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. I used to think at one time that my own dear native Bradshaw
was a sufficiently hard nut for the human intellect to crack; or, to
transpose the simile, that Bradshaw was sufficient to crack an
ordinary human nut. But dear old Bradshaw is an axiom in Euclid for
stone-wall obviousness, compared with a through Continental time-
table. Every morning B. has sat down with the book before him, and,
grasping his head between his hands, has tried to understand it
without going mad.
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