The Trees Were Jubilant
With Birds, And The Paths With Rollicking Children.
One Could Have A Seat In That Place And Plenty Of Music,
Any Afternoon, For About Eight Cents, Or A Family Ticket
For The Season For Two Dollars.
For a change, when you wanted one, you could stroll
to the Castle, and burrow among its dungeons, or climb
about its ruined towers, or visit its interior shows - the
great Heidelberg Tun, for instance.
Everybody has heard
of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it,
no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some
traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other
traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels.
I think it likely that one of these statements is
a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere
matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence,
since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty,
history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could
excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom
in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in,
when you can get a better quality, outside, any day,
free of expense. What could this cask have been
built for? The more one studies over that, the more
uncertain and unhappy he becomes. Some historians say
that thirty couples, some say thirty thousand couples,
can dance on the head of this cask at the same time.
Even this does not seem to me to account for the building
of it.
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