In London, too, many a time, strangers have walked several
blocks with me to show me my way.
There is something very real about this sort of politeness.
Quite often, in Germany, shopkeepers who could not furnish
me the article I wanted have sent one of their employees
with me to show me a place where it could be had.
CHAPTER XIX
[The Deadly Jest of Dilsberg]
However, I wander from the raft. We made the port
of Necharsteinach in good season, and went to the hotel
and ordered a trout dinner, the same to be ready
against our return from a two-hour pedestrian excursion
to the village and castle of Dilsberg, a mile distant,
on the other side of the river. I do not mean that we
proposed to be two hours making two miles - no, we meant
to employ most of the time in inspecting Dilsberg.
For Dilsberg is a quaint place. It is most quaintly
and picturesquely situated, too. Imagine the beautiful
river before you; then a few rods of brilliant green sward
on its opposite shore; then a sudden hill - no preparatory
gently rising slopes, but a sort of instantaneous hill
- a hill two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet high,
as round as a bowl, with the same taper upward that an
inverted bowl has, and with about the same relation
of height to diameter that distinguishes a bowl of good
honest depth - a hill which is thickly clothed with
green bushes - a comely, shapely hill, rising abruptly
out of the dead level of the surrounding green plains,
visible from a great distance down the bends of the river,
and with just exactly room on the top of its head
for its steepled and turreted and roof-clustered cap
of architecture, which same is tightly jammed and compacted
within the perfectly round hoop of the ancient village wall.
There is no house outside the wall on the whole hill,
or any vestige of a former house; all the houses are
inside the wall, but there isn't room for another one.
It is really a finished town, and has been finished
a very long time. There is no space between the wall
and the first circle of buildings; no, the village wall
is itself the rear wall of the first circle of buildings,
and the roofs jut a little over the wall and thus
furnish it with eaves. The general level of the massed
roofs is gracefully broken and relieved by the dominating
towers of the ruined castle and the tall spires of a
couple of churches; so, from a distance Dilsberg has
rather more the look of a king's crown than a cap.
That lofty green eminence and its quaint coronet form
quite a striking picture, you may be sure, in the flush
of the evening sun.
We crossed over in a boat and began the ascent by a narrow,
steep path which plunged us at once into the leafy deeps
of the bushes. But they were not cool deeps by any means,
for the sun's rays were weltering hot and there was
little or no breeze to temper them. As we panted up
the sharp ascent, we met brown, bareheaded and barefooted
boys and girls, occasionally, and sometimes men;
they came upon us without warning, they gave us good day,
flashed out of sight in the bushes, and were gone as
suddenly and mysteriously as they had come. They were
bound for the other side of the river to work. This path
had been traveled by many generations of these people.
They have always gone down to the valley to earn their bread,
but they have always climbed their hill again to eat it,
and to sleep in their snug town.
It is said that the Dilsbergers do not emigrate much;
they find that living up there above the world, in their
peaceful nest, is pleasanter than living down in the
troublous world. The seven hundred inhabitants are all
blood-kin to each other, too; they have always been blood-kin
to each other for fifteen hundred years; they are simply
one large family, and they like the home folks better than
they like strangers, hence they persistently stay at home.
It has been said that for ages Dilsberg has been merely
a thriving and diligent idiot-factory. I saw no idiots there,
but the captain said, "Because of late years the government
has taken to lugging them off to asylums and otherwheres;
and government wants to cripple the factory, too, and is
trying to get these Dilsbergers to marry out of the family,
but they don't like to."
The captain probably imagined all this, as modern science
denies that the intermarrying of relatives deteriorates
the stock.
Arrived within the wall, we found the usual village
sights and life. We moved along a narrow, crooked lane
which had been paved in the Middle Ages. A strapping,
ruddy girl was beating flax or some such stuff in a little
bit of a good-box of a barn, and she swung her flail
with a will - if it was a flail; I was not farmer enough
to know what she was at; a frowsy, barelegged girl was
herding half a dozen geese with a stick - driving them
along the lane and keeping them out of the dwellings;
a cooper was at work in a shop which I know he did not make
so large a thing as a hogshead in, for there was not room.
In the front rooms of dwellings girls and women were
cooking or spinning, and ducks and chickens were waddling
in and out, over the threshold, picking up chance crumbs
and holding pleasant converse; a very old and wrinkled man
sat asleep before his door, with his chin upon his breast
and his extinguished pipe in his lap; soiled children
were playing in the dirt everywhere along the lane,
unmindful of the sun.
