"She is an honor to it, then. I know her. I don't know
her name, but I know HER. I have known her at Allerheiligen
and Baden-Baden. She ought to be an Empress, but she
may be only a Duchess; it is the way things go in this way."
If one asks a German a civil question, he will be quite
sure to get a civil answer. If you stop a German in the
street and ask him to direct you to a certain place,
he shows no sign of feeling offended. If the place be
difficult to find, ten to one the man will drop his own
matters and go with you and show you.
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.
