Arrived At The Station, We Found We Must Wait Till Half Past Five In
The Afternoon For The Train.
This would have been an intolerable doom
in the disconsolate precincts of an English or American station, but
not in a German one.
As usual, this had a charming garden, laid out
with exquisite taste, and all glowing and fragrant with plats of
verbena, fuschias, heliotropes, mignonette, pansies, while rows of
hothouse flowers, set under the shelter of neatly trimmed hedges, gave
brightness to the scene. Among all these pretty grounds were seats and
walks, and a gardener, with his dear pipe in his mouth, was moving
about, watering his dear flowers, thus combining the two delights of a
German, flowers and smoke. These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture
of clay and spirit - what with their beer drinking and smoking, and
their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but
an ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in
most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on
a cactus.
The station room was an agreeable one, painted prettily in frescoes,
with two sofas. So we arranged ourselves in a party. S. and I betook
ourselves to our embroidery, and C. read aloud to us, or tried the
Amati, and when we were tired of reading and music we strolled in the
garden, and I wrote to you.
I wonder why we Anglo-Saxons cannot imitate the liberality of the
continent in the matter of railroad stations, and give the traveller
something more agreeable than the grim, bare, forbidding places, which
now obtain in England and America.
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