will arouse the visitor from the Past to the Present, and, with a sigh, he will saunter forth to see the places that cannot come to him. He will leave with regret this busy, fascinating river—“the lazy Scheldt” that Goldsmith loved. Excited little tugs are bustling busily about, queer-coated dock-hands struggle mightily with their mammoth burdens, and ships of every shape and pattern throng the roadstead before him. The sharp and trim Yankee sloop, the ponderous German tramp, the fastidious British freighter, the clean-cut ocean liner, and, best of all, the round-sterned, wallowing Dutch craft, green of hull and yellow of sail,—all are here, and, he can think, for his especial diversion. A canal barge crawls laboriously by, and in that floating home which she seldom cares to leave, a much-be-petticoated mother of Flanders busies herself with her many children and looks after the care of her tiny house;—and looks after it well, as you may see by the spotless little curtains that flutter in the windows and the bright pots of geraniums that stand on the sills. One recalls the keen delight this[45] singular craft afforded Robert Louis Stevenson at the time he made his charming “Inland Voyage” from Antwerp. Quoth he: “Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands; the most picturesque of things amphibious.... There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.”

Along the front there is also opportunity to expend a couple of francs to advantage for a ticket on the comfortable little steamer that is just impatiently casting off from the embarcadère, and to go sailing with her on an hour’s voyage up the river to Tamise to view the shipping at greater length, to see the merchants’ villas at Hoboken, and finally the famous picture of the Holy Family at the journey’s end. Otherwise the visitor may take a parting look up the Quay van Dyck and the Quay Jordaens, examine once more the striking Porte de l’Escaut that Rubens decorated, and so turn a reluctant back on the bright life of the river to thread a crooked street or two, cobbled and tortuous, and issue forth on the Grand Place before the immense, fantastic Hôtel de Ville.

In the drowsy early afternoon this quaint and curious old city hall wears a most friendly and reposeful air. To one who has never before seen any of these extraordinary[46] Old-World buildings such a one as this will move such incredulity as mastered the countryman at the first sight of a giraffe;—“Shucks!” said he when he had looked it all over, “there never was such an animal!” Fancy a rambling, picture-book of a structure a hundred yards long, made up of the oddest combination of architectural orders—massive pillars for the first story, Doric arcades for the second, Ionic for the third, and last of all, an abbreviated colonnade supporting a steep, tent-like, gable-pierced roof! As though some touch of the whimsical might even so have been neglected, behold a pompous central tower, decorated to suffocation, arched of window and graven of column, rearing itself in three diminishing, denticulated stories above the long, sloping roof, until the singular, box-like ornaments on the very tiptop appear tiny Greek tombs of a cloud-hung Acropolis. The statues of Wisdom and Justice could pass for Æschylus and Sophocles, and the Holy Virgin on the summit might very well be Athena. The friendly air to which I have referred extends even to these statues, who have the appearance of shouting down to you to come in out of the heat and have a look at the great stairway of colored marbles and rest awhile before the splendid chimney-piece of delicately carved black-and-white stone in the elaborate Salle des Mariages. Subtle matchmakers, those statues! And, indeed, if Antwerp is the first steamer-stop of the visitor, he may well be pardoned for reveling in this[47] Hôtel de Ville as something that for picturesque beauty he may not hope to better elsewhere. And yet that would only be because he had not seen the glorious one at Brussels, or the grim and huddled caprice at Mechlin, or the incredible Halle aux Draps at Ypres, or the amazing Rabot Gate or Watermen’s Guild House of Ghent. And even these will fall back into the commonplace once he has drifted along the Quai du Rosaire of drowsy old Bruges and been steeped in picturesqueness and color that is beyond any man’s describing.

No one who cares for structural quaintness and originality can fail to find especial delight in the surroundings of this venerable Grand Place. Along one entire side, like prize competitors in an architectural fancy ball, shoulder to shoulder, stiff and precise, range the old Halls of the Guilds. The Archers, the Coopers, the Tailors, the Carpenters, and all the others of that most unusual alignment, present themselves in full regalia of characteristic ornament and design. As though in keeping with their ancient traditions of stout rivalry, there is a very real air of vying between themselves for some coveted palm for fantastic bizarreness; and all the while with a solemn innocence of being at all grotesque or unusual. One could laugh at their naïve unconsciousness of the prodigious show they make, with sculptures and adornments of bygone days and a combined violent sky-line slashed with long eaves and bitten out in serrated gable ends. But there is little of merriment[48] and very much of reverence in the thoughts they excite of worthy pride in skill of craftsmanship and the glory their masters brought to this city in the sixteenth century in winning from Venice the industrial supremacy of the world. In those days there were no poor in all Antwerp and every child could read and write at least two languages, and the Counts of Flanders were more powerful than half the kings of Europe.

But the Grand Place has more to show than the guild halls. The apogee of the whimsical and fantastic has been attained in the choppy sea of red-tiled roof-tops that eddies above this huddled neighborhood. Grim old dormered veterans, queer and chimerical, palsied and askew, have here held their own stoutly through the centuries. They have echoed back the shouts of the crusaders, the triumphal cannon of Spanish royalty, and the free-hearted welcomes to foreign princes come to curry favor with the Flemish merchant rulers of the world. They have turned gray with the groans of their nobles writhing under the Inquisition and rosy with approval of the adroit and courageous William of Nassau. From their antique windows have leaned the burgomasters of Rubens and the cavaliers of Velasquez, brave in ruffs and beards; and out of the most hidden nests of their eaves the wan and pallid faces of their hunted sons have been raised to watch the approach of the ruthless soldiery of Requesens and Parma. These old roofs look down to-day on a rich and happy people[49] whose skill and tireless industry have reared a commercial fabric that astonishes the world.

At this afternoon hour the Grand Place betrays little of its early-morning activity, when it is thronged with the overflowing stands of busy marketmen in baggy trousers, and banks of rich colors of the flower-women in immaculate linen headdress proffering the choice output of their scrupulously tilled farms. Scarcely less picturesque are these oddly garbed country-folk than the famous fish-venders over at Ostend, and certainly they are a more fragrant people to shop among. A curious and colorful picture they present with the long lines of gayly painted dog-carts blazing with peonies and geraniums. Huddled around the great statue of Brabo they quite throw into limbo the Daughters of the Scheldt that are disporting in bronze on the pedestal. Brabo himself, Antwerp’s Jack-the-Giant-Killer, pauses on high in the act of hurling away the severed hand of the vanquished Antigonus as though he could see no unoccupied spot to throw it in. Should he let go at random, and hit house Number 4, he could surely expect to be hauled down forthwith, for the great Van Dyck was born there, and Antwerp is nothing if not reverent of the memory of her glorious sons of Art. And Brabo cannot afford to take too many chances with the security of his own position, for he himself has a rival; Napoleon the Great was really a greater champion of Flanders than he, and overthrew a worse enemy of[50] Antwerp’s than the fabled Antigonus when he raised the embargo on the Scheldt, that had existed for a century and a half under the terms of the outrageous Treaty of Westphalia, until scarcely a rowboat would venture over the silt-choked mouth of the river, and only then to find the famous capital a forsaken village of empty streets and abandoned factories. The dredging of the channel, the expenditure of millions in construction of wharves and quays, and the restoration of the city to its high place in the commercial world was a greater and more difficult work than Brabo’s.

The varied and vivid life of Antwerp unfolds itself strikingly in the early afternoon to one who exchanges the sleepy, mediæval Grand Place for the broad, curving, crowded boulevard of the popular Place de Meir. It was just such clean and handsome streets as this that inspired John Evelyn to write so delightedly of Antwerp two hundred and fifty years ago, describing them in his famous “Diary” as “fair and noble, clean, well-paved, and sweet to admiration.” Indeed, everything seemed to have charmed Evelyn here, as witness his inclusive approval, “Nor did I ever observe a more quiet, clean, elegantly built, and civil place than this magnificent and famous city of Antwerp.” Rubens, the name of names in Flanders, was then too recently dead to have come into the fullness of his fame; whereas to-day one thinks of him continually here and likes nothing better than the many opportunities to study him in the completeness[51] of his wonderful career—“the greatest master,” said Sir Joshua Reynolds, “in the mechanical part of the art, that ever exercised a pencil.” Even trivial associations of his activity are cherished; as we find them, for instance, in the little woodcut designs he made for his famous friend, Christopher Plantin, the greatest printer of the era, and which one handles reverently in the old Plantin house in the Marché du Vendredi—that picture-book of a house, where corbel-carved ceiling-beams overhang antique presses, types, and mallets, and great windows of tiny leaded panes let in a flood of light from the rarest and mellowest old courtyard in the whole of the Netherlands.

The Place de Meir is Antwerp’s Broadway; and an afternoon stroll along it affords a constantly changing view of stately public and private buildings, no less attractive to the average man than those “apple-green wineshops, garlanded in vines” that delighted Théophile Gautier on the river front. Little corner shrines, so numerous in this city, shelter saints of tinsel and gilt and receive the reverence of a population that has four hundred Catholics to every Protestant. One must necessarily delight in a street whose houses are all of delicately colored brick, with stone trimmings carved to a nicety and shutters painted in softest greens. The imposing Royal Palace is graceful and beautiful, but human interest goes out to the stone-garlanded house across the way,—old Number 54,—where[52] Rubens was born and where he lived so many years and took so much pleasure in making beautiful for his parents. On either hand one sees solid residences of the most generous proportions, and all in tints of pink and gray, and busy hotels with red-faced porters hurrying about in long blouses. Picture stores and bookshops scrupulously stocked with religious volumes beguile lingering inspection. There are establishments on every hand for the sale of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, with windows hung with confirmation wreaths, crucifixes, rosaries, and what-not. Occasionally, even here, one discovers, crushed in between more consequential businesses, the celebrated little gingerbread-shops of which so much amused notice has been taken. Restaurants and cafés abound. One sees them on every hand, with their characteristic overflow of tables and chairs on the sidewalk, always thronged, both inside and out, with jolly, chattering patrons and gleaming in sideboard and shelf with highly polished vessels of brass and pewter. Here and there one passes the confectionery shops, called pâtisseries, where ices, mild liqueurs, and mineral waters refresh a thriving trade. Stevenson found no relish for Flemish food, pronouncing it “of a nondescript, occasional character.” He complained that the Belgians do not go at eating with proper thoroughness, but “peck and trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit.” “All day long” is apt enough, for Antwerp’s restaurants and cafés are always thronged.

These ruddy-faced and placid Belgians are a very serene and contented people. It is pleasant and even restful to watch them; they go about the affairs of life with such an absence of fret and fever. Spanish-appearing ladies float gracefully past in silk mantillas; priests by the hundreds shuffle along leisurely in picturesque hats and gowns; the portly merchant, on his way at this hour to the moresque, many-columned Bourse, proceeds in like deliberate and unhurried fashion. Street venders, in peaked caps and voluminous trousers, approach you with calm deliberation and retire unruffled at your dismissal. On every sunny corner military men by the score “loafe and invite their souls.” Tradesmen in the shops and cabmen in the open go about their business as though it were a matter of infinite leisure. Even the day laborers in the streets, whose huge sabots stand in long rows by the curb, survey life tranquilly; why worry when a good pair of wooden shoes costs less than a dollar and will last for five or six years?

The snatches of conversation one catches betray the confusion of tongues inseparable from a nation of whom one half cannot understand the other, and whose cousins, once or twice removed, are of foreign speech to either. The Dutch spoken in the Scheldt country is said to be as bewildering to a German, as is the French the Walloons employ in the valley of the Meuse to a Parisian. But although the Flemish outnumber their[54] fellow countrymen of Wallonia two to one, still French is the tongue of the court, the sciences, and all the educated and upper circles. It is like Austria-Hungary all over again. And French continues steadily to gain ground in spite of the utmost efforts of the enthusiasts behind the new “Flemish Movement.” One sees both classes on the Place de Meir,—the stolid, light-haired man of Flanders and the nervous, swarthy Walloon. The beauty of the blue-eyed, belle Flamande is in happy contrast with that of the slender, dark-eyed Wallonne, and their poets have exhausted themselves in efforts to do justice to either side of so delicate and distracting a dilemma. Our grandmothers heard much of the charms of La Flamande when Lortzing’s melodious “Czaar und Zimmermann” was so popular, seventy-five years ago:—

The complexion of the life on the Place de Meir changes with the hours. Between two and three o’clock we find it disposed to adapt itself as closely as possible along lines of personal comfort. By five it will be lively with carriages and automobiles bound for the driving in the prim little Pépinière, or the bird-thronged Zoölogical gardens, or around the lake in the central park, with a turn up the fashionable Rue Carnot to the stately boulevards of the new and exclusive Borgerhout section.[55] At that hour one may count confidently upon seeing every uniform of the garrison among the crowds of officers who turn out to have a part in the beauty show. On the other hand, if it were early morning—very early morning—and the sun were still fighting its way through the mists and vapors of the Scheldt, the Place de Meir would resound with rattling little carts by the hundreds, bearing great milk cans of glittering, polished brass packed in straw, by whose sides patient, placid-faced women would trudge along in quaint thimble-bonnets, with plaid shawls crossed and belted above voluminous skirts and their feet set securely in the clumsy wooden sabots of the Fatherland. Market gardeners in linen smocks and gray worsted stockings would be bringing Antwerp its breakfast in carts only a little larger than the milk-women’s, and butcher boys would be scurrying by with meat trays on their heads or suspended from yokes across their shoulders. And all the echoes of the city would be forced into feverish activity to answer the wild clamor of the barking and fighting dogs, shaggy and strong, that draw all these picturesque little wagons. Assuredly there are few sights in Antwerp so impressive to the stranger as this substitution of dog for horse. It has been celebrated in prose and verse, with Ouida possibly carrying off the palm with her canine vie intime, “A Dog of Flanders.”

As the loiterer continues his afternoon stroll to the large and central Place de Commune, crosses into the[56] chain of transverse boulevards, and returns riverward to that choicest spot of all, the tree-shaded, memory-haunted Place Verte, he is bound to reflect upon the vast changes that Antwerp, above all other Continental cities, has experienced in the last quarter-century. He will marvel, too, that Robert Bell should have lamented in his charming “Wayside Pictures” the paucity of gay life here and particularly the lack of theatrical entertainment. It may have been so when Bell wrote, fifty years ago, but it is decidedly otherwise to-day. So far as theatres go, they simply abound; nor could city streets be gayer than these, thronged with a merry, happy people and bright with the uniforms of artillery-men and fortress engineers, grenadiers of the line and the dashing chasseurs-à-cheval. Every hotel and café has its orchestra; and in the early evening practically every square of the city has its concert by a band from a regiment or guild. There is no suburb, they say, but has its own band or orchestra, or both. Indeed, Antwerp is nearly as music-mad as art-mad.

The shady aisles of poplars in the cozy Place Verte, the perfumes and peaceful sounds, the music of the cathedral bells, the homelike hotels and cafés and the drowsy, nodding Old-World house-fronts combine to produce a sense of comfort and satisfaction peculiar to this favored little square. There is, besides, a special and impressive feeling of something like the personal presence of the great Rubens; partly, perhaps, from[57] the fact that the city’s chief statue of him, a lifelike bronze of heroic size, stands at the centre of the Place. Twice the normal stature of man it is, and its pedestal is five times as high as one’s head, and the great palette, book, and scrolls are all of more generous proportions than such things actually ever are;—but there seems nothing at all disproportionate in that, considering what he was and what the average man is. The memory of one who could paint a masterpiece in a day, who stood head and shoulders above every living artist of his time, and whose work has inspired and delighted mankind for three hundred years, becomes, like all great objects, positively prodigious from actual proximity. Such is the inevitable attitude towards Rubens when one touches the things he touched, walks the streets of the city where he was born, lived, and lies buried, where he wrought his greatest artistic triumphs, and where his finest work is still preserved and reverenced. The most admired cathedral in the whole of the Netherlands rises out of the fluttering tree-tops of the square, and the greatest treasures it contains are the product of this man’s genius. Every one feels the Rubens influence in the Place Verte; Eugène Fromentin, fresh from his pictorial triumphs of Algerian life, observed in “Les Maîtres d’Autrefois”: “Our imagination becomes excited more than usual when, in the centre of Place Verte, we see the statue of Rubens and further on, the old basilica where are preserved the triptychs which, humanly[58] speaking, have consecrated it.” Such are the privileged emotions of the wise and fortunate visitors who pitch their passing tent in this fair and favored nook.

Reflections over Rubens naturally arouse thoughts of the many sons of Flanders who won preëminence in the domain of art. No other city, inexplicable as it is, has, in modern times, seen so large a proportion of its citizens achieve the loftiest heights of fame in this glorious activity; nor has any other honored art so unaffectedly in memorializing their triumphs. In Antwerp there are scores of streets and squares, and even quays, named after its artists. There are also fine statues to Rubens, Van Dyck, David Teniers, Jordaens, Quinten Matsys, and Hendrik Leys, and other memorials to the brothers Van Eyck, to Memling, Wappers, Frans Hals, Van der Heyden, De Keyser, and Verboekhoven. In private and public collections the people have jealously kept possession of the masterpieces of their fellow countrymen. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, on the Place du Musée, is as much a treasure-house of Flemish art as the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam is of Dutch art. Again Place Verte plumes itself, for just around the corner was born the great Teniers, wizard depicter of tavern life and kermesses, and on one side is that tourists’ delight, the graceful, feathery well-top that Quinten Matsys wrought out of a single piece of iron, before the days when love inspired him to win the most coveted laurels of the painter.

However, art aside, Place Verte has distinctions of its own. Something of interest is always occurring here. Suburban bands hold weekly competitions in its artistic pavilion and the most skillful musicians hold concerts here each evening. The sidewalks then are crowded with chairs and tables, and at the close the people rise and join in the national hymn “La Brabançonne,” with its out-of-date lament to the men of Brabant that “the orange may no longer wave upon the tree of Liberty.” Of an afternoon a regiment may swing through in full regalia, the red, yellow, and black flag snapping in the van, and the band crashing out the ancient war-song “Bergen-op-Zoom.” If to-day were July 21 there would be tremendous enthusiasm and cheering celebrating the Fêtes Nationales in honor of the Revolution of 1830; as well there should, for Belgium is the smallest and one of the most desirable little kingdoms of all Europe, and the national motto, “L’Union fait la Force,” has to be closely adhered to if the Lion of Brabant would stand up under the baiting of his powerful and covetous neighbors.

The passing of a Sister of the Béguinage, in sombre black garb and an extraordinary creation of immaculate white linen on her head, recalls the many things one has read of this interesting and noble order which is peculiarly Belgium’s own. Their neat little settlements are a source of endless admiration to strangers, and quite as fascinating is their beautiful vesper service[60] which bears the pretty name of the “salut des Béguines.” Readers of Laurence Sterne, who should be legion, promptly recall the curious story of “The Fair Béguine” that Trim told Uncle Toby in “Tristram Shandy,” and the valiant Captain’s comment: “They visit and take care of the sick by profession—I had rather, for my own part, they did it out of good nature.”

It is one of the proud distinctions of Place Verte to be at the very portals of Antwerp’s glorious cathedral, the largest, richest, and most beautiful in the Netherlands. From his café chair the visitor watches its great shadow steal over him as the afternoon wanes, while at any moment by merely raising his eyes he may revel in the graceful outlines of its sweep of ambulatory chapels and let the aspiring tips of delicate pinnacles and arches entice his vision to the loftiest point of its one finished and matchless tower. Never was Napoleon so pat in “fitting the scene with the apposite phrase” as when he compared this tower to Mechlin lace. It is delightful to look up above the trees of the Place at the enormous bulk of this tremendous structure, stained and darkened by the vapors of river and canals, study its rich carvings and stained-glass windows centuries old, and note how the blue sky, in patterns of delicate foliation and fragile arch, shines like mosaics through the clustered apertures of the filmy openwork of the lofty tower. A hundred bells drip mellow music from that exquisite belfry every few minutes all day long. You[61] listen, perhaps, to detect the impression they gave Thackeray of a new version of the shadow-dance from “Dinorah,” conscious that they are going to haunt you as they did him for days after you have left Antwerp far behind. It is peculiarly appropriate that the Lohengrin Wedding March should be a favorite on the bells of the very cathedral where Lohengrin, according to the story, was married. Indeed, so many and so varied are the clear bell-voices of this great carillon that their music seems, as the neighboring bells of Bruges did to Longfellow,—

Within this treasure-chest of a cathedral are jewels worthy of such a casket. One goes out of the glare of the afternoon sun into the coolness and scented gloom of its vaulted, many-aisled, and multi-chapeled vastness, and there in the hush of worshipers kneeling in prayer he finds splendid altars that gleam in a profusion of ornaments of silver, gold, and precious stones, glorious rose-windows, carven confessionals and choir stalls, life-like figures in wax clad in silks and crowned in gold, hundreds of masterful paintings, a high altar of extraordinary splendor blazing in costly decorations under a golden canopy supported by silver figures, and, at the centre of the seven aisles, Verbruggen’s far-famed[62] carved wooden pulpit, realistic in lifelike foliage and birds, and with plump little cherubim floating aloft with the apparently fluttering canopy. As if this were not enough to distinguish any one church, here hang three of the most glorious creations of the hand of man, the masterpieces of Rubens himself. The Assumption alone could have sufficed; what is it, then, to have the tremendous glory of the presence of those greater achievements, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross! One feels he could easily do as did the hero of Gautier’s “Golden Fleece” and carry away forever after a hopeless passion for the beautiful, grief-stricken Magdalen.

The power and appeal of sheer beauty has perhaps never been exampled as in the case of this cathedral. Through all the sackings and pillages of Antwerp the savagery and destructiveness of her foes have stopped here. The most ruthless soldiery could not bring themselves to lay violent hands upon it. One exception stands out in this remarkable experience, and that one was quite sufficient. The fanatical “Iconoclasts,” frenzied against the Church of Rome, fell to a depth of abasement below the worst villains of Spain. Those atrocious, misguided “Iconoclasts”! What a frightful page in Antwerp’s history is the one that recounts the three days of horrors of these frantic and terrible zealots, three hundred and fifty years ago! Schiller, Motley, and Prescott have told the story as few stories have ever[63] been told. In the calm of this afternoon it is impossible to conceive the uproar and confusion with which these lofty arches then resounded. Fancy a horde of men and boys, lighted by wax tapers in the hands of screaming women of the streets, demolishing the altars and rending and destroying every exquisite decoration and even tearing open the graves and scattering the bones of the dead. Says Motley: “Every statue was hurled from its niche, every picture torn from the wall, every wonderfully painted window shivered to atoms, every ancient monument shattered, every sculptured decoration, however inaccessible in appearance, hurled to the ground. Indefatigably, audaciously,—endowed, as it seemed, with preternatural strength and nimbleness,—these furious Iconoclasts clambered up the dizzy heights, shrieking and chattering like malignant apes, as they tore off in triumph the slowly matured fruit of centuries.”

Not the cathedral alone, but every Catholic temple of Antwerp, and four hundred others in Flanders, were sacked in this sudden revolt against the Papacy. It is said that King Philip, when he heard of it, fell into a paroxysm of frenzy and tore his beard for rage, swearing by the soul of his father that it should cost them dear. How dear it shortly did cost them, both the guilty and the innocent, we are shown in the picture Schiller has drawn of Calvinists’ bodies dangling from the beams of their roofless churches,[64] of “the places of execution filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the highroads with fugitives.” Such was one of the extraordinary experiences through which this beautiful cathedral passed—one of the maddest, most senseless, and most frightfully punished outbreaks in all history.

In the company of the doves that nest among the pinnacles and arches away up in the cathedral tower, one looks out at this hour on a very considerable portion of the little kingdom—forty miles, they tell you, with a good glass, in any direction. It is a prospect well worth the weary climb. Just below, the tiled and gabled roofs rise and fall all about like a troubled sea. The crooked streets of the old section and the straight ones of the new, and the places and parks in verdant spaces here and there have the appearance of some vast topographical map. The gray Scheldt lies like a string of Ghent flax to Antwerp’s bent bow. A wrinkled arc of massive and intricate fortifications wards the rich city from its foes, and just beyond lie numerous tiny villages all with the exact primness of mathematical problems. An unusual country view is spread out on every hand. Canals, numerous as fences and dotted with boats and slowly-moving barges, sear the green fields like pale-blue scars; and white, dusty roads criss-cross with their solemn flanking of tall poplar trees. As if this region were the natural habitat of some strange and monstrous form of animal life, one beholds everywhere a[65] semblance of motion and activity in the gaunt, waving, canvas arms of hundreds of plethoric windmills. Diminutive, trim farms, like little gardens, give the appearance of a general carpeting by Turkish rugs of vivid and diversified design; each has its whitewashed cottage roofed in thatch or tile and set in orchards hedged with box and hawthorn. Fields of corn, wheat, rye, and oats expand in well-kept richness, and in all this profusely cultivated region men, women, boys, and girls toil from the faintest dawn to sunset, and often all night by moonlight, content and even happy in the winning of enough to supply clothing and shelter and the unvarying fare of soup, coffee, and black rye bread. Seaward and northward lie sand dunes, dikes, and polders stretching away to the old morasses where the valiant Morini faced and stopped even Cæsar. Literary people will see in all this country the land of “Quentin Durward,” as that greatest story of Flanders comes to mind, and they will perhaps reflect upon the characteristics of the good burghers of those days, whom Sir Walter thought “fat and irritable,” and will see young Durward defying the ferocious “Wild Boar of Ardennes” in the perilous service of the fair Lady Isabelle, herself a Flemish countess.

To the northwest one sees the gleaming reaches of the Scheldt emptying themselves into the distant sea and, nearer at hand, solemn little Terneuzen where the ships turn into the canal for Ghent—Ghent, the “Manchester[66] of Belgium,” where old Roland swings in his belfry and calls

On the east rise the spires of Westmalle, where in their Trappist convent austere disciples of St. Bruno, garbed in sackcloth and with shaven heads, pass their voiceless lives and keep watch beside the open graves in the orchard. To the south is venerable Mechlin on the many-bridged river Dyle, once famous for such laces as we may still see in the pictures of its immortal son, Frans Hals. Brussels lifts its towers forty miles due south, and stretches its broad roads to Waterloo. And it is there the black forest of Ardennes expands, where St. Hubert, patron of hunters, intercedes for the health of good dogs, and which certain Shakespearean editors have fixed upon as the Forest of Arden of “As You Like It.” Over there lies Namur where the gallant Uncle Toby of “Tristram Shandy” received the painful wound deplored of the Widow Wadman, “before the Gate of St. Nicholas,” as the precise description always ran, “in one of the traverses of the trench, opposite to the salient angle of the demibastion of St. Roch.”

One lingers long and delightedly over this charming panorama of fascinating and storied associations, until presently the great clock beneath us booms the hour of three, and our time is up. We turn regretfully from this toyland country and the gracious, old-fashioned[67] town—this placid, music-loving, art-reverencing Antwerp, with its many gables and its many rare delights. The friendly moon, a little later, will silver her huddled roofs and serrated fronts, her façades whose fantastic ends will be steps for White Pierrot to go up to his chimney-tops, her quiet squares and quaint, twisting alleys, her solid burgher mansions and vineclad waterman cottages. Serene and chaste, the delicate spire of the magic cathedral will rear its traceried, guardian length from out the deep shadows of little Place Verte and look down all night, with the affection of half a thousand years, on this quaint and merry Antwerp snuggling up to the languid Scheldt.

Like the lizards in the dusty Forum ruins, emerging from dusky retreats to warm and blink in the sun and then flash back into some sheltered refuge, so visitors at Rome issue from dim closing museums at three o’clock in the afternoon and gaze around in a stupid, dazed fashion on a sky of cloudless deep blue and on placid streets and squares that seem fairly to quiver in a golden haze of strong sunshine. After the cool interiors the sultry heat seems doubly oppressive, and there is something of the nature of a mild struggle before reality succeeds in summoning them back from that vague state of disassociation, that condition of all-mind-and-no-body, produced by an intense and protracted study of all those wonderful things that great museums contain. To this confused condition of mind there is generally added a further disquieting element in the shape of a blank misgiving as to how the intervening hour can be tolerably passed before joining the four o’clock promenaders in the Pincian Gardens to see Roman Fashion at its ante-prandial rites. And yet were strangers merely to remain receptive and allow their extraordinary surroundings[72] to assert themselves and supply the diversion with which they are dynamically charged, this is an hour that might well prove to be one of the most delightful of the whole twenty-four in Rome.

For the masterful spell of the Eternal City is still world-conquering; it only asks the chance. Protract your stay as you will, there remains at last a sense of awe, almost of incredulity, at being, in the actual flesh, in precincts so ultra-venerated—in dread, historic Rome. It is only a somewhat milder form of the feeling that overpowered you the very first morning of your visit when, after the night’s sleep of forgetfulness, you read with amazed, half-awake eyes the printed slip on the bedroom door that affirmed your hotel to be on no less august an eminence than one of the seven hills of Rome. Even when you had rushed to the window for corroboration and stared out in excited astonishment on a vast shoulder of dusty, reddish brown ruins with pert vines greening in its loftiest recesses, and a guidebook insisted that they were the Baths of Diocletian, a reluctant fear remained that you might only be, after all, in the pleasant toils of the old, recurrent dream from which you might shortly and miserably awake.

But if, at three o’clock of a summer afternoon, the particular museum whose doors are remorselessly closing upon your final, lingering look chances to be that fortunate one on the Capitoline Hill that houses, among its array of mellow antiques, the pointed-ear original of[73] Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun,” you could not do better than make use of the remainder of the admission ticket and have a survey of Rome from the airy summit of the campanile in the rear. To effect this, one picks his way among the imposing remains of the ancient record-house of the tabularium, mounts the long flight of iron steps in a corner of its colonnade, and soon reaches the top of the tower of the Capitol, with Rome as utterly at his feet as ever it appeared to the eyes of Alaric and his Goths.

In tones of soft yellow, gray, and dull orange the roof-masses sweep northward, eastward, and westward, while to the southward and at your feet lies heaped the earthy, dusty chaos of ruins that crown the imperial Palatine, the popular Cælian, and the luckless Aventine Hills. Parks and villa gardens are blotches of dark foliage; and, within its white embankment walls, the sacred Tiber, in a twisting yellow band, rushes swiftly down the face of the city in its mad rush for Ostia and the sea. Beyond the most distant suburbs extend the rolling plains of the Campagna like an all-embracing sea, until they seem to wash in a gentle surf about the Sabine foot-hills, away to the north, and brim southward to the verge of the Alban Hills beyond the farthest glimpse of the Aqueduct’s long line of broken arches or the dimming perspective of that taut thread, the Appian Way. From this vantage-point the city may hide no surface secrets. It lies below us like an enormous fan, whose[74] converging point is the round Piazza del Popolo, a good mile to the north. Like three great fingers, there extend from that focus the Via Ripetta, the Via Babuino, and, in the centre and running toward us as straight as a ruler, the popular Corso carrying the old Flaminian Way right through the heart of modern Rome. By degrees we come to distinguish familiar churches among the hundreds of spires, towers, and domes; to pick out, here and there, a mediæval watchtower; to locate well-known squares; to name an occasional obelisk; to identify a column; and even to particularize some of the scores of fountains that give latter-day Rome a pleasant distinction among modern cities. The ribbed, blue-gray dome of St. Peter’s looms impressively from out the deep green of the Papal Gardens of the yellow Vatican; the circular bulk of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo and the columned Pantheon look as familiar as old friends to us—though they may not be friends to each other, with the latter, under papal stress, forced in other days to yield its beautiful bronze tiles to make saints’ ornaments and cannon for the former; the yellow walls of the Sant’ Onofrio monastery mark where died Tasso, “King of Bards,” and where they still show his crucifix and inkstand; and yonder is the great gray church where Beatrice Cenci lies in her nameless grave. If we turn and look southward we see strange sun-tricks among the bleak and shadowy corridors of the vast, half-demolished Colosseum, and[75] crumbling arches of the emperors warm into a venerable dotage. The sun-baked wreckage of the Forum expands at our feet in rows of column stumps, shattered arches, isolated shafts with clinging fragments of cornice and entablature, yawning earthen doorways and dusty heaps of cluttered brick and tufa,—like a gigantic honeycomb,—while all about it birds are singing divinely in the shade of the laurels. The famed Tarpeian Rock, just at hand, has little suggestion of a short shrift for traitors, with rookeries nestling snugly to its base and a rose-trellised garden on its commodious summit.

Victor Emmanuel II, in the regal cool of bronze, gazes over his colossal charger in the gigantic monument on the Capitoline slopes below us and beholds the hills studded with the pretty white villas of his grandson’s prosperous subjects, and the Quarter of the Fields carpeted with the neat stucco homes of the poor that used to languish in the vile slums of the old Ghetto. Had he read Zola’s “Rome” he might even be justified in frowning at so defamatory a description of so pleasant a section. But apparently he prefers to watch the afternoon glow on the gleaming domes and towers and myrtle-set villas of the Trastevere, where the powerful and violent descendants of the ancient Romans still dwell; and to take amused note of Garibaldi over there twisting around on his big bronze horse to keep a wary eye on St. Peter’s.

It taxes the credulity of the visitor to comprehend that yonder is the renowned Janiculum, down whose slopes Lars Porsena led his troops to contend with Horatius Cocles and his intrepid companions as they “held the bridge”—only a hundred yards from where we are standing. And, indeed, imagination is quite unequal to the tasks set it on all this historic ground. Even if we succeed in carrying ourselves back through the periods of the popes, the emperors, the republic, the kings, and possibly the shepherds, what is to become of us when confronted with the statement of Ampère that there were really “nine Romes before Rome.” It is quite enough to undertake the reconstruction of ancient Rome to the mind’s eye, such as authentic history describes it, considering how repeatedly its conquerors sacked it, and how both Nero and Robert Guisecard burned it; and that the Romans themselves, as Lanciani insists, have done more harm to it than all invading hosts put together. “What the Barbarians did not do,” ran the famous pasquinade, “the Barberini did.” It is, really, asking too much of the man who is risking “a touch of sun” to see the city from the sweltering top of the Capitol Tower, to expect him to be communing with himself in terms of travertine and peperino and reassembling antiquities as an agreeable pastime. He will probably content himself with a hasty glance around, and a little irreverent levity over the task of Ascanius, son of “the pious Æneas,” in building[77] a city on the scraggy ridge of distant Alba Longa, or the scramble the Roman bachelors must have had when they scampered down the neighboring Quirinal Hill with their arms full of their Sabine allies’ wives. As he trudges down the tower steps and catches periodic glimpses of that ancient Latium that is now the Campagna, he ought to devote a moment to self-congratulation that the pestilence no longer stalks there by night and noon-day, or that the evil campagnards of Andersen’s “Improvisatore” no more terrorize with impunity, or wild beasts imperil the wayfarer; but rather that these latter themselves flee, especially the foxes, what time the red-coated gentlemen of the English Hunt round on them among the shattered tombs of the Appian Way.

And yet, if the visitor is a sentimentalist, no Italian sun is going to rob him of his reverie: he will be hearing the cries of the Christian martyrs at a Colosseum matinée, and beholding the pride and beauty of ancient Rome loitering along the palace-lined streets on their way to the afternoon diversions at the Baths of Caracalla. And the Forum will bustle with the state business of the world, Cicero will mount the rostrum, and a train of Vestal Virgins pass demurely along the Sacra Via. He will attend the mournful wails of priests at worship in the temples of Jupiter and Saturn, and thrill to see a detachment of the Prætorian Guard dash into the Forum and acclaim some new military hero as emperor. But this should be sufficient to startle him back to the[78] Rome of to-day, and as he looks anxiously over to the northwestern walls, beyond which once stood that infamous camp, he will doubtless rejoice devoutly that the sober and law-abiding soldiery that drills there now is something so very different from the uncontrollable “Frankenstein” that the Cæsars devised to their own undoing. It is, in consequence, with hearty complacence that he will turn his back on even the aristocratic treasure-heap of the lordly Palatine, conscious that if the cry were raised to-day, “Why is the Forum crowded, what means this stir in Rome?” the reply would be forthcoming, “Tourists and picture-card sellers and peddlers of cameo pins.”

Parenthetically, it may be observed that, although pathos and bathos rub elbows in the foregoing reflections, still incongruities come very near to being the rule in latter-day Rome. What is to be said of obelisks of the Pharaohs with Christian crosses on their tops? Of the column of Trajan with St. Peter at its summit, and at its base those twentieth-century cats that visitors feed with fish bought from stands at hand for the purpose? Of St. Paul on the column of Marcus Aurelius, and the sign of an American life insurance company across the street? Of a modern playhouse in the mausoleum of Augustus where the emperors were buried? Of the present use of King Tarquin’s great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, just as good as it was twenty-five hundred years ago? Of electric lights where[79] Cincinnatus had his cabbage-farm? Of a Jewish cemetery above the circus of Tarquin? Of steam-heated flats in the gardens of Sallust? Of modern houses at the Tarpeian Rock, and the Baths of Agrippa? Of street cars with the name of Diocletian? Of automobiles on the Flaminian Way? Of tennis courts beside the burial-place of a Cæsar? Of motor-cycles around the tomb of the Scipios? Of an annual Derby down the Appian Way? Of railroad trains beside the old Servian Wall? Of telephone booths on the banks of Father Tiber? Modernism is, indeed, with us, as his Holiness laments!

The sultry, torrid hour that lies between three o’clock and four of a summer afternoon usually sees Rome rubbing her eyes, fresh from her siesta, that ancient midday nap that Varro declared he could not live without; and you may be sure the final rub would be one of vast amusement if she were to see you walking on the sunny side of the street, where, by the terms of her immemorial observation, only dogs and foreigners go. The heat is intense on these lava pavements; one keeps religiously to the shade. But Roman society is not rubbing its eyes,—at least, not in town,—for tout le monde is passing the annual villeggiatura at its villa in the hills or by the sea, economizing for the fashionable expenditure of the winter, and, incidentally, obliging the people who stay in town with that much more of elbow room on the Corso and other popular promenades. All of which helps a little in making the stroll from the Capitoline[80] Hill to the Pincian Gardens rather more comfortable than moving around the hot-room of a Turkish bath.

As we pick our way down the Capitoline slope, pass Marcus Aurelius on his fat bronze steed, and “bend our steps,” as the old novels used to say, toward the tramway-haunted uproar of the Piazza di Venezia, the rabble rout of the slum district on the left affords a lively conception of the element that goes farthest to make Rome howl. Having been told that this old Ghetto had been swept and garnished, one is properly indignant at finding the air redolent of garlic and everybody under conviction that the chief end of man is to amass macaroni and enjoy it forever. You gaze askance on a universal costume of filth and rags, and hurry along through it, protesting that, while you would not invoke the precedent of Pope Paul IV’s sixteenth-century method of putting gates across the streets, and locking the people in and making the men wear yellow hats and the women yellow veils, as he did with the Jews, still some expedient ought to be hit upon for making the district look a little less like a camp of Falstaff recruits. “A frowzy-headed laborer,” say you, “shouldering a basket of charcoal, may seem attractive in Mr. Storey’s ‘Roba di Roma,’ but in real life one likes to think men can afford shirts, and not have to wear rags over their shoulders after the manner of a herald’s tabard.” You pause a moment to watch the disappearance of a yard of macaroni down some red gullet, and George Augustus[81] Sala’s description of the banquet of the seven wagoners rushes to mind: “Upon this vast mess they fell tooth and nail. The simile is, perchance, not strictly correct. Teeth may be de trop. You should never bite or chew macaroni, but swallow each pipe whole, grease and all, as though it were so much flattery. But their nails they did use, seeing that they ate the macaroni with their fingers. What wondrous twistings and turnings-back of their heads, what play of the muscles of their throats, what straining of their eyeballs and vasty openings of their jaws, did I study as they swallowed their food.”

And now we begin to have the usual experience of Roman mendicancy. Truly, there is no beggar like your Roman beggar. He has raised his profession to both an art and a nuisance. Appeals to charity take every form and phase. Evidences of anatomical disaster are utilized to excite pity at so much per sigh. Tales of misery and misfortune ring all the changes of fervency and fancy. Their whines are both groveling and dramatic. “Niente!” they moan, as with woe-begone faces and pathetic twists of their necks they sidle up with stiff gestures of weary and hopeless expressiveness; “Illustrissimo! Eccellenza! Per amor di Dio!” You could not bluff them, though you were armored in all the calloused nonchalance of the average ambulance surgeon; and your doom is sealed if you undertake to bandy repartee, for their invective is as searching as a satire of Juvenal. Whether you give or not, their volubility[82] and frankness continue unabated; for you are savagely cursed if you decline, and if you acquiesce are blessed strictly in proportion to the gratuity. Indubitably, in the social scheme of the beggar we be brethren all and should each aid the other—after the philosophy of the Italian, saying, “One hand washes the other, and both the face.” The Roman, understanding them, passes coolly by; but the foreigner, who is their special prey, gives up in desperation, on the principle of the local proverb, “We are in the ballroom and we must dance.”

Parenthetically, again, they say the authorities are helpless to curb this universal Roman nuisance. It is an institution. These beggars come of all classes—from the Capuchin and Franciscan lay brothers who go about in brown robes, rope girdles, and sandals and present a basket for food, to the dirty urchins of the Appian Way who stop your carriage with their acrobatic proficiency and then howl for soldi in the name of all the saints. Many a beggar here is a bank depositor; and any of them who can retain the monopoly of the door of a popular church may confidently look forward to affluence. Very likely they are better business men, in their way, than many who drop coins into their pathetic, swindling hands. À chacun son métier.

It would extend a Brooklynite to negotiate the crossing of the Piazza di Venezia. It is the grand gathering-place of tramcars, busses, cabs, carts, bicycles, and every[83] other form of conveyance. You will certainly find a “Seeing Rome” automobile, with the lecturer pointing out the castellated old Palazzo di Venezia and telling his people that it was built of stone from the Colosseum, and has been the seat of the Austrian embassy to the Curia for over a hundred years. So far as traffic is concerned, this is the heart of Rome. Nothing less than a whirlpool could be expected in a spot that is the confluence of such full streams of life as the Corso and the Via Nazionale. One admires its broad, busy sweep, and the dignity of the solid old gray buildings that rim it. No mid-afternoon heat lessens the bustle and activity that rages here; even the experienced natives can be found in large numbers, jostling their way across it, and visitors pass through in droves to reach the Cenci Palace or to see the spot where Paul dwelt for two years “in his own hired house.”

If you stopped, as I did, at one of the hotels near the Baths of Diocletian, the Via Nazionale will have a friendly suggestion of the nearest way home. With thoughts of that temporary home the recollection often comes to me of the mildly stimulating delight I once found in getting lost by night in this city of superior chance encounters. It seemed, on the first occasion, as though I had scarcely turned the corner into the Via Cavour before a delicious conviction of unfamiliarity with my surroundings assured me I was pursuing a course that was certain, sooner or later, to lead to artistic discovery[84] or adventure. Nothing was easier than getting lost, for I was newly arrived; and yet localities and objects of consequence were not without significance, for, like every one else, I had a vivid idea of the landmarks of the famous city. And first of all, I discovered I was passing the infamous spot where “the impious Tullia” drove her chariot across the bleeding body of her royal father; whence I hastened on, with furtive glances. Next, after some speculation I identified an enormous church to be none other than the famous Santa Maria Maggiore, whose ceilings, I had read, were crusted with the first gold brought from the New World, and to whose high altar the popes used to come by torchlight for New Year’s mass. I thrilled at the incredible reflection that the street cars crossing that corner would be passing, a moment later, the site of the gardens of Mæcenas where Horace and Virgil had mused and read their verses. A few blocks farther on I came to a halt before the house of Lucrezia Borgia; and I tried to fancy the circumstances of the night of their quiet family supper there, before the children took leave of their mother with false words of affection and Cæsar hurried to gather his bravos and overtook Francesco, and, muffled in a cloak, sat his horse in easy unconcern while his brother was done to death and thrown into the Tiber. For relief I turned across the street to the church of St. Peter-in-Chains, and imagined how Michael Angelo’s vigorous Moses might be appearing in the dark of the side aisle, and[85] thought of the master striking the completed work with his mallet and crying out, “Now, speak!” On I rambled, through a block or two of darkened shops and gloomy houses, and suddenly a great open space yawned before me and I was staring at rows of column stumps, mellowed and battered, and among them a tall, ghostly shaft of marble with a spiral band of half-mutilated reliefs winding away up to the summit, where was the dusky outline of a sculptured form. It was the old school-geography picture come to life! There was I in the heart of an unfamiliar city, alone, by night, with this vast relic of the ancients. It was like Stanley finding Livingstone in Africa. I felt I had honestly discovered it and that it ought to be mine. It was the Forum of Trajan!

It will seem a violent transition to jump from midnight to mid-afternoon, but the plunge must be taken. The normal state of the Corso at three-thirty of a summer afternoon is one of leisurely activity. The crowds are lethargic, slow-moving, inclined to curiosity. An interesting social comedy is proceeding, with foreign ladies playing sight-seeing rôles, clutching their red Baedekers and Hare’s “Walks in Rome.” Jostling groups of them gather before the beguiling shop windows, and occasionally one enters and possesses herself of a Roman pearl or cameo, or perhaps a mosaic or copy of an antique bronze. Business people pass along in their habitually distrait manner, and priests beyond number[86] brighten the scene with habits of every hue. There is little enough of room in the middle of the street and scarcely any on the sidewalks. Like all Roman thoroughfares, the Corso is clean and distinguished. Long perspectives of gayly awninged shops extend toward the Piazza del Popolo, agreeably broken here and there by the interposition of mellow old palace fronts and richly sculptured baroque façades; and there is frequent opportunity for passing glimpses into cool courtyards attractive with foliage and fountains.

Visitors keep forsaking the Corso at every turning to make inspiring discoveries in the tangled mesh of side streets. We are at liberty to suspect those who go to the west, of sentimental designs on the star under the dome of a neighboring church that marks the spot where Julius Cæsar was assassinated in Pompey’s Senate House; or, perhaps, of an intention to visit the sombre statue of Giordano Bruno in the Field of Flowers, and reflect upon what a constant rebuke it must be to the church that burned him there, three centuries ago, for persisting in his “modernism” to the outrageous extremity of defending the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and like heresies of the hour.

Afternoon walks in Rome should be frequently interrupted, not only to escape the floods of sunshine, but to find out occasionally what is behind the mellow garden walls over whose tops glistening, green foliage droops enticingly down with hints of cool and restful[87] retreats. Such an opportunity presents itself here in the rare Colonna Gardens, just around the corner of the great Colonna Palace where earlier in the day the Titians and Tintorettos ravish the artistic. Spacious, elegant Rome has nothing more charming and exquisite than such gardens as these. Art and antiquity are everywhere in restful profusion—“storied urn and animated bust.” It is even said that sculptures are to be found almost anywhere underground for the mere pains of exhuming. One rests with infinite satisfaction in the deep shade of eucalyptus, cypress, ilex, and laurel, to the sweet singing of multitudes of birds. There are roses and oranges in bloom, and tall hedges of clipped box, and musical little cascades tumble down from terrace to terrace and drip over mossy marble steps. In this particular garden come thoughts of Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, who so often strolled along these very paths and communed in their serene and beautiful friendship. Theirs was a faith that brought its own reward.

And what, pray, without its amazing faith, would this Catholic Rome be, anyway? À chaque saint sa chandelle. Otherwise, what would become of that marble block from the floor of the Appian Way—which the stubborn archæologists will insist was really paved with silex—that is preserved with so much reverence in the church of Domine Quo Vadis, as showing the impressions of the feet of Our Lord and St. Peter when they faced each other there on the occasion of the memorable rebuke[88] of the latter for his proposed flight from Rome? And how about the scala santa—the worn and venerated marble steps in the shrine near the church of St. John Lateran, which were brought from Jerusalem and up which we are told Christ passed on his way to the judgment seat of Pilate? The faithful thank God for the privilege of ascending them on their knees, praying, and receiving the indulgence of a thousand years of purgatory; and they were worn thin with kisses long before the day when Martin Luther got halfway up and suddenly quit and came tramping down with a voice crying in his ears, “The just shall live by faith.” And without faith, where would be the use of the miraculous Bambino, the adored and bejeweled little wooden image that a Franciscan pilgrim carved from a tree of the Mount of Olives and which is imposingly domiciled in a glass case in the church of Ara Cœli? They say there is no disease that the Bambino cannot cure; and when his keepers accompany him through the streets on his errands of mercy, conveyed in his magnificent buff coach, people kneel by hundreds and beseech a blessing. Such blessing may be secured, though possibly of a diminished efficacy, by buying one of his legended cards at the church and having the priest rub it across the glass top of the case. Who would eschew faith and forfeit such advantages? Would we not still have Life’s puzzle, and without this key? Might we not even be reduced to a plane as confused and desperate as that of[89] the famous Sultan of Turkey, who knew so little of music that, when his new Italian band had finished tuning-up, he shouted in delight to the leader, “Marshallah! Let the dogs play that tune again!”

At this languorous hour of the afternoon the broad, sunny piazzas with their many fountains afford incomparably lovely loitering-places on the way to the Pincio. The one of the Quirinal is a near neighbor to the Colonna Gardens, and there you may shelter under eucalyptus trees and dream over the brown old obelisk and the vigorous fountain sculptures of the “horse-tamers” that once graced the Baths of Constantine, and philosophize over the irony of fate that converted a papal summer residence into a royal palace. Or you can thread your way through narrow streets of the Middle Ages that are lined by ochre-colored houses with sun-shades, where artists have their studios and transients their hôtels garnis, and down which a belated wine-cart may jangle or a gayly painted Campagna wagon creak, with its oxen festive in bells and crimson tassels and its rugged driver clad in blue. Were you to follow these typical byways of mediæval Rome until you came to the embankment of the Sant’ Angelo Bridge, you would pass by where Benvenuto Cellini lived among his goldsmiths, and could identify the Gothic window of the old Inn of the Bear where Montaigne stopped, centuries ago.

At this hour the Trevi Fountain is doubly appealing[90] and refreshing, rejoicing the whole side of its roomy square with sparkling waters that dash merrily about Neptune and his allies in the wall niches. Devoted as one may be to the venerable tomb of Cecilia Metella, on the Appian Way, he will fervently commend Pope Clement for having pillaged some of its stone to supply this cheery fountain with its dramatic setting. Were this our last day in the city we should certainly toss a copper coin over our left shoulder into these boiling waters, to insure a return to Rome. Of course, one is pretty sure to come again anyhow; but that makes it a certainty. Besides, it is much less trouble than going away out to Tivoli to ask the same thing of the Sibyl in the Grotto.

Were you to yield to the fountain habit, you would go bird-hopping all over town, for no city has so many or such beautiful ones as Rome, thanks to its huge aqueducts. It is a never-failing delight to turn a corner and come across one of these sun-deluged pleasaunces with its crowds of picturesque loungers; its tritons, “rivers,” and sea gods disporting themselves in attitudes of aqueous grace and gayety; its flower-girls banked behind fragrant barriers of roses and violets; and the slender columns of water streaming sideways like tattered flags in a breeze.

Mid-afternoon is an admirable time to drop in at the most popular of all the piazzas, the Spanish Square. One wonders how the jewelers of the Via Condotti[91] manage to make both ends meet, with such a superior attraction at hand. It is certainly one of the most charming nooks in Rome. A heavy golden sunshine glorifies, at this hour, the broad reach of the Spanish Steps, themselves quite as wide as the square, that sweep between picturesque parapets like a yellow cascade from the terraces of the church at S. Trinità de’ Monte to the boat-shaped fountain in the piazza below. About them, drowsy, dusty, Old-World houses supply a pleasant background of soft color, and the crystal-clear Italian sky spreads above like a cathedral dome. The flower market is the crowning touch, with a flood of fragrant blooms welling over the lower steps and rimming the fountain edge in brilliant hues of purple Roman anemones, orange wallflowers, white narcissus, golden daffodils, snowy gardenias, violets, camelias, hyacinths, mignonettes, and every fair and odorous blossom. A lovely, sunny, fragrant spot—this Piazza di Spagna; a place to dream whole days away in; a well-beloved corner of fascinating Rome, where one may realize to its fullness the beautiful, consoling reflection of Don Quixote, “But still there’s sunshine on the wall.”

Literature has had its chosen seat in the Piazza di Spagna. Half the traveled world of letters has lived or visited there. It invests the spot with a fresh and human interest to know that it has been the musing-place of such rare spirits as Byron, Smollett, Madame de Staël,[92] Cooper, Andersen, Thorwaldsen, Hawthorne, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Dickens, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Lowell, and Longfellow. One thinks of the Brownings entertaining Thackeray, Lockhart, and Fanny Kemble. But, of course, the closest memories are of Keats and Shelley, who lived in either corner house—those radiant friends whose ashes repose under myrtles and violets in the cypress-shaded cemetery beyond the Aurelian Wall. The works of all these authors, as also of the others who may or may not have seen the Piazza di Spagna,—along with the idealism of Fogazzaro, the sensuality of D’Annunzio, the realism of Verga, and the grace of De Amicis,—are to be had at the celebrated shops of Piale or Spithöver, in the square; where, also, you may at little expense become a momentary part of Rome’s bohemia over toast and muffins in the adjoining tea-rooms.

Chacun à son goût. If you are cold to tea there may be something else to interest in the numerous cafés of the neighborhood that begin to hum with activity as the hour approaches four. And, indeed, they may be angels in disguise for such as have tried pension life and grown sadly familiar with puddings as mysterious as Scotch haggis, meat that suggested travertine, and pies constructed of something like silex and tufa. Besides, in the cafés you can regale yourself with vermouth, syrups, or ices, and at the same time observe the Roman at his afternoon ease—thus realizing in yourself the acuteness[93] of the Italian proverb, “One blow at the hoop and one at the cask.” It is quite worth the cost to see how quickly the chairs and little marble-topped tables, out on the sidewalk, are taken by leisurely habitués bent on gossip; by precise old gentlemen in lavender gloves who drop in for a tumbler of black coffee and a hand at dominoes; or by foppish young men in duck trousers, who clatter on the tables for the cameriere to bring copies of the “Tribuna” so they may sup on frivolities and horrors along with coffee and tobacco.

A ruder jocundity also, at this time, is making its start for high tide in poorer sections, where in arbored osteries, Tuscan wine-shops, and spacci da vino straw-covered fiascos of chianti are passing, along with glasses of local wines whose prices will be found conspicuously chalked up on the outsides of the taverns at so many soldi per half-litre.

As we follow the Corso toward the Pincian Gardens we find the congestion increasing, with a decided addition of carriages all bound in our direction. It is now the hour of the afternoon passeggiata; and one marvels that the ancient campus Martius should still be the heart of Rome, and wonders how this narrow street could have held its crowds when the mad, brilliant scenes of Carnival riot and revelry were enacted before these old Renaissance palaces. Every restaurant of the tumultuous Piazza Colonna is working to capacity, and groups of gay army officers swagger about the corners[94] and over by the marble basin beside the Column of Marcus Aurelius where the taxi-cabs have their chief stand. No red-and-white street car dares venture in this favorite square, but busses and cabs supplant them to distraction. And who, indeed, does not prefer an omnibus to a street car! It may want the latter’s business-like directness, but what a holiday air it has of cozy, informal deliberateness! It is coaching in town. You may not arrive so soon, but what a lark you had! And if you mock at the faithful bus, there are the impertinent Roman cabs. Here is speed, seclusion, and economy. You cannot fail to be suited both financially and æsthetically, for you may pick between the latest varnished output of the factory and venerable, decrepit ramshackles that look to have been contemporary with the Colosseum. The Roman cabmen are an inconsequent lot; they wear green felt hats and greasy coats, and dash at one with a reckless scorn of human life that strengthens a suspicion that they are really banditti of the Campagna, transparently disguised. The famous Column of the philosophic Emperor never lacks its groupings of adaptable “rubber-necks,” who are twisting themselves into suicide graves trying to read the spiral band of reliefs that winds away up to the statue of St. Paul.

The Corso passeggiata is an interesting affair. Toward four o’clock it quite fills the street. Young girls are out, with their inevitable chaperons, kittenish and alert-eyed;[95] Bergamasque nurses, with scarlet ribbons and extraordinary silver ornaments falling below their snowy muslin caps; clerks in sober black; Douane men, in short capes and shining hats with yellow rosettes; hatless women, with light mantillas over their blue-black hair; the stolid country-folk,—the contadini,—with the men in brown velvet jackets and goatskin breeches, and the women in faded blue skirts and with red stays stitched outside their bodices; the despised forestieri, with guidebooks; carabinieri, in pairs, resplendent in braided uniforms and cocked hats; the nervous Bersaglieri, with shining round hats and glossy cocks’-feather plumes; army officers in cloaks or bright blue guard-coats, fresh from vermouth at Aragni’s; Savoyards in steel helmets and gold crests; diplomats in silk hats and Prince Albert coats; and clericals by the hundreds. The clericals, indeed, may always be relied upon to supply an effective color-touch anywhere in Rome. They come along in fluttering groups of every hue: English and French seminarists in cassocks of black, Germans in scarlet, Scotch in purple, and Roumanians in orange and blue; it is diverting to see them raise their black beavers to one another with the quietest and most serious air imaginable. Solemn lay brethren shuffle past in sombre brown of Franciscan and Capuchin, or white of the cowled and tonsured Dominicans. Occasionally, along a side street, one passes slowly, absorbed in his breviary, like Don Abbondio in “I Promessi[96] Sposi.” Rome abounds in shovel-hats, shaven heads, sandals, and hempen girdles. But you must not expect to see them all in a Corso passeggiata.

Unless we have yielded too much to the blandishments along the way, we should be crossing the sunny, somnolent circle of the Piazza del Popolo and climbing the fountained and statue-set terraces of the Pincian Gardens as the first strains of the promenade concert usher in the hour of four. The spectacle that confronts us on the low, broad brow of the old hill is animated and brilliant. Hundreds of motor-cars, private carriages and hired cabs roll in a long, gay procession around the driveways, their occupants arrayed in the last word of Italian fashion, and a multitude of happy loiterers stroll leisurely in the mild afternoon sunshine along sylvan paths hedged with box or bordered with flowers, where long lines of marble portrait-busts of Italy’s dead immortals extend into the pleasant shade of groves of myrtles and fragrant acacias. What a contrast in occupation to the scenes that in olden days were enacted here—the luxury and splendor of the golden suppers that the war-worn Lucullus gave to Rome’s poets and artists; or the vicious and voluptuous orgies with which the vile Messalina indulged the depraved favorites of the Claudian court! Young Rome, this afternoon, has decked itself in its gayest raiment, and youth vies with youth in gallantries to the fashionable beauties who prefer the fascinating town, even in summer, to the listless[97] diversions of the country. “Visiting” goes on between carriage-parties, which is said to answer the social requirements of calls at the house. Mild refreshments are being served in a lively little café to which many repair when weary with lounging among the brilliant flowers and lovely foliaged paths; and groups ramble across the new viaduct and stroll among the sycamores and stone-pines of the neighboring Villa Borghese. The Pincian Gardens seem very formal and compact and precisely ornate as compared with our parks at home, but there is much more of sociability and comfort than is to be found Sunday afternoons in New York’s Central Park, for instance. That is probably because New York’s pedestrians are centred in the Mall to hear the band, or around the lakes to watch the boating, and all her carriage-folk are by themselves in the East Side Drive. The Pincian promenade mingles both classes into a great family party. It is a brilliant scene, but it must have been much more so in other days when the popes joined the company in the great glass coach drawn by six black horses in crimson trappings, and outriders and footmen flocked about them.

One wonders whether Pius X does not sometimes think with a sigh of regret of the liberties of his early predecessors, as he paces the flowered garden paths of his voluntary prison and lifts his gentle, shining face toward these pleasant Pincian heights. How often will the memory recur to me of that mild and friendly[98] man, as once I saw him in the Vatican’s Court of the Pine, in his snowy robes and the little cap scarce whiter than his hair. I remember his only ornaments to have been the famous Fisherman’s ring, and a long gold chain about his neck from which a great crucifix was pendent. It was the occasion of a calisthenic drill given by a local orphan asylum for his Holiness’s special benefit. Each little athlete in gray was burning to do his very best in so notable a presence, and was, indeed, succeeding, with the glaring exception of the smallest of the band, whose eager efforts had resulted only in an uninterrupted series of comical mischances, to the infinite chagrin of himself and associates and the increasing amusement of the Pope. In due time the performance came to an end, and the boys were drawn up facing each other in a double line through which, attended by cardinals, chamberlains, and members of the Papal Guard, his Holiness passed extending his hand to be kissed. When he reached the diminutive and blushing blunderer, he halted his imposing train and laid his hand on the boy’s head and smoothed his hair and patted his cheek with affectionate tenderness, whispering the while an intimate message of good cheer, as though it were something strictly confidential between himself and that fatherless little waif whose face was shining with reverence and awe and whose eyes were full of happy tears. I am, I trust, as confirmed a Protestant as the next, but I confess that my heart[99] was bowed as well as my head as that white-robed figure turned, as it disappeared through a door of the Vatican, and raised a hand toward us in the sign of the cross.

The marble parapet of the Pincio is, at this hour, a prime favorite among Roman loafing-places. As from an upper theatre box, one looks precipitously down into the great, peaceful, siesta-drugged circle of the Piazza del Popolo, the scene in other days of so much cruelty and often of so much happiness. The stone lions of the fountain spout patiently to the delighted observation of scores of playing children, and drowsy cabmen nod on the boxes of the long rank of waiting victorias. One may indulge to his fullest in moral reflections over the slender obelisk from the Heliopolis Temple to the Sun, upon which Moses himself may have gazed in days before Rome was thought of, and when the celestial consorts, Isis and Osiris, still waved their lotus sceptres and ruled the quick and the dead. Nineteen hundred years ago Nero, who should have begun blood-letting with himself instead of ending it there, was buried in this ground, and you are told how the evil spirits that haunted the accursed spot were not finally exorcised until yonder church of Santa Maria had been reared above his tomb. One will find it more agreeable to look across the piazza at the portal of the Flaminian Way and re-create the scenes of the triumphant entrance of the noble, hardy Trajan walking by the side of his fair and amiable wife.

The elm-tops are rustling in the deep groves of the Villa Borghese, and the yellow Tiber, “too large to be harmless and too small to be useful,” slips swiftly between the yellow walls of its quays. To the mind’s eye, in the azure distance Mons Sacer is clear, and Tivoli and the Sabine Farm of Horace. Like the Archangel Michael on the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, the sun, too, begins to sheathe his sword, and its glitter throws a warm mantle over the shoulders of the marble angels on the bridge. Most conspicuously, as is proper, it lingers on the pale dome of St. Peter’s, touches into life the sculptured saints of the portico, and floods obelisk, fountains, and all that vast elliptical piazza toward which are extended the sheltering arms of Bernini’s colonnade. How fair, beneath that roof, are the dazzling marbles, shining tombs, sculptured effigies, and glowing mosaics! But fairer far is this prospect from the hill, of Rome in her soft coat of many colors, the velvety ruins of the Palatine, the stone-pines in sentinel stiffness down the distant Appian Way, the sunny piazzas, the sparkling fountains, and the verdure and bloom of the slopes of the Janiculum, under the cloudless blue of a soft Italian sky. Ave, Roma eterna!

A brooding, stolid city is Prague; the sombre capital of a restless, feverish people. It is the hotbed and “darling seat” of all Bohemia; and Bohemia languishes for her lost independence as Israel did by the waters of Babylon. She does not, however, pine in hopeless despair like the Hebrews, but nourishes a keen expectation of regaining her lost estate, and grits her teeth, in the mean while, with fiery impatience. She points, and with reason, to the fact that the Slavs—Czechs, Slovaks, and Moravians—easily outnumber the Hungarians; yet Hungary is free, and she in bondage. And so Bohemia, for all her exterior of gracious courtesy, is bitter and hard at heart; a people of a passionate, thwarted patriotism; a people that has suffered and been degraded, but that has never for a moment forgotten. Prague is an expression of all this; in her sullen, gloomy architecture; in the persistence of national types and characteristics; and peculiarly in the wild, reckless Moldau, which visualizes the traditional, savage intolerance that is bred in the bone of the fatalistic Slav.

There are too many daws about for Prague to wear[104] her heart on her sleeve, so while she bides her time she presents a smiling mask. It may sometimes be a rather weary smile, and the forests that engulf her are gloomy and sinister; but her skies are not always lowering and overcast, and the peace of her fatigue from the national struggle is profound. It is just this deep, brooding peace that appeals to the stranger within her gates; and along with it he senses here a wonderful charm and underlying subtility that invests this curious old city with a lambent play of the imagination.

It was of Prague that Alexander von Humboldt said: “It is the most beautiful inland city I have ever seen.” And it must have been of some such spot that “R. L. S.” was mindful when he expressed the paradox that “any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.” Restfulness is surely one of the prime essentials of the “highly favored” few; and there is no restfulness at all comparable with that we feel in some venerated spot whose present hush and quiet is a reaction from its other days of fever and turmoil. One finds these qualities in Prague, whose calm and serenity seem doubly intense in contrast with its history of tumult and savagery and the hatred and violence that racked and convulsed it for hundreds of years. It has frequently been lightly disposed of as being an “out-of-the-way place”; but no place is more delightful than an “out-of-the-way” place, and particularly when[105] it has the natural and architectural beauty of this one, or has been the theatre of such unusual and stirring occurrences.

Had we but one hour to spend in Prague we should certainly choose the charmed one between four and five o’clock of an afternoon. The sunshine is then most languid and golden, and the day declines slowly over the castled tops of the Hradschin-crowned slope, and the lengthening shadows of towers and turrets creep out on the river, and the copper domes and ruddy tiles of the Neustadt glow in bright spots against the darkling green of the wooded hillsides. If one does not then feel a profound and elevating sense of tranquillity and translating beauty, it will be because he has eyes to see yet sees not.

Since Prague rests under the imputation of being “out of the way,”—and even Shakespeare set this inland kingdom down as “a desert country near the sea,” and lost his compass completely in the shipwreck in the “Winter’s Tale” with Antigonus exclaiming: “Our ship hath touch’d upon the deserts of Bohemia”; and a confused mariner replying, “Aye, my lord; and fear we’ve landed in ill time,”—we may, perhaps, be pardoned for observing that in general appearance it is a wooded valley traversed in its full length by a swift, turbulent river, which follows a northerly course excepting where it bends sharply to the east in the very heart of the city. This stream, the Moldau, rushes along[106] as if in desperate haste to throw itself into the Elbe, and seems to have the one idea, as it dashes through Prague, of getting done with its business and on its way at the earliest moment possible. It has scoured its islands into ovals, slashed the rocky bases of the hills, and continually assailed its bridges and quays. But through all its exhibitions of ill humor the Praguers have indulgently condoned and even extolled it; it was only when the beloved and venerated Karlsbrücke fell a partial victim to its violence, a dozen years ago, that patience ceased to be a virtue and the unnatural marauder was comprehensively anathematized with all the sibilant fury of the hissing tongue of the Czech. Speed apart, there is little to complain of with the Moldau; it is broad and of a pleasant deep blue, and the beauty it supplies to the setting of the city is supplemented by the importance of its traffic, the amusements on its many little wooded islands, and the delights of its boating and bathing. In a word, it is a noble stream—and none the less Bohemian, perhaps, for being a little proud and head-strong.

As the afternoon sun lies heavy over Prague one notes with delight how snugly the old city nestles along the river and up the hillsides of the valley, and with what a natural and comfortable air; not at all as though trying, as newer cities do, to shoulder its suburbs out of the way. It seems a perfect type of the mediæval town, with buildings of solid stone of an agreeable and[107] universal creamy tone, four-square and enduring. It abounds in quaint, high pitched roofs; in curious, turreted spires; in red tiles and green copper domes; and in objects of antique and archaic fascination. Shade trees are everywhere. Indeed, from the thickly wooded heights of the surrounding hills right down to the river quays the gray of the houses and the red and green of the roofs make beautiful color combinations with the feathery foliage.

One stands on the old Karlsbrücke and looks upstream and there he sees the rocky heights of the Wyschehrad Hill on which the fair and wise Libussa reared her castle when she laid the foundations of the city, thirteen centuries ago, and which he will want to visit later to look over the fortifications and to study the glowing frescoes on the cloister walls of the Benedictine monastery of Emmaus. In the elbow of the Moldau, downstream, he will observe the old sections of Prague huddled together in cramped confusion, with no sign left of the ancient separating walls that once defined the original seven districts, though he is to learn, by and by, that the early names remain unchanged—the Aldstadt, and the Jewish Josephstadt, and around and above them the Neustadt, which, of course, from an American time-point, is really not “new” at all. On his left, along the river, he sees the Kleinseite spread out, and on the hillside above it that far-famed acropolis, the redoubtable Hradschin, with its dusty, barracks-like[108] royal and state palaces, and the great bulk of the cathedral of St. Vitus rising out of it like some man-made mount. Such is the first bird’s-eye impression of Prague, set in its wooded slopes, stolid and softly colored. Later on one can scrape acquaintance with its rambling, flourishing, modern suburbs, to the eastward and downstream, and wrestle at his pleasure with such impressive nomenclature as Karolinenthal and Bubna-Holeschowitz.

Between four and five o’clock the visitor will find an especial pleasure in noting the activities that prevail in the several little green islands that fret the impetuous Moldau as it hurries through this “hundred-towered, golden Prague.” The dearest of these to the sentimental Czech is bright Sophien-Insel, that you could almost leap onto from the stone coping of the neighboring Kaiser-Franzbrücke. It always wears a gay and inviting appearance, with café tables set under fine old oaks, but precisely at four, summer afternoons, the leader of its military band lifts his baton and launches some crashing prelude, and the noisy company instantly stills and with nervously tapping fingers and glowing eyes abandons itself to that music passion which is the deepest and most intense expression of the Bohemian temperament. It gives the dilettante a new conception of the power of this inspiring art to observe the significant and varying expressions that play over the faces of a Prague audience under its influence. He witnesses[109] then the profoundest stirring of the Slavic nature and the moving of emotional depths beyond the conception of the reserved and impassive Anglo-Saxon. Especially is this so when the music is of a national character, such as the “Ma Vlast” symphonic poems of Smetana, or a Slavic dance of Dvorak’s. These Bohemian masters, with their fellow countryman, Fibich, constitute a trinity that is reverenced in their native land to an extent that almost passes belief, and that has done so much in making Prague one of the foremost centres of Europe.

The music from the Sophien-Insel floats down the river to our vantage-point on Karlsbrücke, mellowed and softened, and contributes just the right pleasing note to the agreeable mood these picturesque surroundings excite. The ponderous, antique old structure on which we stand has the appearance of some full-page color illustration for a charming Middle-Age romance. For half a millennium it has dug its broad arches into the bottom of the Moldau, stoutly defiant of flood or storm. Its massive buttresses are crowned with heroic statues so deeply revered that pilgrimages are made by the faithful to pay their devotions before them. For a third of a mile this old veteran strides the stream, and at each end he lifts an amazing mediæval tower well worth a journey to stare at. These ponderous structures, weathered by centuries of storm to a rich brownish black, are pierced by a deep Gothic archway through which the street traffic pours all day. Their sides are[110] decorated with colonnades and traceries, armorial bearings and statues of ancient heroes of the city, and their tops are incredible creations of slender turrets and of pointed roofs so desperately precipitate that they seem like long narrow paving-stones tilted end to end.

Catholic legend and ceremonial run riot on the old bridge. The statues are almost altogether of a religious character, and two of them, the Crucifixion Group and the bronze one of St. John Nepomuc, are practically never passed without the sign of the cross and the raising of hat or cap; in the case of the latter the devout will touch the tablet that marks the spot from which he is said to have been cast into the river, and then kiss their fingers and bless themselves. For St. John Nepomuc, of all the holy martyrs, was Prague’s very own. The legend is dramatic. Father John was the queen’s confessor, five hundred years ago, and when he declined to oblige the king by revealing what the queen had told under the seal of the confessional, his Majesty had him summarily cast into the Moldau, from just where we are standing at the centre of this bridge. The result was far from the expectations of the king, for not only was the poor priest preserved from sinking, but—which is quite as hard to believe of so swift a stream as this—he actually remained floating for four days at the very spot where he fell, and five bright stars hung above him all the while! When they took him out he was dead, and to this extent only did the king succeed. As[111] was perfectly natural, the amazed Praguers could see nothing in all this but an astounding miracle; and when Catholicism had finally displaced the Protestantism that followed the Hussite wars for two hundred years, their clamor for the canonization of Father John eventually resulted in placing the name of St. John Nepomuc in the catalogue of Rome. Equipped with a saint all their own, they adroitly converted the statues of the Protestant John Huss, that stood here and there about town, into St. John Nepomucs by the simple expedient of adding a five-starred halo to each.

Now, if to-day were the sixteenth of May, St. John Nepomuc’s special day, we should behold the greatest festival of all the year. An altar would be erected beside his statue, here on the bridge, and mass celebrated before enormous kneeling crowds. Bohemian peasants would flock into town from miles and miles around, in all the picturesque finery of the national dress, gala performances would be given at the theatres, an especial illumination of the city made at public expense, and fireworks displayed to-night on Schutzen-Insel. It would be an orderly celebration, too, for the Czechs are more fond of dancing than drinking; and religious enthusiasm would be practically universal, for Prague, which for two centuries was exclusively Protestant, now numbers at least nine Catholics out of every ten of its people.

As we look about us this afternoon we derive a[112] vivid consciousness of being very far from home, set down in an environment that is, for Europe, oddly foreign and unfamiliar. The soft, sibilant prattle of the Czechish speech is heard on every hand, and the names on cars and corners are outlandish to us, with their profusion of consonants and curious accent marks like our o and v. One sees a great disproportion in numbers between the German and Czechish population; only thirteen to the hundred are said to be German, but in the opinion of Bohemians that is too many, for the stubborn struggle for the existence of the old national speech and spirit against the threatening usurpation of the Teutonic invaders is a real matter of life and death. As we watch the crowds throng along the bridge the prevalence of the Slavic type is very noticeable: short of body, heavy of head, and with high cheek bones and coarse features. The general expression is one of settled melancholy, bred of their peculiar fatalism. Having heard the “Bohemian Girl” and read the foundationless libels of popular French literature, one looks about for gypsies; he will be lucky if he finds one. Bohemia, as he should have known, is one of the leading industrial countries of Europe, and Prague is made up of hard-working, skillful mechanics. Energy and resolution are stamped on these serious, rugged faces; on the powerful men, the tall, strong women, and even on the little black-eyed children. And they can do many worthy things well: they market the country’s rich coal and iron deposits,[113] make garnets to perfection, and manufacture beet-sugar by thousands of tons. Who has not heard of Bohemian glass, or Pilsener beer? And shall we belittle the resourcefulness of Bohemia, with the prosperous resorts of Karlsbad and Marienbad well within the western boundary of the Böhmer Wald? If this does not convince, one has only to run over to Dresden, seventy-five miles away, which he can reach by rail in four hours at an outlay of but eight florins, and ask any one where the finest farm produce comes from and what section yields the best fruit and honey, butter and eggs, milk and cheese.

If now we can manage to look away from the bridge and its crowds, we shall observe that the afternoon activities of the river-life of Prague are manifold and highly interesting. There is a prodigious bustling about of longshoremen on the fine, broad quays, and boats of many descriptions and diversified cargoes are laboriously struggling upstream or drifting guardedly down. From time to time huge, unwieldy rafts pass along to the din of vigorous shouting and hysterical warnings. Bathers at the riverside establishments are adding their share of laughter and frolic, their diversions watched with vast amusement by the afternoon idlers loitering along the embankments. On our right the shaded walks and trim lawns of the popular Rudolfs-Quai are comfortably filled with a leisurely company of promenaders and of nursemaids airing their charges. All this contributes an agreeable note of homeliness[114] and contentment and seems eminently in harmony with the prevailing serenity and peace of the surrounding groves. There is at hand a little chain footbridge which they call the Kettensteg, and in a beautiful clump of lindens at its end rise the sculptured porticoes of the classic Rudolfinum, Prague’s noble home of the arts and industries. Enter it, and you find whole halls devoted to the work of Bohemian artists, with the school of old Theodoric of Prague represented in surprising completeness, an entire cabinet filled with the engravings of that famous Praguer, Wenzel Hollar, and many of the most beautiful paintings of such celebrated Bohemians as Gabriel Max, Václav Brozǐk and Josef Mánes.

With artistic bridges arching the river in whichever direction you look, with music and soft voices welling up from the gay islands, and with a full and virile life at cry along the quays, you find yourself about as far removed as possible from the atmosphere of Longfellow’s “Beleaguered City”:—

Assuredly, there is no “army of the dead” at this hour beside the Moldau, whatever there may be under the “wan moon” in a poet’s eye. On the contrary, there is an army of the living, a quarter-million of them, and[115] it marches without resting, day in and day out, along the Graben and the stately Wenzels-Platz, and through the venerable Grosser Ring and the narrow, crooked alleys of old Josephstadt.

Walk east across Karlsbrücke, pass under the Gothic arch of the somnolent Aldstadt Tower, with the stony statue of Karl IV on your left, and you will shortly emerge on the Grosser Ring and can settle the matter for yourself. This fantastic Ring is the oldest and most famous square of the city, still preserving its ancient appearance. You find it an irregular quadrilateral, surrounded by quaint, gloomy, colonnaded houses, churches, and dilapidated palaces. There towers in its centre a sombre memorial column, called the Mariensäule, commemorating Prague’s liberation from the Swedes at the close of the Thirty Years’ War. The very first thing to catch the eye is the singular Teynkirche—the old Gothic church where John Huss so often preached, where the astronomer Tycho Brahe lies entombed in red marble, and in whose shadows, through five centuries, many of the bloodiest events of the city had their inception and execution. The influence of Huss on the Europe of his day was so great and has continued so long that it is hard to realize that he had only reached his forty-sixth year when the Council of Constance sent him and his friend, Jerome of Prague, to the stake. The old Teynkirche, where he so often attacked the doctrines of Rome, still rears its battered and darkened[116] bulk from behind a melancholy row of colonnaded houses and gazes solemnly and patiently over them at the noisy Ring, its lofty spires curiously clustered with airy turrets like hornets’ nests on some old tree. Directly opposite, the modern Gothic Rathaus shoulders up to the moldering tower of its predecessor whose famous clock has delighted its thousands with the surprising things the automatic figures do when the hours and quarters roll around. Just at hand, a portion of the old Erkerkapelle still stands in excellent preservation, and you could not find more beautiful Gothic windows in all Prague, nor finer canopied saints nor more richly sculptured coats of arms. Before this building—a place of hideous history—the best blood of the city was spilled after the fall of Bohemian independence at the fateful battle of the White Hill, three centuries ago, when twenty-seven nobles were butchered here on the scaffold. A dozen years passed, and again blood soaked this earth, with the stony-hearted Wallenstein executing eleven of his chief officers for alleged cowardice at the battle of Lutzen. Prague still shows the palace of Wallenstein, and those of the other two famous generals of his period, Gallas and Piccolomini. The Clam-Gallas Palace is just at hand, in the Hussgasse, distinguished for its beautiful portal flanked with colossal caryatids and sculptured urns, and surmounted by a marble balustrade wrought with the perfection of life. A final note in the Old-World charm of the Grosser[117] Ring is contributed by the ancient Kinsky Palace, adjoining the Teynkirche, in the elaborate baroque architecture despised of Mr. Ruskin. People in the manner and seeming of to-day walk and talk, barter and sell under the nodding brows of these historic buildings, but the visitor stands among them unconscious of their noisy presence in the spell such storied surroundings cast on every phase of fancy and imagination.

There is a peculiar fascination about aimless rambles in Prague. Modern improvements have come, of course, but many an old and rare landmark has been reverently preserved, with the result that you can scarcely turn a corner or cross a square without coming face to face with some fantastic and blackened architectural fragment that holds you spellbound with wonder and delight. Whole sections, indeed, are of such a character; as you would find were you to fare forth from the Grosser Ring and seek adventures by crossing the Kettensteg and invading the region beyond the Rudolfinum. With almost the suddenness of tumbling into a river you would find yourself groping, even at this bright hour of the afternoon, in the black and twisting mazes of the old Jewish Ghetto that still goes by the name of Josephstadt. Here you have at once all the detail and color of a romance of the crusades. Everything appears aged and eccentric. The time-weary, saddened, ramshackle houses project their upper stories feebly and seek to rest their wrinkled foreheads on one another; tortuous, winding[118] alleys that you can almost span with your outstretched arms reel giddily all ways from a straight line, plodding wearily uphill and sliding helplessly down. On all sides there seems to be a general feeling that nothing matters, that everything comes by accident or caprice. Over the frowzy heads of slovenly children quarreling in the doorways, glimpses are to be had of dark and filthy interiors, from which foul odors escape to the street. Long-coated, unkempt patriarchs of Israel lope solemnly by, with rounded shoulders and hands clasped behind; and if you follow in their wake you will sooner or later arrive at a curious, melancholy Rathaus that is a rare jumble of architectural orders and has an extraordinary steeple that might once have done time on a Chinese temple. This very inclusive structure, persisting in its oddities to the end, makes a great point of staring down at the gaping crowds out of a big belfry clock that has one dial Hebrew and one Christian. But a single marvel is as nothing in this old wonderland where, as Alice would have remarked, things become “curiouser and curiouser.” If your eyes popped at the Rathaus what will they do at the gaunt, barnlike synagogue next door! Here is the thing that every visitor to Prague goes straight to see. Its early history is lost in legends, but you will be disposed to credit them all—even to that one about the Prague Jews fleeing from Jerusalem to escape the persecutions of Titus—once you have seen its doleful walls and breakneck roof, and have[119] passed through the narrow black doorway into that shadowy tomb of an interior. Brass lamps depend by long chains from the smoky ceiling, but they only intensify the gloom with their feeble light and deepen the feeling of creepy depression. Visitors are told that during the horrors of the Hussite wars this black hole was literally packed with the bloody corpses of Jews and that, in a bitter spirit of defiance, no attempt was made for three hundred years to efface the frightful stains. Little wonder that the Prague Jews evolved out of their hatred an ancient malediction that ran: “May your head be as thick as the walls of the Hradschin, your body grow as big as the city of Prague; may your limbs wither away to birds’ claws, and may you flee around the world for a thousand years!”

It is like escaping from a sick-bed to come out of this chamber of horrors and cross the street to the quiet and hush of the wonderful old Ghetto cemetery. Here we have another of the “sights” of the Josephstadt. In the refreshing coolness of its elder-trees one looks about on as extraordinary a three acres as can be found anywhere in all Europe. The Jews insist that they have buried here for twelve or fourteen hundred years, and inscriptions can be found that date back at least half that far. By the simple process of spreading new layers of earth, this plot has been packed with graves six deep; and all that was accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the cemetery not having been in use since the middle of the[120] eighteenth century. The closeness of the black, mossy tombstones, and their toppled and huddled look, suggest the troubled shouldering of some gigantic, ghoulish mole at work deep down in the horror-crowded darkness underground. The ancient tribal insignia of Israel are found graven on these tottering slabs,—the Hands of Aaron, the Cup of Levi, the Double Triangle of David, the Stag, the Fish, etc.,—and here and there you come across those little piles of stones heaped on graves that mark a Jewish act of reverence for the resting-place of some long-buried ancestor.

Hold to a generally southern direction in your afternoon stroll through the narrow Ghetto alleys, and shortly you will meet with a fine reward in the shape of a face-to-face contemplation of one of Prague’s most cherished antiquities, the Pulverturm. They may have once stored powder here, as the name implies, or they may not; but almost anything looks to have been possible to this sturdy, brown survivor of the Middle Ages, under whose broad Gothic archway the twentieth-century crowds are passing day and night. Set solidly down in the thickest stream of traffic, it has the look of those unconquerable obstructions that have to be tunneled through. It looms above you, a great, dark, dusty mass, out-of-time in every particularity of design and decoration. Stubbornness and defiance are expressed in every line; and with its atmosphere of drowsy aloofness and mystery there is such an element of loneliness[121] among such modern surroundings that one could almost believe he sometimes hears the old veteran sigh. Certainly you would say it is brooding over memories centuries dead, so incongruous and distrait is its seeming, so anachronous are its whimsical turrets, fantastic roof, statues, arms, and sculptured traceries. This impression of isolation is enhanced as one reflects that the most ultra-modern of Prague’s new buildings all stand within easy range, could one of the Pulverturm’s ancient archers take up a position in any of those lofty turrets and wing an arrow from his stout crossbow toward what quarter of the heavens he chose.

When you have passed under the arch of the Pulverturm, you have entered the Graben, and so reached the business heart of the city. The Graben has nothing to-day to suggest the “Ditch” that its derivative source implies, unless you fancifully regard it as a moat of the modern commercial ramparts. On the contrary, it presents a busy array of all the leading hotels, shops, restaurants, and cafés. Overhead-trolley cars splutter along it, and you see gray stone buildings of irregular roof-lines with skylight dormers in the tiles, and Venetian blinds in the windows, narrow sidewalks decorated in mosaic designs, and active throngs of strong-featured men, and bareheaded, vigorous women whose chief pride of dress concerns itself with capacious aprons elaborately embroidered. Were you to visit the second-story cafés, whose gay window-boxes look so inviting from the[122] street, you would find games of chess and checkers in progress at this hour, and more than one merchant who had stolen from his shop to have a look at the “Prager Tagblatt” over a glass of Pilsener or “three fingers” of the plum brandy they call slivovitz or a dram of tshai—which is tea and rum—or a cup of tee—which is just plain tea and cream. Coffee and chocolate, of course, would be found in general demand.

One passes out of the Graben into the fine boulevard of the Wenzelsplatz, and at once exchanges bustle and uproar for the quiet and dignity of the most beautiful and stately avenue of the city. It is broad and well-paved, with buildings of elaborate design, with shop fronts protected by bright awnings and with fine shade-trees every few yards along its entire length. At the corner of the Stadt Park, one finds a beautiful cascade fountain, and beside it a noble building which is the centre of all that is best and most intense in the new movement for the reviving and vitalizing of the national spirit among Bohemians—the new Bohemian Museum. Were you to enter it you would doubtless be astonished to see how many souvenirs of Bohemian history have already been assembled there,—autographs and documents, ancient musical instruments, art objects, flails of the Hussites, and scientific collections. Such is the intellectual Bohemia of to-day.

From this pleasant stroll one wends his way back to the Karlsbrücke, and as he passes the buildings that still[123] remain of the ancient famous university, thoughts are kindled of the wonderful renown this institution had, six centuries ago, when it was easily the foremost educational institution of the world. Fifteen thousand students, from every quarter of the earth, gathered to hear its celebrated savants, and the revels and achievements of those days have gone down in prose and rhyme. Five thousand students still attend, two thirds of them Czechs and the others German; but the revelry of to-day is largely the bitter and bruising encounters that are continually arising between these conflicting hot-heads. The intellectual impulse is strong in Prague. It has poly-technic institutes, art schools, and learned societies, and one of the most famous conservatories of music in the whole of Europe.

The west bank of the Moldau, the Kleinseite district, was royalty’s region in the olden time when Bohemian kings and queens dwelt in the huge Hradschin on the ridge of the hill. Seen from the Karlsbrücke, toward five o’clock, the long slope rises toward the declining sun with many more suggestions, even now, of the pomp and circumstance that have departed than of the modernism that has taken their place. There is a dreary and saddening array of closed and boarded palaces, arcaded and many-windowed, whose owners are rich and powerful Bohemian nobles with a preference for the gayeties and frivolities of the court life of Vienna. One regards with especial interest the long, rambling one of[124] Wallenstein, to make room for which one hundred houses had to be torn down, where this rival of royalty retired in the interval of imperial disfavor and held magnificent court with hundreds of followers and attendants. Among the many chambers of that great honeycomb was one equipped as an astrological cabinet—for Wallenstein always had faith in his star. How vividly it recalls the Schiller dramas and the operations of the uncanny Ceni! “Such a man!” exclaims a character at the conclusion of “Wallensteins Tod.” Born a Protestant, he well-nigh became their exterminator; turned Jesuit, the Jesuits distrusted and hated him. With his sword he made and unmade kings and carved out principalities for himself—and yet he was but fifty-one years old at the time of his assassination!

Like an aged soldier nodding in his armchair in the sun, the Wallenstein Palace, once passion-rocked and treachery-haunted, basks this afternoon in an atmosphere of the intensest calm and peace. To ramble through it is to learn history from a participant. One courtyard, in particular, is so serene and lovely as to be really unforgettable. One entire side of this enclosure is a lofty, echoing loggia three stories high, with arching spans for a roof supported on graceful, towering columns. Within the loggia are heavy sculptured balustrades, and a broad flight of marble steps flanked by huge stone urns leads to a beautiful open space of soft lawns bordered with simple flowers. It was a favorite resort of Wallenstein’s,[125] and he called it his sala terrina. In its present mellow and half-deserted beauty it is a place for a poet to dream away a life in.

Staring gloomily down on the Kleinseite, and set solidly far above it on a precipitous hill, the rugged old Hradschin, Prague’s acropolis, warms into mild ruddy tones in the afternoon sun. I have said it reminds one of a barracks, such an enormous, rambling affair as it is; though its commanding situation and impressive proportions would immediately suggest to a stranger some more consequential employment in other days. Undoubtedly it is the most striking feature of Prague. One might think it a solid architectural mass, as seen from the Karlsbrücke, but on closer inspection it resolves itself into a series of separate structures falling into irregular groups, but which, taken together, composed the setting of the imperial court during the long period of Bohemia’s independence. That splendid fragment, the vast cathedral of St. Vitus, supplies a worthy centrepiece; and is full of interest, too, with its rich Gothic windows, chapel walls set with precious stones, marble tombs of the Bohemian kings, and the wonderful silver monument to St. John Nepomuc. Indeed, the whole Hradschin abounds in rich surprises. Such, for instance, is the venerable church of St. George, awkward and archaic, which has stood for nine hundred years and is the sole memorial in Bohemia of the earliest period of Romanic architecture. Every one, of course, hurries[126] to see the rude royal palace of the Hofburg, on the edge of an adjacent steep hill, from the windows of whose Kanzlei Zimmer the Imperial Councillors were “defenestrated” and the Thirty Years’ War, in consequence, precipitated upon the troubled states of Europe. And then there is the archbishop’s palace, across the quadrangle from the Hofburg, in whose courtyard the church authorities impotently burned the two hundred Wycliffe books that John Huss had loaned them with the challenge to read and, if they could, refute. Two grim towers on the eastern extremity, the Daliborka and the Black Tower, have no end of creepy legends of tortures and prison horrors. The former takes its name from a romantic knight, Dalibor, who is said to have been long confined there and of whom and his solacing violin we hear at pleasant length in Smetana’s opera of that name. One of the most curious sights of the Hradschin is the low, drawn-out Loretto church, with a maximum of frontage and a minimum of depth, like city seminaries for young ladies. Among the red tiles of its steep roof, giant stone saints perform miracles of precarious footing, and out of the centre of the façade, on a base of colossal spirals, rises an antique belfry spire set with domes and turrets and bearing aloft a huge clock dial like a burnished shield. Surely, somewhere in this Hradschin-wonderland occurred the unrecounted events of that much-interrupted narrative of the “King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles,” which Trim tried so hard to tell to[127] Uncle Toby Shandy; and may we not be confident that the charming Prince Florizel, whose strange adventures Stevenson has so gracefully recounted, once lived and courted perils in these romantic surroundings!

It is to be hoped that every visitor will have more than one hour in Prague; and then, of course, he will want to go up to the Hradschin and loiter through and about it at his leisure. He will find large and beautiful gardens where he can rest under noble trees and enjoy an inspiring view of the city in the pleasant companionship of statuary and fountains. When he has exhausted this viewpoint he can secure quite another from the colonnaded verandas of the Renaissance Belvedere; or, perhaps better still, he will journey out to the picturesque Abbey of Strahow, embowered in blooming orchards that are vocal with blackbirds, and from its yellow stuccoed walls look down on the dense forests of the Laurenzberg sweeping in billowy green to the very banks of the Moldau.

At this hour a sharp point of light, seen from the observation tower on the summit of the Hasenberg, marks the location of a little white church on a distant hilltop—and when you have been told all about what happened there at the fatal battle of the White Hill you will have listened to the bitterest chapter in the whole history of Bohemia and will know how the national life of this kingdom gasped itself out, three centuries ago, in the panic and rout of the “Winter King’s” ill-managed[128] soldiery before the fierce infantry of Bavaria. There fell the state won by the flails of a fanatical peasantry whose sonorous war-hymn, “Ye Who Are God’s Warriors,” had so often struck terror into the ranks of the finest armies of Europe. Those were the men whom the furious Ziska led—Ziska, the squat and one-eyed, the friend and avenger of Huss; “John Ziska of the Chalice, Commander in the Hope of God of the Taborites.” Such was the terror in which this dread chieftain was held by his foes that they feared him even after his death and declared that his skin had been stretched for drum-heads to summon his followers on to victory.

Since the battle of the White Hill there has been little for Prague in the way of war except sieges and captures; and it has mattered little to her whether it was Maria Theresa come to be crowned, or Frederick the Great come to destroy, or the Swedes of Gustavus Adolphus come to plague and offend. Suffering has been her regular portion. During the Thirty Years’ War alone, Bohemia’s population declined from four millions to fewer than seven hundred thousand.

The stranger on the Karlsbrücke will turn from thoughts of Ziska’s peasants to regard with increased interest the occasional specimen of the countryman who strides past along the bridge with no embarrassment at appearing in the streets of his capital in the costume of his nation. Behold him in his high boots, tight buff trousers, well-embroidered, blue bolero jacket with many buttons,[129] broad lapels and embroidered cuffs, his soft shirt puffed out like a pigeon, and the jaunty Astrachan cap cocked to one side. And there, too, marches his wife; boots laced high, bodice bright and abbreviated, petticoats short and broad and covered by a wide-bordered apron, her arms bare to the shoulders, and her headdress of white linen very starchy and stiff. Sometimes one passes wearing a hat that suggests Spain, but he, too, as they all do, wears the tight trousers and the close-fitting knee boots. In time one learns to distinguish the Slovaks and Moravians by their long, sleeveless white coats, tight blue trousers, and white jackets with lapels and cuffs embroidered in red.

One hears many interesting things about these peasants. Throughout the year, it is said, they fare frugally on black bread and a cheese made of sheeps’ milk, to which is added an occasional trout from the mountain streams. The great age some of them attain speaks well for the diet. Strangers who go up into the hills to stalk chamois and have a go at the big game come back with surprising stories of the inherited deference that is still paid in the country to caste. They will tell you that the peasant still kisses the hand of the lord of the soil. The Praguer thinks highly of his country brother, though he finds a vast amusement in observing his rustic antics when he comes to town on St. John Nepomuc’s Day and shuffles about the streets, wide-eyed and gaping, after the manner of rus in urbe the world over.

Curious stories are told of peasant customs. Christmas is their day of days, and preparations for its proper observance are made long in advance. They believe it to be a season when evil spirits are powerless to injure and may even be made to aid. When the great day arrives, the cottages are scrupulously cleaned, fresh straw laid on the earthen floor, and the entire household assembled for a processional round of the outbuildings. In the course of this ceremonial parade, beans are carefully dropped into cracks and chinks of the buildings, with elaborate incantations for protection against fires. Bread and salt are offered to every animal on the place. The unmarried daughters are sprinkled with honey-water to insure them faithful and sweet-natured husbands. The family drink of celebration is the plum-distilled slivovitz.

What effective use the great national composers of Bohemia—Smetana, Dvorak, and Fibich—have made of the native melodies and costumes! Smetana, a friend and protégé of Liszt,—the master utilizer of Hungarian folk-themes,—was determined that Bohemia, too, should have music of a distinctively national character; and in his eight operas and six symphonic poems, as well as in his beautiful stringed quartette, the “Carnival of Prague,” he abundantly realized his ambition. There is no more popular opera played in Prague to-day than his “Bartered Bride.” One hears a great deal of Smetana in talking with the people of this city; of his poverty and[131] sadness, his final deafness, and of how, when fame at last crowned him so completely, he was dying in an asylum here. Music is a favorite topic of conversation in Prague. A violin player in one of the local theatre orchestras was no less a person than the great Dvorak, a pupil of Smetana’s; and he, too, added to Bohemian musical glory with his Slavonic rhapsodies and dances and the splendid overture that he constructed on the folk-melody “Kde Domov Muj.” There was a sort of Bach-like foundation for all these composers in the early litanies of the talented Bishop of Prague. The Czech temperament finds its natural expression in music. It is even insisted that their most popular movement, the polka, was invented by a Bohemian servant girl.

Certainly there has been no lack of beautiful legendary material on which to construct effective compositions. These traditional stories are all full of sadness and superstition, and they always revolve about simple, natural elements—the rain, the mountains, the valleys, ghosts, and wild hunters, and, above all, that most recurrent and universal of themes, love.

Could we win favor with some old Praguer this afternoon and entice him into the sunny corner of Karl IV’s monument place, beside the bridge, we should close out our hour with many a captivating and romantic story that would alone have made our visit well worth while. Such, for example, is the legend of the “Spinning Girl.” Deserted by her lover, she wove a wonderful shroud[132] threaded with moonbeams, and in this she was buried, and by its magic she appeared to him on his wedding night and lured him to leap to his death in the river. And there is the story of the “Wedding Shirt”: A girl implores the Virgin either to let her die or restore her absent lover who, unknown to her, has been dead some time. The Virgin bows from the holy picture, and forthwith the pallid lover appears and conducts his sweetheart by a midnight journey to the spot where his body lies buried. Thereupon ensues a desperate struggle by fiends and ghouls to capture the soul of the girl, who is finally rescued by the interposition of the Virgin to whom in her terror she appeals. The wedding shirts that she had brought as her bridal portion are found scattered in fragments by the sinister spirits on the surrounding graves. The flight of the maid and her ghostly lover is vividly depicted at length, and is expressed, in translation, by such lurid lines as—

One of the most romantic of these legends is the “Golden Spinning-Wheel.” A king loses his way while hunting and stops for a drink at a peasant’s cottage. There he finds a marvelously beautiful girl, to whom he eagerly offers himself in marriage. This girl is an orphan, with a stepmother and stepsister who are cruel and jealous. Under pretense of accompanying her to the[133] king’s castle they lure her into a black forest and slay her, taking great pains to conceal her identity by removing and carrying with them her eyes, hands, and feet. They then proceed to the castle and the wicked daughter successfully impersonates the good one, whom she closely resembles. Seven days of wedding festivities ensue, at the end of which the king is called away to the wars. In the mean while a mysterious hermit—a heavenly messenger in disguise—takes up the dead body in the forest, dispatches his lad to the castle and secures the eyes, hands, and feet by bartering for them a golden spinning-wheel, a golden distaff, and a magic whirl. Thus equipped, he miraculously restores the girl to life and limb. When the king returns from the wars he invites his false bride to spin for him with her new golden wheel, and forthwith the magic instrument sings aloud the whole miserable story. The furious king rushes to the forest, finds his real sweetheart, and installs her in his castle, while the murderers are mutilated as she had been, and cast to the wild wolves.

It may be thought that I have gone somewhat out of my allotted way in taking such notice as I have of the superstitions, customs, and music passion of the Bohemians, but I cannot believe that a satisfactory idea of Prague can be had in this, or any other hour, without some conception of the fundamental traits that so powerfully sway this people. For the real significance of the city lies deeper than its surface-showing of wooded[134] hillsides sown with quaint buildings and a broad blue river rushing under many bridges; it is its peculiar raciness of the soil that underlies the Czech’s mad devotion to his capital. Expressing, as only Prague does, so much that is dear and beautiful to him, it centres in itself the most burning and passionate interests of the race. Without some knowledge of this desperate attachment one would fail utterly to grasp the force and truth of such a fine observation as Mr. Arthur Symons has made on the devotion of the Bohemian to this city: “He sees it, as a man sees the woman he loves, with her first beauty; and he loves it, as a man loves a woman, more for what she has suffered.”

Nurtured in the salt sadness of the sea, Scheveningen is a Whistler nocturne. Its prevailing and distinctive tones are neutral and elusive. There are, of course, days when the sun is as clear and powerful here as elsewhere, but more often it is obscured; then the sky becomes pearly, the sea opalescent, the shore drab and dun. Presently a thin fog drifts in, or vapors steal over the trees from the inland marshes, and all tints are rapidly neutralized into a common dimness of that vague and sentimental mistland so dear to the heart of the painter. This is the characteristic suspended color note of the average day at Scheveningen. It harmonizes to perfection with the sentiment of the environment and invests the region with a marvelous charm—peculiar, distinctive, and of the finest dignity.

The power of Scheveningen’s attraction, the force of its appeal, lies largely in its grim aloofness and self-sufficiency. It is unsympathetic, discouraging. It consistently dominates its visitors, and, indeed, with an easy insolence and indifference. Wealth and fashion may abide with it for a few days, under tolerance, but[138] the impression of the temporary and migratory character of their sojourn is always present. Undistracted, the fierce and gaunt sea assails the stark and surly shore, and the grim fishermen stand by and have their toll of both. Of the presence of the strangers they are all but unaware. In a brief day the incongruous invaders will have gone, but this relentless warfare will continue unabated. All the way from Helder to the Hook glistening seas will hiss over the flat beaches, snarling and biting at the shoulders of the dunes. All through the long, bitter winter, without an instant’s intermission, the struggle will go on. It is, consequently, of the very heart of the charm of the place that one has the feeling of intruding on battle; of tolerated propinquity to Titanic contenders.

Loafing at Scheveningen is the apotheosis of idleness. The strong wind stimulates, the broad beaches delight, the solemn sea inspires. To this must be added the sense of strong contrasts. It emphasizes the impression of having dropped, for a time, out of the familiar monotony of Life’s treadmill; of being away from home; of both resting and recreating. It is present to the eyes in the eloquent disproportion between the vast Kurhaus and the diminutive homes of the villagers; in the incongruity of Parisian finery invading the savage haunts of the gull and the curlew. In the novel and bizarre activities of the fisher-folk, as in their theatrical surroundings as well, one finds just the right touch of the[139] picturesque and the unfamiliar to complete the full realization of dolce far niente.

Of the fabled monsters of the wild North Sea the imaginative man will believe he sees one certain survivor in that languid sea-serpent of a pier—the “Jetée Königin Wilhelmina”—that stretches its delicate length a quarter mile over the waves from off the drab sand dunes of Scheveningen. Its pavilion-crowned head snuggles flatly on the water. In the afternoon and evening, when its orchestra is playing, one fancies the monster is actually singing. At five o’clock, precisely, we have its last drowsy utterance as it drops off into a three-hours’ nap—quite as Fafner, in the opera, yawns at Alberich and mutters “lasst mich schlafen!” It must be admitted it is a highly pleasing song he sings,—a Waldteufel waltz, more than likely,—and we come in time to recognize in it the closing number of the matinée musicale. And then, like Jonah’s captor, he wearies of his living contents; and we see them emerge by hundreds, scathless and unafraid, gay with parasols and immaculate of raiment, and pick their way leisurely along his back until they have rejoined their friends in the voluble company that crowds the cafés of the Kurhaus. In a moment more the abandoned monster is fast asleep; which, by a familiar association of ideas, is a sign to the multitudes on the beaches that surf-bathing ends in just one hour.

Forthwith, there is a great bustling all along the[140] shore side of the broad boulevard they call the “Standweg.” Bathers pick themselves up regretfully from sunbaths in the soft, powdery sand and trot down for a final dip in the surf, and those already in hasten to convert pleasure into work with increased energy and enthusiasm. To all such the implacable watchman shall come within the hour and beckon them out with stern and remorseless gestures, and the curious little wagons they call bath-cars will engulf each in turn and trundle them up out of the water, while the nervous old women who look after the bathing-suits will hover about with anxious eyes and lay violent hands on the dripping and discarded garments.

And now a tremendous clamor arises from all the little Holland children, who, from early morning, have been indulging the national instinct for dike-building and surrounding their mothers’ beach-chairs with scientific sand-bulwarks against the imaginary encroachments of the sea. For lo! their nurses approach, wonderful in white streamers and golden head-ornaments, and visions of the odious ante-prandial toilet rise like North Sea fogs in every youngster’s eye until even dinner itself appears abhorrent. Vagabond jugglers run through their final tricks, fold their carpets and steal away. Itinerant peddlers redouble their efforts and retire disgusted or jubilant as Fortune may have hidden or shown her face. More than ever does the sea front take on the appearance of a long apiary, with[141] the hundreds of tall, shrouded beehives of beach-chairs emptying themselves of their comfortable occupants and being bundled by bee-men in white linen to safety for the night. And of all the odd sights of Scheveningen certainly no other will remain longer in mind than this curious, huddled colony of beach-chairs. What a pleasing and cheerful spectacle! Thronging the shore for quite a mile they contribute to the local picture decidedly its most jolly and fantastic feature. Between the beach-chairs and the boulevard there is a picket line of prim little peaked white tents, with the top of each precisely matching all the others in an edging of stiff, woodeny scallops; now that the flaps are thrown back and the sides rolled up, we see tables and chairs inside, with evidence of recent and jovial occupancy.

To the eye of a man taking his comfort at the pretty little Café de la Plage on the Kurhaus terrace, all this bustle and late afternoon animation is bound to prove decidedly diverting. The broad, paved plazas that lie like carpets between him and the dunes are steadily filling with a considerable proportion of the thirty thousand Hollanders and Germans who summer here, and acquaintances are exchanging civilities and joining and taking leave of little groups in a way to make the general picture a brilliant, restless, and bewildering interweaving of color. As the open-air tables are filling, the activity of the waiters approaches hysteria, and the verandas and saloons of the ponderous Kurhaus[142] begin to hum with the advent of the evening guests. Copies of “Le Courrier de Schéveningue” pass from hand to hand as the curious scan the lists of the latest arrivals or look over the various musical programmes of the evening. Out on the terraces, the ornate little newspaper kiosks attract groups of loiterers and gradually take on the character of social centres, and as these companies increase, one thinks of stock exchanges and the rallying about the trading standards. The matinée at the Seinpost concludes and out troops its audience to swell the human high tide. Bright bits of color are afforded by the blue uniforms and yellow facings of Holland infantrymen dotted here and there in the press. It is odd to see the usually arid and monotonous dunes grow brilliant with an artificial blossoming of fashionable millinery, where by nature there is nothing better than a scraggy growth of stringy heather, a little rosemary and broom, or the dry stem of the “miller.”

It is at this hour, when “the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,” that the stolid natives array themselves and sally forth, like Delft tiles come to life, to the amused amazement of the visitors. Your Scheveningen man is wont to go about his duties, during the day, flopping vigorously in vivid red knickerbockers, voluminous as sails and quite as crudely patched; but when he makes a point of toilet he appears in gray homespun, the knickerbockers cut from the same pattern as the red ones, but there is a jacket closed up to the chin with[143] two rows of large buttons, a red handkerchief twisted about the neck, a small cap with a glazed peak, and, of course, the wooden klompen. Such a display richly deserves attention, but what can the poor man expect when his wife appears in her full regalia! She, too, is shod with klompen,—though you have to take that on faith in view of the dozen or two of petticoats that balloon above them,—and her waist is a gay butterfly of variegated embroidery, while her headgear is about the most incredible thing conceivable. You might, at a distance, mistake them for bishops with their mitres tilted back at a rakish angle. Nor is it always of the one pattern. Usually it is a sort of long white cap of linen, embroidered at the edges; and the wearer adds a touch of coquetry in the shape of a long curl hanging at either side. But not infrequently you see a formidable contrivance of vastly more consequence; it consists, first, of a skullcap of polished gold or silver, technically known as a hoofdijzer, pierced at the top for ventilation and cut to leave room for the exposure of the forehead, and over this is drawn an elaborate cape of lace, with gold ornaments of spirals and squares dangling over the ears. This triumph of millinery never fails to elicit cries of delight from feminine visitors, or to set mere man to chuckling. It is most likely to form a part of the impressive gear of the nurses from the provinces, who have more money for such uses than the wives of the fishermen; and the things that are told to newcomers[144] as to the significance of this or that ornament is the boldest advantage ever taken of innocent credulity. They undertook to tell me that you could distinguish between married, single, and engaged women by glancing at the ornaments—I wonder if you can! It is said that parents present their daughters with this headdress on the day of their confirmation; and that it is a fine sight to behold the array of them at kermesstime with their wearers, six or eight abreast, arm in arm, rushing down the streets in the odd dances peculiar to those festivals, droning monotonous tunes.

To my way of thinking the unflagging industry of the Scheveningen women is a matter of quite as much note. One seldom sees them without their knitting, even when they are recreating, and as they stroll along, laughing and chatting together, their fingers, all unnoticed by them, are flashing with extraordinary speed like things of an independent volition. Many of the women wear no sleeves and take great pride in their strong, round arms; and this, I am told, is the case even in winter when they are cracked and purple from exposure to the cold.

The faces of the elder fisher-folk are studies in wrinkles. Their eyes are brave and quizzical, but with a certain settled hardness, not perhaps to be unlooked-for in men and women who come of a stock that for five hundred years has forced even the savage North Sea to yield them a livelihood. They show next to nothing of humor,[145] but rather a stern and weary hopelessness. Strong faces are these, hard, weather-beaten faces, but eloquent of tenacity and desperate courage. They have been called “the most poetic and original of all Hollanders.” They are grave, dignified, and self-reliant; and as they pass you by they show their invariable courtesy in a bow and a quiet “Goe ’n Dag.” One has only to see them to feel the propriety and justification of the boast in their national song:—

Fishermen naturally suggest ships, and if you glance down the beach you will usually see several of them drawn up to the edge of the water, with the red, white, and blue of Holland at the masthead. During the mid-summer season the fishing-fleet is away on the cruise for red herring off the coasts of Scotland, but there are always a few that could not get away, and so we have the famous Scheveningen bom on its native strand. How the artists have delighted in these lumbering, flat-bottomed tubs, ponderous of mast and weathered of sail! Mesdag, Maris, Alfred Stevens, and the rest have familiarized the world with this fantastic and picturesque craft. Who would buy a painting of Scheveningen unless it showed a bom or two hauled up on the beach? And that is precisely the raison d’ être of the bom—it can be hauled up on the beach. Otherwise,[146] what should a Scheveningen fisherman do with a boat, having no deep-water harbor at hand nor anchorage facility? There have, through the centuries, been many other styles of Dutch fishing-boats,—busses, loggers, hookers, sloops, pinken, etc.,—and at times, when the forehanded Hollanders have made away with the lion’s share of the foreign catch, outsiders have lost patience and classed them all as “Dutch toads”; but there have been no boms but Scheveningen boms. Nowadays they have had to build them larger and they do not beach so easily, and it is probably only a matter of time when steam vessels will supplant them altogether; but when that evil hour strikes the chiefest picturesque glory of this little village will have forever departed.

There used to be vast excitement, in the old days, over the first herring catch of the season, and it was always hurried ashore and conveyed to the king’s table with no end of flourish and punctilio. Over at Vlaardingen they used to post a watchman on the church tower, and when he made out the first boat coming in he would hoist a blue flag and all the people trooped joyfully down to the wharves shouting a song called “De Nieuwe Haring.” Scheveningen, indeed, still presents one of its most picturesque scenes when the returning fishermen arrive and their catch is auctioned off, down the beach near the lighthouse, with much more of gusto and excitement than you would imagine these phlegmatic people could muster. The shrewd Scheveningen[147] fishermen have learned how to eke out the bare three hundred florins they realize from a year’s fishing by turning new tricks in the way of rope-spinning, sail-making, ship-building, and curing and smoking the herring. The fish go into this latter process as “steur haring” and emerge as “bokking”—if that means anything to anybody!

The long-beaked curlew that flashes overhead with hoarse, raucous news of the sea looks down at this hour on pleasant and curious sights as he wings his swift circle above the Scheveningen neighborhood. The placid village of twisted alleys, of innumerable “Tabak te Koop” signs, of queer little gabled houses and unpainted fishermen’s huts, has emptied its good folk into its narrow main street which, fickle of name, starts out as Keizer-Straat, almost immediately becomes Willem-Straat, and within a moment is the Oud-Weg. Here one sees in actual life the fascinating things he has marveled over in the canvases of Teniers, Jan Steen, and Gerard Dou,—good Dutch vrows supper-marketing. There they go, ballooning along, bargaining and bustling from shop to shop, storing capacious hampers with game and cheeses, and every grim line in their faces shouts a challenge to the shopmen to best them by so much as a stuiver if they can. From time to time, quaint little children like sturdy Dutch toys escape from the press and clatter off home, with an air of vast responsibility, hugging in both arms a brown loaf of bread a yard long.[148] How it recalls the bright pages of “Hans Brinker”; and as you catch a glimpse of the broad canal down the street it is natural enough to speculate upon the probability of Gretel’s winning another pair of silver skates before you get back to Scheveningen next summer.

In the meadows back of the village women in blue shawls are drying and mending fishing-nets, nor do they so much as raise their heads as the yellow, double-decked tramway car rumbles past on its trip to The Hague. If all seats are occupied the car will display a large sign marked “Vol,” and rattle along oblivious to appeals from any and all who ask to get on. It is but three scant miles to the beautiful capital of Holland and the tramway makes it in ten minutes—a notable concession by leisurely Holland to the time-saving spirit of the age, in view of other days when they devoted a half-hour to making the same journey by canal barge. The broad, smooth highway that the yellow car follows is, as every one knows, one of the favorite roads of Europe. As the curlew looks down, between five and six o’clock of any bright summer afternoon, he is sure to find it thronged with handsome equipages and to see gay companies in each little wayside inn that peeps out from the deep shade of the noble trees. The desired touch of the foreign and unusual is supplied to the visitor in the scores of heavy carts drawn by frisking, barking dogs; in the ever-present windmills beating the air with long, awkward arms; and in dozens of storks that cock their wise[149] heads over the edges of their nests and regard the passing show with philosophic amusement, patient as the old apple-women of Amsterdam.

The Scheveningen Bosch is one of the most delightful woods imaginable. It is national property, and no private park could be more beautifully kept up. A ball would roll with perfect smoothness down its driveways of crushed gravel, and even Ireland would be taxed to equal the vivid greenness of its lawns. This whole fair forest is studded with villas of the aristocracy and even of royalty. Their wide verandas and orchards and flowery lawns move the most contented to envy a Hollander the comfort he takes in his zomerhuis. To know the Bosch rightly it must be walked through; and the more leisurely and the oftener, the better. It is not only a lovely woodland set with charming homes, but everything a fine forest should be. The green and coppery beeches, the hardy oaks and elms, and the living embroidery of bright flowers perfume the air with delicate odors; and the wind in the lofty tops makes sweet and haunting music. Deep down in the clear mirror of the canals, splotches of broad leaf shadows lazily float and dapple like drowsy fishes. Through the deep foliage you catch occasional glimpses of open, sunny meadows, with cows contentedly grazing; and you come to revel in every vague and tranquil sensation.

In the midst of this beautiful forest, two centuries and a half ago, the best-beloved and most widely read of[150] Holland’s poets—the venerable Jacob Cats—composed his madrigals and moral fables, and so passed the last eight years of his eventful career. Rembrandt loved and painted him, and a monument stands to his memory in his native town of Brouwershaven. They say his books are in every peasants’ hut and his verses in every peasant’s heart. His cottage was at Zorgvliet, a few steps from Scheveningen, near where the Queen Mother now has her summer home, and there in the garden of the Café de la Promenade they will show you the old stone table at which he wrote, with the hole he cut in it for his inkstand.

Wild game throng the wooded inner dunes. Partridges, hares, and rabbits abound in the underbrush, and the polder meadows yield the finest grade of mallard ducks. The pines and firs are resonant with the calls of cuckoos, pheasants, and nightingales. Farmers clear patches of ground to serve as finch flats, which they call vinkie baans; and there, in the autumn, they snare chaffinches which they sell for a cent apiece, to be used as a garnishment in serving other game.

As you look out across the Scheveningen dunes and watch the day declining, stirring thoughts come trooping to mind of the gallant scenes these bleak shores have witnessed. Off yonder, two centuries and a half ago, fell the brave Tromp, hero of thirty-three sea fights. On the bridge of his lofty-sterned Brederode he died, as every true warrior longs to die, in the foremost thick of[151] the fray. “I am done; but keep up a good heart,” were his last words as they carried him into his cabin. Next day they brought his body to these shores and bore it away to lie in the old gray church at Delft beside the revered William the Silent. “The bravest are the tenderest,” and his war-hardened sailors were not ashamed to weep as heartily for him as the little children, fifty years before, had wept in the streets for the great William. Half a dozen years later a shouting multitude thronged this beach and waved a bon voyage to Charles II of England as he sailed homeward to his recovered throne, to restore a licentious court and renew such royal revels as had already cost England a revolution. Another dozen years roll around, and Scheveningen looks on while the fleets of France and England are battered to wreckage by the cannon of Holland’s pet hero, the intrepid De Ruyter. A century or so more, and once again this village is the storm centre of Holland’s hopes and fears as William Frederick I eludes the pursuing French troops and a little Scheveningen fishing-smack bears the whole royal family away in safety to Germany. And when he came back in triumph, twenty years later, it was at Scheveningen that he landed, and at the very spot where yonder gray obelisk now stands in commemoration.

And now through chilly mists the sun, a vast bloated orange, settles down into the glowing wastes of the desolate North Sea. The roaring surf spreads glittering[152] carpets far up the beach. It has suddenly become a region of placid power and glory, something quite other than the fabled home of monsters and terrors, of tempest and shipwreck. That vessel in the offing, with the black hull and the crimson sails, may be the very Flying Dutchman’s own; but still you would like to be on it and so much nearer the sinking sun. The sky is astounding; like a glorified Holland! There you see cloud-islands more wonderful than Walcheren; gray wastes that beggar the Zuyder Zee; sky dunes that stretch beyond Helder or the Hook; meadows more gorgeous than the tulip fields of Haarlem; celestial flora more pure and palpitating than any fairest, faintest bloom in any rarest, dimmest glade throughout the whole woodland of The Hague. It is Holland in excelsis.

While the sun is still sinking behind the Potsdam hills that victorious old Fighting Fritz loved so well, and the hero himself, astride his bronze charger, in cloak and cocked hat in the statue group on the Linden, seems riding slowly home to his neighboring palace with the lengthening shadows, the vast industrial army of the German capital issues in myriad units from its individual barracks and debouches on the spacious squares and broad avenues in quest of the evening’s diversions. It is the lull hour. The long, hard day’s work over, the amusements of the night are shortly to begin. In this pleasant interval the bustling, aggressive city seems pervaded with a spirit of relaxation, and no more opportune moment presents for catching the Berliner off his guard and really seeing him as his intimates know him.

This man, it should be borne in mind, is a type unto himself. The light-hearted Rhinelander, the solemn Bavarian, and the plodding, self-reliant Saxon are only half-brothers to the energetic, systematic, masterful Prussian whose most boisterous and irrepressible development is the Berliner. He plays as hard as he works,[156] yielding to none in the thoroughness of either. He has a strong individuality, but with something of coarseness in feeling. He is enormously self-assertive, indefatigable, and patient, but scratch through his veneer of culture and you find a basis that is rude and often boorish. His optimism is sublime and his spirits correspondingly high. At work he is engrossed and determined, but when it is laid aside for the day he enters as eagerly upon his pastimes; and it is then one finds him witty and merry to a degree, but, at times, with the loudness and ostentation of a mischievous, unruly schoolboy. He is the sort of man that has a great time in zoölogical gardens, and goes picnicking in his best clothes. Intellectually, he is still as Buckle described him in the “History of Civilization in Europe,” the foremost man in the world when he is a scholar and the most ordinary in the main. Europeans dub him “a practical hedonist”; in America we should refer to him as “rough and ready.”

As soon as supper is over these joyous and virile people display their primitive scorn of roofs and flock into the open for fun and frolic; yet supper, itself, has been one of Gargantuan proportions at which an observer, recalling Rabelais, might well have trembled for palmers in the cabbage. From the four quarters they gather in force to hang about the fountains in the roomy squares or loaf on the Linden benches until the call of the concert-hall or the comfortable, tree-shaded beer-garden allures to those bibulous indulgences that old Tacitus,[157] eighteen centuries ago, noted as peculiarly their own. For silent now are the forges and furnaces of Spandau, the clothing Fabriks of the northeast suburbs, the factories of the east end, and all the skilled industries of the south. The artist colony of Moabit may no longer complain of drilling regiments, and the mammoth business blocks they call Höfe have swelled the throng of clerks on Friedrich and Leipziger Strassen. All have supped; and merchant and laborer fare forth en famille to take the evening air.

With what heartiness and placidity does this multitude enjoy its ease! It is a trick your highstrung peoples beyond the borders can never get the hang of. It calms one merely to look on at the contentment and satisfaction with which they stroll slowly and merrily along, chattering animatedly in their deep guttural speech, and greeting friends with punctilious bows and infinite hat-raisings. With every other word they “bend their backs and they bow their heads,” like the celebrated character of “Dorothy.” There is an agreeable absence of rush and hurry. Ponderous and massive, but with an erectness bred of military training, they wear their sombre, loose-fitting clothes with palpable relish, for comfort and inconspicuousness are virtues of price with the Teuton. The stately gnädige Frau treads heavily in rustling silk, the mincing Fräulein favors ribbons and flounces, and mein Sohn is dapper in a tight suit, lavender gloves, and the indispensable little cane. Chaperons, of course,[158] abound; for if a young man were to walk abroad alone with an unmarried girl in Berlin he would be consigning her at once to a plane with the painted nymphe de pavé.

The surroundings are animated. Motor-cars roll sedately along with the least din possible and with scrupulous regard for speed limits, and a prodigious assortment of cheap and comfortable Droschke cabs hovers expectantly about with their drivers decked out in long coats and patent-leather hats. From time to time an officer in brilliant uniform or a diplomat in severe black, with a row of orders across his breast, posts past hurriedly to dine out in formal state; and with knowledge of the terrifying discomfort of a German social function comes confidence that most of them look from their smart broughams with profound envy at the jovial, care-free crowds that are so boisterously happy along the way.

The visitor, who is struggling with an uncomfortable suspicion that he may be missing something in the other two rings of the circus, might do well to climb the Kreuzberg and take the whole show in like a map. He has probably already learned that although the city lies prostrate on a level sandy plain as guiltless of a hill as a billiard table, yet the indomitable Berliner has repaired this oversight of nature by himself building a fine little mountain at a convenient spot due south. That is one of the advantages in rearing your own hills—you can have them where you want them.

In the sullen red of the dying day one beholds from[159] the battlements of the Kreuzberg’s Gothic tower a monster plain, twenty-five miles in an irregular circle, smothered in house-tops, and barred and seamed with an intricate entanglement of carefully made streets. He sees parks and squares in surprising profusion, and an abundance of foliage in spite of the sand; and there is a sluggish river winding a serpentine course, a Ringbahn encircling the suburbs, an elevated road that dives underground and becomes a subway, and surface lines without number. One could fancy a great cross in the centre of the city, whose upright is the long Friedrichstrasse and whose broad crosspiece is the splendid Unter den Linden. The last rays of the sun gild the roofs and spires of each of the “town districts,” which the Prussian Diet has recently merged into a Greater Berlin of four million souls—Wilmersdorf, whose “millionaire peasants” became rich overnight by selling their lands to speculators; Charlottenburg the Pampered, that has increased tenfold in thirty years; Rixdorf the Prosperous; and Schöneberg the Renowned—which is well worth a sentimental journey to the graves of the Brothers Grimm under the cypresses of St. Matthew’s Cemetery, if only out of gratitude for the familiar versions of “Cinderella,” “Tom Thumb,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and so many others of our childhood’s companions. The sunset glory falls where glory is due—on a region at our feet of ancient martial fame; the little village that the Knights Templar held for centuries, and the broad[160] Tempelhofer Feld,—Prussian drill-ground for two hundred years,—whither all Berliners turn holiday-faces when the Kaiser reviews the Guards in spring and autumn, and journey cockishly homeward when the show is over, “snapping their fingers at the foeman’s taunts.”

In every section that the Kreuzberg looks down upon, and still farther away under the fading western skies, pleasant signs of recreation abound. The Linden overflows, the lesser streets are swollen streams, and every open square is a ruffled lake of leisurely humanity. A strong tide of loiterers sets through the most popular of Berlin’s breathing-places—the stately Tiergarten—and ripples there about the bases of statues and monuments, the marble settles of the Sieges-Allée, and the sculptured benches of the Anlagen of the Brandenburg Gate. There is the usual deep eddy before the graceful statue of the adored Queen Louise, which is half-buried in flowers by a grateful people every March 10. The bridle-paths teem with lines of aristocratic riders, with possibly the Kaiser himself among them. Indeed, no other part of the city may compare with the Tiergarten at this hour, so beautiful is it in turf and tree and so delightful in heavy fragrance. No wonder that Berliners have so long regarded it as the best last glimpse of life—to fight duels in by dawn in other days, and to take their own lives in now.

All Berlin is now out of doors. The millionaires of the exclusive Tiergarten purlieus are cooling themselves in[161] their villa gardens, and the middle-class man is beaming at the band at the Zoo, where the restaurant-terraces are overflowing into the flowered walks among the trees. There is a boisterous coterie of shouting children to every prim fountain in the prim squares. Out under the pines and cypresses of Grunewald crowds returning from the races are gazing admiringly at the pretty white villas that rim the verges of the placid forest lakes; and others are turning aside for the spectacular amusements of Luna Park. At Steglitz the bicycle races are ending and merrymakers are swarming into the Botanic Gardens to marvel over the cacti and palms of the long hot-houses. Capital boating is in progress on the Spree, and sailing at Wannsee, and steamer trips all through the suburbs. Bands are crashing in the noisy penny-shows of the tumultuous Zeltern; they are having beer in crowded Weinhandlungen, chocolate at dainty Conditoreien, and much besides in the jolly Vienna cafés that open out invitingly to the street. In every part of the city rise music and laughter and the sound of early revelry in pretty, tree-shaded summer gardens. It is an audible expression of the Berliners’ joy of living—their cherished Lebensfreude.

Could we rise with Zeppelin we should find it the same now at Charlottenburg, and over at Potsdam. Charlottenburg the Prosperous is having its serene and dignified companies sauntering in quiet evening talk along the broad, handsome streets. The gay are at the lively[162] Orangerie, the philosophic in the trim, pert little parks, and the sentimental among the flaming roses and fragrant trellises of the charming Palace Garden. In solemn and conscious superiority the great Technical High School and famed Reichanstalt shroud their learned cornices in the gloaming of tree-tops, and that chiefest mecca of all, the royal mausoleum, embowers its gleaming marble walls in heavy shrubbery at the bottom of its avenue of pines. No loiterer, you may be sure, but thinks reverently of the recumbent snowy effigies of the dead rulers that lie in the hushed gloom of that dim interior.

Potsdam, Germany’s Versailles, steeped in the melancholy beauties of the Havelland pine forests, redolent of old Frederick the Great and his dream of an earthly Sans Souci, thinks nothing of drawing Berliners twenty miles to its twilight peace and calm. Exuberance tempers to the dignity and beauty of those parks and palaces where the Kaiser has his favorite royal seat. Up the broad Hauptweg they stroll by hundreds and gladden their patriotic eyes with the colonnades, porticoes, and statues of the vast New Palace that proved to the foes of defiant old Fritz that the sturdy warrior was far from bankrupt despite the Seven Years’ War. Nor do they forget that it was here the late emperor, beloved “Unser Fritz,” learned how

The classic Town Palace of Potsdam is receiving its compliments, as usual, and no less the artistic Lustgarten, opulent in marbles and fountains; and many will be wandering even out to the cool and spacious park that lies about the charming Babelsberg Château. But old Frederick remains the local hero, and there is sure to be a crowd at the venerable lime-tree where petitioners used to stand to catch the eye of the king, and a kind of procession will be passing reverently before the garrison church, where lie his remains in the vault before which Napoleon outdid himself in eulogy the while he pilfered the old warrior’s sword. And the leaping column of the Great Fountain will be the centre of an admiring throng, and scores will be going up and down the vista of broad stairs and fruited terraces that lead to the long, low palace of Sans Souci. As to the latter, a stranger might be pardoned if he were to mistake it for a casino, which it strikingly resembles, with its flat-domed entrance, line of caryatids like pedestal busts, and the row of stone urns on the balustraded top of the façade. At this hour there is no admission, but one may peer through the low French windows and, in fancy, people Voltaire’s room with a miserly ghost of the crafty old philosopher, see him fraternizing and quarreling with the king, imagine a royal soirée in progress with Frederick playing skillfully on the flute, recall the brilliant talk of the Round Table, and think with pity of the cheerless, childless old soldier toiling wearily on those histories that Macaulay[164] praised, and winding his big clock, and yearning all the while to lie buried among his dogs out on the terrace. To many will come visions wrought from the extravagant fiction of Luise Mühlbach. What moral observations and theatrical posings fell to poor Frederick’s lot in her “Berlin and Sans Souci,” sandwiched in among the woeful loves of Amelia and Baron Trenck and of the dancer Barbarina and the High Chancellor’s son! But perhaps such literature helps one to understand the application to Frederick of the celebrated characterization of a very different personage, the “wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind.”

In Berlin proper there are two fine squares that best serve the well-advised as start-and-finish places for the most interesting evening walk to be had in the city—the Lustgarten before the Royal Palace and the Königs-Platz at the Tiergarten corner. By this notable route one arrives, within the smoking of two cigars, at something like an intelligent comprehension of Berlin and Berliners.

The gracious expanse of the Lustgarten is so appealing in the melancholy light of sunset that one almost feels, at the very beginning of the stroll, like going no farther for fear of faring worse, but rather remaining where he is among the trees and fountains and artistic shrubbery and watching the children playing Hashekater around the colossal Granite Basin, or Ringer-Ringer-Rosa at the marble stairs of Frederick William’s lofty statue. Soft[165] splashes of deep colors warm the long rows of blinking windows in the Royal Palace on the left, and flush the domes of the cathedral and the columns of the Old Museum’s Ionic portico. Hundreds of Berliners are idling along the asphalt walks that entice to the Palace Bridge that arches the Spree in a double line of marble groups and so opens up the long, tree-shaded perspective of the Linden. To see it at this hour one would not guess that this fair Lustgarten had once been a neglected palace-close and even a dusty drill-ground; no more than one could believe that the occasional decrepit church or twisting, narrow street in the district in the rear is all that marks antiquity in the whole of the city. For the furious tempo of Berlin’s development has swept everything before it. Three out of every four buildings, all over town, are garishly modern. Indeed, it is all so utterly of the present moment that it is hard to believe that even a group of fishermen’s huts could have stood here beside the Spree so long as seven hundred years ago. Were one to see no more of Germany than its capital he might very easily imagine a Chicago or two somewhere in the empire, but certainly not a Nuremberg.

Sunset imparts an air of cordiality to the ponderous, baroque, seven-hundred-roomed Royal Palace, whose four stories of regular window lines suggest an ornate and elaborate factory that had been diverted from its original purpose by the addition of the chapel dome on[166] the west wing. However, for those who cross its low terrace and enter the sculptured portals there awaits a revelation of pomp and majesty, of throne-room splendors and saloon magnificence, that rivals the best of Versailles and Vienna. Unhappily we cannot here see the windows of the royal family’s apartments, for they are on the second floor of the opposite wing; whence the Kaiser looks out on the Neptune fountain of the Schloss-Platz and the elaborate façade of the royal stables when the purple banner that denotes his presence flies from the palace standard.

In the gloaming the high portico columns, “Lion Killer,” “Amazon,” and shadowy sculptured groups of the vestibule of the classic Old Museum gleam through the dark branches of the trees with charming grace and effectiveness. Not all the imposing galleries on Museum Island, just beyond, can displace this well-beloved old temple of the arts in the affectionate regard of Berliners. The commanding Dom, or cathedral, dominates the Lustgarten and all the city besides, but in the modest and inoffensive manner that is becoming in an architectural débutante of only six seasons—though that is quite long enough for a building to become passé in Berlin. Its granite walls, copper domes, high-vaulted portals, elaborately carved cornices, and profusion of statuary stand out in beautiful relief against the darkness of the trees beyond.

At this hour the sturdy, besculptured Palace Bridge[167] is thronged with loiterers leaning over the broad balustrades to admire the festoons of lichen on the opposite masonry embankment or gaze down into the languid blue Spree. These waters have journeyed wearily all the way from distant Saxony, and with little enough to delight them along the road, excepting, perhaps, the scenes of the romantic and picturesque forest—Venice of Spreewald, where the strange Wendish people in outlandish garb pole flat market-barges through the labyrinth of canals and jabber to each other in a foreign tongue. Even on reaching the capital, the career of the Spree continues uneventful and dejected; and shortly after clearing the city it gives up in discouragement and empties itself into the Havel at Spandau. One finds a pleasant evening-life along its masonry banks, however, in spite of the personal indifference of the stream itself, and sometimes even of a brisk and important nature, thanks to the shipping from the canals. Beside these urban embankments one sees, here and there, a narrow sidewalk between the wall and the houses that instantly recalls the delightful little rivas along the Venice canals. It is interesting to watch the swift, pert little steamers that dash up and down the stream and to take note of the air of bravado with which they plunge under the low bridges. Then, there are the soldiers washing their linen service uniforms on floating docks. But best of all are the canal boats. These invariably have a fat woman at the tiller and an excited dog dancing from end to end,[168] while a sturdy husband propels a snail-like passage by means of a long pole which he sets to his shoulder like a crutch and inserts the other end into niches in the walls and so plods the entire length of the deck, with the boat advancing slowly under his feet.

Entering Unter den Linden from the Schloss-Brücke, the imposing array of splendid public buildings on either hand of the expanding vista suggests the middle of the street as the only adequate viewpoint—and the majority take it, in the evening. The visitor is bound speedily to conclude that, unless it be Vienna, no European city can boast a more beautiful or impressive double line of structures. They have dignity and solidity in appearance, richness and taste in decoration, and spaces to stand in of princely proportions. The agreeable effect of shade trees has been freely made use of, and on all sides one sees that profusion of sculpture and statuary in which Berlin is as rich as London, for example, is poor. As if impressed with such surroundings, the evening crowds move along slowly and observantly, looking up admiringly at the dark gray fronts—the statue-set façade of the Arsenal, the stately palaces of Crown Prince and Crown Princess, the Opera House, the rococo Royal Library, and the palace of old Emperor William I, from whose famous corner window the conqueror of Sedan used to look out affectionately on the street life of his people. With no less of satisfaction must the old emperor have looked over the heads of the crowds[169] at the University across the way—the proper toast of all Germany. One notes its open square and wide triple story and thinks of the ripe scholarship suggested by the surrounding statues of its savants, Helmholtz, Mommsen, Treitschke, and the great William and Alexander von Humboldt, whose ashes lie out at Tegel under Thorwaldsen’s beautiful “Hope.” Here six hundred teachers and ten thousand students work in the inspiring memory of such masters as these, and of such others as Fichte and Hegel and Schelling. From contemplations over the intellectual achievements of Prussia one turns to martial glory in the form of Rauch’s immortal equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, about which the crowds are now swarming, and observes the hero’s head cocked in characteristic defiance and his hand lightly resting on the hilt of his ready sword. Berliners make great ado in studying and identifying the numerous eminent men of that period whose reliefs are exquisitely executed on the four sides of the lofty pedestal.

And now we pass under the limes and chestnuts of the five-streeted Linden, keeping to the broad gravel promenade in the centre where the children play all day and their parents fill the benches half the night. On its outer streets one may see the finest hotels, theatres, cafés, and shops of the city. It is amusing to watch the people at this hour, in settling their arrangements for the evening, cluster about the poster pillars that they call[170] “Litfassäulen,” and the newspaper kiosks, scanning announcements and theatre bills. Familiar to them, but suggestive to a stranger, are the iron standards at important street intersections supporting placards of the red cross of the hospital boards to indicate the locations of emergency surgeons, who are always on the spot. You may rest on a Linden bench a moment, if you like, but expect thrifty Berlin to tax you for it; and read carefully the conspicuous placards, so redolent of this systematic city, to learn just where you may sit; for some are “reserved for women,” some for “nurses with children,” others for “adults,” and what remain for mere “men.”

But the well-advised will break the walk when they reach the corner of Friedrichstrasse for a few minutes of refreshments at the celebrated Café Bauer, where open house is held for all the world, and where you may take your ease under the frescoes of Anton Werner, or, at a balcony table, look down on the cosmopolitan congestion of the streets and observe ladies having ices across the way at Kranzler’s after the fatigue of shopping at Tietz’s or Wertheim’s.

The animated scenes of the Café Bauer are those of busy restaurants the world over, with the possible difference that Berliners make more of café life than many others, as being an institution essential to temperaments that crave social diversion, simple enjoyment and friendliness. So we hear much laughter and find the air vital[171] with the vociferous rumbling thunder of this deep-lunged speech, and with continual explosions of “So!” and “Ach!” and “Ja wohl!” and “Bitte!” and “Entschuldigen!” and “Wunderschön!” and, especially, “Prosit!” There is an incessant clamoring for waiters by handclaps and shouts of “Kellner!” to which those distracted functionaries respond with “Augenblick!”—“in a wink of the eye,”—and dash off in haste, to return at leisure. The gold that falls in Trinkgeld passes belief; but tipping is like breathing all over Berlin. It is said that the head waiters pay handsomely for the positions. You will see few people in the Café Bauer uncompanioned, for sociability is a national characteristic. The man in the corner reading the “Fliegende Blätter” or “Illustrirte Zeitung” or any other of the eleven thousand publications of the city will shortly be joined by some friend for whom he is waiting and raise his voice in the general “Prosit!” chorus. Should you address the waiter in English, you will be answered at once in that language; as you would, for that matter, in any Berlin business house. The formality on every hand, the bowing and eternal thanking, is of the Berliner Berlinesque. It is a trick that is soon picked up, and it is no time at all before you can enter a store with the best of them, remove your hat and wish the clerk “Mahlzeit,” remain uncovered until your purchase is made, again bow and say “Mahlzeit,” replace your hat, and go about your business.

From a balcony table at the Bauer you may study, as you elect, the diners within or the crowds without. If it be the latter, you doubtless observe at once the extensive presence of the military element that so preëminently dominates the empire. There goes a stiff-backed, narrow-waisted, tight-coated officer jangling his sword and fussing at his gloves. His chin is tilted at a supercilious angle and his mustachios are trained to look fierce, like the Kaiser’s. As he approaches a brother officer he begins a salute a quarter-block away and keeps it up as far again after passing. He would perish before he would unbend in public to give the most unofficial of winks at the pretty, barearmed nursemaid who is tripping demurely by, and yet it is whispered that in private “Die Wacht am Rhein” is not the only song he knows. And lo, the humble man of the ranks,—facetiously dubbed “Sandhase,”—who is saluting and “goose-stepping” to some superior or other the greater part of the time. You perceive him now to be roaming about with evident relish; and a familiar bit of local color is the dark blue tunic and gray trousers and the brass-bedecked leather helmet with its Pickelhaube top spike. You learn to distinguish the corps, in time, by the color of the shoulder knots.

Parenthetically, it will be remembered that these husky fellows are paid just nine cents a day, and out of that go two and a half cents for dinner. Their only free rations are coffee and the famous black bread. They[173] carry their “cash balance” suspended about the neck in a bag, and any time an officer wishes to make sure the “sand-rabbit” has not been squandering his money too fast, he opens the bag at morning inspection and examines the contents. Pay is small, all the way up; a second lieutenant, with heavy and unavoidable social obligations, receives twenty dollars a month—like an American sergeant. Higher officers must live in town and keep their horses. “Marry money” becomes the first requirement of the “silent manual.” But Germany’s exposed borders must be lined with bayonets, and she has not forgotten that the French war cost her a hundred thousand men in killed and wounded; so she maintains an army of a peace-footing strength of six hundred thousand, at a cost of $175,000,000 a year. The “Defenders of the Fatherland” become, in consequence, the pets of the court and the social arbiters of the empire.

On leaving the Bauer it is amusing to dip for a few moments into the tumult of rip-roaring Friedrichstrasse and sweep along with merchants, government clerks, shop girls, artists, soldiers, and all the rest of the jovial, motley company. Out in the middle of the street students go rushing by, boisterously inviting trouble and waving their hats and the husky bludgeons they call canes. Conveyances of all descriptions are coming and going—Droschken, stages, double-decked omnibuses, motor-cars, et al. The corner of Leipzigerstrasse[174] is a whirlpool through which traffic moves like so much drifting pack-ice. Trolley cars pass gingerly by to come to a stop at the iron posts marked “Haltestellen.” One notes that the little “isles of safety” in the middle of the street have each its representative of the omnipresent police, dressed up like major-generals in military long coats and nickel-pointed helmets. They could tell you that Leipzigerstrasse is just as crowded all the way to the tumultuous Potsdam Gate, where on each sharp corner of the five radiating streets ponderous hotels project into the maelstrom like pieces of toast on spits. I say the policemen could tell you that, if they wanted to, but the probability is they would only wave excited hands and shout “Verboten!”

And that makes you realize that about everything you want to do in Berlin is forbidden for some reason or other. No yarn of the Mormons ever conveyed an idea of such perpetual, unwinking vigilance as is second nature to this police force. Soon after arriving you become uncomfortably conscious of being secretly and unremittingly watched, but while this rankles for a while you eventually become acclimated, as it were, and pass into a hardened stage of moral irresponsibility where you are scrupulously circumspect and not a little sly. Since the police have elected to play the rôle of your conscience you determine to go about without one, like Peter Schlemihl and his shadow, in the balmy confidence that whatever you are up to must be all right or the[175] authorities would have notified you that it was “verboten” and had you up at headquarters for one of those myriad fines that range from two cents up.

Parenthetically, again, it is the people’s fault. They are government-mad; intoxicated with bureaucracy. Not for all the gold reserve at Spandau would they abate one jot of this supervision. There is a law for everything. Some one has said that for every pfennig the German pays in taxes he expects and receives a pfennig’s worth of government. You see it on every hand. Each bus and car is placarded to announce its exact seating capacity, as well as the precise amount of standing-room on the platforms; once that space is occupied it would not stop for you, though you go on your knees. Have you ever taken notice of the little metallic racks at each end of a Berlin street car? That is where you leave the cigar you may be smoking when you enter; putting it anywhere else is absolutely “verboten.” It is the spirit of the time. Berlin is a “touch-the-button” town—a machine-made community of deadly rote and rule. System is the thing. Street numbers have arrows indicating which way they run; letter boxes are cleared every fifteen minutes; a letter goes by the pneumatic Rohrpost with the speed of a telegram; packages are sent by the parcel delivery more quickly and more cheaply than by express; hotels have electric elevators and vacuum cleaning. It is so all over Germany. Who ever sees a picture of Düsseldorf, these days, without a Zeppelin[176] airship in the background? How eloquent it is of the thoroughness of this people whose boastful “Made in Germany” is expressive of the rankest materialism, that their warlike capital should be distinguished for the quality and quantity of its artistic feeling, and excel, besides, in usefulness, as exemplified in scores of museums that are admittedly the most instructive of any in the world.

As the last of daylight disappears, Friedrichstrasse’s shops blaze out brilliantly in every guise of electricity, the present pet scientific rage. The window dressings are highly attractive, but seldom the interiors behind them. Americans are finding home products in the kodak and sewing-machine stores, in penny-in-the-slot establishments, and at alleged American soda-fountains and bars—all displayed for sale in business buildings that are better built than the battlements of Jericho. People need not go out of a single block on Friedrichstrasse to secure every comfort they require, for in so small a space one finds fashionable hotels, hôtels garnis, pensions, or the exemplary hospices affected by ladies traveling alone; where also you may dine at establishments to suit your purse—at extravagant cost, or on the lightest of repasts at a Conditorei, or on a heavy seven-course dinner at a popular restaurant for twenty cents, with a glass of beer in the bargain. One finds the dance halls largely supported by foreigners and tourists, of which latter America sends fully[177] forty thousand annually. It is also speedily apparent that the undertow of the feverish stream brings its wreckage to the surface, where the rouged cheek and carmined lip betray the presence of fiercer kinds of “questing bestes” than ever were recorded in the “Morte d’Arthur.”

Out again under the rustling trees of the Linden one strolls on in increasing delight. In the growing zest of the evening the prosperous crowds toss pfennigs to the begging old “Linden Angels” and patronize the flower-venders and newsboys. Of the Linden’s fivefold boulevard, the outer streets are rumbling with heavy wagons and cabs, the drive with carriages, the bridle-path is lively with belated riders and the broad middle promenade is overflowing with pedestrians. Good Americans, on passing the United States Embassy headquarters, at the corner of Schadowstrasse, raise their hats in a sudden welling of patriotic reverence, and very likely with a wistful sympathy for the heimweh that must frequently oppress the two thousand members of the American colony that tarry in the pleasant environs of Victoria Louise Platz. Diplomats are coming and going on aristocratic Wilhelmstrasse, which sweeps southward at this point, and where the lights are beginning to sparkle before the double line of government department buildings, royal palaces, and foreign embassy houses. The famous palace of mellow gray stone, in which the Iron Chancellor lived and held court like a king in the[178] heyday of his power, shrouds itself proudly in the deep green of its garden of thick shrubbery.

But all this fails to hold the stroller’s attention when he glances about and sees he is at the end of the Linden and that a dozen steps will carry him to a sudden widening into stately Pariser-Platz, at the bottom of which, flanked by fountained lateral lawns and light-flecked in the twilight blur, rises one of Berlin’s chiefest features—the famed Brandenburg Gate. When the Berlin exile is homesick this is the picture he always sees—the imposing five-arched gateway, creamy against the misty deep green of the Tiergarten tree-tops, the dignified fronts of surrounding embassy houses, flowered grass plots on either hand, leaping fountains, the long lines of the trees of the Linden, and through the gateway-portals glimpses of colonnades and white statues in the cool, dusky allées of the park.

It is an inspiring spot. The classic grace of Greece is present in the gate itself,—a copy of the Athenian Propylæa,—and the eventualities of warfare are suggested in Schadow’s bronze Quadriga above it, which the envious Napoleon carried off to his Paris. These old trees of the Linden know much of the turning of the wheel of fortune; they shook to the tread of the conquering legions of Napoleon the Great, after Jena, when Queen Louise and her little ten-year-old son fled in want and humiliation; but they also rocked, threescore and five years later, to the shouting of the armies of a united[179] and triumphant Germany when that same little boy, become Emperor William I, returned from the annihilation of Napoleon the Little.

Any German student, adequately inspired, will tell the legend of the Quadriga; how the Goddess of Victory each New Year’s Eve drives her chariot and four up the Linden, pays her respects to Frederick the Great on his bronze horse and is back in her place by 1 A.M. And that is the night, by the way, that the Great Elector rides his charger all over the city, taking note of the year’s changes, and returns to his position on the Kurfürsten Brücke before the stroke of one. Out of the same Nibelungen Land comes the legend of the White Lady that goes moaning through the Royal Palace when a Hohenzollern is about to die. Now we are on Berlin traditions, it may be said that there is more agreeable flesh and blood to the custom of receiving bouquets from the witches of the Blocksberg on Walpurgis Nacht (May 1), and an altogether human foundation for the ancient torch dances at Hohenzollern weddings, of which Carlyle has given so enthusiastic a description.

Beyond the gate, we face a beautiful picture. The sweeping arc of the Anlagen, rimmed with marble benches, balustrades, and statues, is spirited with pleasure seekers, and its thick lines of lights are all glowing brightly, and carriages and cabs are speeding noiselessly across it. An attractive dilemma presents, as to whether we choose to reach the adjoining Königs-Platz by the[180] embowered and vernal Path of Peace—the tree-arched Friedens-Allée through this corner of the Tiergarten—or by the celebrated War-Way—the Sieges-Allée—between the double lines of the thirty-two marble groups portraying the rulers of the House of Brandenburg. There are advantages to either; the first is shorter and supremely sylvan, but the second presents an opportunity of settling for one’s self the violent difference of opinion as to the artistic merits of this elaborate gift of the Kaiser to his capital. Each of the groups of the latter has a heroic statue of a Prussian ruler half encircled by a marble bench whose ends are Hermes busts of eminent men of that period. We are entitled to an opinion. Some pronounce it incomparable; others think it pompous and insipid, and very much like a stone cutter’s yard.

In either event one soon reaches the Königs-Platz, and beholds envisioned the power and glory of the Fatherland. At no hour does it appear to such advantage as at twilight. The dusky shadows lie heavy about the great circular field of trees and shrubbery, shrouding the sculptured mass of the vast Reichstag building until its huge glass dome looms like a colossal moon in a lake of emerald. Bismarck and Von Moltke rise above their statue-groups like demigods of bronze, and the lofty Column of Victory, studded with captured cannon, rears its brisk and lightly-poised angel to acclaim the glories of Germany to an invisible world among the skies. Kroll’s neighboring summer garden is gay in hundreds of colored[181] lights that glow in the grass plots and dim arbors and hang like pendent fruit from the branches of the trees. The dusk deepens into gloom, and twilight plays Whistler-tricks with fountain spray and statue. Distant domes pass, in night wizardry, for ghostly war-tents of Von Moltke. Faint vapors steal among the trees of the lower levels, and the dark of dim retreats is deeper for the brilliance of groups of lights that fade surrounding foliage into shades of pale olive. Music drifts softly over from Kroll’s, and the subdued hum of engulfing Berlin conveys a pleasant sense of companionship and a feeling of admiration and affection.

In the vivid appreciation of all we have just been seeing, one thinks in amazement, What a people! Harveyized against everything but progress, they are bending their tremendous energy to the enormous task of transforming Berlin from the capital of a kingdom into the capital of an empire. To see what they are accomplishing is to whip one’s wastrel forces and holystone his resolution. Here is energy and power of a kind to move mountains. Foreign critics bite their nails in envy and decry Berlin as “a parvenu among capitals”; they say it lacks distinction, is solemnly conscious of its new dignity, is “big without being cosmopolitan, and imposing without being impressive.” That it is garishly modern is true enough, as in the light of its sudden apotheosis it could not have otherwise been, and its own people are first to admit frequent grave errors in artistic[182] taste. But taken all in all, a fairer, more substantial or more worthy city has never before been reared in the same length of time in the history of mankind. Nor is the end yet. The soaring impetus of the capital waxes with its own effort; gathers strength with each fresh achievement. Germany may be pardoned for taking pride in having risen as a world power to the very van of the nations, with her war-lord one of the foremost figures of the era. That his capital is his special pride is well known, and there are many who feel that he has gone far to realizing his expressed determination to make Berlin the most beautiful city of Europe.

One rests in the Königs-Platz, at the foot of Bismarck’s statue, and regards with wonder the stern features of that man of “blood and iron,” to whose prescience and indomitable resolution these vast results are so largely due. The best of Bismarck is not dead, but lives and increases in the activities of his countrymen. As was said of another, “Would you see his monument, look about you.” The destiny Germany is working out is the one he bequeathed her; all this fair fruition is the flower of his seeding. The Kaiser may continue his idolatry of his grandfather by sowing the empire with statues of the war emperor, but the people do not for a moment forget that the man who previsioned and compelled these results was he at the feet of whose grim statue we uncover in deep respect in the evening calm of the Königs-Platz. The hand was the hand of Bismarck.

It will probably have seemed to many that in London the evening hour between seven and eight o’clock is the most distinctive and significant of the twenty-four, the one that is most expressive of the city’s real life and character. It has something in its mellowness and repose that stimulates in the spectator a subtle receptiveness and quickens a special sensitiveness to the trooping impressions of this manifold, multi-faceted community. One comes nearest then to truly “sensing” colossal, world-weary, indomitable London, as she relaxes a gracious hour to catch breath in the turmoil and struggle that has endured for more than a dozen centuries. For quite the same reason as you would not say that the ocean is most characteristic in either calm or storm, but rather when rolling in long and steady swells, so London is not so much her real self at her most vacant hour of sunrise when the milk carts clatter where the omnibuses usually are and the street lights turn as wan and sickly as the tramps on the benches, nor yet at the height of her turbulence when busy men are dashing hatless about Cheapside and loaded drays are delayed for hours[186] in traffic blocks, but rather in the agreeable period of early evening “let-up” while truce is effective between the working-hours of day and the playing-hours of night.

Of course, “let-up” is meant in a comparative sense only, for in the bright lexicon of London there is properly no such word; but there comes at seven o’clock at least as much of a lull as is ever to be looked for here. The savage roar of the streets is dulled to a deep growl, the crowds become shuffling and idle and their relative depletion and the proportionate activity and congestion in restaurants, pensions, and hotel dining-rooms are eloquent of the fact that the great city is now engaged in solemn rites before the Roast Beef of Old England. Nor does the altered complexion of things come amiss to the distracted foreign visitors who, though at odds in everything else, are of one opinion in this, that, without reservation on the part of humor, during the greater part of the day they cannot see London for the people. By that they mean that the life of the streets is so intense and so varied that it proves a serious distraction from taking adequate note of the appearance and significance of the city itself. It is, therefore, with profound satisfaction that they welcome an hour in which they may devote a portion of their energy to something more edifying than jostling pedestrians or escaping sudden and sordid destruction by motor-car, hansom, or bus. It is now that the town throws off the yoke of its drivers and the very[187] buildings become instinct with individuality and character. Every little dim and noiseless square, each broad and lordly park, the massive mansions of the great whose names have been in history for ages, business blocks of Old-World charm to which trade seems the merest incident, blackened pavements and Wren’s slender steeples, every memory-haunted nook and corner, all wrought by smoke and fog to a blood-brotherhood of neutral tones, are joining the song Father Thames is singing of dignity, power, and grandeur,—all breathe the common exultation of being London. It is more than Self-Assertion. It is Apotheosis!

If this may seem an extravagant idea to some, it is certain there can be but one mind as to the relief that comes with the “let-up.” It gives a man a chance to find himself after being lost and daunted and disheartened all day, and to square off and give the giant a good look between the eyes and happily attain to some just impression. “Some just impression” is doubtless within the possibilities, but any complete one is not. London is so vast in territory, interests, activities, and history—such a “monstrous tuberosity of civilized life,” as Carlyle observed—that it effectually defies comprehension. It cannot be taken in. Look south on it from Hornsey or Primrose Hill, or west on it from Blackwell or the Greenwich Observatory, or east from the top of the opera house at Hammersmith, or north from Crystal Palace, and you may see a vast prairie of house-tops and sharp,[188] aspiring steeples and irregular, twisting streets, but you also observe quite the same kind of prairies rolling away under the horizon beyond your ken. If one were to try such an experiment right at the heart of things, futility would still be obvious, for either the Victoria Tower of Parliament or the slightly higher dome of St. Paul’s lifts you only four hundred feet above the pavement to hang like a lookout in midocean. There might be hope of a completer impression if you tried an aëroplane; in which case prostrate London-town would take the seeming of some fabulous “questing beste” of the “Morte d’Arthur,” in format the traditional lion, rotund, monstrous, and oddly marked, half-reclining and gazing fixedly seaward down the Thames. A monster, indeed, fourteen miles by ten, and of a vitality so expansive that his nebulous aura pervades an area of seven hundred square miles! Along his grim, grimy side the Thames draws a crawling blue band with a deep U for the convenience of his paws as it swings around the Isle of Dogs, the Regent’s Canal marks him lightly up the shoulder and clear across the upper body, and along the profile of the head meanders the marshy River Lea. Odd green patches would stand for the parks—Regent’s on his back, Hyde, Green, and St. James’s on his flank, and on his right ear, Victoria. At the present hour he is speckled with a myriad of lights from the tip of his tail to his chin-whisker, and doubtless in all respects looks wild enough to daunt Sir Launcelot himself.

To the average visitor London is the Strand, Fleet Street, Regent Street, the Embankment, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the British Museum, and the Tower. But tastes differ in this as in other things, and Boswell was doubtless justified in amusing himself by noting how different London was to different people. Opinions on the subject have always been very decided but hopelessly conflicting. “Sir,” quoth Dr. Johnson to Boswell at the Mitre Tavern, “the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it.” Note Heinrich Heine, on the other hand, observing in his “English Fragments”: “Do not send a philosopher to London, and, for Heaven’s sake, do not send a poet. The grim seriousness of all things; the colossal monotony; the engine-like activity; the moroseness even of pleasure; and the whole of this exaggerated London will break his heart.” There is wisdom, as always, in a happy mean; and one might do worse than to go about his sight-seeing with the whetted curiosity and flaming imagination of those country children once described by Leigh Hunt as fancying they see “the Duke of Wellington standing with his sword drawn in Apsley House, and the Queen, sitting with her crown on, eating barley-sugar in Buckingham Palace.”

To such a mood as this, evening impressions are fresh and vivid, and the goggle-eyed stranger, suddenly set down at seven o’clock before the Shaftesbury Fountain in the centre of Piccadilly Circus,—“feeling in[190] heart and soul the shock of the huge town’s first presence,”—would probably have his own opinion of any intimation that there was really very little doing at that time in view of the hour and the absence of Londoners in the country. He would rather incline to the view of the Chinese prince who took one look at the wave of humanity sweeping across London Bridge and went back to his hotel and wrote home that he had reached the spot where all human life originates. Certainly the stranger at Piccadilly Circus would need but one wild glance at the glare and blaze of lights, the excitement around the “Cri,” the beckoning bill-boards of the Pavilion, the dazzle of shop windows in the sweeping curve of the Regent Street quadrant and the tremendous interweaving of carriages, swift hansoms, delivery bicycles, lumbering busses, “taxis,” “flys,” and “growlers,” to start him shouting to the nearest “Bobby” through the roar of the wild surge for safe passage to the sidewalk—which would be readily and obligingly accomplished by that calmest and most tranquil of officials, the mere lift of whose hand is as miraculously effective as the presence of a regiment at “charge.”

And yet the intimation to the stranger would be entirely within the facts, for a good proportion of Londoners are too far away to hear the seven o’clock bells ring in town. The Briton’s passion for out of doors leads him far afield. Thousands are at this hour in the surf at Brighton or strolling on the terraced streets of the chalk[191] cliffs there; hundreds are at Harrow enjoying the wide prospect beloved by the boy Byron; others in the pleasant villages of Hatfield and St. Albans; some are spying for deer in Epping Forest; and a happy multitude is turning from the “Maze” and Dutch Gardens of Hampton Court to roll homeward by brake and motor-car along the incomparable chestnut avenue of Bushy Park, among the placid deer of Richmond, and the manifold delights of Kew Gardens. For hours the “tubes,” surface cars, and busses have been working to capacity to get business men home, and loaded trains have been groaning out of Charing Cross, Euston, Paddington, St. Pancras, Victoria, and Waterloo. They have all arrived by now at their various destinations—around the picturesque Common of Clapham, the breezy heights of Highgate, the river greens of Hammersmith, the lush meadows of Dulwich, the stuccoed villas of Islington, the quietude of Bethnal Green, or the wooded gardens of Brixton Road. Fancy residential property, in every guise of architectural surprises, is drowsing in the shade of elm and oak and poplar and humming to the contented chatter of reunited families. The fortunate stranger whom Sir Launcelot has “asked down” to “Joyous Garde” is reveling in the generous roast that makes its august appearance between courses of Scotch salmon and Surrey fowl, and presently there will be politics and Havanas after the ladies have left, and later on a general assembling in a serene walled garden with[192] light laughter and low-voiced talk and mild discussion of water-parties, dinners, and dances.

The London parks are in full revelry now, with bands at play and tens of thousands of loiterers crowding the benches and moving along broad, graveled walks under the deep shadows of old elms and in the fragrance of trim flowerbeds. At Hampstead Heath, for example, not so much as the ghost of a highwayman haunts the bracken-carpeted hills, and East-Enders are out there in force along “Judge’s Walk,” and in the “Vale of Health” that Keats and Leigh Hunt admired, or up at the “Flagstaff” inspecting “Jack Straw’s Castle,” as Dickens so often did, or speculating upon the sources of the ponds with as much aplomb as ever did Mr. Pickwick himself.

Down on rugged and untamed Blackheath the band is playing at “The Point,” and in all that region where Wat Tyler and Jack Cade stirred Kent to rebellion the talk is now of London docks and the latest scores of the golfers.

Up at airy Victoria Park the swans in the ponds and the chaffinches in the hawthorn bushes are performing to enthusiastic audiences, and the Gothic Temple of the Victoria Fountain is rimmed with rough gallants and the “Sallies of their Alleys” who betray no inclination to “attempt from Love’s sickness to fly.”

The cyclists are foregathered at picturesque Battersea Park and chatting with their sweethearts over tea in the refreshment rooms, while hundreds of unemployed[193] who can afford neither bicycle, sweetheart, nor tea gaze gloomily on the gorgeous blooms of the sub-tropical garden, loll over the balustrade of the long Thames embankment, and end up by sprawling face down on the grass or dozing fitfully on the benches.

Perhaps the largest outpouring of all is at ever popular Regent’s Park, preferred by the substantial middle-class,—long noted, like George I, for virtues rather than accomplishments. Doubtless they are now rambling through the Zoo, exploring the Botanic Gardens where flowered borders and large stone urns are spilling over with brilliant color, watching the driving in the “Outer Circle,” or swelling the throng on the long Board Walk. Hundreds on these shady acres are taking their ease with all the unction of Arden:—

In all probability tremendous admiration is being expressed at aristocratic Hyde Park, as usual, for the broad reaches of velvety turf and the venerable oaks and elms. More than one will indulge a pleasant reverie over the dead and gone who have braved it there—Pepys in his new yellow coach, dainty ladies in powder and patches flashing sparkling eyes on the gallants, and the scented, unhappy beaux who have sighed with Shenstone along these allées:

Across the Serpentine in the children’s paradise of Kensington Gardens we should find that the Board Walk and the “Round Pond” lose none of their drawing-power with the years and that the fountains and flowers are as beautiful and as highly prized as ever. There is the additional attraction of having a chance, by keeping a sharp eye on the tops of the tall ash-trees, of catching a glimpse of Peter Pan preparing to fly home to his mother’s window.

The exclusive shades of Green Park and St. James’s have a convenient nearness that entices hundreds from the roaring thoroughfares of the neighborhood, and at this hour their old elms and graceful bowers give impartially of their repose and peace to hearts that are heavy and hearts that are gay. It would seem inevitable that thoughts must come of the royal and princely companies that once trod these ways—of Charles II, at least, strolling in St. James’s surrounded by his dogs, pausing a while to feed his ducks and then tripping gayly up the “Green Walk” for a chat with Nell Gwynn over the garden wall, while scandalized John Evelyn hurries home to make note in his journal of “a very familiar discourse between the King and Mrs. Nelly.”

The London social season being at its height during May, June, and July, while Parliament is in session, belated[195] clerks wending homeward between seven and eight o’clock find the great houses occupied and dinner-parties in progress with as much universality as a New York clerk, under like circumstances at home, would expect to see in December. All Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico is indulging in feasting and merriment, and the austere aloofness of their retired squares, with central parks high-fenced in iron from contact with the “ordinary person,” is broken by the whirl of the carriages and motors of arriving guests. The sudden flood of soft lights from the reception hall as Hawkins throws open the door, and the quick and noiseless disappearance of the conveyances, is all of a moment and our clerk finds himself disconsolately gazing at the frowning front of some solid, ivy-grown, and altogether charming old mansion, through whose carefully-drawn window draperies only the slightest of beams dares venture forth to him. Were he to indulge such a passion for walking as characterized Lord Macaulay,—said to have passed through every street of London in his day,—he would find the same thing in progress at this hour in all the exclusive region that lies in the purlieus of Buckingham Palace. Dignity, riches, elegance, and power would be his in hasty, grudging glimpses—and then the dim square again and the high iron fence. The London square, indeed, seems decorative only—trees, turf, flowers, and the fence, and the surrounding houses playing dog-in-the-manager. This is not always without its[196] bewilderment to foreigners; and so confirmed a traveler as Théophile Gautier puzzled over the matter considerably before he dismissed it with the conclusion that it is probably satisfaction enough to the owners to have kept other people out.

If our clerk were to take the “tube” at Brompton Road and come out at Whitechapel Station in the East End, he would see the other side of the story with a vengeance. To quote Gautier again, “to be poor in London is one of the tortures forgotten by Dante.” Here the air is stifling with dirty dust, and thousands of miserable, unkempt creatures with wan and pasty faces feed, when they can muster a penny, on a choice of “black puddings,” pork-pies, “sheep-trotters,” or the mysterious, smoking “faggots.” In old Ratcliffe Highway, which is now St. George Street, they make out by munching kippers carried in hand as they go their devious ways. An occasional stale fish from Billingsgate is that much better than nothing. Yiddish seems to be the prevailing national tongue east of Aldgate Pump, and if you understand it there will be no trouble over the signs and announcements. With characteristic Hebrew thrift it is always “open season” for buyers. Each product has its special habitat. Toys or other sweatshop articles come from Houndsditch, shoes from Spitalfields, leather goods from Bermondsey, beef remnants from Smithfield, left-over poultry from Leadenhall, vegetable “seconds” from Covent Garden, birds[197] are to be had in Club Row, meat and clothing in Brick Lane, and a general outfitting in Petticoat Lane which the reformers have rechristened Middlesex Street. As for a “screw o’ baccy” or a “mug o’ bitter,” the “pub” of any corner will answer. The University Settlement workers of Toynbee Hall are doing what men can to better conditions, but so have others tried for ages—yet here is the malodorous East End practically as unwashed and unregenerate as of old. The glimpses one catches of squalor and filth up narrow passages and of the damp and grimy “closes” that remind you of Hogarth’s drawings are apt to content the most curious, unless he be an insatiable investigator, indeed, and is willing to take his chances of being “burked.” Hand on pocket you thread narrow alleys where people are said to have been offered attractive bargains on their own watches when they reached the other end. Here after the day’s work is over and the “moke” and barrow safely stabled for the night, with a “Wot cher, chummy; ’ow yer ’oppin’ up?” our industrious coster friends, ’Arry and ’Arriet, make merry among pals at a “Free and Easy,” or lay out a couple of “thri’-p’ny bits” for seats in a local theatre, whence they emerge between acts for a “’arf-en’-’arf” or a “pot-o’-porter” with instant and painfully frank opinions if “it ’yn’t fustryte.” Dinner at “The Three Nuns,” of course, is only for state occasions. They are the people, just the same, to get most out of Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday or a picnic at[198] Epping Forest any time. With them originated in days gone most of the catchy street-cries for which London was long curiously noted. But one hears no more “Bellows to Mend!” or “Three Rows a Penny Pins!” or “Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive oh!” or “Sweet Blooming Lavender, Six Bunches a Penny!” or “One a Penny, two a Penny, Hot Cross Buns!” or the traditional tune of “Buy a Broom!” or the barrow-woman’s “Ripe Cherries!” and “Green Rushes O!” You may, however, have a chance at “’Taters, all ’ot!” or “Three a Penny, Yarmouth Bloaters; ’ere’s yer Bloaters!” After all, it takes a very limited inspection of the East End to wish them all in Hyde Park, as the flag falls at seven-thirty, to join the hundreds of men and boys there who are out of their clothes before the signal is barely given and taking an evening plunge in the Serpentine.

Between the truffles of Mayfair and the “faggots” of Whitechapel lies the region of the menu with which the average Londoner is most familiar and which he is now exploring with profound earnestness according to his lights and shillings. Dining, as every one knows, is an important expression of the British conscience, a solemn rite of well-nigh religious momentousness. The traditional fate of the uninvited guest is his in double measure who ventures to intrude between the Briton and his beef. One might “try it on,” perhaps, on the Surrey Side where they incline to “dining from the joint” around six o’clock—though nothing short of compulsion[199] should take a sight-seer to South London after nightfall. The shabby Southwark shore of dingy wharves and grimy sheds is half concealed in drifting shadows raised by the uncertain light of flickering gas jets and the net results are not worth the trouble of walking London Bridge, unless we except the picture of quiet dignity and mellow beauty presented by the ancient church of St. Saviour. This rare old survivor finely expresses by night the subtle sense of a long-continued veneration and the finger-touches of the passing years. And to think that St. Saviour’s was doing parish duty and was a delight to look upon long before the Globe Theatre of Shakespearean fame had reared a neighboring head! But the gloom of the Surrey Side is thicker and more discomforting than the fog. Long, monotonous, cheerless streets, poorly lighted and scantily employed after dark, emerge from drab perspectives of gloaming and fade sullenly away into others. The scattered pedestrians one encounters reflect by solemn countenance the prevailing depression and seem able to take but little heart of courage as they go their melancholy ways. The whole region appears given over to breweries, potteries, factories, and hospitals. By night Lambeth Palace itself takes on the universal brewery aspect. You even detect a vatish look to the Greenwich Observatory and mistrust some trace of beer in the famous meridian. And then the tarry hotels of Greenwich must add their quota to the general[200] dejection by offering everything in the world in the way of fish excepting its celebrated whitebait, which was, of course, the one thing you had come for. The lights of St. George’s Circus—the Leicester Square of South London—may be few in point of fact, but they seem highly exhilarating down there; nor are you to scorn the good cheer of the comfortable old tavern hard by that rejoices in the extraordinary name of “The Elephant and Castle.” There may also be a kindly feeling for the Old Kent Road where Chevalier’s coster “knock’d ’em,” but otherwise the breweries win. There is one on the sacred site of the old Globe Theatre, something like one where stood the Tabard Inn whence Chaucer started his immortal Pilgrims for Canterbury, and you will find a brazen gin palace if you search for “The White Hart Inn,” of “Henry VI” and “Pickwick Papers.” Poor old Southwark! Her glorious days of light have passed!

Even Southwark is not much duller at this hour than that ancient nucleus that is still styled the “City.” Where the leading commercial centres and money markets of the world were in frenzied activity, two or three hours ago, a few belated pedestrians now go clattering along echoing and deserted streets with an unhappy air of apology. No section of London undergoes so[201] amazing a transformation each day; nor is any other so drear and cheerless by the suddenness of contrast—attesting the keenness of Lowell’s observation that nothing makes so much for loneliness as the sense of man’s departure. There is little dining now in the region where Falstaff once reveled at “The Boar’s Head” and the Shakespearean coterie at “The Mermaid Tavern.” The low, windowless, stolid Bank of England gropes like a blindman toward Wellington on his horse before the lofty Corinthian portico of the Royal Exchange, and the massive, sombre Mansion House of the Lord Mayor suggests some ruined temple of Paestum. “Gog” and “Magog” slumber in the dusty recesses of the old Guildhall, and the pigeons nest in its blackened eaves unstartled by the impassioned oratory of government ministers at banquets. But it is the time of times to attend the sweet chiming of Bow Bells, under the dragon in the beautiful tower that Wren built for St. Mary’s, and one could almost wish to have been born cockney if only to have heard them ringing from babyhood. The winding and gloomy little streets whose names recall so much in the lives of the Elizabethan literati entice one craftily, like so many Bow runners, into the purlieus of the Tower, within the shadows of whose momentous walls cabmen drowse securely on the boxes of dusty four-wheelers. To the imaginative stranger its bright fascination by day suffers a night-change into something gruesomely repellent,[202] and the “beef-eaters” do not protect the crown jewels half so effectively as do the headless shades of Lady Jane Grey and Henry’s unhappy queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Doubtless there are safer thoroughfares on earth than Lower Thames Street in the early evening, but they would not lead to as diverting a neighborhood. The wharves and storehouses may not be as tumultuous as by day, but the fastidious wayfarer encounters at Billingsgate enough strength of language and odor to satisfy. Tom Bowling is entertaining Black-eyed Susan at some East End “hall,” but the “pubs” are roaring with “the mariners of England that guard our native seas.” Still, cutty-pipes are glowing at Wapping Old Stairs, and the heaving turmoil of the shipping in the “Pool,” with swaying riding-lights dotting the vast tangle of masts and cordage, prepares you for the shock of the amazing human wave that is ever surging with a ceaseless roar across old London Bridge. Caught in the strong current of that billow one washes back to Wellington and his horse and drifts aimlessly along under the raised awnings of the tailor shops of Cheapside, with scarce time for a grateful hand-wave to hushed and shadowed St. Augustine’s for the “Ingoldsby Legends” its former rector gave us, before he finds himself high and dry in Paternoster Row and the bookish churchyard of St. Paul’s. The great cathedral is imposing, without doubt, and no one would think of saying that Wren did not earn the two hundred[203] pounds per annum he received during the thirty-five years it took him to build it;—and yet it can hardly be expected to appear over-cheerful by night, when it is chill and gloomy and repellent by day with the sun powerless to warm the tessellated floor and stiff, gloomy monuments with the brightest colors of its stained-glass windows—futile to rival even the moon in that vision of Keats as she

The moon, however, will aid us now in quickening into life the rich memories that adhere to the surrounding churchyard and to Paternoster Row, where so many generations of authors and publishers in dingy shops and inns and coffee-houses have debated the launching of immortal books. Every English-published volume must still start its race from neighboring Stationers’ Hall.

The foolish stranger who chooses such an hour for a tramp about the “City” will breathe more freely, after he has exorcised the last whimpering shade of Newgate and “the poor prisoners of the ‘Fleet,’” as he hurries along Ludgate Hill and attains unto his heart’s desire at Fleet Street. Thence on, it is all the primrose way. No matter what the hour or season, he can never be companionless in the “Highway of Letters”[204] for its very excess of material and immaterial presences. In its brief and narrow course of a few hundred yards, the richest in literary associations of any region on earth, the weather-beaten, irregular fronts of its old stone houses look down affectionately, and perhaps pityingly, on hurrying journalists and anxious authors, as they have been doing for ages. The leisurely diner of the old school who clings to the mellow places of inspiring associations is pretty sure to be going along Fleet Street at this time, intent on a chop and kidneys and a mug of stout at “The Cock,” preferred of Tennyson, or a beefsteak-pudding and toby of ale at the sand-floored “Cheshire Cheese” palpitant with memories of autocratic and snuffy Dr. Johnson exploding with “Sirs,” of good-natured Goldsmith, crotchety Reynolds, impassioned Burke, merry Garrick, and all the others of that deathless company. The usual evening idler and aimless stroller always makes Fleet Street a part of his pleasant itinerary, and it matters little to him that the sidewalks are narrow and the crowd uncomfortably large, when he can beguile each yard or two by lingering glances up dim and fascinating little rookery courts full of mysterious corners and deep shadows whose paving-stones have reëchoed the tread of so many sons of fame. The lights may not be as bright nor as numerous as in the Strand, nor the shops as attractive, but they are non-existent to the sentimentalist who is seeing Izaak Walton in his hosier[205] shop at the Coventry Lane corner and Richard Lovelace in dingy quarters up Gunpowder Alley, and is peering wistfully through the arched gateway to the Temple for a glimpse of Lamb’s birthplace or Fielding’s home or Goldsmith’s grave or a sight of those delightful “old benchers,” brusque “Thomas Coventry,” methodical “Peter Pierson,” and gentle “Samuel Salt.” Doubtless he is able even to detect the rich aroma of the chimney-sweeps’ sassafras tea in the neighborhood of “Mr. Read’s shop, on the south side of Fleet Street, as thou approachest Bridge Street.”

The shadows fall away with startling suddenness as Fleet Street becomes the Strand at Temple Bar. The jolliest uproar of all London storms impetuously along that modern Rialto all the way into Trafalgar Square. Brilliant lights, shop displays of every description, theatres, hotels, and restaurants create a profusion of excitement for the gay and jostling crowd that harries you perilously near to the curb and the heavy wheels of the ponderous busses.

And what an amazing institution the London bus is! The Strand might still be the Strand if St. Mary’s and St. Clement Danes were effaced from its roadway, but what if the busses went! Gladstone’s partiality for these archaic contrivances was extreme, which naturally disposed Disraeli to take the other side and champion the fleeting hansom—“the gondola of London,” as he aptly styled it. And, indeed, much may be said[206] in commendation of the omnipresence, economy, and convenience of the latter, and of its friendly way of flying to one’s aid at the merest raising of the hand to whisk you away at breakneck speed and through a thousand hairbreadth escapes to any possible destination you may indicate. But the majority vote with Gladstone, nevertheless, and take their ease on a bus-top. It is true that in the profusion of advertising signs you may not always be certain whether you are bound for Pear’s Soap or Sanderson’s Mountain Dew, but with blissful indifference you pocket the long ticket, and, ensconced among the glowing pipe-bowls in the dusk of a “garden-seat,” “rumble earthquakingly aloft.” What a delight it is to hear the cockney conductor drawl “Chairin’ Crauss,” “Tot’nh’m Court Rauwd,” “S’n Jimes-iz Pawk,” and the rest of it! From your heaving perch beside the ruddy-faced driver in his white high hat you observe that your ark keeps turning to the left,—the English rule of the road,—and that now you must look down instead of up to find the placards on the trolley posts that mark the stopping-places of the trams. You see belated solicitors and barristers hurrying out of the great gray courts of justice, and above the heads of the pedestrians you may study the gloomy arches of Somerset House or the ornate Lyceum where Sir Henry Irving reigned or the neat little Savoy where Gilbert and Sullivan won spurs and fortune. It is a great satisfaction to look down in comfort on the[207] elbowing throng you have escaped, with its jostling and its stereotyped “I’m sorry,”—the top-hats and the caps, the actors, bohemians, professional men, tourists, tramps, beggars, thieves, Tommy Atkins in “pill-box” and “swagger,” blue-coated and yellow-legged boys of Christ’s Hospital, red-coated bootblacks, barmaids in turndown collars, well-dressed and shabbily-dressed women, as well as that particularly flashy brand to whom you return a “Vade retro, Satanus!” to her “Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance.” No wonder when Kipling’s “Private Ortheris” went mad of the heat in India that he babbled of the Adelphi Arches and the Strand!

In the lull before the turning of the evening tide toward the opera and the theatre there is opportunity for each to indulge his penchant. What the shops of Fleet Street and the Strand show in general, the windows of specialists elsewhere are presenting in particular and with increased elaboration. Regent Street will draw the fanciers of pictures, leather goods, perfumes, and jewelry; Bond Street, rare paintings and choice porcelains; Wardour Street, curios and antiques; Stanway Street, silver and embroidery; Charing Cross Road, old bookstalls; and Hatton Garden, diamonds,—the same Hatton Garden that Queen Elizabeth gave a slice of to a favorite courtier and threatened the Bishop of Ely in a brief but sufficient note to hurry up with the necessary details or “I will unfrock you, by God!” This methodical[208] fashion of grouping certain interests in definite localities is carried even further; as, for example, should you feel the need of a physician it is not necessary to wade through the thirty-five hundred pages of Kelly’s Post-Office Directory, but take a taxi to Harley Street where any house can supply you. No matter where you ramble, surprises and delights await you. It will be found so to those in particular who stroll down Oxford Street—with thoughts, perhaps, of De Quincey when a starved and homeless little boy groping a timorous and whimpering way down this street as he clutched the hand of his new acquaintance; or of Hazlitt’s dramatic struggle with hunger and poverty—and suddenly, on reaching High Holborn, catch their first glimpse of the picturesque beauty of mediæval Staple Inn. There are few lovelier spots in all London, and the sparrows still chatter there as clamorously every evening as they did when Dr. Johnson frowned up at them from the manuscript of “Rasselas,” or when Dickens lived and worked there, or when Hawthorne visited and revisited it with increasing delight.

The princely spaces in the neighborhood of Buckingham Palace are quite as attractive at this hour as when the afternoon sun is warm along fair Piccadilly—“radiant and immortal street,” said Henley—and the gay coaches clatter back toward Trafalgar Square with blasts of horn and jangling chains. The Mall, the Grand Walk for ages, fairly exhales class and pride in the deepening[209] dusk of the late English twilight. The clubmen of Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, in their fine, imposing old houses, are taking up the question of the evening’s amusements with as much bored listlessness by the aristocrats at Brooks’s as rakish enthusiasm by the country gentlemen of Boodle’s. Signs of approaching activity are even to be observed in the stately mansions of exclusive Park Lane—a street that half the business men of London hope to be rich enough to live in some day; so effectually has time effaced the memory of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild and the rest of the air-dancing specialists who figured here in chains in the days when Tyburn Hill was a name to shudder over.

But the appeal of the “halls,” which began when the curtains of the Alhambra and the Pavilion went up at seven-thirty, grows almost imperative as the hour wears around toward eight. The rank of waiting cabs up the middle of Haymarket is thinned to the merest trickle. “Heavy swells” of clubdom and the West End are strolling in groups across the wide, statue-dotted expanse of Trafalgar Square, stopping to scratch matches on the lions of Nelson’s Column or General Gordon’s granite base. The artists are forsaking the studios of Chelsea, the real bohemians—not the pretenders of the Savage Club and the Vagabond dinners—the cheap restaurants and the performing monkeys of Soho, the students their quiet quarters in Bloomsbury and the forty miles of book-shelves of the British Museum, the[210] musicians their Baker Street lodgings up Madame Tussaud’s way, the literary people their charming Kensington, and even the gay Italians are deserting the organ-grinding on Saffron Hill and the disorder of St. Giles—and all are rapidly moving on Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, and the Strand. There they will view the elaborate ballets according to their means; from the “pit” for a shilling, or from a grand circle “stall” for seven shillings sixpence, with another sixpence to the girl usher for a programme loaded with advertisements. It is the hour when Pierce Egan would have summoned “Tom and Jerry” to be in at the inaugural of the night life of the great city, and Colonel Newcome would have marched Clive out of the “Cave of Harmony” to hear less offensive entertainers at the “halls.” It is the time Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights” has invested with the richest potentiality for adventure, and when, in consequence, any polite tobacconist is likely suddenly to disclose himself as a reigning sovereign in disguise. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, you may be sure, are never in their Baker Street lodgings at such a time as this. In the preliminary uproar about the bars of the favorite cafés and in the flashing of electric signs, glare of lights, and rush of hansoms and motors, one may discern the beginnings of “a night of it” for many whom the early sun will surprise with bleared eyes and battered top-hats about the coffee-booths of Covent Garden. And, indeed, unless you have access to a club,[211] night-foraging is a highly difficult undertaking in London. Every restaurant closes down at half an hour after midnight; and thereafter, unless you come across a chance “luncheon-bar” that defies the authorities, or a friendly cabman introduces you to a “shelter,” you may have to content yourself with a hard-boiled egg at a coffee-stall. Many a sturdy Briton trudging along behind his linkman could have found better accommodation two hundred years ago when the watch went by with stave and lantern and cried out that it was two o’clock and a fine morning.

With Big Ben in Parliament Watch Tower throwing his full thirteen tons into an effort to advise as many Londoners as possible that it is eight o’clock at last, and with a band concert in progress in the Villiers Street Garden of the Embankment, as agreeable a lounging-place as one could desire is the beautiful expanse of Waterloo Bridge. Not only is the prospect fair and inspiring, but the great bridge itself is worthy of it. Said Gautier, “It is surely the finest in the world”; said Canova, “It is worthy of the Romans.” Pallid and broad and long, and so level that its double lines of fine lights scarcely rise to the slightest of arcs, it rests with rare grace on its nine sweeping arches and spans the Thames just where the great bend is made to the east. One looks along it northward and sees the lamps of Wellington Street fade into the blurring dazzle of the Strand and Longacre, and southward to find the converging[212] lights of Waterloo Road sending a bright arrow straight to the heart of Southwark. The greensward of the flowered and statued Embankment sweeps across and back on either side of its northern end, and palace hotels, Somerset House and the huge glass roof of Charing Cross Station bulk large at hand. Eastward the Ionic columns of Blackfriars Bridge and the strutting iron arches of Southwark Bridge stalk boldly across the serene river, and southwestward the broad arch of Westminster Bridge offers Parliament cheer to glum Lambeth. It would be the most natural mistake in the world to suppose the trim buildings of St. Thomas Hospital, on the Surrey bank, a favored row of handsome detached summer villas, with owners of strong political influence to be able to build on the fine long curve of the Albert Embankment, having no less a vis-à-vis than the terraces and glorious Gothic pile of Parliament buildings on their thousand feet of “noblest water front in the world.”

Only the mind’s eye may look farther on to Chelsea and take note of the tall plane-trees of Cheyne Walk, and re-people the red brick terraces and homely old houses with Sir Thomas More entertaining Erasmus and Holbein, with Addison and Steele in revelry at Don Saltero’s coffee-house, with Byron at home in the amazing disorder of Leigh Hunt’s cottage, with Tennyson smoking long pipes with Carlyle, with Turner and Whistler bending over their palettes, and with Rossetti,[213] Swinburne, and Meredith courting the Muses under a common roof and in a common brotherhood.

To the observer on Waterloo Bridge the deep roar of the city comes out dulled and subdued. Bells chime softly and the whistles of the river-craft sound, from time to time, with sudden and startling shrillness. Long shafts of light shake out from either bank and spots of color from signal lamps dot the nearer rim. All outside is a bright dazzle, with patches of deep shadow and heavy ripples from the brown-sailed lighters and pert steamers that move across the shining reaches. The gloomy Southwark shore is blurred and uncertain in light mists, and the roof masses of the frowning city lift the ghostly fingers of Wren’s slender spires and cower beneath the indistinct and cloudlike silhouette of the dome of St. Paul’s. The prospect is that of a vast, confused expanse of indistinguishable, shadowy blending of buildings and foliage whose remoter verges merge into a soft violet blur, and over all of it rages a wild snowstorm of tiny pin-point lights. Under the arches of the bridge old Father Thames moves serenely seaward, the most ancient and yet ever the youngest member of the community. From his continual renewal of life one could believe that in some long-forgotten time he had won this reward when he, too, had achieved the Holy Grail among the stout knights up Camelot way “in the dayes of Vther pendragon when he was kynge of all Englond and so regned.” With true British reserve he[214] whispers to a stranger no word of such secrets as once he confided at this bridge to Dickens, of the savagery and cruelty of this London that has driven so many of its desperate children to peace within his sheltering arms,—

Looking from one of these bridges on the proud, powerful, self-sufficient city, Wordsworth was once moved to exclaim that “earth has not anything to show more fair.” Certainly it has few things to show more stirring and impressive, few to move the heart more profoundly, few that in achievement, resourcefulness, and power embody more completely to men of to-day

Drifting lazily of a summer evening over the Bay of Naples in a brown old fishing felucca with a friendly ancient boatman for companion, careless of time or direction; the night winds soft; the moon clear; indolent boating-parties in joyous relaxation all about; languorous, plaintive songs of Italy near by and far away; Vesuvius glorious and mysterious in the purple offing, and the gray old city, touched with silver, beaming down from all her crescent hillsides,—here, indeed, is the stuff of which day dreams are compounded! Chimes in shadowy belfries take soft, musical notice of the hour; and my thoughts recede with those fading echoes and retrace the bright and pleasant stages that have led me this evening into an environment of such charm and romance.

Thus, then, it was. Two hours ago, as I loitered along the crowded Via Caracciolo on the Bay front and watched Neapolitan Fashion take the air, I again encountered my Old Man of the Sea at his landing-place,—swarthy, wrinkled Luigi of the hoop earrings and faded blue trousers rolled to the knees. Little was he[218] bothering his grizzled head over the frivolity that fluttered above him; and yet it was, in fact, a charming show. Old Luigi makes a mistake, in my opinion, in ignoring the elegant passeggiata; for afternoon promenading on the Caracciolo is something that most of Naples will do more than lift its head to see. Besides, what an attractive setting it has! The boasted park, the Villa Nazionale, arrays the western front in a pleasant old woods of broad and shady trees, along the water side of which stretches the handsome boulevard of the Caracciolo. The distinguishing mark is thus supplied to divide society between the carriage set who hector it here and along the Villa’s winding drives, and those lesser lights who venture to raise their heads secure from snubs in the promenading spaces under the trees and before the cafés and bandstand. With the latter, as the elders salute friends, renew acquaintances, and exchange civilities with jubilant exclamations, delighted shrugs, and storms of exultant gestures, the younger men, in flannel suits and foppish canes, flirt desperately by twirling their waxed little mustaches, and the snappy-eyed signorinas respond in kind by a subtle and discrete use of the fan. The contemplative promenader will stroll along the cool, statue-lined allées, issuing forth from time to time to enjoy the brisk music of the band. The hardened idler will take a mean delight in penetrating the retired and romantic retreats in the neighborhood of the Pæstum Fountain and thus arousing whole[219] coveys of indignant lovers who have regarded this region as peculiarly their own from time immemorial; in the event of threatened reprisals the disturber can seek sanctuary in the renowned Aquarium, just at hand, and there spend his time to better advantage in contemplating octopi and sensitive plants, and all sorts of astonishing fishes. But the real show, of course, is en voiture. With a clatter and dash along they come: The jeunesse dorée, with straw hats cocked rakishly, shouting loudly to their horses and sawing desperately on the reins; young beauties in the latest word of milliner and modiste loll back in handsome victorias, reveling in the sensation they are creating, and with great black eyes flashing in curious contrast to the studied placidity of their quiet faces; consequential senators down from Rome; fat merchants trying to appear at ease; and all the usual remnants of the fashionable rout. On the wide sidewalks the promenaders proceed leisurely and with more good-humored democracy: prim little girls with governesses; romping schoolboys in caps of all colors; back-robed students; long-haired artisti; and priests by the score strolling sedately and gesturing earnestly with dark, nervous hands.

To all this brave parade Luigi turns a blind eye and a deaf ear; but he always manages to see me, I have noticed. This afternoon his programme was the attractive one of a sail down to the Cape of Posilipo for a fish-dinner at a rustic little ristoranti, with the table to be[220] spread under a chestnut-tree on a weathered stone terrace at the water’s edge where the spray from an occasional wave-top could spatter the cloth and I might fleck the ashes of my cigar straight down into the Bay. This old fellow can interest any one, I believe, when he wrinkles up into his insinuating and enthusiastic grin and plays that trump card, “And after dinner, if the signore wish, we can drift about the Bay or sail over toward Capri and Sorrento.” Naturally, this is my cue to enter. Into the boat I go; off come hat, coat, collar, and tie, and up go sleeves to the shoulder. I am allowed the tiller, and the genial old fisherman stretches at his ease beside the slanting mast and lights a long, black, quill-stemmed cheroot. Now for comfort and romance and all the delights of Buchanan Read’s inspired vision:

From all garish distractions our little boat bore us in rippling leisure along the picturesque Mergellina front and under the long, villa-dotted heights of the Posilipo hillside, whose shadows crept slowly out on the waters as Apollo drove his flaming chariot beyond the ridge to seek the dread Sibyl of Cumæ. Nature has always been partial to her gay, irresponsible Naples, and this afternoon[221] she seemed resolved to outdo herself in clothing it with charm and beauty. Under the setting sun the entire sky over Posilipo became a gorgeous riot of crimson and gold, and the opposite Vesuvian shore basked with indolent Oriental listlessness in a brilliant deluge that penetrated the deepest recesses of its vineyards and fruited terraces. Through this magic realm of richest color we floated lightly, silently responsive to the varying phases of the calm and glorious sunset hour. In deepest content

The region to which we lifted our eyes is one of veritable poet-worship. How incredible to think that on this hillside Lucullus has lived and Horace strolled and Virgil mused over his deathless verse! Look again, and under a clump of gnarled old trees one sees the latter’s venerated tomb. Over these waters came the pious Æneas with his Trojan galleys to question the Cumæan Sibyl; and since the age of fable what fleets of Carthage have passed around Cape Miseno, what barks of savage pirates, what brazen triremes of Rome, what armadas of Spain and navies of all the world! It staggers the mind to attempt to recall the scenes of war and pillage that have been enacted under the frowning brows of these storied hills during the last three thousand years.

The wonderful sail was all too brief, and almost before I was aware the goal was at hand, and I stepped ashore[222] at the ristoranti approved of Luigi and entered upon the promised joys. It was all as he had predicted; with possibly the exception of a few details he had discreetly neglected to warn me against. That it required four determined efforts and a threat of police to get the proper change when I came to settle the bill is really no jarring memory at all. It is the usual experience with the “forgetful” Neapolitan restaurant keeper. And what are foreigners for, anyway? And was it not worth something extra to have dined face to face with this glittering Bay, with the panorama of Naples on one hand and a sunset over Cape Miseno on the other? So with many bows and mutual civilities I parted with the zealous boniface and rejoined the waiting felucca. A light shove, and the shadows of the terrace fell behind us and we were out again on the Bay. Such are the alluring stages, among others, that may bring one eventually to an evening’s moonlight sail at Naples.

Just now the bells rang eight. Luigi grows sentimental. Again he declines my cigars, stretches at his ease and produces another quilled specimen of government monopoly such as, when at home, he lights at the end of a smouldering rope dangling in a tobacco shop of the Mercato. In the gathering gloom one sees little now of the trellised paths of Posilipo, the white marble villas with their balconies and terraces, or the brilliant clustering roses gay against the glossy green of groves of lemons and oranges. In the darkness of the[223] firs each cavern and grotto of this legend-haunted headland disappears and one can barely make out the wave-washed Rock of Virgil, at the farthest extremity, where, the Neapolitans will tell you, the poet was wont to practice his enchantments. The ruddy sky pales over the mouth of Avernus and the Elysian Fields, and Apollo abandons us to Diana and the broad flecking of the lights of Parthenope. We swing a wide circle in the offing. Between us and the distant rim of water-front lamps hundreds of light craft are idly floating. Romantic, pleasure-loving Naples has dined and taken to the water, to cheer its heart with laughter and song. Like glowworms the lights of the little boats lift and sway with the movement of the waves; while seaward, the drifting torches of fishermen flare in search of frutti di mare.

Like an aged beauty Naples is at her best by night, when the ravages of time are concealed. Lights glitter brightly along the shore line from Posilipo to Sorrento and all over the hillsides, and even beyond Sant’ Elmo and the low white priory of San Martino the palace-crowned heights of Capodimonte, where the paper-chases of early spring afford so much diversion to the young gallants of the court. Popular restaurants up the hillsides are marked by groups of colored lights. A thick spangle of lamps proclaims the progress of some neighborhood festa. The moon is full; the sky brilliant with enormous stars. In the distance the curling smoke[224] of Vesuvius glows with a sultry red or fades fitfully into gloomy tones, as suits that imperious will which threescore of eruptions have rendered absolute. But, as all the world knows, this aged beauty of a city that “lights up” so well by night is far from “plain” by day. Then appears the charm and distinction of the original way she has of parting her hair, as it were, with the great dividing rocky ridge that runs downward from Capodimonte to Sant’ Elmo and then on to Pizzofalcone, “Rock of the Falcon.” She even secures a coquettish touch in the projecting point, like an antique necklace pendant, at the centre of her double-crescented shore, where juts a low reef and at its end rests the ancient, blackened Castello dell’Ovo,—on a magically supported egg, they say,—the accredited theatre of so many extravagant adventures. And by day she looks down in indolent content through the half-closed eyes of ten thousand windows and surveys a glorious sea of milky blue, brimming tawny curving beaches crowned with white villas in luxuriant groves and vineyards, expanding in turquoise about soft headlands and dim precipices, and bearing, on its smooth, restful bosom in the far, faint offing, magical islands of pink and pearl that seem no more than tinted clouds.

A shoal of skiffs hangs under the black hull of a belated liner, whose rails are crowded with new arrivals delighted at so picturesque and enthusiastic a reception, and whose silver falls merrily into the inverted umbrellas[225] of the boys and girls who are singing and dancing in the little boats by the light of flaming torches. Very shortly these visitors will learn that the interest they excite in Neapolitans is to be measured very strictly in terms of ready cash. Secretly, they will be despised. There is no smile-hid rapacity comparable with that encountered here. The incoming steamer has not yet warped into her berth before the Neapolitan has begun his campaign for money. Beggars crawl out on the pier flaunting their hideous deformities and wailing for soldi, and insulting cabmen lie in ambush at the gates. At no other port does a foreigner disembark with so much embarrassment. He goes ashore feeling like a lamb marked for the shearing, and lives to fulfill the expectation with humiliating dispatch. It has to be admitted, on the other hand, that the customs-officers occasionally catch strange flashes of transmarine interests that must puzzle them not a little. As an instance, the first person to land from the steamer I was on was a young American athlete in desperate quest of the latest daily paper, and bent, as we presumed, upon securing instant word of some matter of great and immediate importance. He succeeded; but what was our astonishment to behold him a minute later leap and shout for joy and announce to every one about him that Princeton had again won the Yale baseball series and remained the college champions!

Naples, to-night, is vibrant with song; faithful to her[226] ancient myth of the nymph Parthenope, whose sweet singing long lured men to destruction until Ulysses withstood it and the chagrined goddess cast herself into the sea and perished and her body floated to these shores. Parthenope’s children here do not destroy people by their singing now, but rather delight and revitalize them. Mandolins and guitars are throbbing softly on every hand and the old familiar songs of Naples fill the air. “Traviata,” “Trovatore,” and the “Cavalleria” reign prime favorites. To be sure, there is no escaping the linked sweetness of the wailing “Sa-an-ta-a Lu-u-ci-a,” nor that notion of perpetual and hilarious youth conveyed in the ubiquitous “Funiculì-Funiculà.” In martial staccato, as of old, Margarita, the love-lorn seamstress, is jestingly warned against Salvatore,—“Mar-ga-rì, ’e perzo a Salvatore!”—and the skittish “Frangese” recites for the millionth time the discouraging experience of the giddy young peddler who undertook to barter his “pretty pins from Paris” in exchange for kisses that would only bring “a farthing for five” in Paradise. More than one singer is deploring the heartless coquetry of “La Bella Sorrentina,” while as many more appeal amorously to the charming Maria with promises of “beds of roseleaves,”—

We take an æsthetic interest in the Pagliaccian ravings[227] of Canio, and grieve for the “little frozen hands” of “La Bohème”; while, by way of contrast, all the peace and serenity of moonlight comes to us in the chaste, stately measures of the pensive “Luna Nova.” Serenades seem twice serenades when breathed in the soft, lissome dialect of Naples. There is no tiring of the impassioned refrain of “Sole Mio”:—

And what sufficient word can be said of the lovely “A Serenata d’ ’e Rrose”? It is impossible not to rejoice with these soulful tenors in that

Like old Ulysses, the swift little felucca soon stops its ears to these fascinating distractions, and bears Luigi and me off into the purple darkness. The prison-capped rock of Nisida drops astern with all its august memories of Brutus and his devoted Portia, and its repugnant ones of Queen Joanna, the very bad, and King Robert, the very good. In the moonlit path the distant cliffs of[228] Procida, isle of romance and beauty, loom afar, but we distinguish no faintest echo of the bewildering tarantella music that is danced there in its perfection. What a different spectacle its observers are enjoying from the stale perfunctory performances of the Sorrento hotels, which the tourists see at two dollars a head. For the tarantella, well done, is the intensest and most expressive of dances. All the emotions of the lover and his coquettish sweetheart are aptly portrayed—the advances, rebuffs, encouragements, slights, and final triumph. The Procida dance is a revelation when rendered out of sheer delight—con amore, as the Italians say.

An occasional faint light marks dissolute Rome’s favorite place of revelry, Baiæ the magnificent. In its heyday every house, as we read, was a palace; and it has been said that every woman who entered it a Penelope came out a Helen. Through their faded green blinds no light may be seen in the yellow stone houses of neighboring Puteoli where Paul, Timothy, and Luke took refuge in the early days of the Faith. Stolid pagan Rome had little time for them, considering that Cumæ was just around the headland, with Dædalus landing from his flight from Crete and the frantic Sibyl, at the very Jaws of Avernus, screaming her “Dies iræ! Dies illa!”

Distant Ischia appears a huge ghostly blot, mysterious and solemn. Scarce an outline can be caught of its[229] fabled, crag-hung castle, chambered as the very nautilus and eloquent of the unhappy Vittoria Colonna. How often has Michael Angelo climbed with sighs that old stone causeway where now the fishermen mend their blackened nets! Ischia never wants for devotees, however, and already a quarter-century has sufficed to dull the horror of that July night when Casamicciola paid its quota of three thousand lives to the dread greed of the earthquake. To-day one lingers, undisturbed by such memories, amidst the pretty whitewashed cottages set in olive groves and vineyards, loiters among the picturesque straw plaiters of Lacco, or dreams to the drowsy tinkle of goat bells in the myrtle and chestnut groves on the slopes of Mont’ Epomeo.

Shadowy Capri, isle of enchantment, lies soft and dim off the Sorrento headland as we swing our little vessel toward the city. It seems only a delightful dream that a few mornings ago my déjeuner was served on a cool terrace of the Quisisana there, and that I looked down over the coffee-urn on olive groves and sloping hillsides green with famous vineyards. With joy I relive the row around its precipitous shores, the eerie swim in the elfland of the Blue Grotto, the drive down the white, dusty road from the lofty perch of Anacapri to the pebbly beaches of Marina Grande, before a fascinating, unfolding panorama of verdant lawns, fruited terraces, snowy villas, and bold cliffs crowned with fantastic ruins. Sinister Tiberius and his unspeakable companions have[230] small place in our permanent memories of Capri; one is more apt to recall the charming blue and white Virgin in the cool grotto beside the old Stone Stairs.

A faint rim of lights on the mainland marks Sorrento, and a patch nearer the city, Castellammare; and were we nearer, the great white hotels would doubtless be found brilliant and musical. Could we but see it now, we should find the moonlit statue of Tasso in the little square vastly more tolerable than by day, and this would be a pleasant hour to spend on the old green bench before it absorbed in stirring thoughts of the “Gerusalemme Liberata” in the place where its author was born. Monte Sant’ Angelo looms above Castallammare spectre-like in night shadows, and the royal ilex groves must be taken on faith. The crested hoopoes, crowned of King Solomon, have long been asleep on the mountain-sides, but Italian Fashion, devoted to its Castellammare, having idled and rested all day in the bagni, now flirts and dances at the verandaed stabilimenti. An occasional faint breath of fragrance recalls the floral luxuriance that is so notable here—the gorgeous scarlet geraniums, snowy daturas, cactus, and aloe, festoons of smilax, and the carmine oleanders that they call “St. Joseph’s Nosegay.”

Far away to the southeastward, vague and ghostly headlands are dimming toward regions of rarest beauty—Amalfi, Majori, Cetara, Salerno. In our happy thoughts the smooth, white Corniche road lies like a[231] delicate thread along the green mountain-sides,—those Mountains of the Blest, whose rounded brows home the nightingale, whose shoulders are terraces of fruits of the tropics and whose storied feet rest eternally on white beaches that glisten in the blue waters of a matchless bay. A memory this, compounded of pebbly, curving shores sweeping around soft, distant headlands; lustrous groves of pomegranates and oranges; picturesque fishing hamlets of little stone houses nestled away in deep, shady inlets; the patter and shuffle of barefooted women trotting steadily through the dust under great hampers of lemons; sunburned workmen singing homeward through the dusk; the shouts and laughter of bare-headed fishermen drawing their red-bottomed boats up on the shore; and the low, contented singing of your Neapolitan coachman who, as twilight falls, looks long and dreamily out to sea and no longer cracks his whip over the weary little Barbary ponies that are drawing you up the dusty heights toward the cool rose-pergola of the Cappuccini. Visitors, reluctantly departing, will never forget this land “where summer sings and never dies,” and must ever after feel with Longfellow:—

We distinguish Torre Annunciata, abreast of our speeding boat, by the evil redolence of its swarming fish markets and the boisterous shouting of its many children at mora; and, in striking contrast, one thinks of grim Pompeii, farther inland,—“la città morta,”—hushed and prostrate in moonlit desolation. At the neighboring Torre del Greco we can fancy the coral fishers, who may not yet have left for the season’s diving off Sicily, to be smoking black cheroots along the wharves and planning lively times when they market their coral and Barbary ponies in November. Certainly there is little to suggest the peace that Shelley found here. Few shores are more dramatic than those of this Vesuvian Campagna Felice. Resina hangs gloomily over the entrance to the entombed Herculaneum, and Portici lights up but half-heartedly, abashed that all her royal Bourbon palaces should now be housing only schoolboys. About both villages and for miles inland any one may see the wrath of Vesuvius in dismal evidence in twisted lava rock of weird and sinister shapes. But there is a fullness of life on these shores to-night, increasing as our boat advances; individual houses multiply into villages, and villages overlap into a solid mass that is Naples’s East End. We pick our way among the clustering boats, and around long piers with little lighthouses at their ends, and presently Luigi abandons his cheroot, stands up by the mast and shouts shrill and mysterious hails, and shortly up we come to our[233] landing at a flight of dripping stone steps at the tatterdemalion Villa del Popolo, sea-gate to the noisiest, dirtiest, most crowded (and so most characteristic) section of all Naples. A passing of silver from me, from Luigi a twisted smile and a regretful “buon riposo,”—the last, I fear, that I shall ever hear from him,—and I take leave of my amiable companion for the sputtering lights and exciting diversions of the swarming Carmine Gate and Mercato. From the tide-washed Castello dell’ Ovo to the prison heights of Sant’ Elmo and the charming cloisters of San Martino, and from the huts of the Mergellina fishermen to far beyond where I am standing on the eastern front of the city, all Naples is sparkling with lights and humming with an intense and multi-phased tumult.

Lucifer falling from Paradise must have experienced some such contrast as those who exchange the serene evening beauty of the Bay of Naples for the odors, uproar, and confusion of the Mercato. But does not the saying run, “See Naples and die”? And to miss visiting so characteristic a district by night is almost to fail to see “Naples” at all; though it may, perhaps, appear at first glance to assure the “and die.” The quay of Santa Lucia is the only other section that even attempts to rival this in preserving unimpaired the “best” traditions of Neapolitan uproar and picturesque squalor. And it must be remembered that one’s interest in this city is like that felt for a pretty, bright, and amiable child[234] who is, at the same time, a very ragged and dirty one. Life, as it is found in the Mercato, is exuberance in extenso; the most complete conception possible of a “much ado about nothing.” It is an irrelevant tumult in which matter-of-fact inconsequences are expressed with an incredibly disproportionate use of shoulders, fingers, and lungs. An inquiry as to the time of day is attended with a violence of gesticulation adequate to convey the emotions of Othello slaying Desdemona; an observation on the weather involves a pounding of the table and a wild flourish of arms like the expiring agony of an octopus. Even work itself seems half play in its accompaniment of romantic posturing, eloquent and profuse gestures, and continual over-bubbling of merriment, quarrels, and song. All this is of the very essence of the Mercato—hopelessly tattered and unkempt, artlessly unconscious of its picturesque rags, and altogether so frankly frowzy and disheveled as to become, upon the whole, positively charming. No one equals the Neapolitan in expressing the full force of the Scotch proverb, “Little gear the less care.”

In appearance the Mercato is a rabbit-warren of tortuous chasms lined with dowdy structures in every advanced stage of decrepitude. Even its lumbering churches of Spanish baroque rather add to than detract from this effect. No money is squandered on upkeep. The cost of initial construction is here like an author’s[235] definitive edition,—final. Little, cramped balconies, innocent of paint, blink under the flapping of reed-made shades, shop signs are illegible from dirt and discoloration, and the weathered house-fronts shed scales of plaster as snakes do skins. The very skies are overcast with clouds of other people’s laundry. Dead walls flame with lurid theatre posters, unless warned off by the “post-no-bills” sign—the familiar “è vietata l’ affissione.” Cheap theatres are completely covered with life-size paintings illustrating scenes from the play for the week. Lottery signs abound. Certain window placards, by their very insistence, eventually become familiar and homelike; as, for instance, the “first floor to let,” the omnipresent “si loca, appartamento grande, 1^o primo,” for which one comes in time to look as for a face from home. Religion contributes a garish and tawdry decorative feature in the little gaudy shrines on street corners and house-fronts, where, in a sort of shadow box covered with glass, candles sputter before painted saints. The government monopolies, salt and tobacco, the Siamese Twins of Italy, are inseparable with their ever-lasting “Sale e Tabacchi” signs and dwell together everywhere on a common and friendly footing, like the owls, snakes, and prairie dogs in Kansas.

Curiosity fairly plunges a man into so promising a field, and Adventure stalks at his elbow. He finds the narrow, squalid streets brimming with a restless, noisy, nervous swarm. Picturesque qualities are brought out[236] in the play of feeble street lamps and the dejected, half-hearted lights of dingy, cavernous shops and eating-places. A comme il faut costume for men appears to be limited to trousers and shirt, with the latter worn open to the belt. The women affect toilettes of a general dirty disarray which their laudable interest in the life around frequently leads them absent-mindedly to arrange in the quasi-retirement of the doorways, the front sill itself being reserved for the popular diversion of combing the hair of their spawn of half-naked children. To traverse an alley and avoid stepping on some rollicking youngster in puris naturalibus is vigorous exercise of the value of a calisthenic drill. Still, it is possible to escape the babies, but scarcely the fakirs and beggars. The fakir has odds and ends of everything to sell and teases for patronage for love of all the saints; one even awaits the Oriental announcement, “In the name of the Prophet, figs!” The beggars, of course, are worse; crawling across your path and dragging themselves after you to display their physical damages, often self-inflicted, in quest of a soldo of sympathy. Express compassion in other than monetary terms and you get it back instanter, along with a dazing assortment of vitriolic maledictions. As the visitor’s patience gives way under the strain, it presently becomes a very pretty question as to whose language is the most horrific, his own or the beggar’s.

Women dodge through the streets carrying great[237] bundles on their heads, and pause from time to time for friendly greetings with frowzy acquaintances tilting out of the upper windows where the laundry hangs. It is from these mysterious upper windows that the housewife in the morning lowers a pail and a bit of money wrapped in a piece of newspaper, and bargains with the leather-lunged padulano when he comes loafing along beside his panniered donkey, crying his wares in that “carrying voice” we all admire in our opera singers. Those are the hours of trying domestic exaction, when the woman who does not care for water in the milk watches the production of the raw material with the cow standing at the doorway, or from the frolicsome goat that nimbly ascends every flight of stairs to the very portal of the combined kitchen and sleeping-room. But just now neighbors are shouting conversations in those same upper windows, or calling down to the women and girls who go shuffling along on the lava pavement below in wooden sabots that look like bath-slippers—if, indeed, one has imagination enough to think of bath-slippers in this vicinity.

Restless activity prevails. The most unnatural things are the statues, chiefly because they do not move. One catches glimpses of them now and then in the niches of the motley-marbled churches,—churches of memories grave and gay, of Boccaccio’s first glimpse of Fiammetta, or the slaying of the young fisherman-tribune, Masaniello, whom Salvator Rosa delighted to paint. There[238] is buying and selling, eating and drinking. There are fruit stands and lemonade stalls and macaroni stores and dejected little shops with festoons of vegetables pendent from the smoky ceilings over whose home-painted counters weary women await custom with babies in their arms. A brisk demand prevails for the famous cheese-flavored biscuit called “pizza,” set with little powdered fish, and those who desire can have a slice of devilfish-tentacle for a soldo, which the purchaser dips in the kettle of hot water and devours on the spot. Should this latter fare disagree with any one, there will be access on the morrow to the miracle-working “La Bruna”—the picture of the Virgin in the church of St. Mary of the Carmine—which every child in Naples knows was painted by St. Luke; and if that should fail, there is still the liquefying blood of St. Januarius in the inner shrine of the cathedral.

Happily, the senses are more than four; and when seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling fail from over-exertion in the Mercato, still hearing remains, so that one may study the Sicilian-like prattle of the Neapolitan in all its ramifications from a whisper to a shriek. The character of the man is expressed along with it; and thus one observes that while a Piedmontese may be steady and industrious, a Venetian gossipy and artistic, a Tuscan reserved and frugal, and a Roman proud and lordly, the Neapolitan is merry, loquacious, generous, quarrelsome, superstitious, and, too frequently, vicious.[239] Thus the Mafia flourishes with him, and the Camorra, an unbegrudged possession, is wholly his own. His vendetta may, perhaps, be mildly defended on the ground that it is, at least, only a personal affair, and certainly less foolish and reprehensible than the perennial jealousy of an entire people, as, for example, the ancient feud between Florence and Siena, where an inherited antagonism is still devoutly cherished and the old battle of Montaperti refought with fury every morning. The Neapolitan had rather spend that time on the lottery, dream his lucky numbers, look them up in his dream-book, and go to the Saturday afternoon drawings with a fresh and stimulating interest in life.

It is a nice question whether the Mercato loves singing best, or eating—when it can get it. At night one inclines to the latter view. There is a prodigious hubbub around all the open-air cooking-stoves and in every smoky trattoria and family eating-place. One would scarcely hazard an opinion as to the number of bowls of macaroni, quantities of polenta, and whole nations of snails and frogs that are being devoured between appreciative gestures and puffs of cigarettes, and washed down unctiously with minestra soup and watery wines. But as all these good people have probably breakfasted solely on dry bread and black coffee, no one would think of begrudging them the delight they are taking in dining so gayly and at so modest an outlay. If stricter economy becomes necessary later, they will patronize the charity[240] “kitchens,” where soup, vegetables, meat, and wine are supplied at cost, or perhaps some friend will give them a voucher and they will be able to get it all for nothing.

So far as economy is concerned, they know all there is to be learned on the subject. Several families of them will live in a single room; and when that room is the damp, foul cellar they call fondaco, it is something one does not care to think of a second time. When they indulge in street-car riding they never neglect to take the middle seats, because they are the cheapest. They know all about the market for restaurant scraps and cigar stumps, where quotations are governed by length.

Their extraordinary generosity to one another in times of distress is almost proverbial. Misery both fascinates and touches them, perhaps because it is never very far from their own doors. One morning I shouldered my way into the middle of a strangely silent crowd and found there a weeping crockery vender whose entire stock in trade had been demolished by some mishap. It meant his temporary ruin, as could be seen from the faces of the painfully silent and sympathetic audience. The peddler seemed utterly stunned by his misfortune and lay on the ground with his face in his arms. How touching it was to see the little cup that some one had significantly set beside him, and to know that every copper-piece that fell into it came from Poverty’s Very Self, and bore the message, “It’s hard, poor fellow; we[241] know how hard; but here’s a little something—try again.”

But, as Thomas Hardy’s peasants say, it is time to go “home-along.” Emerging from the noisy congestion of the Mercato the quiet and cool of the water front is rather more than refreshing. The shipping along the Strada Nuova stands out stately and picturesque, silvered toward the moon and black in the dense shadows. Harbor lights sparkle brightly under the solemn eye of the molo lighthouse. The military pier points a long, black finger warningly toward Vesuvius. Along the Strada del Piliero one has pleasant choice of viewing on the left the animated steamer piers and the secure anchorage where the great ships for Marseilles and the Orient tug mildly at their hawsers, or seeing on the right the ceaseless activity of swarming little streets, some glowing in arbors of colored lights in celebration of a neighborhood festa and others observing a milder form of the same noisy programme we have just forsaken. On the broad Piazza del Municipio the massive and heavy-towered Castello Nuovo rears a sombre and storied front; and farther along we pass the vast gray bulk of the famous Teatro San Carlo and the lofty crossed-arcade of the Galleria Umberto I, and skirting the corner of the Royal Palace enter the broad and brilliant Piazza del Publiscito.

Contrasts again! What a different crowd from that of the poor Mercato. Here is a groomed and well-conducted[242] multitude that has come out to enjoy its coffee and cigarettes as it listens to the band in the pavilion on the western side or the open-air melodrama in that on the east. And what a change in surroundings! Palaces and splendid churches and public buildings, now. Solemn effigies of departed kings stare stonily down from niches in the moonlit façades. A fringe of dark-eyed boys lounges in indolent content around the coping of a fountain. Hundreds of chairs and tables throng the open space, and we gladly rest on one of them and experiment with Nocera and lemon juice, preparatory to a good-night stroll up the Toledo. Enthusiasm prevails here, too. Familiar melodies from the old operas are welcomed with storms of applause and shouts of “Bravo” or “Bis”; whereupon the conductor bows profound gratification and selects the music for the next number with a face glowing with pride. Politeness abounds. The air is gracious with “grazie,” and like expressions of courtesy. Ask a light for your cigar, and the Neapolitan raises his hat and thanks you, supplies the match, raises his hat and thanks you again, though all the while he has been doing the service. Indeed, he seems capable of expressing more civility by a touch of the hat than we can by completely doffing ours. One looks about and concludes that the women are not particularly pretty and that good dressing is a lost art with them. The men, as a rule, impress one more favorably; though they are perversely inclined to spoil their good looks by waxing[243] their mustaches to a needle-point and trimming their long beards square, like bas-reliefs of Assyrian kings.

It is nearly nine o’clock. I settle for my drink, leave the usual centesimi with the bowing waiter, and plunge into the Broadway of Naples, the renowned Toledo. Its map-name is Via Roma, but the “Toledo” it has been for ages and as such it will remain to many Neapolitans to the end of time. It is a busy and peculiar street. Rows of raised awnings in two long, converging lines dress the feet of tall, dark buildings that are studded with shallow iron balconies filled with pots of flowers. It is comparatively narrow and with sadly straitened sidewalks, but no street in Naples is so long or so continually used; if it is followed, through all its changes of names, it will carry one past the Museo and away up to the very doors of the summer palace at Capodimonte, running due north all the way. Shops of all descriptions line it, and it is thronged to the overflow of the sidewalks and the hysterical abuse of distracted cabmen in the middle of the street. One thinks of Paris when he sees the newspaper kiosks and the many bright little stands decked out with fruit and gay trifles. The shops satisfy any taste and any purse, for it is the common gathering-ground of Naples.

It is vastly diverting to step aside and take note of the varieties of people that troop along this brilliant highway. One sees jaunty naval cadets from Leghorn; street dandies in white duck and tilted Panamas;[244] delivery boys in long blue blouses; tattered and bare-headed bootblacks, with sleeves rolled up in business fashion; artisti in greasy coats; minor government officials in spectacles and rusty black, trying to be rakish on four hundred dollars a year; sub-lieutenants, with their month’s thirty dollars in hand, off to lose it at cards at some circolo; swarthy contadini, the farmer “Rubes” of Italy, having disposed of their poultry and their wives’ straw plaiting, are here “doing the town”; groups of impoverished laborers from near-by estates, lamenting with despairing gestures the impending failure of the olive crop and charging it to ghosts and the evil eye; venders of coral and tortoise shell; resplendent Carabinieri in pairs, fanning themselves with their picturesque chapeaux; thrifty policemen pursuing street peddlers, with an eye to a per centum of the fines; heroic school-ma’ams, trying to forget that their miserable one hundred and fifty dollars per annum is not likely to save them from such distress as De Amicis tells of in his impressive “Romanzo d’ un Mestro”; that odd military rara avis, the Bersagliero, pruning his glossy feathers and looking quite equal to a trot to Posilipo and back; rioting students, still unreconciled to having been “ploughed” at the recent examinations, or having failed of the coveted laurea degree when, frock-coated and nervous, they discussed their theses unsuccessfully before the jury of examiners; the pompous syndic of some commune; priests in black cassocks and fuzzy,[245] broad-brimmed hats; some prefect returning from a many-coursed dinner, intent upon political coups when the Government’s candidates come up for election; and, most dejected and dangerous of all, the unemployed men of education, the spostati, who will hunt government jobs while there is any hope and then turn Socialists in Lombardy or Camorristi in Naples.

All along the way the soda fountains are sputtering and the “American Bars” bustling. Bookstores fascinate here, as everywhere, and shining leather volumes cry out for attention in the names of D’Annunzio, De Amicis, Verga, and Fogazzaro. “Il Trionfo della Morta” lifts its slimy head on every counter, side by side with the breezy Neapolitan stories of Signora Serao. I always look curiously, but so far unsuccessfully, to find a single bookstore window that does not contain that national family table ornament, the “I Promessi Sposi” of Manzoni—the man for whom Verdi composed the immortal Requiem Mass.

The Toledo tide runs northward for twenty blocks or so from where we entered it, swings around the marble statue of Dante in the poet’s piazza, and sets south again. At nine o’clock it begins to diverge into the Strada di Chiaja, where there is music and promenading until midnight.

Detecting this hint of the hour, I hail a venerable, loose-jointed cab and bargain to be taken to my great, sepulchral, marble-floored room on the Corso Vittorio[246] Emmanuele. Now, cabs are cheap in Naples—after you have paid a penalty of extortion for the first few days’ experience; the real expense concerns the tailor as much as the cabman, in wear and tear to clothing, trying to keep on the seat as you bounce along over these volcanic-block pavements. This evening the cabman starts the usual trouble by demanding threefold the legal fare, and as we work it down to the tariff rate he insults me pleasantly and volubly, and I try to do as well by him. At length we arrive at a quasi-satisfactory basis; he shrugs contemptuous acceptance of my terms and I relax to the point of conceding that his ponies are only a little worse-groomed than the average and have, as far as I can see, all the mountainous brass fixtures prescribed by custom, along with the coral horn that will save me from the evil eye. So in I clamber. There is an infantry volley of whip-cracking and a burst of wild invective at the obstructing crowd and my head snaps back with sufficient force to keep me quiet to the journey’s end.

On the pleasant little balcony of my room I dare not linger long to-night. Well I know the busy programme of the departure on the morrow. There will be a hurried stop for one last hasty look into the Museo, with my luggage on the waiting cab outside; then, at my urgent “Fa presto,” some reckless Jehu will rattle me over the stones to the station; I will go down into my pocket again, in the old familiar way, for seventy centesimi and[247] an additional pourboire to the cabby; and twenty more for the spry old porter who will shoulder my grips into the smoker; and the conductor will blow a horn, and the station bell will ring, and the engineer will blow a whistle,—in their rare Italian manner,—and the wheels will begin to squeak and groan, and I shall be off for Rome.

And that is why a cigar lacks its usual solace on my balcony to-night; the last I am to smoke in Good Night to this fascinating city. The subdued hum of cheery, happy revelry, mingled with music and song, drifts up from the bright squares and animated streets. The minutes multiply as I dwell over the varying phases of old Vesuvius, or gaze long and lingeringly over the star-lit Bay and all the romantic playground of these grown-up children. One cannot bring himself to say a definite farewell to this beautiful Region of Revisitors. With a yearning hope of returning some other day, he moderates it to a heartfelt Good Night and a tentative “till we meet again”:—

When the sun has gone down behind the Blue Alsatian Mountains and the last stain of color has faded from the skies of the Rhenish plain, when clock tower has answered clock tower and evening bell responded to evening bell from the mountain streams and mill wheels of the Odenwald to the busy squares of Mannheim, then the quiet and gentle valley of the Neckar takes on a peculiar peace and glory that is exquisite and marvelous, and Heidelberg and its lordly ruins seem set in a veritable fairy-ring of delicate charm and beauty. So tranquil and lovely is this region in the early evening that even the latest comer soon feels a comforting sense of having turned aside from out of the rush and fever of[252] life into a singularly placid and protected corner of earth, a hushed and happy Vale of Tempe. This sense of rest and seclusion is one of Heidelberg’s strongest appeals—and her appeals, though few, are all emphatic. For there are no “sights” here, the castle excepted. The quaint old town is friendly and genial, though not more so than many others of this comfortable German father-land; nor is the serene Neckar so exceptional as to occasion pilgrimage.

Heidelberg’s appeals are to the mind, the heart, and the senses: the mind is inspired by her impressive achievements in learning; the heart is touched by her tragic history; and the senses are spellbound by the exceptional charm of her natural beauty. She is never so fair as in the early evening. With the soft fall of night each blemish fades away, and what remains to see and feel is altogether rare and lovely.

When the valley clocks are booming nine with muffled strokes it is delightful to be up in the castle’s ruins, lounging on the Great Balcony of the crumbling Friedrich Palace, with a broad coping for a seat and the rustling ivy of the hollow walls for a pillow. Behind and about one is the vast, ruddy wreckage of the knightly halls and towers of this far-famed “Alhambra of Germany,” and fluttering plains of tree-tops are billowing upward on every hand to the dark heights of the Königsstuhl. On the opposite side of the valley, across the river, dense forests of oak and chestnut glitter in the[253] moonlight, sweeping aloft to the summit of the storied Saints’ Mountain. Just below our balcony the clustered spires and steep roofs of the huddled old town house their fifty thousand happy people between the wooded hillsides and the shimmering Neckar that bands the middle distance, on its placid Rhine journey, like a silver ribbon on a velvet cloak. In its bright waters hills and trees are luminously mirrored, along with the inky, motionless shadows of its bridges and the sober reflections of shuttered house-fronts along its verge.

In the dewy coolness and still of evening the guardian oaks breathe a recurrent lullaby—now softly agitated, now as hushed and ghostly and motionless as the hills in which they are rooted; and one understands how such a soothing environment could have softened even the impetuous, fiery, war-loving young Körner to indite so gentle a benediction as his beautiful “Good Night”:—

Up in the castle ruins one is seldom alone before midnight, and not even then if the melancholy spectre of Rupert’s Tower is disposed to walk abroad. In the early evening the good people of Heidelberg, kindliest and most contented of Germans, stroll with vast delight under the lindens of the castle gardens, and groups of careless students loiter merrily along the terraces, adding bright touches of color with their peaked caps and broad corps ribbons. Bits of song and bursts of laughter give a homely suggestion of habitation to these staring walls; one could fancy the dead-and-gone old nobles at wassail again, with minstrels in the banquet hall, and Perkeo, the jester, whispering jokes in the ear of the Count Palatine.

“Under the tree-tops,” sang Goethe, “is quiet now.” There is a low sad sound of night breeze in the ivy; a swallow darts through a paneless window; a bat zig-zags among the echoing arches of a tower. Like phantom sentinels the stone statues of the old electors stand white and impressive in niches on the palace fronts. Fragrance of flowers drifts in from the castle gardens and the delicate plash of falling water comes from a terrace fountain. The lamps of the city rim the river below, and villas beyond the farther bank are marked by tiny dots of lights in the purple of the groves behind Neuenheim. Across the Neckar-cut gulf of shadow the chestnut-crowned summit of the Heiligenberg stares down solemnly at us, and not all the songs of its blithest[255] nightingales can banish thoughts of its ancient Roman sacrifices nor divert the credulous from vigils over the blue grave lights around the Benedictine cloister where they buried the sainted Abbot of Hirschau. Up through the dark billows of this tree-top ocean rises a strain of Wagner’s music from some cheery, hidden woodland inn—and under the magic spell of the night one could fancy the golden-haired Siegfried approaching on a new Rhine Journey, following the winding Neckar up the broad Rhenish plain; the Tarnhelm is at his belt, the World-Warder Ring on his finger, and the moonlight flashes dreadfully from the glittering blade of “Nothung” as the hero’s horn winds note of arrival under the walls of our stout castle!

It is especially at such an hour as this that one realizes how easy it is for the man who thoroughly knows Heidelberg to acknowledge a delightful and lifelong bondage. A large number of the most eminent literati of the world have agreed in this. Goethe ascribed to her “ideal beauty.” Macaulay pronounced her environment “one of the fairest regions of Europe.” The father of German poetry, Martin Opitz, loved her dearly in his student days here, three centuries ago, and wrote affectionately of her all the rest of his life. The prolific Tieck found time between novels to lament the destruction of a few of her oaks. Alois Schreiber turned from his poetry and history to grieve over the loss of a lime-tree. Von Scheffel praised her in prose and verse and hailed her[256] in seven songs of his “Gaudeamus.” La Fontaine could not conceive of more ideal surroundings in which to reunite his “Clara du Plessis” and her devoted “Clairant.” G. P. R. James, in his favorite romance “Heidelberg,” wrought prodigies of sentimentality here with the heroic “Algernon Grey” and the emotional “Agnes.” Matthisson immortalized himself by his “Elegie” in these ruins. All who have read Alexandre Dumas’s dramatic “Crimes Célèbres” will recall the young fanatic, Karl Ludwig Sand, and his assassination of the poet, Kotzebue, in our neighboring city of Mannheim, but they may not have heard of how Kotzebue once said: “If an unhappy individual were to ask me what spot to live in to get rid of the cares and sorrows which pursue him, I should say Heidelberg; and a happy one asks me what spot he would choose to adorn with fresh wreaths the joys of his life, I should still say Heidelberg.”

Goethe loved the Neckar, and scarcely less its famous old bridge. In an interpretative mood he once observed, “The bridge shows itself in such beauty as is perhaps not to be equaled by any other in the world.” And, indeed, it is an easy thing to divide enthusiasm between bridge and river. Nothing is jollier than loafing against the broad balustrades of this solid old veteran, as the students love to do, and lazily take note of the river’s tinted reflections, the ripple and eddy about the piers, the mirroring of the arches in perfect reverse, and watch the deep green shadows of the hills creep out and[257] steal across. Great rafts come downstream laden with the output of the Odenwald and Black Forest, and swift steamers hurry under the massive arches bound upstream for the mountain towns or downward to Mannheim. Ferries ply beside it, fishermen drift beneath it, and throngs of townspeople and countrymen stroll along it, with now and then a be-petticoated peasant girl from the Odenwald whose fair hair is hidden under a huge black coif. How redolent it is of Rhenish life! One lingers beside the great statue of its builder, the old Elector, and gazes with unwearying satisfaction on the strange mediæval gateway, loopholed and portcullised, and wonders where two other such queer round towers can be found with such odd bell-shaped capitals and such slender little spires. Terrible and tragic experiences have befallen this sturdy old hero, and its antique towers are pitted from the riddling of French and Swedish and German bullets. Fire has swept it, cannon shaken it, floods grappled with it, and blood drenched it from shore to shore. Wan processions of famine-stricken people have dragged themselves across its paving-stones, and its gateways have reëchoed with groans and prayers and curses. To-night we see it as defiant as ever, battle-scarred and unshaken, with “head bloody but unbowed,” striding its river with broad and shapely arches—as real a part of Heidelberg as the very hills above it.

One looks down from the castle on the twinkling[258] lights of the cramped old town, and notes how it has ambitiously spread its suburbs even beyond the opposite bank and that its villa-lamps sprinkle their way in the distance toward that little hamlet with the great mouthful of a name,—Handschuhsheim,—in the hills. It is there, could we see it, that the tumbledown hut stands that sheltered Luther when he escaped from the “Tile-Devils” of Worms; at a sight of it one wonders if he did not exclaim here as he did at the Diet: “Here I take my stand. I can do no otherwise. God help me!” In Heidelberg itself, the shops of that one long street, Hauptstrasse, send up a wavering, crooked path of softened light, but the more elegant Anlage is discreetly reserved with all its hotels and imposing homes. One distinguishes little at this hour of the peaked tile roofs and faded shutters of the venerable town—the little awninged shops, sombre cafés, Stuben, and restaurants; or the excited appearance of an occasional side street that starts with all enthusiasm at the river, loses heart in a block or two, and comes suddenly to a discouraged end in a tangle of trees and forest paths. We only know that Emperor William I canters his bronze steed with its capacious girth along the middle of Ludwigs-Platz right up to the university building where the celebrated professors have their “readings” before their frisky young “Meine Herren”; and that the market-place is probably as shabby and gloomy as usual, and the Kornmarkt subsided again to its customary listlessness[259] since the last of the evening crowds have taken the mountain railroads there for cool trips to the Königsstuhl or the Molkenkur or for a trout dinner at the distant Wolfsbrunnen.

Out of this cramped nest of roofs the shadowy Gothic tower of St. Peter’s Church rises boldly, challenging beholders to forget—if they can—how Jerome of Prague once nailed his theses on its doors and defended them before excited multitudes; calling, besides, on the distant and indifferent to sometimes have a thought of the famous university scholars who lie under the weeping-willows of its churchyard. A neighboring bidder for consideration, the famous Heilig-Geistkirche, thrusts a lofty spire skyward above the dark tree-tops until its weather vane is almost on a level with our feet. There is little need for this ecclesiastic to feel any apprehension on the score of being forgotten, so renowned has it been for half a thousand years as once the foremost cathedral of the Palatinate, celebrated for richness of endowment, extent of revenues, the beauty of its art treasures, and the learning of its prebendaries. As it appeals to us to-night it is as one fallen far from its former high estate, and yet the very eagles that soar over Heidelberg must have enough knowledge of religious controversy to recall its past amusing dilemmas of divided orthodoxy. The stranger in the castle ruins will smile as he thinks of what he has read of the days when both Protestants and Catholics worshiped there at one and the same[260] time, through the effective device of a partition wall thrown up to separate choir from nave. The elaborate Catholic ceremonials of the altar necessitated the reservation of the choir for them, while the Protestants got along very nicely with a pulpit built in the end of the nave. What unusual entertainment might have been contrived by neutrals to the controversy had a brick or two been removed from the partition wall and an ear applied alternately to either service! On one side, Ave Marias and Pater Nosters—on the other, hymns of the Lutherans; here, the wailing Confiteor and the penitential breast-beating of mea culpa—there, grim scorn of all ritual and ceremony; in the choir, the intoning of versicle and response, reiterations of “Dominus Vobiscum” and “Et cum Spiritu tuo,” the solemn Tantum Ergo, the passionate Agnus Dei, and the triple sound of the acolyte’s bell as the Host is elevated above the kneeling, praying throngs—in the nave, a rapt absorption in the new significance of old truths, and lengthy discourses by stern and ascetic expounders; for one congregation, a glittering altar, sacred images, flaming candles, and a jeweled monstrance—stiff pews and a painted pulpit, for the other; for the Catholics, flocks of priests and choir boys, deacons and subdeacons, sumptuously vested in alb and stole and gorgeous chasuble—for the Protestants, one solemn man in black. Neutrals at the dividing wall could have rendered both congregations a service by loosening a[261] brick or two and letting a little incense and beauty pass to the Dissenters’ side, and some word of wisdom concerning a release from dogma get through to the Catholics. Had America’s new policy of church unity existed then, it would have advocated doing away with the wall altogether and finding some compromise for approaching a common God in a common way. Time, the great umpire, has settled the contest as a draw; for the partition wall has come out and the rival camps with it: the present occupants are “Old Catholics”—a sect with which either side has little sympathy and less patience.

The evening lounger in the old castle will doubtless have more than one thought of the famous seat of learning that has, for five and a quarter centuries, invested the name of Heidelberg with so much lustre and glory. He will, of course, have heard it called the “cradle of Germanic science,” and will have been told that of all Germanic universities only those at Prague and Vienna are older than this. He can form some conclusion as to its rich contributions to human knowledge by merely recalling the names of its famous scholars,—Reuchlin, Melanchthon, Ursinus, Voss, Helmholtz, Bunsen, Kuno Fischer, and the rest,—and will gauge its present standing by the acknowledged eminence of its faculties in medicine, law, and philosophy. One thinks of its long eras of philosophic speculation, always deeply earnest if not invariably profitable, and applauds the force of[262] Longfellow’s simile in “Hyperion” when he compared them to roads in our Western forests that are broad and pleasant at first, but eventually dwindle to a squirrel-track and run up a tree. If the loiterer be a Presbyterian, he will want to acknowledge indebtedness to old Ursinus for that celebrated “Heidelberg Catechism” of three hundred and fifty years ago that supplied the Westminster Assembly with a model for the “Shorter Catechism” in use to-day. That the university has survived the destructive rigors of so many fierce wars is perhaps sufficient proof of its vitality and the estimate men have set on its usefulness. Tilly carried off its library and presented it to the Pope, when he conquered Heidelberg in the Thirty Years’ War, but although only a small portion of it has ever been returned it has to-day a half-million volumes and documents, among which are original writings of Martin Luther and manuscripts of the Minnesingers. The pleasant summer semester attracts students here,—being allowed, under the “Freiheit” system, to exchange alma maters,—and then one may count up perhaps two thousand scholastic transients in Heidelberg. To many visitors the equipment will appear meagre, for, excepting the main building in Ludwigs-Platz, the library building, medical institution, and botanical gardens, there is little in sight to remind one of its existence. In witness of which there is the popular joke about a new arrival who inquired of a passer-by where the university[263] might be: “Don’t know,” was the reply: “I’m a student myself.”

The presence of the jovial student, however, is too much in evidence at this time of the evening, through distant shouts and songs, to leave any one in doubt about the university being somewhere hereabouts. But when are they not in evidence? At any hour of the day and night you come across them in the cafés, on the streets, loafing on the bridge or up in the castle, or returning or departing on their favorite recreation of walking-trips through the hills. Their smart peaked caps and broad corps ribbons are scenic features of the neighborhood. You wonder when they study, and how much time they ever spend in the private rooms they call their Wohnungen. In spite of the appearance of extreme hauteur conveyed by their invariable and ceremonious punctilio these ruddy-faced boys are highly sociable, and take a prodigious delight in smoking, drinking, and singing together. A Kaffeeconcert is entirely to their liking, and even more a jolly Kegelbahn supper in some forest restaurant at the end of a long tramp. Most of all, which is amazing, they relish their stupid Kneipen where every friendly draft of their weak beer is preceded by a challenge to drink, and where the only redeeming feature is the fine singing. Still, at Commerces, one hears the time-honored Fox Chorus, “What comes there from the hill.” Even the pet vice of dueling might be mildly defended on the ground that[264] German students have no such athletic contests as their brothers of America and England and that each looks to the sword, in consequence, as an arbiter of courage and prowess—from the Füchse (who are freshmen) to the Bürschen (who are seniors). Granted that the occasional sabre duel is really dangerous, still injuries are trifling in the ordinary encounters Auf der Mensur, fought with the thin, basket-hilted Schläger, and preferably on the Paukboden of the famous Hirschgasse tavern up the little valley across the river. Blood apart, it is rather amusing than otherwise to watch the contestants in their pads and goggles, the seconds straddling between them with drawn words, and the callous umpire keeping merry count of the wounds. Few topers and bullies here, but vigorous, wholesome youth.

The outlook from the Grand Balcony is upon a sea of foliage so vast as completely to surround castle, gardens, and terraces and convert them into just such an enchanted island as springs so naturally out of the pages of the “Arabian Nights.” Evidences of sorcery and magic multiply as we make the rounds of our fortress, for voices and music come up out of the tremulous green depths, and companion isles emerge in the moonlit distance, but lifted far above us and set on prodigious wave-shoulders of steadily increasing height. The loftiest of these rocks we know to be famous Königsstuhl, a name they have vainly been trying to change to Kaisersstuhl since the visit of Emperor Francis of Austria, a[265] hundred years ago, and Emperor Alexander of Russia. From this eyrie perch one looks abroad by day on a very considerable portion of the wide, wide world, and the distance covered is only limited by the imagination of the observer. Then the Neckar valley is at one’s feet, and a little farther off is the Rhine, and away yonder are the Haardt Mountains and the sombre edges of the Black Forest. The faint blur on the southwestern horizon is said to be Speyer, where the followers of the Reformation were first called “Protestants,” and the lofty pinnacle of the cathedral, rising above the tombs of its imperial dead, quickens thoughts of that “mellifluous doctor” whose writings were “a river of Paradise,” the crusade preacher, St. Bernard, to whom the Madonna is credited with having revealed herself in that very church. Our mortal eyes may confirm the identity of this much from the Königsstuhl’s observation tower, but we can only envy the miraculous vision of those who see the spire of the Strassburg Cathedral, sixty miles away. Doubtless they could distinguish the identical tree of the famous Odenwald rhyme:—

Another of the companion isles of this moonlit, tree-top ocean is the popular Molkenkur, a modern “whey-cure,” that flourishes on the princely site of the earliest[266] stronghold of this whole region. To those who are strolling its broad terrace and reflecting, perhaps, upon the tragic history of the place, seven centuries roll back and Barbarossa’s brother, the savage Conrad of Hohenstaufen, climbs the forest trail with archers and spearmen, returning to his mountain retreat from a robber raid along the Rhine. And perhaps the visitor fancies he even hears the roar of that historic explosion that rained the wreckage of old Conrad’s fortress on town and river, or sees the blinding lightning stroke that crumbled this dread stronghold into a stalking-ground for the shuddering phantoms of winter fireside legends.

Reflections that penetrate still farther back into the gloaming of local tradition will precede Conrad’s fortress with the temple of the enchantress Jetta; and could we distinguish in the distance the rock where the cozy inn of the Wolfsbrunnen perches and serves its rare dinners of mountain trout, we should see the very spot where the wolf slew Jetta in judgment of the Goddess Hertha, who was properly indignant that her priestess should have fallen in love with a mortal.

The nearer waters of the billowy forest-sea that ripples around the ruined castle walls contain in their dark, cool depths a picturesque tangle of woodland paths and romantic walks, thickets of fragrant flowers, a shattered arch half cloaked with ivy, and many a pleasant wayside café opened to the sky and gay with its little German band. For those who emerge from the shadows and come[267] up like Undines into the moonlight that streams in a silver mist on terrace and garden, as fair a picture reveals itself as can be seen in any part of our world. Here are lakes and grottoes and fountains and statues, all flecked with the heavy shadows of lindens and beeches. Here are crumbling towers and vine-mantled turrets and shattered, moss-grown arch and cornice. Even lovelier to-day are these gardens and scarcely less celebrated than three hundred years ago when old Solomon de Caus, architect and engineer of the Counts Palatine and first prophet of the power of steam, “leveled the mountain-tops and filled up the valleys” (as he has recorded in a Latin inscription in one of the older grottoes), and built these “plantations” and made them the haunts of singing birds, and filled them with orange-trees and rare exotic plants, and ornamented them with statues and with fountains that made music as they played. The ruined castle is embraced and enfolded in these beautiful gardens as an ailing child by its mother’s arms. The ravages of fire and war have scarred and wrecked it beyond man’s redemption, but the sturdy walls still oppose their twenty-foot masonry to the attacks of Time as stubbornly as did the great Wrent Tower when it defied the powder blasts of the detested Count Mélac and his devastating Frenchmen.

As the hour of ten draws near, we return through the vaulted passage from the Great Balcony and enter the grass-grown central courtyard. Outside the façades[268] were grim and bleak and built to meet an enemy’s blows, but toward the courtyard the castle turned faces of ornament and beauty. One feels at once the force of the saying that this is not the ruin of a castle, but of an epoch. It slowly flowered through the five hundred years that Heidelberg was the capital of the Palatinate, and all the development of those intervening times is expressed in its varying architecture. Pomp and circumstance are written big across it, for its masters and builders were counts and princes, kings and emperors. One feels the love and pride they took in these deserted palaces, now masterless. In the pale moonlight whole rows of effigies of the illustrious dead stand boldly forth in niches of the hollow, staring walls, and medallion heads peer curiously out of pediment recesses, and history and allegory find expression in lifelike statue and carven bust. Delicate arabesques and fanciful conceits wreathe themselves in stones of portal and cornice, and the armorial chequers of Bavaria and the Lion of the Palatinate oppose the lordly Eagle of the Empire. Time has modulated the discordant keys of architecture of divergent periods into a common and mellow harmony, so that the first rude stones laid by old Rudolph seem a consistent part of an assemblage that includes that finest example of Renaissance architecture in all Germany—Otto-Heinrich’s wonderful ruddy palace set with its yellow statues. One thinks of Prague and the battle of the White Hill as he sees the ill-starred[269] Frederick’s massive contribution, and wonders why this beautiful realm could not have enticed him from playing that tragic rôle of “Winter King.” Frederick’s palace looms impressively by night; in its varied architecture and majestic effigies of the House of Wittelsbach one feels the propriety of having here a comprehensive levy upon the building-knowledge of all previous time as an adequate and appropriate expression of the catholic culture of the lords of the Palatinate.

And, indeed, one reflects, there was need for both strength and beauty to a fortress that was to play so momentous a rôle in the fierce dissensions of its time. In that dungeon a pope once lay a prisoner; in this chamber Huss found refuge; in yonder chapel Luther has preached, and all the foremost spiritual lords of the hour. This courtyard has echoed with shouts for the Emperor Sigismund when he tarried here en route to play that perfidious part at the Council of Constance, and has rocked with wild applause as “Wicked Fritz,” returning in triumph from the battlefield of Seckenheim, marched in his captive princes. These staring walls have blazed with royal fêtes—in the hush and desolation of to-night one feels a deep sadness in contrasting the ominous silence that pervades them now with the splendor and uproar that vitalized them when a princess was wedded in this crumbling chapel; when Emperor Maximilian came up from his coronation at Frankfort; when the foremost figure of his era, Emperor[270] Charles V, and his sallow little son who was later Phillip II, feasted and reveled here for days at a time.

We look up at the Gothic balconies, and it seems as though we could almost see some early lord of this stronghold peering down through painted windows at the athletic sports of his hardy sons; and a certain unreality takes phantom form and substance, and the sentinel figures descend solemnly from their niches as a train of valorous knights and pages issues from Otto-Heinrich’s broad portal with music and laughter; there is the scrape and tread of mailed feet and the shouts of a gallant company as fair-haired women in shimmering silks and high-peaked headdresses award prizes of the tourney to kneeling men in glittering armor; and the trumpets sound and the torches flare and the noble retinue sweeps into the great banquet hall, while the “merry councilor” who brings up the rear makes us a profound and mocking bow as the door is closed—and we are alone with the statues in the moonlight.

The empty, silent courtyard is spectral and sad; it is an hour for reverie, for apprehension. The pale silver of the moon whitens into phantom-life two sides and a corner; the rest is a deep, hushed shadow. A cushion of ivy stirs in the faint night air; a bat flashes over a shattered cornice; a stone detaches itself exhaustedly and falls with a tinkle of sand, waking a protest of little echoes.

One steals away silently, resigning ward of all this senile decay to faithful Perkeo, who, in wooden effigy, still companions his huge empty tuns in the darkness of the cellars—the little, red-haired, faithful jester who alone remains constant to his master, of all the army of attendants that thronged these palaces for half a thousand years.

We pass the old stone-canopied well whose columns once were Charlemagne’s, pass the ponderous clock tower and the moat bridge, and enter the fragrant gardens as the valley bells sound ten and the purple mists are rising from the Neckar.

It is impossible to escape a feeling of profound melancholy. Where now are the powerful princes whose rusted swords may not strike back were I to raise a hand of destruction against the halls they reared and loved and guarded with such might? “The fate of every man,” said the Koran, “have We bound about his neck.”

It is depressing to think that such glory, power, and beauty as once were here should have flourished so wonderfully and come to so little. Was all this magnificence created merely for destruction? Could nothing less suffice grim Time to build him an eyrie for bats and swallows? Was Von Matthisson right in the judgment he expressed in the sad and sympathetic “Elegie” he penned in these ruins, and must we conclude with him that temporal glory is but ashes and[272] that the darkness of the grave adorns impartially the proud brow of the world ruler and the trembling head that shakes above the pilgrim’s staff?

THE top of the evening at brisk and bracing Interlaken is certainly ten o’clock. Vigorous, vitalizing air breathes down on the lush meadows from towering Alpine snowfields, and languor and ennui fall away from her dispirited summer idlers and a refreshing life interest reasserts itself. It is then one may see the deep, flowered lawns that front the great hotels of the broad Höheweg pleasantly thronged with animated guests, modishly and immaculately groomed; and each little street and quiet lane has its quota of vivacious strollers who prefer the keen night air and the inspiring mountain-prospect to the conventional attractions of the brilliant Kursaal or the round of mild social diversions that is in progress in the hotel apartments. Then, too, there is a certain subdued note of expectancy in the air, for this is the little village’s fête hour; and almost as the valley clocks are striking the hour the celebration is heralded with a burst of rockets from the open field of the Höhenmatte, in the centre of the town, and there is a general rush of chattering guests to see the display and to exhibit prodigious approval. All are aware of the fact that this is[276] merely an expression, in terms of Swiss thrift, of the appreciation the seventy-five hundred villagers feel for the lucrative presence of thousands of guests, and yet it admirably serves as a mid-break in the evening’s diversions. There is little enough to the celebration, to be sure, excepting the exaggerated importance such an event always assumes to isolated summer people, but you would think it was a pyrotechnic marvel, to judge by the enthusiasm.

To see Interlaken then is to behold her at her gayest. Bridge-parties forsake their cards, late diners their ices, and billiardists their cues. Each little balcony on the hotel fronts is promptly crowded, orchestras strike up lively Strauss waltzes, troops of delighted guests hurry across the Höheweg and pour into the meadow, until one might fairly conclude there was a carnival on, from the overflow of laughter and merrymaking. It is always a great moment at the Kursaal. There the excitement seekers have been wandering from parlors to lounging-rooms and ending up in the cheery gaming-hall, where a toy train on a long green table darts around a little track, laden with the francs and merry hopes of modest challengers of fortune, and comes to an exciting and leisurely stop before some station with the name of a European capital. Just then, like as not, as the croupier begins raking in the scattered piles of silver and the losers are being gleefully accosted by their friends, somebody suddenly shouts “Fireworks!” and forthwith[277] all run hurrahing into the gardens and cry out like summer children in vast delight over the rockets that go hurtling skyward from the Höhenmatte. It is all quite of the nature of a very elegant international fête to which the Old World and the New have accredited their most recherché representatives.

There is seldom a lack of keen activity at Interlaken, but at this hour it is most abounding; nor will the new arrival fail to note the contrast between the sharp alertness of this company and the lethargic listlessness that depresses, for instance, the bored idlers who bask in the dusty olive gardens of the Riviera. In the intermittent glow of the fireworks, cottages and distant hotels spring out of the surrounding darkness. The top of a hillside sanatorium appears of a sudden white against the dark pines, the packsaddle roof of the church tower discovers itself, a turret shows with the red field and white Greek cross of the Swiss flag lazily unfolding above it, and one looks anxiously for just one glimpse of the old cloister’s round towers and cone-shaped roofs that reminded Longfellow of “tall tapers with extinguishers.” Music drifts down from remote cafés and pavilions nestling in wooded nooks. The air is heady and buoyant with the scent of pine and fir. Life seems at high tide; and then just as suddenly it is all over, and the gay company resumes its interrupted activities with infinite laughter and handclapping.

There is a positive spell to all this Alpine comedy.[278] No new arrival will feel inclined to return at once to hotel conventionalities, with a soft purple mist shrouding the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and the distant Jungfrau lying pallid and wan in the moonlight. He will gaze about him in wonder at the snow-crowned peaks that hem in the little Bödeli plain where Interlaken snuggles, and will feel how wonderful it is that the boisterous Lütschine and its fellow torrents could ever have filled in this alluvial barrier between the deep lakes that fought them inch by inch. He will think of the enchanted regions of the Bernese Oberland that lie just before him, and of the contrasting beauty of the inland seas that stretch away on either hand: Lake Brienz, mysterious and austere, scowling at its precipitous mountain shores, roaring welcomes to its thundering waterfalls, and begrudging standing-room for the tiniest of hamlets; Lake Thun, “the Riviera of Switzerland,” with lovely vistas of green meadows, châteaux-dotted hillsides and distant snowy summits, all breathing such mildness and serenity as befitted the former abode of the holy hermit of St. Beatenberg. And doubtless he will seek out some tree-embowered path that winds along the Aare, and there indulge in contemplative thought of this glittering blue link between the lakes. Nor could he do better, for this arrogant stream is an illustrious instance of a reformed rake. Of evil repute for riotous cascade and brawling torrent all the way up to its home by the Grimsel Pass, it[279] responds to the touch of civilization at Interlaken and meekly accepts the bondage of steam for the remainder of its career. What a gratifying example of reform it presents as it proceeds demurely along from this scene of moral crisis, laving thankful little towns, reporting conscientiously to the proper authorities at Bern, and, after an exhibition review-sweep around the capital, flowing sweetly on to Waldshut and modestly laying down its burden on the broad bosom of the Rhine. The stranger will perceive that virtue has its rewards, with rivers as with humans, when he takes note of the extravagant petting and eulogy that has followed the repentance of the Aare at Interlaken, its adornment with promenades, gardens, and artistic bridges, and the choice of much excellent society, particularly at night, on the part of ruminating savants and romantic lovers of all ages.

Strolling along the river paths carpeted with sweet-scented pine needles, the delighted new arrival has only to lift his eyes to discover how picturesquely the little city lies in its bed of lush and fertile meadows. It will seem to him like a great stage set for a mammoth spectacle. For background there is the black and flinty Harder, set with the grim rock face of the scowling Hardermannli, rugged in boulders and sheer cliffs and hiding its base in treacherous, grassy slopes; the Aare skirts it fearfully, and the pretty little cottages of Unterseen shrink close to Lake Thun on its farther side.[280] Prostrate Interlaken lies supine before it, gazing appealingly through its innumerable windows across the open Höhenmatte, over the beeches and firs of the protruding shoulder of the Rugen, and on up the dodging, narrow Lütschine Valley to the remote and sympathetic Jungfrau. The scene is ready for the curtain when you have dotted the mountain slopes with châlets.

Or perhaps, if the stranger is fanciful, he will conceive the Alpine ravens thinking it some enormous eagle swooping toward the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with clustered houses for an attenuated body and two lakes for powerful blue wings beating out and back. Or, again, he may be reminded by this group of huge hotels of some fleet of old-time ships-of-the-line that started down the valley to bombard the Jungfrau. Early in the action formation was lost and the great hulks drifted about in hopeless confusion. Several, apparently, went promptly aground on the banks of the Aare right under the precipices of the Harder; all of the big ones foundered in a row along the Höheweg; a number became desperately entangled in the square before the Spielmatten Island; some trailed southward in what we call Jungfraustrasse, and others in Alpenstrasse; here and there one lies at anchor along the farther meadows, waiting for signals from the flagship on the Höheweg; and at least one, in the guise of an ugly white church, was caught in some violent cross-current and tossed up high and dry on the brow of the fir-smothered Gsteig.

The evening guest who does not fancy reveries along a mountain stream, nor yet the quiet pacing of the neat lanes that are so characteristic of this immaculate republic of “spotless towns,” whose very flag appropriately suggests the Red Cross Society’s familiar emblem of sanitation, will find it amusing to loiter among the little shops of the village and see the curious wooden trifles of Brienz, the delicately tinted majolica ware of Thun, exquisite ivory carvings, and rare bijouterie of filigree silver wrought with infinite patience and skill. Tiring of these, he may ramble under the fine old walnut-trees of the Höheweg and congratulate himself that he is not under the horse-chestnuts of Lucerne to look out on inferior mountain prospects and breathe a less intoxicating air.

The most approved form of evening entertainment is a round of calls among friends scattered over the broad lawns of the hotels, when one may divert himself with summer orchestras or itinerant bands of Italian singers in crimson sashes, or revel in a rare profusion of beautiful flowers; and, from time to time, look gladly up at a crisp sky splendid with great luminous stars whose tremulous ardor, in Walter Pater’s famous phrase, “burns like a gem.” It is a capital place to gather impressions of what life at Interlaken means and what goes forward each day among its votaries. It is perfectly plain that this must be a great place; everybody is so bubblingly cheerful and so devoutly grateful for being just here and no possible spot else. You will hear them insisting that[282] Interlaken, being halfway between, is an admirable combination of the complacent “prettiness” of Geneva and the austere solemnity of the vaunted Engadine Valley. Or there will be fragments of conversation reaching you about tennis matches on the Höhenmatte, lake bathing in Brienz, motor-bus runs from the golf links of Bönigen, where the residents plant a fruit tree whenever a baby is born, or of desperate scrambles up the zigzag trails of the Harder beloved of Weber, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, with rapturous accounts of the inspiring view from the Kulm. Some, you will gather, have passed the day uneventfully among the park walks of the Rugen, gazing down on Lake Brienz from the Trinkhalle Café, or on Lake Thun from the Scheffel Pavilion, or on both from farther up on the belvedere of the Heimwehfluh. Others again, it seems, have actually crossed the mild Wagner Ravine and ascended the lofty Abendberg of the Grosser Rugen; and for this pitiful adventure you hear them pose as veteran mountain conquerors who will carry their alpenstocks home with them and forever after speak familiarly of edelweiss and the flora of the summits. There even appear to have been romantic souls, familiar with Madame de Staël’s accounts of St. Berchtold festivals, who have spent the hours in dreams of Byron’s “Manfred” down by the old round tower of the dilapidated wreckage of Unspunnen Castle—in truth, the most abject of ruins, and quite as forlorn as Mariana’s Moated Grange. Not a few will have the courage to confess that[283] they have done nothing more heroic than stroll by the shaded Goldei promenades along the Aare until they came to Unterseen, where they deliberately sat down and gazed to satiety at the curious toy houses with the long carved balconies and amazing roofs that project beyond all belief.

Thus, by merely catching flying ends of talk, a stranger may imbibe the proper amount of enthusiasm and gather some rambling notion of the fine things Interlaken has in store for him.

But the real evening-heroes must be looked for at the Kursaal. That is where you hear the great champion talkers of the world! What was the amiable Tartarin to such as these? Or Baron Munchausen? Or Sir John Mandeville? On such deaf ears fell the warning ignored of “Excelsior”:—

Behold them at their ease in wicker chairs in the lounging-room, stretching the weary limbs that have borne them in safety through a hundred Alpine perils. For all who will listen, what tales may be heard of desperate daring amid the imminent deadly breach of crevasse and avalanche! Under the vivid hand of the actual participant one fairly sees the progress of the proud mountain-queller—follows with bated breath the slow and tedious early stages, the hazardous upward advance, the surmounting of final barriers by dint of ice-axe and[284] life-rope, and so enters into the joy of the ultimate conquest of the wild, bleak, wind-swept summit. Who would have the hardihood in such a presence to speak a word of such contemptible contrivances as mountain tramways and funicular railroads! It is enough that the uninitiated should realize in the shuddering depths of his soul that there still remains terra incognita to the listless, the fat, and the asthmatic. Later on, of course, we come to view these hardy characters in a somewhat truer perspective; but that will be after we have talked with their guides, or ourselves turned heroes and bluffed at like hazards.

All the same, there is no denying the satisfaction a newcomer has, in the beginning, in attending the impressive conversation of these desperate and intrepid Kursaal adventurers. He certainly feels that he has at last reached a region of hardy men and genuine mountain hand-to-hand struggles. He hears, with popping eyes, of the lofty little hamlet of Mürren, away up in cloudland, whose tiny cottages stagger under broad, stone-freighted roofs and where vast, sublime Titans scowl awfully from inaccessible heights. They tell him it is a region of eternal dazzling whiteness, with patches of black here and there that are really forests half buried in snow, and where the air is stifling with the constant odor of ice and frost. A truly shuddering place, they say, where men cannot hear themselves talk for the incessant thundering of plunging avalanches, and where the herdsman[285] seldom ventures and the sunrise is never heralded by the alphorn of the hardy Senn. Later on, to be sure, we journey luxuriously to this same Mürren in a comfortable mountain railway and with considerably less of peril than attends going to office by elevator in a sky-scraper at home; and we find it a green and peaceful retreat, well supplied with hotels and gratefully affected by delicate old ladies with weak lungs. Just the same, we would not have missed the thrills of that first Kursaal account. Alas for all disillusionment, anyway! Most of the beautiful white, velvety edelweiss these rocking-chair climbers produce from their pockets in proof of their presence in frightful and remote ravines has really been bought for a franc on the Höheweg, and the chamois they stalked in summit passes generally dwindle down to the little ivory ones you find in the shops of Jungfraustrasse.

The truth of the Kursaal, when you get it, is stranger than its fiction; as when the talk turns to the progress of the construction work on the Jungfrau Railway, that imperishable monument to the genius and patience of the late Adolf Guyer-Zeller, of Zurich. It is then you hear of the loftiest tunnels in the world, eight and ten miles long, through icy mountain shoulders ten thousand feet above the sea; of gradients of one in four; of squirrel locomotives so ingeniously contrived that if the electric power were suddenly to fail they could generate enough by their own weight to clap on brakes and come down in[286] safety; of searchlights in the stations on the peaks so strong that a man can read by them away over at Thun; of powerful telescopes, free to patrons, through which you may observe the occupations of the crowds on the Rigi and Mount Pilatus at remote Lucerne; of roomy and luxurious stations blasted out of the depths of the mountains, whose floors are parquetry and whose light and heat are electricity, with twenty-foot windows piercing the rock and appearing, even from across the neighboring abyss, like tiny pin-pricks in the perpendicular cliff; of the highest post-office on earth, from whose windows you look out on twenty glaciers. Of the truth of all this you are to learn later on when you make the unforgettable run to Eismeer—“sea of ice”—the farthest point so far attained in the steady progress of this marvelous railway toward the summit of the Jungfrau, now only a mile or two beyond, and which had been the despair of mountain climbers of all time until the Meyer brothers conquered it, one hundred years ago.

One finds the evening gossipers of the Kursaal scarcely less fascinating when they focus their talents on nearer regions; for “distant meadows” are not always “the greenest.” Agreeable things are to be heard of Schynige Platte, whither, it appears, you journey by cogwheel railway up steep gradients in an observation car behind a violently puffing locomotive, past pretty toy stations, around dizzy corners, through the startling blackness of[287] unexpected tunnels, and so on out and up to the giddy plateau and an overpowering prospect of snowfields, misty valleys, gorges, and cataracts upon which you gaze in spellbound astonishment from the comfortable terrace of the “Alpenrose.” From no other viewpoint, they tell you, does the stupendous Mönch (Monk) seem to stand out so squarely in the middle distance in his cowl of snow, playing his traditional rôle of discouraging duenna between the coveted Jungfrau and the eager Eiger whom he repels with an eternal arm of glittering, blue ridge-ice.

When the conversation takes up Grindelwald, it becomes so attractive that you make a mental note to go there the first thing in the morning. It seems you are to take one of those droll little coaches of the Bernese Oberland Road marked “B.O.B.,” and proceed delightedly up the green valley of the Lütschine. Very soon will loom before you the bleak shoulders of the Wetterhorn, seared and precipitous, capped and pocketed with snow; the overwhelming pyramid of the Eiger, fearful with gorge and chasm; the regal Jungfrau, immaculate and stupendous; and, most uncommon spectacle of all, the awe-inspiring glacier—a frozen tumble of scarred boulders and grimy icebergs, pierced by glittering ice grottoes and ridged with terraced ways from which you stare down into yawning black gulfs that are fringed with giant icicles pendent from the frozen ledges. What was it Coleridge said of glaciers?

But many there will be at the Kursaal to tell you such tales of the enchanted Lauterbrunnen Valley as to incline you to reconsider any resolution about going first to Grindelwald. There, it is clear, we are to find quality rather than quantity: a narrow ravine through the mountains, carpeted with the greenest of turf and hung with glorious waterfalls that come tumbling down from lofty limestone precipices. We are to drive beside a turbulent stream set with occasional châlets whose projecting roofs will suggest broad-brimmed hats jammed down over their eyes, and here and there we shall come across a white stone church. Shortly there will be raging, leaping torrents all about us, vaulting down great cliffs of strange and startling appearance, and a vista of wonderland will open before us with the stately Steinberg enthroned in the midst. Next, climax on climax, the incomparable Staubbach! Before this queen of cataracts every other “hanging thread” is instantly and hopelessly dwarfed, as it launches its “wreaths of dangling water-smoke” from a thousand feet above. We will think this “dust brook” a mere feathery spray fluttered in a capricious breeze, so astonishing is the evidence of the resistance of the air and the friction of the rocks back of it; but once we have gone behind it and observed the “perpetual iris” made by the sun in shining[289] through, it will appear a wonder beyond classification. Byron fancied it “the tail of the White Horse”; Wordsworth called it “the sky-born waterfall”; and Goethe’s dripping song of it runs:—

Lesser lights are to be found among the Kursaal heroes who will confess to nothing more unusual in the way of activity than salmon-fishing in the neighboring lakes or bagging red partridge and hazel hens in the upper meadows. But these, by contrast, appear sportsmen of so mean an order that the stranger who has fed fat on the succulent yarns of the Munchausens receives with impatience information for which, in fact, he should be grateful. For instance: that in the winter the thermometers of the higher settlements get down to fifty-four below freezing and yet the dry air keeps people warmer than in the valleys, and that the snow falls in such incredible quantities that artificial lights have to be used in the lower stories of the houses all day and trenches cut for exit; that up there when the terrific Föhn blows from the south no man can make headway against it, but must lie flat on his face and hang on and then jump up and dart forward a few yards between[290] gusts; that those people can foretell the weather by changes in the color of the ice—blue meaning fine, green for snow, and white for fog; that the Alpine crows of the summits are dark blue, with yellow beaks and red feet, and the “wall-creepers” are gray as mice, with white and red spots on their wings and with beaks shaped like awls. At some such point as this the stranger will rise with a yawn and go away in disgust, annoyed at being taken for a credulous fool. The seed, however, has been sown and it flourishes like the fabled mustard. The new arrival becomes a confirmed zealot and burns with all the ardor of a convert; albeit his brain is a confused and bewildered muddle of harsh-sounding mountain names, all, apparently, ending in horn.

When he comes out on the lawns he finds the guests still thronging the verandas, although it is nearly eleven and prodigies of mountaineering are slated for the morrow, and he hears the bands still engaged with Puccini and the latest Vienna successes. In the fragrant, dewy gardens fountains are playing, and lovers are discreetly screening behind clumps of flowering shrubs. Returning excursionists are excitedly vocal over the illumination of the Giessbach, whence they have just arrived in one of those pompous lake steamers whose sure and cautious pace reminded the satirical Victor Tissot of “the dignified motion of a canalboat.” To hear these enthusiasts, this appears to have been one more of those exceptionable occasions that the absent are always missing,[291] and that the renowned waterfall never before roared and tumbled and foamed half so extravagantly in making its long, mad plunge through the dusky, dark-green firs. Out on the Höheweg a walking-party in knickerbockers and hobnailed shoes, and with edelweiss stuck in green felt hats, are flourishing their alpenstocks and driving bargains with sunburned guides whose names, undoubtedly, are either Melchior or Mathias; these latter, we are to learn, are of a fearless but canny and laconic nature, “economical as gypsies and punctual as executioners.”

How keenly people take their pleasures in the sparkling evenings of Interlaken. How sharp and distinct are sounds and sights, and how varied the night life. Each little street is as gayly illuminated as though for some special celebration, and so hearty with good cheer that one looks for some band of Bernese wrestlers, returning in triumph from a festival, to round the next corner and strike up that clarion anthem “Stehe fest, O Vaterland.” It would seem as though the “Fête du Mi-Été” must actually be in full swing right here, instead of afar in the upland pastures. Even at this hour a joyful multitude still streams along under the Höheweg’s century-old walnuts, hatless, radiant, and babbling in every European tongue. They flock about the confectioners’ stands and in and out of the curiosity-châlets, greeting acquaintances with eager pleasure and proposing jolly plans for to-morrow. Each little shop seems selling to capacity.[292] Occasionally a peasant girl passes, brusque and stolid, in short skirt and bright bodice, with V-shaped rows of edelweiss buttons. Out on the green Höhenmatte lively groups loiter about aimlessly, and somewhere in the vague distance some one is singing the ever-popular “Trittst im Morgenrot daher.” The thickly-wooded Rugen seems a colossal black mastiff asleep with his head between his paws. Away up the misty valley, whose vital air is so sweet with refreshing odors and so soothing with soft music, the regal Jungfrau looms in dim and spectral outline, as ghostly and deceptive as any faint feathering of cumulus clouds.

A distant Jödel or the lilt of a plaintive Ranz des Vaches excites cordial thoughts of this fair Helvetia and her strong and devoted people. “I wonder,” a friend once said to me at Interlaken, “if these men and women really appreciate how lovely their country is.” Perhaps the best answer is to be found in the desperate resolution with which they have held it for six hundred years. Hard necessity has taught these brawny mountaineers, whom Mr. Ruskin ungenerously called “ungenerous and unchivalrous,” that to be “painfully economical” is wiser than to chance privation. One thinks with wonder of the hardships endured by the herdsman away up in the mountain pastures, eating his sweet-bread and draining his milk-filled wooden bowl in a rude pine hut, with goats and kine for comrades, and, for his sole diversion, an occasional glimpse of a leaping chamois, a sly mountain[293] fox, a white hare, or the whistling, rat-like, shadowy marmot. With his long alphorn he calls the cattle home or sounds the vesper hour, until the loud echoes shout back from snowfield and ice gorge and the great ravens swerve in their swimming flight. In summer, fluttering clouds of butterflies will drift above the pansies and Alpine roses and gentians on his meadow; but in winter the pallid, velvety edelweiss is all the huntsman will find on those frozen ledges. What a wild and tragic region it must be when the last Senn has driven his herd down into the valleys and old Winter is in undisturbed possession of his “dear domestic cave.” The herdsman may rejoice that he is not there then; for it becomes a world of black and white, of illimitable snow and blotches of black forests, of death and waste and the frightful stillness of stupendous heights. Then it is a deserted realm of ice and snow set with pitfalls of treacherous crevasses and dreadful perils from hidden gulfs and pitiless avalanches; a shuddering space of cloud banks and waving vapor-scarfs; a haunted borderland of sinister shapes in the writhing mists like wraiths of Alpine legends.

Even so, hundreds of failing foreigners go a long way up in those forbidding regions in winter for an “enthusiasm of the blood” and a “fairy titillation of the nerves.” And when the days are bright and of their peculiar crystal clearness, and the skies are a cloudless blue and the sunshine a deluge, these invalids revel in skating[294] and curling and the hockey they call “bandy”; and will even try appalling flights by ski and toboggan through the “nipping and eager air,” over smooth trails of glistening snow, rivaling the records of the “blue-ribbon” Schatzalp course at Davos, where they do the two-mile run in something under four minutes. There is a chance observation in “Silas Marner” that “youth is not exclusively the period of folly!”

Of a summer evening, however, it might not be altogether unpleasant in some parts of that cloudland. Could we return with the happy little mule-boy who has just now come “jödeling” down from the passes, doubtless we should find the sound of goat bells both romantic and soothing up there, and might even in time muster a respectable show of excitement over the passage of the four-horse diligences as they rattle by in storms of dust. Certainly we should come across many a charming little wayside inn far up those winding roads that climb to solitude, and they would have overhanging eaves and carved wooden balconies and boxes of rich orange nasturtiums before the tiny windows with the lozenge panes; and when we pushed open the door and walked in, there would be a great stone stove in a bar parlor and the face of William Tell on an old clock behind the door.

One reads in “Hyperion” of a stolid Englishman so far forgetting his cherished reserve as to exclaim: “This Interlaken! This Interlaken! It is the loveliest spot[295] on the face of the earth!” It is a nice question as to whether any one might not easily be guilty of like enthusiasm, provided the time were evening, and that he were capable of responding to something of such passionate sympathy for mountain and valley as breathes through Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell.” It is impossible not to be moved by such unusual beauty or uplifted by such sublimity. Here jangled nerves recover rhythm and dulled interests vitality. Boredom and ennui fall away, and work and responsibility acquire new value and lustre. In the still of these pine-scented evenings, luminous with enormous stars, a keen and sobering joy of life takes full and welcome possession. Here, if anywhere, the sun of youth will have its afterglow.

There is something like benediction in a night-vision of the magic Jungfrau—peerless “bride of quietness.” With such an appealing spectacle in view, what wonder that the houses have so many windows, or the night “a thousand eyes.” It is the master touch to Interlaken, completing and glorifying the picture as it banks the far end of the valley with towering clouds of snow. Neither Mont Blanc nor the Matterhorn may rival this queen of the Alps, so charming in outline, vast in bulk, and ravishing in purity. It could not fail to dominate any region of earth, and Interlaken acknowledges its supremacy with a completeness that is not without a certain flavor of proprietorship. Each hillside has its view-pavilion, belvedere, or simple clearing, like so many[296] chapels for devotion. We come each morning for our sunrise view, pass the day in adoration, marvel at sunset and the afterglow, and close the evening with a wonderwist contemplation of the phantom peak in moonlight. Of these “stations” of the mount, the afterglow is the climax. Nor is the reason far to seek, once you have stood among the awed and reverent throng that crowds the Höhenmatte each late afternoon, and have seen black night about you in the valley, while, for an hour or more after, the snowfields of the Jungfrau’s summits still continued to blaze brilliantly in full sunshine. And then, as we watched, there came the color-miracle of glittering white merging into every hue of the rose, into scarlet stains and a deluge of crimson, into deepening tints and sombre shades of blue, and finally fading gradually to a misty, grayish, cloudy shadow as the last fires burned out and the great mountain paled to a phantom of the night.

How spirit-like, how faint and fair the magic mountain swims at night among its silver cloud veils! What serenity and majesty invest it! Did God here plan another flood, and stay His hand when He had heaped an angry ocean into this dread tidal wave and left it piled in suspended[297] motion, with giant frozen seas, furious with foam, mounting to that appalling crest that seems to dash its icy spray against the very skies? No man may look with undaunted heart upon the chaos of its glittering snowy plains, vast, chaste, and spectral in the moonlight. How base and contemptible appear the petty pursuits of man in the presence of such thrilling sublimity! It reconciles him to his lot in life, where his “much” is really so very little; and inspires courage, and shames the heart from low, ignoble ends.

There is reverent awe in thoughts of the breathless hush of the far, white vales no man has trod; the remote and shuddering abysses into which the very birds of the air look down with affright. There is magic of inspiration in its sublime aloofness—as with those “unheard melodies that are sweetest,” those supremest joys that lie beyond attainment. Through the hidden, echoing caverns of this fair, pallid mount wan spirits of Snowland may even now be dancing; along its lonely, lovely glades are “horns of elfland faintly blowing.” Of its profoundest and most secret mysteries not even the friendly moon may have too curious knowledge—mysteries unknown of man since first the morning stars sang together.

A July moon over, a gondola under, a tenor lilting a barcarolle, thousands with you on the Grand Canal—Venice a festa! From a near-by belfry, a clock booms eleven. Eleven! and we are only to the Foscari Palace. An hour ago we started at the Rialto, a thousand gay gondolas with bunting, lanterns, and greens, everybody jostling, singing, and shouting, and in the centre, like the queen-jewel of a tiara, the brilliant barca filled with orchestra and singers and ablaze in a myriad of colored lights. This is a great occasion, the serenata ufficiale. The festa of the Redentore is near its close. Church portals hang with mulberry branches begged by the monks of St. Francis, and the people have feasted royally on the luscious black fruit bought at the little stands on the Giudecca quays. Last Sunday the priestly procession in full canonicals crossed the bridge of boats to the Giudecca on its annual pilgrimage to the church of the Redentore. Venice thus sustains her reputation as a reverencer of traditions; they are burning lamps still in San Marco Cathedral for an innocent man who was put to death hundreds of years ago. And so the church[302] of the Redentore is packed to suffocation at least one day of the year, and after that, with the religious rites off her mind, Venice suddenly gives up trying to look solemn and bursts out into the joy and tumult of the “Official Serenade.”

This year it is splendid. Every moment belated gondolas are arriving like flocks of black swans, with fresh quotas of enthusiasm and an increase of gayety and confusion. What laughter and fun! The Canal is a hopeless jam. Dancing lanterns play light and shade on thousands of bright faces, and the gondoliers, in fresh white blouses and blue sailor collars, look like shadows as they lean silently on their long oars. In the intervals of the music there is something weird and frantic to both their labor and their language as they agonize to protect their beloved boats from scratches and smashes and at the same time retain positions of vantage in this ice-floe of a tangle as the barca struggles forward a few difficult yards to its next point of serenade. There are ten or a dozen of these serenade-points, and at each the writhing flotilla pauses, and singers and orchestra provide the entertainment. It is finest to be afloat, but, oh, the land! Red-and-green fire throws into enormous relief fairylike towers and turrets that have figured in song and story for a thousand years; and in windows, terraces, balconies, and tops there throngs a multitude that none of us may number. Every face is turned toward the barca; every handkerchief[303] waves our way. An occasional searchlight darts impartially over them and us, picks out a spot in sudden brilliance and as suddenly drops it back into blacker obscurity. But in that brief flashing, scattered friends have discovered friends, and gondolas are started inching toward each other, and presently parties are joined and ice boxes uncovered. After covertly studying the apparently aimless movements of our own gondola I finally unearthed a dark conspiracy in the reunion line that interested only Paolo, our gondolier, and an occasional crony at a neighboring oar. Paolo’s face and manners are innocence itself, but his guile is fathoms deep. We could not understand why he did not get us nearer to the barca, the universal objective, until we saw the bottle pass between him and a raven-haired, flashing-toothed athlete at the nearest oar and surprised the quick greeting and low, musical laugh of congratulation and content. But who minds, with Venice a festa! And Venice is Paolo’s—not ours, alas!

Night on the Grand Canal! What a realm of witchery! “The horns of elfland faintly blowing.” What lullaby could soothe more sweetly than the dip of the oar or the soft plash of the dark water under the gondola’s prow! The charm of unreality invests the shadowy, spiritualized palaces rising like silver wraiths from the quivering stream. The summer moon touches each carven arch and column, each stone-lace balcony, each fretted embrasure, each delicate ogive window and sculptured[304] capital, and lo, a magician’s wand has reared a dream-land of unearthly beauty!

In the soft and odorous darkness the birds that love this Venice are securely nesting—the gulls, that in winter whirl up the canals with harsh clamors of the coming storms, are now at rest along the beaches of their blue Adriatic; the swallows and pigeons are sleeping among the red tiles of the crooked gables; the sparrows are aloft among the mulberry-trees of the Giudecca and the sycamores of the Public Gardens; the canaries are dim spots in fragrant magnolia-trees or in spreading beds of purple oleander; and the ortolans, robins, and blackbirds nestle among azaleas and the heavy festoons of banksias. All their music now is hushed, and they are as mute and soundless to-night as were their awe-struck sires, long centuries since, when gentle St. Francis read them his offices under the cypresses of Del Deserto.

The night is fragrant with the breath of roses, carnations, and camellias from palace gardens and with spicy honeysuckle from the neighboring Zattere. Visions of stirring romance and adventure crowd in on the mind. Down the pebbly paths of yonder garden surely some lover has just passed, brave in velvet doublet and silken hose, from laying his roses at the satin-slippered feet of his lady! Presently he will drift this way in his cushioned gondola and the soft night winds will bear her the mellow throb of his guitar and many a plaintive[305] sigh of love and Venice. But hush! from out that old black watergate, in bravo’s cloak and with muffled oar, who bears the helpless lady away through the deep shadows under the garden wall? Hard with your oar, my gondolier! A purse of golden ducats if you speed me to San Marco! I shall slip this scribbled note into the Lion’s Mouth! Ho, for the vengeance of The Ten!

If it were day, what a different scene we should have on this twisting sea-serpent of a Grand Canal. Venice would then be a sparkling vision resplendent with every sea charm, tinted with pinks and opals and pearls, and as changeful and full of caprice as any other coquette. Instead of this spangle of stars above, we should have a vast expanse of pale-blue sky, cloudless and glittering, and the misty reflections that now sink faintly deep down into these dark waters would vanish before a stream so azure and brilliant that it would seem as if a portion of the sky above had been cut and fitted between the palace fronts below. And how these mellow old churches and houses would glow and their wavering shadows shake in the stream! The exquisite traceries on balcony, arch, and column would seem carven of ivory, and from under the red-tiled eaves grim heads of stone would stare down over sculptured cornices and peep out through delicate quatrefoils and creamy foliations. And into these wonder-palaces the eager sun would peer to see the lofty ceilings all frescoed and gilded, the floors of colored marbles, the carven furniture and[306] faded rich hangings, and the deep and arched recesses that overlook the gardens in the rear. And what gardens! Mellow brick walls festooned in pale-blue wistaria and lined with hedges of white thorn, a solemn cypress in either corner, clumps of fig-trees and mulberry and golden magnolia, airy grapevine pergolas of slender, osier-bound willow, little paths snugly bordered with box, trellises of gorgeous roses, and here and there some antique statue or rude stone urn half hidden in color masses of scarlet pomegranates and snowy lilies.

The day-life of this famed waterway is very gay and picturesque. Here is both energy and idleness, and jolly friendships and laughter and light-heartedness. Deep-laden market scows pass ponderously by, piled high with fruits and vegetables, the rowers singing at their oars or shouting voluble greetings. Fishermen step slowly along, balancing baskets on their heads. Swarthy, black-eyed women, in dark skirts and gay neckerchiefs and with mauve-colored shawls falling gracefully from head to waist, throng the riva shops and bargain over purchases with violent gestures and eager earnestness. Priests returning from mass in rusty black cassocks loiter among the noisy groups and are received with profound bows and reverent touches of the cap. Husky, barefooted girl water-carriers, known as the bigolanti, stride by with copper vessels hanging from the yoke across their shoulders and offer you a supply for a[307] soldo. Up the intersecting canals endless processions are passing over the arching bridges, and you pause, perhaps, to observe the varied life from a place by the rail: girl bead-stringers with wooden trays full of turquoise bits; garrulous pleasure parties off for the Lido; laboring boatmen, breaking out into song; old men and women shuffling along to gossip and quarrel around the carven well-heads of the little campi; and now and then some withered old aristocrat on his way to have coffee and chess at Florian’s and then a solemn smoke over the “Gazetta di Venezia” before the Caffè Orientale in the warm morning sun of the riva of the Schiavoni.

How well the Foscari Palace, there, looks by night. The Foscari Palace—poor old Foscari! It is a sad but glowing chapter his name recalls. Here lived the great Doge, the least serene of all their Serenities. Grown old in power and worn with foreign wars, his heart broke over the treason of his worthless son, and the helpless, sobbing old man, no longer of use, was deposed by The Ten in his tottering age. The very next day he died—and there, in that palace. Just now, when the red-fire glowed, a pale campanile stood out of the gloom to the right and beyond the palace; that is where they buried him, in the church of the Frari. With belated reverence and remorseful at having dishonored him a few hours since, they proceeded to make history in Venice with the splendor of his obsequies. They clothed him in cloth of gold, set his ducal cap upon his[308] head, buckled on his golden spurs, and laid his great sword by his side. And thus in solemn pomp, attended by nobles and lighted by countless tapers, the pageant passed out of San Marco, crossed the Rialto, and came at last to the church of the Frari. And there what is left of Doge Foscari lies to this day. It is not a poor place to be in, either. The bones of Titian and Canova are beside him, a Titian masterpiece glorifies the choir, and on the opposite wall are two altar pieces of Bellini’s so lovely as to mark the very zenith of Venetian art.

A pause in the music of the serenade brings us suddenly back to the Venice of to-night. A vast scramble is in progress. We jostle and scrape forward another few yards. The barca sends a light hose-spray to right, left, and in front in a desperate effort to clear a passage. Dilatory or helpless gondoliers are lightly sprinkled, and all those of us who a moment since had been envying their good positions now basely give way to howls of joy. No use to struggle: all gondoliers are alike in such a crush. A champion Castellani is no better than Paolo, if he is strong enough to bend copper centesimi pieces between thumb and finger. Presently we stop. The tumult rages, good-naturedly and jolly, as the jockeying goes on for improved positions. And then there falls a sudden silence. A tenor is singing the “Cielo e Mar” of “La Gioconda.” You lie at full length on the cushions, the gondola lifting slowly with an indolent sway, and under the spell of the dreamy,[309] witching music you watch the smoke of your cigar as it drifts up and over and out and away toward the little streets in the dark.

Ah, little streets of Venice; under whatever name of calle or corto or salizzada, you are just the same—bedraggled and delightful! What rare surprises are always reserved for each revisit—an overlooked doorway, a balcony, some sculptured detail! If the house-fronts are plastered and patched—still they are picturesquely discolored. If the fantastic windows are out of plumb the gay shutters, nevertheless, are charmingly faded and there are pretty faces behind the bars. The roofs let in the rain—but how rookish and rickety they are. The battered doors are low—but they have knockers that are ponderous and imposing. Name plates are surprisingly large and keyholes deep and cavernous. The stirrup-handled bell-wires run almost to the tiny iron balconies, away up under the oval windows of the eaves—those little balconies that for ages have never refused sympathetic regard for the hum of slippered feet on the stone pavements below. And there are weathered store-fronts with corrugated iron shutters and gilt signs on black boards; and under your feet in the pavement are odd little slits for water to run off in, that remind you of openings in letter-drops at home. There, too, are the shops whose modest output arrays the Venetian poor to such advantage, and there are the stores and markets where they bargain for[310] frittole of white flour and oil, or polenta of ground corn, and personally pick out their sardines at ten for a penny, or indulge in a fine brunrino as large as a trout. There one sees picturesque lanterns and gay little window-boxes full of flowers away up among the chimneys and tin waterpipes. The rooms, perhaps, seem dark and gloomy to us of modern houses, but you stop with a thrill of delight at the happiness in the voice that carols a gay air from “Traviata” somewhere in their depths, and you look up with a smile at the bright bird that loves that dark cage. Some carping and fussy visitors may compare these rude homes to the dungeons under the “Leads” beyond the Bridge of Sighs, but how could they consistently be other than they are, venerable and dirty, with splotches of paint and charcoal markings and half-effaced pencil-drawings, of cracked plaster full of holes, and all toned down by time and weather to a uniform mellow gray! Of course, such critics accept, with all Italy, the proud ones with the marble tablets that tell that Marco Polo lived there, or Petrarch, or Titian, or Garibaldi, but the nameless and undistinguished many are quite as worth preserving. Thus one appreciates the inspiration of the authorities and applauds their industry in profusely tacking up those little ovals of blue tin with the jealous warning in white letters, “Divieto di Affisione”—that is, “Don’t spoil these walls with placards!” So, peace, harping Philistine, to whom nothing is ever hallowed! Though your emotions are thin[311] and your enthusiasms a-chill, respect these little byways; and if not for themselves, then for where they bring you—to fascinating curiosity shops of the antiquarians up the back courts; to charming campi where you stand by graven well-heads, wonderwist in the lengthening shadows of historic churches; to lichen-grown bridges, themselves pictures, arched over sunny canals overhung by gabled windows and flanked by garden walls pale blue with wistaria; or (could you have forgotten?) to nothing less than the great Piazza itself and glittering San Marco, the supreme jewel-casket of the world.

But the wistful “Cielo e Mar” is ended, and we move along to opposite the Accademia, treasure-temple of Venetian art. You uncovered just then, my comrade of the night, and out of reverence to the Titian Assumption, I dare say. I uncovered, too, but it was to the madonnas and saints of Giovanni Bellini. Do you know them well? No? Not the Santa Conversazione? Ah, then life still holds a delight in reserve for you.

A sudden great and universal hush has fallen on canal and shore. Another tenor, sweet and vibrant as a bell, breathes that tenderest of all serenades, the one from “Don Pasquale.” At all times irresistible, it seems doubly so now. The faces that you see are grave and eager and transported. The silence and rapt attention is a tribute beyond words to composer and singer; and where else but in Italy would a multitude hush to a whisper when[312] music sounds, and break into wild tumult when it ceases? A few weeks here, and one comes to understand that music is the very breath and life of these people. The vagabond Venetian, penniless but happy, comes out of his doze in a corner of a sunny riva and before his mouth has settled from its yawn it is rounded into a song. A bottle of cheap wine, a loaf of bread, and a guitar provide joy enough for an army in the family parties of the poor that float out on to the lagoon in rough market gondolas at sunset. Verdi and Rossini make work light for women, walk to business with the men, and hum comfort and courage all day. And so one needs to be discreet and silent when a solo begins or be prepared for an instant and tempestuous rebuke. But there seems little need for a warning to-night, with the hand of Venice so strong upon us.

Between serenades one takes his ease on the cushions and looks about on the people around him. Some one begins to whistle the jolly old “Carnival of Venice,” and it is promptly taken up on all sides, bolder spirits even venturing upon the variations. A German gives us the Fatherland’s version, about the hat that had three corners. An enormous Spaniard near at hand bellows a fragment of “I Pagliacci,” and is thunderously applauded. His friends, embarrassed but elated, urge him on to a second effort, which is received with indifference. On his third attempt he is hissed. Such is the caprice of an open-air audience in Italy.

The jolly stag party in the gondola to the right presses upon us the hospitality of the capacious hamper, which we decline with a thousand thanks and in gestures more intelligible than our pidgin-Italian. At our elbow two slender American women in black provide excellent eavesdropping entertainment. Here is talk to our liking, thrilling with the names of men of fame who knew and loved this Venice. “Just over there, Helen, is the palace where Browning lived and died. What an elaborate place for a poet! Howells lived next door, you know, when he wrote his ‘Venetian Life.’ These places are ever so much finer than the one farther down where Goldoni wrote his comedies. Oh, don’t you know the Goldoni house? It is this side the Rialto, just opposite the Byron Palace with the blue-striped gondola posts.” “I think,” says the other, “that the memories are quite as rich farther on. At the Hotel Europa, you remember, Chateaubriand once lived, and so did George Eliot; and from there you can see the Danieli where George Sand and Alfred de Musset sought happiness but only found misery.” At mention of the Europa the face of her friend is transfigured and our own hearts beat high in sympathy with the reverence of the lowered voice: “Wagner wrote ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Europa. He died in the palace where the three trees stand, away down beyond the Rialto.” Oh, deathless Venice! Oh, universal Love! They marvel at this elfin world—the English father, mother, and son in the gondola ahead.

The boy turns from the distant fairy candles of San Marco and regards them with amaze and disapproval. His enthusiasms are keen and a-quiver and the freshness of life’s morning is on his face. “Don’t analyze,” he says. “Just breathe it and feel it.” The parents exchange amused glances and smile indulgently. “‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings,’” quotes the father under his breath; but we know, and they know, that they have been answered.

Gorgeous silks and priceless tapestries and rare Oriental stuffs have doubtless often hung from the balconies of the palace on the right in the great gala days of the wonderful past when the Carnival lasted half a year. The law had not yet ruled that all gondolas must be a uniform solemn black, and the cradle-like boat of to-day, for all its brass dolphins and carven scenes from the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” would have cut a sorry figure beside the sumptuous ones of an earlier time, with their mountings of silver and gold, profusion of rich colors, upholstery of enormous value, and bearing owners of fabulous wealth whose names were written in the city’s Book of Gold. Ah, those were the triumphant days when foreign princes waited, half a hundred at a time, to have the judgment of the Venetian Senate on the affairs of their states; when royalty was no unusual spectacle on the Piazza of San Marco; when the argosies[315] of the world, “with portly sail,” came to anchor in these waters; when Dante and Petrarch were received as ambassadors; when the Admirable Crichton would be tossed a hundred ducats for amusing the Senate with an extemporized Latin oration; and when his Serenity, the Doge, on Ascension Day fared forth in dazzling splendor to espouse the sea from the throne of his sumptuous Bucentoro. The glory of that old and powerful Venice can never pass from the memory of men. Whole libraries preserve it in imperishable record. It is interesting, too, to note how it affected bygone visitors just as it does us to-day—as when one turns the pages of John Evelyn’s “Diary” and smiles to see how soon it was after his “portmanteau” had been “visited” at the Dogana customs-offices that he pronounced the Merceria to be “one of the most delicious streets in the world for the sweetness of it,” and learned with amaze of the skill and rapidity of Venetian artisans who, while King Henry III of England was one day visiting the Arsenal, built a galley, rigged, and finished it for launching, and cast a cannon of sixteen thousand pounds and put it on board,—and all while his Majesty was having luncheon. There was, indeed, a great deal of the marvelous about men who could contrive glass goblets so sensitive as to betray the presence of poison, or who could at so early an age make such exquisite books as the Aldine classics, to the despair of publishers for hundreds of years to follow.

Just now, in the fitful glare of red-lights, hundreds of eager Venetian faces, transported as always by the spirit of Carnival, were seen in excited groupings in every nook and corner of the neighboring fondamente. One thinks how different is the present scene from those these people are accustomed to look upon on other nights. You would find them then in the little family squares whose corners are shrines of the Virgin set with flowers and illumined with candles. Husband and wife will, perhaps, have spent the early evening in gallery seats at the Teatro Goldoni, and Giovanni, weary with a long day at the traghetto, would have finished thumbing the headlines of the day’s “L’ Adriatico” and would now have his friends about him, and Maria would let the bambino stay up a little longer, and all would feast with prodigious merriment and satisfaction on the ever-popular soupe au pidocchi,—which is mussel-broth flavored with spices,—to be followed by Chioggia eels and white wine of Policella. Neighboring women would, of course, drop in for their dearly loved gossip, hatless, with silver pins fastening their blue-black hair, coral beads around their necks, and draping shawls thrown over their bright waists. And presently some withered old coffee-roaster would drag himself in with his fragrant ovens glowing, the bright flames leaping, and toffee-venders would plead for sales. With the ease of sleight-of-hand a guitar suddenly makes its appearance out of nowhere and everybody enthusiastically joins in some haunting,[317] languorous, dreamy villotte dear to the hearts of Venetians. Just around the corner lounging groups would be scattered before café doors and voices would be humming in low, eager talk. The usual wrangling and bargaining would be in progress at the cooking-stalls piled high with fish and garlic, polenta, cabbages, and apples. In near-by trattorie with sanded floors artistic bohemia, with ambition numbed by the latest African sirocco, battens on bowls of macaroni in a turmoil of smoke and confusion. In the dark interior of a neighboring wineshop one would find the wonderful golden-browns that Rembrandt loved, as a single oil lamp glows on the weathered faces of a circle of old cronies. And somewhere, just at hand, a gondolier’s weird and fascinating cry of “Ah, Stalì!” would be heard; and all about them Venice would be crooning her ancient lullaby in the ceaseless, low lapping of water on stone steps.

All together and forward once more, to opposite the church of the Salute. We have lost our recent neighbors and have an entirely new set. The changes in the grouping are like the shuffling units of a kaleidoscope. A brilliant company is gathered on the balconies of Desdemona’s Palace, but Othello is not among them—another piece of calculated devilty, no doubt, on the part of the crafty Iago! Still, Portia is there from flowery Belmont and with her are Jessica and Lorenzo. The music is now from melodious old “Dinorah,” charmingly rendered and just as soothing as the first time[318] one ever heard it. The Salute stands out impressively in her great domes and elaborate spirals. It is beautiful, of course, by night, but then if it were day we might run inside and revel in Titians and Tintorettos. The fantastic columns fade and flash as the red and green fires smoulder or flame, and the gilded Fortuna on the dome of the adjoining Dogana catches some of the glitter and generously sends it on to the Seminario in the rear.

Some one calls my name from among the oleanders of the Britannia terrace, just opposite. What a delight to be known by name in this charmed city! I look up at the adjoining hotel and there are the windows of my room, and I know that within in the dark my clothing and articles of travel lie about. With secret wonder I whisper to myself that I, after all the years of waiting and hoping, I am actually a part of Venice!

One might think there could not possibly be any more gondolas in all the city outside of to-night’s tremendous gathering; but even now you could find them floating lazily about the lagoons, or away out toward the Lido where the moist winds are ruffling the water and the distant Bride of the Sea seems only some sort of bright exhalation. Theirs is a languorous and listless drifting and their dim lamps waver slowly like glowworms. Little need there for the musical wails of “Ah, Premì!” “Ah, Stalì!” Little of such complaint as Byron made that gondoliers are songless, for one could not ask for more plaintive and soothing melody than the low, passionate[319] crooning of the barefooted boy at the oar. And, perhaps, in the musky dark of silent canals more gondolas than one are even now stealing lightly and with love’s devious purposes under the fretted balconies of the star-eyed daughters of Venice, while Beppo muffles his oar to the warning of Tom Moore:—

It seems weeks since, in the cool of this very morning, out at the little island of Burano, I lunched under shady locusts in the quiet garden of “The Crowned Lion.” It was a pleasant stop on the way to deserted old Torcello—Torcello that mothered Venice, but now sleeps, a clutter of grass-grown ruins, in the appalling stillness of her weedy canals and thickets of blackberry hedges. Within a cable length of where our gondola is now resting a black, tarry fishing-bark tugs at anchor. If it were day and her sails were set, one could not help being delighted over the oranges and reds and blues of her patched and weathered canvas, the curve of the elaborately painted bow, and the spirited air of the curious figurehead. Unchanged survivors of the fading Past are these sturdy old bragozzi of Chioggia, and one could not ask for a braver show than they present when they hoist their painted sails to dry in one long line from the Public Gardens to the Doge’s Palace.

It was at Chioggia that we loitered, a few days back, and fed on picturesqueness to satiety. We have but to close our eyes—and there are the grizzled old fellows in red berrettas, trousers rolled to their wiry brown knees and great hoops of yellow gold in their ears. When the midday sun was hottest we found them sitting in the shade of their fishing-boats’ sails, mending their nets with wooden bodkins and brown twine. In the old days, when the hand of Venice was all-powerful in this part of the world, the Chioggians were the gayest and most picturesque people of these islands. Artists still consider them the purest types of Venetians, but they are a sad and melancholy lot now, as if burdened with the heritage of glorious memories. It seemed to me that the old men were the happiest living things in Chioggia; then, perhaps, came the boys, then the girls, and last of all the women—and the older the women the gloomier. The flirt of a sober mantilla is the nearest they ever come nowadays to gayety.

We shall never forget, nor ever want to, that wonderful sail back from Chioggia to Venice. Listening to the music on the Canal to-night the memory of it seems compact of dreams, or as the florid cloister-fancy of a Middle-Ages monk that we had read in some illuminated old volume bound in vellum and clasped with gold. There was all the vitalizing pageantry of sunset about us, all the immensity of sky and sea, and many a bright little island rising out of the rippling lagoon this[321] side the marshy wastes. The yellow strips of Pellestrina and Malamocco topped the waves in two long lines, like half-submerged reefs of gold. Above was a vast dome of turquoise glinted with pinks and grays, and with here and there a little heap of snowy clouds. Every phase of the wonderful sky was reproduced in the water. The sun reflected a second sun of no less ruddy fire which burned across the sea in a broad highway of shaking light that rolled to our very feet. The piled and fleecy clouds were steeped in gold, and bands of purple mists across Shelley’s Euganean Hills were pierced by it through and through. Venice, a mirage of the azure sea, rose slowly as we drew nearer, a witchery of towers, campaniles, palaces, painted sails, and drifting gondolas. As the dimming beauty faded with the brief Eastern twilight and we were gazing in awe on the enchanting panorama, there suddenly loomed a fresh and added glory, for just above the topmost pinnacle of stately San Giorgio floated a young summer moon!

Beauty has here an abiding-place. Venice is doubtless a fairer vision now, with its myriad lights, than when the only illumination was from flickering tapers before the corner shrines of the Virgin. More comfortable it surely is than when St. Roche himself was baffled by more than seventy plagues. The jaunty boatman and his peerless gondola still charm us, and dustless and noiseless the city continues musical with the cheery hum of voices and the soft shuffle of feet. In the cool[322] twilight of the churches marvels of sculpture and immortal canvases still inspire and enthrall. Time has added new charms to the marbles of bell tower, church, and palace, and nature still employs a witchery scarce equaled elsewhere in decking the Sea City with flowers. From the water-lilies of the Brenta, the flaming begonia trumpets of the Giudecca, the pale sea-lavender of the Dead Lagoon, the rose-pergolas and oleander-cloisters of San Lazzaro, the primroses and sea-holly of the Lido wooded with odorous acacias and white-flowered catalpas, and carpeted with crimson poppies and the snowy Star of Bethlehem, away out to the sand dunes and lush grasses of Triporti, there continually rises an inexhaustible incense of fragrance and beauty.

The serenade is nearly ended. Anticipating the coming rush at the San Marco Piazza, a word to Paolo starts us laboriously toward the outskirts of the flotilla. From the Royal Gardens to the molo is a matter of only a dozen plunges or so of the stout oar, spurred by an offer of extra lire for extra speed. Off flies our gondola, frowning as superbly as ever did swan in the eye of Keats. We dart alongside the wet quay beyond the Bridge of Sighs and one of those superannuated old gondoliers called rampini earns a pourboire by steadying the prow as we jump ashore at the base of the column of San Marco’s winged lion. St. Theodore looks down placidly from the vantage-point above his crocodile as we pass between these storied pillars—“fra Marco e[323] Todaro,” as the Venetians say when they mean “between pillar and post.” The piazzetta is already crowded and our hope of a table at Florian’s is dwindling. Never did the stately Sansovino Library or the airy colonnades and warm Moorish marbles of the Palace of the Doges look finer, but past them we speed with no time for the scantiest of glances at the famous quatrefoils and the thirty-six pillars with the renowned capitals, and in we hurry to the broad and glorious piazza and its flooding of light and life. Florian’s is in a state of siege. Every table seems taken and hungry people by hundreds are clamoring for places. The Quadri, across the square, would probably have had to content us had not the efficacy of frequent past tips saved the day, and my nightly waiter welcomes us with his dry and mirthless smile and slips us into a snug harbor under the very guns of the enemy. My companions are officers of the American squadron now lying at Triest and they pass their professional opinion that the strategy was capital. But though officers, they are young officers, and Venice has captured them hand and foot. Scarcely have we completed our supper-order when the flowing strains of the Coronation March from “The Prophet” roll in from the molo in the barca’s good night, and, as if it were riding in on that splendid musical tide, the noisy, jubilant host of the festa comes pouring upon us.

And what a fascinating spectacle does this grand, unrivaled old square then present! Were Byron here[324] to-night he would still have to call it “the pleasant place of all festivity.” No chance now to study the designs in this vast flooring of marble or to coax a half-persuaded pigeon on to your shoulder. In every part of its two hundred yards of arcaded length, set with storied architecture so inspiring by beauty and association that it moved even the self-contained Mr. Howells to exclaim, “It makes you glad to be living in this world,” and under the blaze of its rimming of clustered lights and shops and thronged cafés, there storms and chatters a vigorous, cheery, light-hearted multitude fresh from the stimulus of the glittering water pageant. It comes in through the piazzetta with such a rush that one looks for the band and band-stand, too, to be swept the full length of the square and out under the arches of the Royal Palace. Such laughing and uproar! Such a sirocco of gestures and hailstorm of crackling exclamations! This human tidal wave of the Adriatic pours down the middle, seethes along the edges, and swirls and eddies in the remotest corners. One sees in it happy, voluntary exiles from almost every part of the world, but to-night the festa-loving Venetians predominate. Every local type is here; from the languid patrician, come in from her country estate and now sipping anise-water here at Florian’s, and the vapid and scented fashionable youths with carnations in their buttonholes, to the flashing, black-eyed shop-girls with red roses in their crisp black hair and graceful mantilla shawls dropping back from[325] their tossing heads, and the vigorous, smiling artisans, easy and jaunty of gait, with soft hats pushed back at every rakish angle on their curly heads. How happy and transported Maria is to-night, in her new black skirt and crimson bodice, and how the sultry red smoulders through the olive of her cheeks as her little hands whirl in a tempest of gestures and the lightnings of excitement play in her midnight eyes! And no less carried away is Giovanni, beside her,—proud as Colleoni on the big bronze horse,—though he lets her do most of the talking and contents himself with approving in quick, expressive shrugs. All classes of society are with us—“rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief”; and old Shylock himself, who was most of these, “dreaming of money-bags.” Scraps of gay, slurring song are continually bubbling over and flashes of wit and snappy repartees go flying to and fro. Flower-girls thread the press and insist upon pinning boutonnières on the men, and street merchants move about offering everything from curios to caramel-on-a-stick. A crowd gathers about a blind old troubadour thrumming a dirty guitar and struggling to force his rusty voice along the melodious course of some popular villotte, and presently he will be led among the tables before the cafés and centesimi and silver lire will jingle into his ragged hat.

It is little enough to say that no scene ever had a more romantic setting. The quaint old Venetian quatrain does this famed spot scant justice:—

In the moonlight the sculptured and arcaded old buildings glow like mellow ivory around three sides of it, and it is warmed and vitalized by bustling cafés and brilliant shop windows set with tempting snares of artful jewelry and cunningly wrought glass. Strong and proud the great Campanile towers upward into the clear night, away above the tops of the three tall flag-staffs. The sumptuous Cathedral, in its wealth of glowing color and lavish adornment, makes one think of a vast heap of glittering treasure piled up by returning Venetian pirates in answer to the accustomed question, “What have you brought back for Marco?” One can scarcely take his eyes off its lofty, yawning portals, its gates of bronze, its forest of columns, its sweeping arches glowing in every color of brilliant mosaics, its profusion of creamy sculptures, its canopied saints and statued pinnacles and its great Byzantine domes billowing into the purple sky. On the ancient clock tower of the Merceria the fierce winged lion of St. Mark’s holds a resolute paw on the open Gospels, and the bronze bellringers swing twelve ponderous blows and hang up the hour of midnight on a dial of blue and gold. As they pause at the completion of their labors and look down on the sea of faces turned toward them from the Piazza they seem[327] so nearly galvanized into life that it would scarcely surprise one to hear them shout, “What news of the argosies of Antonio?”

With the sparkling beauty of Venice so irresistible it is a terrible temptation to my companions to hurry straight back to Triest and come over with their battleship and, like dashing naval Lochinvars, force an espousal of this incomparable Bride of the Sea. Vain thought! It is Venice herself who has always done the espousing; fully to possess her it must be on her own conditions of complete surrender.

How inevitable it seems at night that you must take the step; must cry out, once and for all, to fellow voyagers on the Dead Lagoons of Life: “Ho, brothers! No more of the drab and wretched wastes for me! I am for beauty and romance—‘in Venice, all golden, to dream!’ I shall dwell in this enchanted realm of dolce far niente and float with my gondola into the final Sunset. Companions [328]on Life’s waters, ‘Ah, Stalì’!”

Like a practiced coquette, Paris, the world’s enchanteresse, reserves for the supreme moments of midnight her rarest resources of gayety and charm. Her last laughs are her best. And decidedly, she is dangerous when laughing. Beyond question, her glowing eyes at midnight are wonderfully sweet and beguiling; and hers is the skill to touch the bright hours with the most delectable couleur de rose. There is satisfaction for each desire. “Would monsieur sup?” The most amazing cuisine in the world awaits your pleasure. “Would monsieur stroll?” The sparkling lights and rustling trees of the fairest of boulevards fairly drag you their way. “Would he drive?” You raise your hand; a fiacre dashes up; and soon the Bois and the Champs-Élysées, cool, scented, dewy, receive you gladly to their enchanting retreats. “Would he join a revel—just a little one?” Cabarets, cafés-chantants, bals publics were designed for no other purpose. “Would he look on at life?” “Garçon vite! Une demi-tasse—une; sur la terrasse!”—and heart could not ask for a madder, merrier, more absorbing spectacle than that which will whirl and surge by the[332] very edge of your little round table. “Eh? Monsieur has a fancy for nature and solitude? Mon Dieu! C’est un original, celui-là! Mais”—and you will find nowhere gardens lovelier than those of the Tuileries, elegant with statues and carpeted with flowers. Thus at every point the charmer wins. What is left but surrender? She seems the very Queen of Heart’s Desire.

Of course, the night side of Paris is her most trivial side. But then visitors have always refused to take her seriously at any time. No matter how many wonderful achievements have been crying out to them all day that this is one of the most extraordinary and advanced communities to be found anywhere on the face of the earth, still they stubbornly cling to the conviction that all is frivolity here and that night is Paris’s supreme period and pleasure seeking her most conspicuous and characteristic rôle. Accustomed to the droll ideas of foreigners, and bothering little about them except to find occasional amusement, Paris shrugs her shoulders in indifference and turns on more lights. Brilliant, charming, and ingenious she creates what she prefers—an atmosphere of gayety and beauty. And the visiting world purrs about her in joy of a fascination it cannot find elsewhere and salves its own patriotism with the conclusion that this is her principal raison d’être.

As a matter of fact, the Parisians are masters of the art of living. As their kitchen is the best, so is their drawing-room and study. All the affairs of every day[333] are handled with ease and grace, with imagination and a kind of poetic skill that adorns even the ugly and commonplace and invests them with attractiveness and charm. The cheery light-heartedness that is a fundamental trait of Parisians converts the life of their streets and parks into scenes delightful either to contemplate or share. Indeed, they often seem to be only grown-up children, so gracefully have they retained the fresh and stimulating enthusiasm of youth—so rueful and pouting over a rainy day; so exuberant over a bright one. And the best of it is that there is an infection to their high spirits that passes into the observer and clears his perception of the folly of worry and depression, and shows him the value and availableness of optimism and good cheer. Such is the glorious influence of a people whose attitude toward life is essentially one of hope and zest.

No one is going to deny that the Parisian is vain. Indeed, his attitude toward the rest of the earth, while patient and polite, is at bottom patronizing and even a little supercilious. And sometimes, it must be confessed, this gets on the visitor’s nerves. One cannot give out admiration forever and rest content with getting none back. It is easy to understand the mood of bitter derision into which even so enthusiastic an admirer as Edmondo de Amicis fell when he wrathfully wrote: “Three hundred ‘citizens’ hang over the side of a bridge to see a dog washed; if a drum passes, a crowd collects; and a thousand people, in one railway station, make a[334] tremendous uproar by clapping their hands, shouting, and laughing because one of the guards of the train has lost his hat!” Yet De Amicis came shortly to see that this is only the Parisian temperament, which he admired in so many other of its manifestations, and that under it lie solid qualities of the highest and rarest order. So he forgave Paris, as everyone does, and took her again to his heart—albeit, I mistrust, with reservation and a lingering grain of suspicion and perhaps something of the foreign conviction that she is not always to be taken quite seriously.

To the vast majority of visitors Paris by night means the boulevards. The beauty of these famed thoroughfares, the cosmopolitan and fascinating sea of humanity that flows through them, the means of amusement that abound, and all the many little refinements of comfort and elegance to be seen on every hand place them in a class by themselves among the city streets of the world. In the matter of virility the life of the boulevards is amazing. Every one seems to be at his keenest when he walks there. Anticipation is fairly skipping on tiptoe. The old boulevardier, the traditional flâneur, has not been disappointed of his evening’s diverting on-look these forty years or more, and he can, therefore, clothed and gloved and caned à la mode, proceed with his stroll in unhasting dignity, confident that the usual amusing spectacle will unfold itself in good time. But the new arrivals and the visitors of a few weeks show in[335] their eager faces that nothing is going to escape them and that a thorough debauch of pleasure is the least they propose to make out of all the bewildering light and life about them. From the Place de la Concorde to the Place de la République a laughing, brilliant, light-hearted multitude pours along all night with infinite bustle and chatter. Between twelve and one o’clock it is at its gayest. The theatres and cafés-concerts have emptied their audiences into the stream, which is swollen to the very curb, and the driveways are whirling with an enormous outpouring of busses, motors, and cabs. The size of the loads the hired victorias and fiacres will accommodate is determined solely by the inclination and interest of the impertinent fat cocher in the varnished plug hat; and it is nothing to see a conveyance, that ordinarily carries but two people, trundling merrily along behind a sprung-kneed nag, with a man and several girls piled inside and all waving hands to the crowd with the vastest camaraderie imaginable. This is of a piece with the universal high spirits and good humor that prevail along the boulevards. It is all fun and frolic, and everybody is in it. The rows of chairs and tables on the sidewalks before the cafés really make the spectators a part of the show; and the groups before the artistic little newspaper kiosks and the comfortable sitters on the green benches along the curb are, in spite of themselves, part and parcel of the big family, with something of the intimacy and allied interest of a village street at fair-time. And[336] it always seems fair-time in Paris by night. The profusion of lights that have won it the title of “La Ville Lumière” gives it an appearance of being perpetually en fête, and the ebullient crowds complete the illusion.

But the Grand Boulevards have no monopoly of the night attractiveness of the city. All over town stretch broad, clean streets with shade trees and double lines of lights and rows of stone and stucco houses. In the main these houses resemble each other rather closely; slate-colored, Mansard-roofed, and with shallow iron balconies running full length of the second, fourth, and fifth stories. By night they fairly exhale an atmosphere of tranquillity and peace. There are, besides, hundreds of beautiful roomy squares, flooded with light and set with comfortable benches that are seldom without contented occupants. Such a notable one as the Place de la Concorde is without its equal in any city. It costs the three and a quarter millions of people who live in and about Paris more than $70,000,000 a year to maintain their city’s reputation for beauty; and not a sou of it is begrudged. For Paris is the whole world to most of them, and many a Parisian politician had rather be Prefect of the Seine and rule this town than president of the whole Republic. And with what reason! “It is a world-city,” said Goethe, “where the crossing of every bridge or every square recalls a great past, and where at every street corner a piece of history has been unfolded.”

Whoever turns from the boulevards for a space will learn of other kinds of life that are in full cry at midnight. What of the studio revelries of the Quartier Latin? There abound jollity and earnestness and strong friendships with few of the gilded accessories of the Rive Droite. The brightest of these scenes are often the most meagre in setting. A group of jovial, smoking, singing companions—and about them an easel and sketching-board, a dingy divan, a few battered chairs, a stove in the corner with the remains of the last meal, a huddle of draperies and hangings, fragments of casts and uncompleted sketches on the walls, and a corner table piled with a dusty litter of squeezed-out paint-tubes, broken brushes, magazine illustrations, a dog-eared book or two, and a generous strewing of cigarette butts. The cleanest things in sight are a freshly scraped palette and a sheaf of brushes stuck in a half-filled jar of water. With so much of equipment your merry, care-free artist squeezes the orange of life to its smallest drop, and cares not a sou how the whole world wags, provided all is well between the Place de l’Observatoire and the Seine.

Then, again, were you to pass some pleasant house on a quiet avenue where an evening’s party is ending, you could not help but linger under the windows in delight to hear some tender song of Massenet’s, some soothing berceuse of Ropartz’s, a haunting plaint of Saint-Saëns or a vitalizing torrent of Chaminade’s.

And perhaps where you might most expect just such[338] a scene as this, behind the closely-drawn window draperies of some handsome apartment, there is gathered around a broad green table a group of flushed, excited men to whom a hard-eyed croupier is singing the abominable siren song of “Faites vos jeux,” “Les jeux sont faits,” “Rien ne va plus.” It seems quiet and peaceful enough. You could scarcely believe that there hangs above it the shadow of the little gray Morgue down behind Notre-Dame!

Before returning to the giddy boulevards for a final petit-verre and an exchange of pleasantries with café acquaintances, one likes to finish a cigar in an aimless ramble through such placid scenes as these. Not only may he so indulge the pleasing diversion of speculating over the kinds of home life that go on within these houses, but incidentally he escapes the tumult of the maelstrom for a few calm moments, and eventually sees for himself what a pity it is that so many night fascinations should abound in Paris and be enjoyed by so few. He may like to draw moral conclusions from the peace-loving pigeons nesting in the war-glorifying reliefs of the gigantic and towering Arc de Triomphe, or take satisfied note of the monuments of the victories of peace that dot the broad avenues that radiate from it. One such monument is always under the eyes of the boulevardiers in the form of that most glorious of all temples to music, the Paris Opera House. It is especially impressive by night, with the shadows blending[339] columns and statues in bewildering beauty, and high-lights from the street lamps glinting on sculptured balustrades and cornices, chalking the edges of half-hidden arches and penciling the delicate detail of medallions and reliefs. Nor, it must be allowed, are devotees often wanting for that fair Greek temple of La Madeleine—so chaste and of such imposing dignity, rimmed with giant columns and embowered in verdure.

After like fashion does night enhance the beauty of the great, rambling Louvre—though this may only be Diana’s way of paying tribute to the Arts and of venerating the sacred shrine of a sister divinity, that serenest and sublimest of goddesses, the Venus de Milo. There is certainly something of almost ethereal comeliness by night to those long vistas of columns and arcades, to the shadowy sculptures of the pavilions, the lines of graceful caryatids and the blustering triumphal groups of the pediments. One might fancy the Louvre wearing a look of grave disapproval over the hubbub that drifts in from the boulevards were he not aware how carefully it treasures so many pictorial skeletons in its own closets. Boucher and Watteau are on record with infinitely worse scenes than these. But now it has the appearance of some palace capitol of Shadowland; and before it in perfect sympathy lies its beautiful dream-kingdom, the hushed and fragrant gardens of the Tuileries,—fair as the golden Hesperides,—fresh with fountains, silvered in patches with little shining[340] lakes, marquetried in flowers, and peopled with shadowy forms of pallid marble.

From a Seine bridge one notes the wizard liberties the reckless moon takes with the colonnaded dome of the sombre Panthéon. And, more astonishing still, the magic tricks it plays with the adorned and enormous bulk of Notre Dame—now veiling, now revealing massive buttress and delicate rose-window, some recessed arch tucked full of sculptured saints all snugly foot to head, or a goblin band of hideous gargoyles that leer ghoulishly down from out the purple haze of the towers. One could well wish, however, for a closer view of that exquisite survivor of the Valois kings, the peerless Tour Saint-Jacques, at the first sight of which the most indifferent exclaim with delight over so rare a vision of grace and lace-like beauty, over long slender windows delicately foliated, over traceries of stone like petrified festoons, and an ensemble so suggestive of some dainty ivory-carving a million times enlarged. With a glimpse of the round pointed towers of the dread Conciergerie comes something of the horror of the days of the Terror, and one fancies ghastly forms beckoning him at the windows with white, frightened faces and hanging hair and eyes with hideous rings, and delicate praying hands upheld to passers-by, and iron bars clutched by the little white fingers of Marie Antoinette and her court.

From such a gruesome fancy it is a relief to turn and look down on the dark rippling Seine and watch the[341] wavy ribbons of light swim quiveringly out from the bridge lamps. And there in the cool of their stone wharves, still panting and perspiring from the violent exertions of the earlier evening, lie the fat little open-deck steamers that haul the lovers home. For many a happy pair this day has been dining deliciously à deux under the gay terrace awnings of one or another of the romantic, flower-embowered inns that overlook the river all the way from Charenton to gray old Argenteuil, where Héloïse in her nunnery fought her losing fight against love and the memory of Abélard. Some of these steamers appear alarmingly apoplectic, so that one wonders how they have managed to wheeze safely under all those low arches with the garlanded “N’s” and past so many formidable buttresses all sculptured cap-a-pie.

If now you turn and look upward and about you, lo! the heaped and cluttered roofs of Paris—the most fantastic and romantic of spectacles! It is singular, almost startling, to see how they stare down as though to study you, and with apparently as much curious intentness and dark suspicion as you do them. There must be whole volumes of stories to each of them. Out of the ponderous Mansard roofs impudent, leering little dormer windows wink down and squint up, each with his rakish peaked roof like a jockey cap over one ear. And up above even them are whole groves of blackened chimney-stacks leaning all askew, like barricades for[342] sansculottes. You look expectantly to see miserable white Pierrot come forth, guitar in hand, and sing sadly of Colombine to the pallid moon.

Suddenly, to the right, the lift of a cloud unveils the bronze dome of the solemn Hôtel des Invalides, and your heart beats high with thoughts of the marvelous man who lies under it among his tattered battle-flags on a pavement inscribed with his victories. It is a sobering reflection that now in the darkness and stillness of that chamber the only eyes that are looking down on his porphyry sarcophagus are those of the bronze Christ that hangs on the cross in the little side chapel of the tomb.

“Tout-Paris,” as smart society calls itself, spends the early summer at Trouville. All the most exclusive names of the two-volume Bottin are then inscribed in the hotel registers of this recherché resort, nor are their owners to be looked for in town again until long after the derbies have reappeared in the hatters’ windows. But while Fashion is flirting on the beaches and betting on the little wooden horses of the Trouville Casino, what is left at home after “All Paris” has gone is quite sufficient to keep the boulevards lively. What walking-space remains is eagerly employed by the tens of thousands of visitors. One may not, therefore, see the fashionable show of winter, but he finds an acceptable substitute in the vivacious summer throngs with their perpetual atmosphere of Mardi Gras.

As midnight wanes and the multitude waxes, it is amusing to speculate upon the scattered sources of the innumerable tiny streams that come gradually trickling in. The outlying attractions hold firmly enough up to this hour, but the magnet of the boulevards is strongest in the end.

Montmartre, you may be sure, has been up to her old tricks. What “La Butte” has to learn about promiscuous entertaining may be classed among the negligible quantities. Somewhere in that honeycomb of moulins, cabarets, penny-shows, spectacles, revues, tiny theatres with sensational rococo façades and cafés with fantastic names dedicated to the riotous and the risqué, diversion is bound to be forthcoming for any amusement hunter blasé with the usual. All the way down from the quaint little shops and crooked, cobble-stoned streets of the rustic upper region above the Moulin de la Galette to the blazing purlieus of the Place de Clichy and the Place Pigalle, there is always something on hand at midnight to amaze the neophyte. You may indulge or not, as inclination dictates, but you are pretty apt to be astonished, when you look at your watch, to see how long you have lingered. French ingenuity has lavished itself on every form of “attraction” from vaudeville and bals publics to papier-maché establishments devoted to parodies of Heaven and Hell. The Boulevard de Clichy is the heart of “La Butte,” but the life it pumps along its arteries flows principally from one show[344] to another. You may settle down on a bench under the trees, if you like, and resolve to view life only in the open in defiance of all the devils rampant in the neighborhood, but presently a flashing electric sign shrieks out an overlooked novelty and you find yourself saying, “Oh, well, since I am in Paris,” etc., etc., and off you go.

The excuse of being in Paris covers a multitude of sins. To do as the Parisians do serves purposes rarely indulged by Parisians themselves. It must be because “everything is different here.” The frolicsome party in pink stockings who dropped her heel playfully on my bashful friend’s shoulder in an aside of the “quadrille” at the Moulin Rouge was merely turning one of the tricks that pass as chic on Montmartre. She was of the assured and robust type that supports the “pyramid” in acrobatic feats, and the effect this had of dazing my friend arose rather from astonishment at its unconventionality than delight at its skill. This much I gathered when he seized my arm and hurried me away and eventually choked out, “Do you know, I have to keep saying to myself ‘Mullen, can this be you!’” I think it was quite as hard on him at the Jardin de Paris, on the Champs-Élysées, when he saw beautifully gowned Paris girls step out of the crowd and go down the chutes on their shoulders, screaming with laughter, in a whirl of skirts and flash of lingerie. In Paris! What American would dream of trying the tricks at home that he[345] accomplishes with the ease of an expert on and under the tables of the “Rat Mort” or the Café Tabarin? It is a pretty problem as to whether he has saved up a special surplus of buoyancy for this city alone, or whether he has become infected with the natural high spirits of the Parisians and discovers too late that he is unable to control them as they do. The men who want “one more fling” before settling down head straight for Paris. It is probable if they could not get here that they would dispense with the fling altogether.

Nor is the Rive Gauche without its votaries at midnight. If the Latin Quarter stands for anything it is for unconventionality and comfortable enjoyment. If it is Thursday night the famous Bal Bullier is in full blast, and visitors are gazing down from the encircling boxes upon a jolly whirl of students in velvet coats and black slouch hats cutting fantastic capers in the quadrilles with their latest bonnes and pretty models. Mimi and Musette are on the arms of Rudolphe and Marcel, “contented with little, happy with more.” Those so disposed need not long remain uncompanioned if they take a turn among the tables under the trees of the enclosed garden, where from any cozy corner a soft voice at any moment may ask you for a cigarette. With so auspicious a start there is no reason, if you are that sort, why you should not be swearing eternal devotion before you have finished one citron glacé.

And no matter what night it is there is the old “Boul’[346] Miche’” as always, the resort and delight of artists and students from time immemorial. Would you sup, there are cafés, tavernes, brasseries, and restaurants of every price and description. You can have a plat du jour of venerable beef and a quantity of vin ordinaire for the modest outlay of one franc fifty; and your payment is received with many a cheery “Merci, monsieur,” and “S’il vous plaît,” and hearty “Bon soir,” and all the rest of that captivating civility that prevails to the last corner of the city. It is perhaps more agreeable to join the few remaining Henri Murger types among the crowds on the terraces of the Taverne du Panthéon or the Café Soufflot and listen to the vigorous talk that goes on over the little glasses of anisette and vermouth. It always seems to be that “hour of the apéritif” pronounced by Baudelaire,—

When the flower-women and peddlers become too numerous before the café and you are weary with declining nuts and nougats and ten-olives-for-two-sous, you may have a look into Les Noctambules or some other smoke-laden cabaret. The old-timers will grin behind their cigars at your “stung-again” expression when the polite garçon adds to the price of your first refreshment a franc or so for the consommation of what was advertised as a free show; but shortly you get the run of things and settle down to attend the chansonnier, who[347] is the ox-eyed gentleman in the long beard who strides up to the consumptive piano and pours forth an original and impassioned rhapsody to our old friend “Parfait Amour.”

A little of this goes a long ways. When you have politely heard him through, you are apt to think better of the boulevards and to start bowing your way into the street. How still and deserted the familiar places appear where by day is so much life and stir—such bustling about of stout market-women in aprons, such racing of delivery-boys in white blouses shouldering trays and boxes, such a concourse of the little fruit wagons they push and the two-wheeled carts they haul! In the little wineshops that dot the side streets one sees the portly proprietors in shirt-sleeves behind the shining zinc bars polishing glasses and chatting with their patrons, who are workmen in jerseys and corduroy trousers and cabmen in glazed hats and whips in hand. The loveliness of the Luxembourg Gardens fairly shouts for appreciation. One could scarcely linger too long under the chestnuts and sycamores, among the puffing fountains, the bronzes and marbles, the beds of dahlias and geraniums, the oleanders of the Terrace and the great stone urns that drip petunias and purple clematis. As you cross the Seine by the old Pont Neuf and lean a moment on its broad balustrade, kindly thoughts go out to the garrets that may now be sheltering those pathetic stooping figures that bend all day[348] above the long lines of book-shelves along the quays, and never buy, and you wish “good luck” to the good-natured book-sellers who never annoy them with importunities, but sit indulgently oblivious on the benches opposite and smoke their pipes and read their papers. So great a love of books will at least insure the old habitués from ever being included in that dread toll of two-a-day that the Seine regularly pays into the Morgue.

It is like getting home to be back on the boulevards,—gay, gleaming, brimming, and confused. The air hums with the incessant shuffle of feet on the asphalt sidewalks and the pounding of hoofs on the wood-paved streets. The eyes ache with trying to miss none of the faces that flash past or any of the good-fellowship that abounds. The bubbling current drifts one along by little kiosks all a-flutter with magazines and newspapers, by advertising pillars flaming in play-bills of many colors, by crowded curb benches, glowing shop windows and table-lined café fronts. The wise drop out where the red lights mark tobacco bureaux and replenish their cigar-supply from government boxes with the prices stamped on them, rather than pay double for the same article in a restaurant later on. As you proceed to your favorite café it is immensely diverting to catch the glimpses of good cheer from those you pass. It is the same sort of thing in each case and yet somehow always different. On the red divans that extend[349] around the rooms, with mirrors at their backs and petits verres on marble-topped tables before them, one beholds formidable arrays of bons vivants, all taking their ease with as hearty a will as the very kings of Yvetot. Military men with red noses and white imperials, politicians with pervasive smiles, litterati bearded like the Assyrian kings and wearing rosettes of the Legion of Honor, fat merchants in fat diamonds, and pot-hatted élégants who advertise smart tailors with as much exuberant grace as Roland himself. Happily for Paris, champagne is never out of season, and popping corks are held by many to make sweeter music than some of the orchestras in restaurant corners. The tide of life appears at flood. La Belle Ninette, of the Folies, très fêtée et très admirée, fares daintily on out-of-season delicacies, thanks to the enduring ardor of the distingué Marquis opposite, and drops candied fruits with the prettiest air imaginable into the nervous mouth of her favorite poodle, who is himself rejoicing in a new silver collar set with garnets. La séduisante Gabrielle, at an adjoining table, having once been a blanchisseuse herself, appropriately excels in a toilette of cloudlike gossamer, and is quite the adored of the rheumatic old party beside her, who has probably been doting on the ballet for two generations. The talk is largely of la belle this and la belle that, of the latest display of extravagance, the most recent spectacle, the most promising plays for the fall, or the drollest freaks of the new fashions.[350] One sees foreign faces from all quarters of the earth, as though it were some kind of international congress, with both hemispheres fully represented. Long accustomed to seeing the world without leaving home, nothing surprises Paris. A Chinese admiral, a Bedouin sheik, a Spitzbergen Eskimo, a lotus-lover of Tahiti, a Russian Grand Duke, or a millionaire hemp-grower of Yucatan pass practically unremarked. It would be a matter of no comment if “the Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.” L’amour is the point of common contact, and even so one has little chance against a rich old roué in the eyes of a première danseuse or a far-visioned chanteuse of the Marigny. Business flourishes in the cafés. The harried waiters are kept bowing right and left and hurry off crying “tout de suite.” Each open door sends out its vision of fluttering hands and shrugging shoulders and one hears an incessant rapid fire of “Bien!” “Dis donc!” “Écoutez!” “Mais non!” “Précisément!” “Allons!” “Oh, là là!”— and so on and on. At Maxim’s and the Olympia you would think there was a riot. Ice pails are as numerous as pulse-beats.

When you reach your café at last, on the corner by the Opera House, perhaps, the ponderous maître d’hôtel assigns you a garçon, whose name is doubtless François, Gustave, or Adolphe, and who is very businesslike in short jacket and white apron. To him goes your order for a filet de bœuf, or perhaps a fricandeau, or, better[351] still, a sole with shrimp sauce; and as you await its preparation you think with satisfaction of the self-appreciative observation of Brillat-Savarin, “One eats everywhere; one dines only in Paris.”

The life you then see about you is the usual thing here; to a stranger, novel and amusing; to a Parisian, altogether important and absorbing—an indispensable part of his existence. The setting is of soft carpets, palms, red velvet divans, chandeliers, and a crush of small, marble-topped tables. The place is crowded to the point of discomfort. A thin veil of smoke hangs over all. There are people in all kinds of street clothes and evening dress, ladies in opera cloaks and gentlemen in immaculate white waistcoats. There are ordinary individuals and fantastic “types”; ruddy, portly bourgeois who shout “mon vieux” at each other and make a prodigious racket generally; and nervous old beaux in toupées who fancy themselves in drafts. Occupations vary. Ladies are dining on champagne and truffles; the man at your elbow is writing a letter; another is looking through the illustrated papers; another has called for ink and paper and is casting up the day’s expenditures; rubbers of dominoes and écarté are being played out; there is a continual running to the telephone-booths and you hear the muffled calls of “Allô!”—and all the time an orchestra is holding forth in the corner. The clatter of chairs and dishes and the confused rattle of conversation is amazing. Wit whets on wit. Everybody has an[352] opinion and is anxious to back it. Politicians bang their fists on the tables and address one another as “citoyen.” Philosophers have it out, Cartesian against Hegelian. Poets quote from their latest lyrics and are tremendously applauded. Novelists dispose of rival books with a scornful shrug and a withering mot. And the playwright, by universal concession, is supreme cock of the walk.

Presently you move a little out of all this and have a seat near the outer edge of the terrace, and begin to accumulate a pile of cups and saucers each with the price of the order burned in the bottom. So far as out of doors goes, you are now the audience and the passing crowd the show. The number has dwindled, but in characteristics it remains the same—sociable, good-humored, easy in manner, and quick in intelligence. It will be seen to differ from the night throngs of other cities not only in variety and exuberance, but in dramatic qualities as well. Camelots rush up to you crying the latest editions of the evening papers, and suddenly, with furtive glances over their shoulders, thrust some questionable commodity under your nose and protest it is a bargain. Jolly parties sweep along, arm in arm, in lines that cross the sidewalk from house to curb. Lady visitors, with eyes full of excited delight, pause for a wistful glance down Rue de la Paix where the establishments of famed milliners and modistes stand in gloom, little dreaming that they may be touching elbows this minute with the very chefs des jupes, corsagères, and garnisseuses that[353] they are to visit in the morning. Chic grisettes trip smilingly by, who have dined frugally at Duval’s on chocolate and bread, to have another rose to their corsages. There are blasé clubmen from the exclusive cercles of Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées, and supercilious representatives of the American colony of the Boulevard Haussmann. Here comes D’Artagnan himself, capable and alert, arm in arm with blustering Porthos. Ragged voyous with shifty looks run to open the carriage doors. From time to time there saunters by in cap and cape that model policeman, the affable and accommodating sergent de ville, and if you look around for a camelot then, you will find him attending very strictly to business. And so the fascinating procession troops merrily by: roaring students from the Boul’ Miche’, black-eyed soldiers in shakos and baggy red trousers, members of the Institute, pretty working-girls who handle their skirts with the captivating grace of comediennes, the shapely dress-models they nickname “quails,” conceited figurantes from the cafés-concerts, famous models, cocottes,—frail daughters of Lutetia,—with complexions like Italian sunsets, impudent gamins chattering in unintelligible argot, dilettanti, poseurs, and the usual concomitants of beggars and thieves. What a jumble of happiness and misery! What an amazing spectacle, with the shimmer of silks and the glint of pearl ranged beside the mendicant in his rags!

What a wealth of material, too, for the capable! One[354] sees how Balzac found the best types of his “Human Comedy” on the boulevards; why Victor Hugo tramped them day and night and read shop signs by the hour in search for characters and the names to fit them; where Zola got the misery that he put between covers; where Molière secured impressions that he transplanted so effectually to the stage. How Dumas must have known these streets! And Flaubert and De Maupassant! Nor are they exhausted yet; or ever will be. Where the entire gamut of the emotions is so incessantly run as here, vital, human material can never be lacking.

As one o’clock wears round, it is easy to distinguish a change in the appearance of the crowd.

Something of that wan and forlorn look is beginning to appear that makes even these buildings themselves seem dejected and remorseful, by the time the street cleaners advance to flood the boulevards and the sky beyond Père-Lachaise is paling to dawn. The heart says, “Let’s keep it up”; the body says, “To bed.” And now, too, the crasser comedies of the fag end of the night receive their premières. Amaryllis has lost her Colin and laments loudly with Florian:—

Mlle. Fifi demands her carriage and bundles out into it, with the red-faced Baron hurrying after, carrying her amazing hat; and off they go toward the Champs-Élysées. A stag party of revelers hails a victoria and sinks limply onto its cushions; and they, too, head for the Champs-Élysées with one hanging onto the cocher and reciting dramatically:—

Everyone smiles, for they know whither, they are bound. For Pré Catelon, of course, in the Bois de Boulogne, where they will chase the ducks and chickens around the little farmyard and make speeches to the mild-eyed cows and recover themselves gradually on mugs of cold milk.

Clearly, it is time to depart. One does not want the lees of this sparkling cup. A man is a fool to abuse his pleasures—though this may sound naïve at one o’clock in the morning. Go, while everything is still charming and delightful. The seasoned boulevardier can do it, for he has a viewpoint that is all his own; it is by no means that of France, nor yet that of Paris by day, but of Paris by night—his Paris. It is opportunism applied to society. Not the mad, reckless après-moi-le-déluge folly rout of the late Louises, but rather a conception of the importance of few things and the inconsequence of many. He sings with Villon: “Where are the snows of yester-year?” He searches the classics,[356] and has “Carpe Diem” framed. He skims Holy Writ and puts his finger on “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” “Life is poetry,” quoth he, “in spite of a limping line here and there! Why fuss over Waterloo, or the Place de Grève, or the guillotine, or the tumbrils that rattled up the Rue Royale? The present alone is ours; enjoy it to the uttermost! Life is beautiful and of the moment. Lights are sparkling. Fountains are splashing. The night is delicious with fragrance and enchanting with music and laughter. Join me!” he cries. “I raise my glass: To the lilies of France and the Bright Eyes of the Daughters of Paris!”

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EDINBURGH—1 P.M. TO 2 P.M.	1
ANTWERP—2 P.M. TO 3 P.M.	33
ROME—3 P.M. TO 4 P.M.	69
PRAGUE—4 P.M. TO 5 P.M.	101
SCHEVENINGEN—5 P.M. TO 6 P.M.	135
BERLIN—6 P.M. TO 7 P.M.	153
LONDON—7 P.M. TO 8 P.M.	183
NAPLES—8 P.M. TO 9 P.M.	215
HEIDELBERG—9 P.M. TO 10 P.M.	249
INTERLAKEN—10 P.M. TO 11 P.M.	273
VENICE—11 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT	299
PARIS—MIDNIGHT TO 1 A.M.	329

Piazza San Marco from the Grand Canal (page 305)	Frontispiece
Edinburgh Castle	1
Edinburgh, Princes Street	4
The Whole Family	33
Antwerp, from the Scheldt	42
In the Gardens of the Vatican	69
Rome, The Piazza di Spagna	90
The Pulverturm	101
Prague, The Castle from the Old Bridge	108
Dutch Girls are always Knitting	135
Scheveningen Beach	140
In the Sieges-Allée	153
Berlin, Unter den Linden	160
Trafalgar Square	183
London, St. Paul’s from under Waterloo Bridge	212
Margherita	215
The Bay of Naples[xvi]	220
A Heidelberg Student	249
Heidelberg, From the Castle Terrace	252
Down from the Mountain	273
Interlaken, On the Hotel Lawn	282
Piazza San Marco	299
Venice, Grand Canal from the Piazzetta	304
A Gargoyle of Notre Dame	329
Paris, On the Boulevard	334

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Around the clock in Europe

Transcriber’s Note

AROUND THE CLOCK IN EUROPE

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

AROUND THE CLOCK

EDINBURGH

ANTWERP

ROME

PRAGUE

SCHEVENINGEN

BERLIN

LONDON

NAPLES

HEIDELBERG

INTERLAKEN

VENICE

PARIS

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE