________________________________________________
_ We stopped at a hotel by the railway-station. Next morning,
as we sat in my room waiting for breakfast to come up,
we got a good deal interested in something which was
going on over the way, in front of another hotel.
First, the personage who is called the PORTIER (who is
not the PORTER, but is a sort of first-mate of a hotel)
[1. See Appendix A] appeared at the door in a spick-and-span
new blue cloth uniform, decorated with shining brass buttons,
and with bands of gold lace around his cap and wristbands;
and he wore white gloves, too. He shed an official glance
upon the situation, and then began to give orders.
Two women-servants came out with pails and brooms
and brushes, and gave the sidewalk a thorough scrubbing;
meanwhile two others scrubbed the four marble steps
which led up to the door; beyond these we could see some
men-servants taking up the carpet of the grand staircase.
This carpet was carried away and the last grain of dust
beaten and banged and swept out of it; then brought back
and put down again. The brass stair-rods received an
exhaustive polishing and were returned to their places.
Now a troop of servants brought pots and tubs
of blooming plants and formed them into a beautiful
jungle about the door and the base of the staircase.
Other servants adorned all the balconies of the various
stories with flowers and banners; others ascended
to the roof and hoisted a great flag on a staff there.
Now came some more chamber-maids and retouched the sidewalk,
and afterward wiped the marble steps with damp cloths
and finished by dusting them off with feather brushes.
Now a broad black carpet was brought out and laid down the
marble steps and out across the sidewalk to the curbstone.
The PORTIER cast his eye along it, and found it was not
absolutely straight; he commanded it to be straightened;
the servants made the effort--made several efforts,
in fact--but the PORTIER was not satisfied. He finally
had it taken up, and then he put it down himself and got
it right.
At this stage of the proceedings, a narrow bright
red carpet was unrolled and stretched from the top
of the marble steps to the curbstone, along the center
of the black carpet. This red path cost the PORTIER
more trouble than even the black one had done. But he
patiently fixed and refixed it until it was exactly right
and lay precisely in the middle of the black carpet.
In New York these performances would have gathered a mighty
crowd of curious and intensely interested spectators;
but here it only captured an audience of half a dozen
little boys who stood in a row across the pavement,
some with their school-knapsacks on their backs and their
hands in their pockets, others with arms full of bundles,
and all absorbed in the show. Occasionally one of them
skipped irreverently over the carpet and took up a position
on the other side. This always visibly annoyed the PORTIER.
Now came a waiting interval. The landlord, in plain clothes,
and bareheaded, placed himself on the bottom marble step,
abreast the PORTIER, who stood on the other end of the
same steps; six or eight waiters, gloved, bareheaded,
and wearing their whitest linen, their whitest cravats,
and their finest swallow-tails, grouped themselves
about these chiefs, but leaving the carpetway clear.
Nobody moved or spoke any more but only waited.
In a short time the shrill piping of a coming train was heard,
and immediately groups of people began to gather in the street.
Two or three open carriages arrived, and deposited some
maids of honor and some male officials at the hotel.
Presently another open carriage brought the Grand Duke
of Baden, a stately man in uniform, who wore the handsome
brass-mounted, steel-spiked helmet of the army on his head.
Last came the Empress of Germany and the Grand Duchess
of Baden in a closed carriage; these passed through the
low-bowing groups of servants and disappeared in the hotel,
exhibiting to us only the backs of their heads, and then
the show was over.
It appears to be as difficult to land a monarch as it
is to launch a ship.
But as to Heidelberg. The weather was growing pretty warm,
--very warm, in fact. So we left the valley and took
quarters at the Schloss Hotel, on the hill, above the Castle.
Heidelberg lies at the mouth of a narrow gorge--a gorge
the shape of a shepherd's crook; if one looks up it he
perceives that it is about straight, for a mile and a half,
then makes a sharp curve to the right and disappears.
This gorge--along whose bottom pours the swift Neckar--
is confined between (or cloven through) a couple of long,
steep ridges, a thousand feet high and densely wooded
clear to their summits, with the exception of one section
which has been shaved and put under cultivation.
These ridges are chopped off at the mouth of the gorge
and form two bold and conspicuous headlands, with Heidelberg
nestling between them; from their bases spreads away
the vast dim expanse of the Rhine valley, and into this
expanse the Neckar goes wandering in shining curves and is
presently lost to view.
Now if one turns and looks up the gorge once more, he will
see the Schloss Hotel on the right perched on a precipice
overlooking the Neckar--a precipice which is so sumptuously
cushioned and draped with foliage that no glimpse of the
rock appears. The building seems very airily situated.
It has the appearance of being on a shelf half-way up
the wooded mountainside; and as it is remote and isolated,
and very white, it makes a strong mark against the lofty
leafy rampart at its back.
This hotel had a feature which was a decided novelty,
and one which might be adopted with advantage by any house
which is perched in a commanding situation. This feature
may be described as a series of glass-enclosed parlors
CLINGING TO THE OUTSIDE OF THE HOUSE, one against each
and every bed-chamber and drawing-room. They are like long,
narrow, high-ceiled bird-cages hung against the building.
My room was a corner room, and had two of these things,
a north one and a west one.
From the north cage one looks up the Neckar gorge;
from the west one he looks down it. This last affords
the most extensive view, and it is one of the loveliest
that can be imagined, too. Out of a billowy upheaval of
vivid green foliage, a rifle-shot removed, rises the huge
ruin of Heidelberg Castle, [2. See Appendix B] with empty window
arches,
ivy-mailed battlements, moldering towers--the Lear of
inanimate nature--deserted, discrowned, beaten by the storms,
but royal still, and beautiful. It is a fine sight to see
the evening sunlight suddenly strike the leafy declivity
at the Castle's base and dash up it and drench it as with
a luminous spray, while the adjacent groves are in deep shadow.
Behind the Castle swells a great dome-shaped hill,
forest-clad, and beyond that a nobler and loftier one.
The Castle looks down upon the compact brown-roofed town;
and from the town two picturesque old bridges span
the river. Now the view broadens; through the gateway
of the sentinel headlands you gaze out over the wide
Rhine plain, which stretches away, softly and richly tinted,
grows gradually and dreamily indistinct, and finally melts
imperceptibly into the remote horizon.
I have never enjoyed a view which had such a serene
and satisfying charm about it as this one gives.
The first night we were there, we went to bed and to
sleep early; but I awoke at the end of two or three hours,
and lay a comfortable while listening to the soothing
patter of the rain against the balcony windows.
I took it to be rain, but it turned out to be only the
murmur of the restless Neckar, tumbling over her dikes
and dams far below, in the gorge. I got up and went
into the west balcony and saw a wonderful sight.
Away down on the level under the black mass of the Castle,
the town lay, stretched along the river, its intricate
cobweb of streets jeweled with twinkling lights;
there were rows of lights on the bridges; these flung
lances of light upon the water, in the black shadows
of the arches; and away at the extremity of all this
fairy spectacle blinked and glowed a massed multitude
of gas-jets which seemed to cover acres of ground;
it was as if all the diamonds in the world had been spread
out there. I did not know before, that a half-mile
of sextuple railway-tracks could be made such an adornment.
One thinks Heidelberg by day--with its surroundings--
is the last possibility of the beautiful; but when he
sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way, with that
glittering railway constellation pinned to the border,
he requires time to consider upon the verdict.
One never tires of poking about in the dense woods that
clothe all these lofty Neckar hills to their beguiling
and impressive charm in any country; but German legends
and fairy tales have given these an added charm.
They have peopled all that region with gnomes, and dwarfs,
and all sorts of mysterious and uncanny creatures.
At the time I am writing of, I had been reading so much
of this literature that sometimes I was not sure but I
was beginning to believe in the gnomes and fairies
as realities.
One afternoon I got lost in the woods about a mile from
the hotel, and presently fell into a train of dreamy thought
about animals which talk, and kobolds, and enchanted folk,
and the rest of the pleasant legendary stuff; and so,
by stimulating my fancy, I finally got to imagining I
glimpsed small flitting shapes here and there down the
columned aisles of the forest. It was a place which was
peculiarly meet for the occasion. It was a pine wood,
with so thick and soft a carpet of brown needles that one's
footfall made no more sound than if he were treading
on wool; the tree-trunks were as round and straight
and smooth as pillars, and stood close together;
they were bare of branches to a point about twenty-five
feet above-ground, and from there upward so thick with
boughs that not a ray of sunlight could pierce through.
The world was bright with sunshine outside, but a deep
and mellow twilight reigned in there, and also a deep
silence so profound that I seemed to hear my own breathings.
When I had stood ten minutes, thinking and imagining,
and getting my spirit in tune with the place, and in the
right mood to enjoy the supernatural, a raven suddenly
uttered a horse croak over my head. It made me start;
and then I was angry because I started. I looked up,
and the creature was sitting on a limb right over me,
looking down at me. I felt something of the same sense
of humiliation and injury which one feels when he finds
that a human stranger has been clandestinely inspecting
him in his privacy and mentally commenting upon him.
I eyed the raven, and the raven eyed me. Nothing was said
during some seconds. Then the bird stepped a little way
along his limb to get a better point of observation,
lifted his wings, stuck his head far down below his
shoulders toward me and croaked again--a croak with a
distinctly insulting expression about it. If he had
spoken in English he could not have said any more plainly
that he did say in raven, "Well, what do YOU want here?"
I felt as foolish as if I had been caught in some mean act
by a responsible being, and reproved for it. However, I
made no reply; I would not bandy words with a raven.
The adversary waited a while, with his shoulders still lifted,
his head thrust down between them, and his keen bright eye
fixed on me; then he threw out two or three more insults,
which I could not understand, further than that I
knew a portion of them consisted of language not used
in church.
I still made no reply. Now the adversary raised his head
and called. There was an answering croak from a little
distance in the wood--evidently a croak of inquiry.
The adversary explained with enthusiasm, and the other raven
dropped everything and came. The two sat side by side
on the limb and discussed me as freely and offensively
as two great naturalists might discuss a new kind of bug.
The thing became more and more embarrassing. They called
in another friend. This was too much. I saw that they
had the advantage of me, and so I concluded to get out
of the scrape by walking out of it. They enjoyed my
defeat as much as any low white people could have done.
They craned their necks and laughed at me (for a raven
CAN laugh, just like a man), they squalled insulting remarks
after me as long as they could see me. They were nothing
but ravens--I knew that--what they thought of me could
be a matter of no consequence--and yet when even a raven
shouts after you, "What a hat!" "Oh, pull down your vest!"
and that sort of thing, it hurts you and humiliates you,
and there is no getting around it with fine reasoning and
pretty arguments.
Animals talk to each other, of course. There can be no
question about that; but I suppose there are very few
people who can understand them. I never knew but one man
who could. I knew he could, however, because he told
me so himself. He was a middle-aged, simple-hearted
miner who had lived in a lonely corner of California,
among the woods and mountains, a good many years,
and had studied the ways of his only neighbors, the beasts
and the birds, until he believed he could accurately
translate any remark which they made. This was Jim Baker.
According to Jim Baker, some animals have only a
limited education, and some use only simple words,
and scarcely ever a comparison or a flowery figure;
whereas, certain other animals have a large vocabulary,
a fine command of language and a ready and fluent delivery;
consequently these latter talk a great deal; they like it;
they are so conscious of their talent, and they enjoy
"showing off." Baker said, that after long and careful
observation, he had come to the conclusion that the bluejays
were the best talkers he had found among birds and beasts. Said
he:
"There's more TO a bluejay than any other creature.
He has got more moods, and more different kinds
of feelings than other creatures; and, mind you,
whatever a bluejay feels, he can put into language.
And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling,
out-and-out book-talk--and bristling with metaphor,
too--just bristling! And as for command of language--why
YOU never see a bluejay get stuck for a word. No man
ever did. They just boil out of him! And another thing:
I've noticed a good deal, and there's no bird, or cow,
or anything that uses as good grammar as a bluejay.
You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat
does--but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat
get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights,
and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw.
Ignorant people think it's the NOISE which fighting
cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so;
it's the sickening grammar they use. Now I've never heard
a jay use bad grammar but very seldom; and when they do,
they are as ashamed as a human; they shut right down
and leave.
"You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--
but he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church,
perhaps; but otherwise he is just as much human as you be.
And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts, and instincts,
and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground.
A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.
A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive,
a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay
will go back on his solemnest promise. The sacredness
of an obligation is such a thing which you can't cram
into no bluejay's head. Now, on top of all this,
there's another thing; a jay can out-swear any gentleman
in the mines. You think a cat can swear. Well, a cat can;
but you give a bluejay a subject that calls for his
reserve-powers, and where is your cat? Don't talk to ME--I
know too much about this thing; in the one little particular
of scolding--just good, clean, out-and-out scolding--
a bluejay can lay over anything, human or divine.
Yes, sir, a jay is everything that a man is. A jay can cry,
a jay can laugh, a jay can feel shame, a jay can reason
and plan and discuss, a jay likes gossip and scandal,
a jay has got a sense of humor, a jay knows when he is
an ass just as well as you do--maybe better. If a jay
ain't human, he better take in his sign, that's all.
Now I'm going to tell you a perfectly true fact about
some bluejays. _
Read next: CHAPTER III - Baker's Bluejay Yarn - What Stumped the Blue Jays
Read previous: CHAPTER I - The Knighted Knave of Bergen
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