We could not imagine how he
came there. The weather is too fine for shipwrecks, and it was not
a part of the coast where any passing trader would be likely to
land. Besides, if anyone has landed, where is he? We have been
able to find no trace of him whatever. To this hour, we have never
discovered who our strange visitant was.
It is a very mysterious affair, and I am glad we are going away.
We have been travelling about a good deal since we left Munich. We
went first to Heidelberg. We arrived early in the morning at
Heidelberg, after an all-night journey, and the first thing that the
proprietor of the Royal suggested, on seeing us, was that we should
have a bath. We consented to the operation, and were each shown
into a little marble bath-room, in which I felt like a bit out of a
picture by Alma Tadema.
The bath was very refreshing; but I should have enjoyed the whole
thing much better if they had provided me with something more
suitable to wipe upon than a thin linen sheet. The Germans hold
very curious notions as to the needs and requirements of a wet man.
I wish they would occasionally wash and bath themselves, and then
they would, perhaps, obtain more practical ideas upon the subject.
I have wiped upon a sheet in cases of emergency, and so I have upon
a pair of socks; but there is no doubt that the proper thing is a
towel. To dry oneself upon a sheet needs special training and
unusual agility. A Nautch Girl or a Dancing Dervish would, no
doubt, get through the performance with credit. They would twirl
the sheet gracefully round their head, draw it lightly across their
back, twist it in waving folds round their legs, wrap themselves for
a moment in its whirling maze, and then lightly skip away from it,
dry and smiling.
But that is not the manner in which the dripping, untaught Briton
attempts to wipe himself upon a sheet. The method he adopts is, to
clutch the sheet with both hands, lean up against the wall, and rub
himself with it. In trying to get the thing round to the back of
him, he drops half of it into the water, and from that moment the
bathroom is not big enough to enable him to get away for an instant
from that wet half. When he is wiping the front of himself with the
dry half, the wet half climbs round behind, and, in a spirit of
offensive familiarity, slaps him on the back. While he is stooping
down rubbing his feet, it throws itself with delirious joy around
his head, and he is black in the face before he can struggle away
from its embrace. When he is least expecting anything of the kind,
it flies round and gives him a playful flick upon some particularly
tender part of his body that sends him springing with a yell ten
feet up into the air. The great delight of the sheet, as a whole,
is to trip him up whenever he attempts to move, so as to hear what
he says when he sits down suddenly on the stone floor; and if it can
throw him into the bath again just as he has finished wiping
himself, it feels that life is worth living after all.
We spent two days at Heidelberg, climbing the wooded mountains that
surround that pleasant little town, and that afford, from their
restaurant or ruin-crowned summits, enchanting, far-stretching
views, through which, with many a turn and twist, the distant Rhine
and nearer Neckar wind; or strolling among the crumbling walls and
arches of the grand, history-logged wreck that was once the noblest
castle in all Germany.
We stood in awed admiration before the "Great Tun," which is the
chief object of interest in Heidelberg. What there is of interest
in the sight of a big beer-barrel it is difficult, in one's calmer
moments, to understand; but the guide book says that it is a thing
to be seen, and so all we tourists go and stand in a row and gape at
it. We are a sheep-headed lot. If, by a printer's error, no
mention were made in the guide book of the Colosseum, we should
spend a month in Rome, and not think it worth going across the road
to look at. If the guide book says we must by no means omit to pay
a visit to some famous pincushion that contains eleven million pins,
we travel five hundred miles on purpose to see it!
From Heidelberg we went to Darmstadt. We spent half-an-hour at
Darmstadt. Why we ever thought of stopping longer there, I do not
know. It is a pleasant enough town to live in, I should say; but
utterly uninteresting to the stranger. After one walk round it, we
made inquiries as to the next train out of it, and being informed
that one was then on the point of starting, we tumbled into it and
went to Bonn.
From Bonn (whence we made one or two Rhine excursions, and where we
ascended twenty-eight "blessed steps" on our knees - the chapel
people called them "blessed steps;" WE didn't, after the first
fourteen) we returned to Cologne. From Cologne we went to Brussels;
from Brussels to Ghent (where we saw more famous pictures, and heard
the mighty "Roland" ring "o'er lagoon and lake of sand"). From
Ghent we went to Bruges (where I had the satisfaction of throwing a
stone at the statue of Simon Stevin, who added to the miseries of my
school-days, by inventing decimals), and from Bruges we came on
here.
Finding out and arranging our trains has been a fearful work. I
have left the whole business with B., and he has lost two stone over
it.
