Down went the meat-axe again, and, with eyesand mouth wide open, the boy stood speechless before me.
Thus we were both inanely staring at each other when the back door flew open, and a burly lump of tumid humanity stumbled through it with a curse, wanting to know why the boy was not at work. The poor apprentice caught up his cleaver again, and I faced the man who had just entered.
“Do you want any Wurst?” he asked.
“No, no.” And I went over the whole story once more with such perspicuity as shipwrecked patience would naturally inspire in a person thoroughly at sea in a language. In the thick of my oration I detected a cloudy gleam of intelligence spreading itself over the red face of my hearer. My eloquence had touched him at last. I had not quite reached my peroration when—
“Doch!” interrupted my fat friend, as he pulled me briskly to the door. “You see that shop, three houses farther down the street?”
“Yes,” said I.
“You are sure you see the right one?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, you go right down there. There is aFrenchman down there. His wife is from Italy. I think, maybe, he can understand the Russian language:Ican’t!”
It was at that moment, I think, I learned to make the distinction between the degrees of benefit one derives from a book-knowledge of a language: it may help you to understand others, but it can hardly be said to help others to understand you.
While on this subject I may be pardoned, I hope, for telling of the more expeditious way I adopted to acquire the other modern tongues, which my subsequent poverty rather than any extraordinary ambition induced me to learn, in order to preserve the disguise of which I shall tell you presently.
On going into an unfamiliar country for the first time, I shut myself up in some cheap garret, with a grammar, for a couple of weeks. Then I sallied forth with a pocket-dictionary, and captured some worthless young fellow without friends or employment. To this luckless person I cleaved without mercy. I followed him—if I could not make him follow me—everywhere,and talked at him and made him talk. I argued with him over his three sous’ worth of chocolate, if we were in France, or over his boiled beans and olive-oil, if we were in Italy.
I asked him questions about everything, if we walked together in the streets; and, by the way, is it not truly wonderful how much one has to say when he has a difficulty in saying it? You may have noticed that a man who stutters, or has a hair-lip, is always talking. He who learns a new language is invariably troubled with the same fruitful suggestiveness, and often, too, with a more distressful execution.
If, therefore, the patience of my friendless tutor would sometimes flag, I would attempt to make him understand my glowing accounts of the comparative wealth of such vagrants as he was in my own prosperous, poor man’s country, advising him to immigrate. This occasionally would have the effect of restoring him to a feeble interest in life.
But if he would still persist in his low spirits, and find himself on the verge of asking me why I did not myself go back to my Eldorado of good-for-nothings, where he, no doubt, heartily wishedme, then, at that last critical stage of his gloom, I would soothe and cheer him with a penny cigar. Generally speaking, this will not fail thoroughly to overcome your Old World vagabond. He will talk, and even listen, after that. The only difficulty is to know just when to administer to him the cigar: he must not be pampered or spoiled by undue indulgence and luxury.
At first, when I commenced my experiments on these unfortunate beings, and I could see them wince under my laceration of their helpless mother-tongue, I had slight qualms of conscience. Learning to quiet these at last, however, I fastened myself on the most intelligent vagrant at hand, with an almost faultless pre-calculation of my man, and subjected him to my tortures with a triumphant sense of virtue in the act, far transcending, I fancy, that experienced by your enthusiasticsavantwhen substantiating some pet theory on a living criminal.
Nothing, I am sure, ever before impressed me so highly with the modest merit that may lie concealed in vagrancy. It would be positively surprising to any one who has not enjoyed the advantage of this desperate method of masteringthe colloquial speech of a country, if I should tell how soon I was enabled by it to drop my humble tutor, and, moving out of his neighborhood to some other city in the same state, to utilize and practise upon more pretending persons, in a higher grade of society.
BUT I must get back to Heidelberg, where the sympathetic reader will not, I trust, have imagined that I went all this time without dinners because the search for one which should be theultima Thuleof cheapness was embarrassing and adventurous. I found a place, at last, where a homely abundant midday meal was furnished me in a private family, for one gulden and twenty-six kreutzers per week,—a fraction over eight cents a day. My supper I took at aGasthaus, in company with some theological students, at the cost of about four cents.
Many of my countrymen, who have spent large sums in endeavoring to live cheaply in the same city, will of course believe nothing of this. They have paid dearly for the privilege of being Americans. They date their experiences from hotels supplied with waiters who speak ourlanguage, and have dealt at shops on whose windows they have seen blazoned in golden letters, “English spoken.” They have, in reality, paid the teacher who taught these waiters and those shop-keepers to murder our own vernacular.
By matriculating at the great University of Heidelberg, I became endowed with all the time-honored privileges of students. I could not be arrested or taken through the streets, if I had been guilty of an ordinary crime; I could not be confined in a common prison or go to a common hospital, the University having those institutions for its own particular benefit.
And poverty seemed there to have lost its curse. The very fact of my being a student put me on a social scale above that of the wealthy merchant. This, however, may have been only in the estimation of the collegians themselves.
A fellow-student thought some of going to America, and propounded the following question: “But when I arrive, I shall not have any money, and I shall know nothing of the language of the country; what shall I do?”
“Go to work!” said I.
“What? manual labor! I am too aristocratic!”
That young man, let me add, was then living on an income of one hundred and ten dollars a year.
The German student must have his pipe, his beer, and a life of pleasure at whatever sacrifice. If he is rich, he pays some attention to his personal appearance. You will see him adorned with boots of immense length;corpscaps and ribbons; the number of his duels scored on his red face in ungainly sword-scars; and followed by a retinue of sinecurists, in the shape of great ugly worthless dogs.Hislife is a continued sacrifice to the merry gods. He is rarely seen at lectures.
Indeed, there is one society or club at the University, the first article of whose constitution reads, “No member shall at any time, or on any pretence whatever, after matriculation, be seen in the University building.”
On the other hand, if the student is poor, he pays very slight attention to what he wears. He does not the less, however, devote a great portion of his time to beer, tobacco, and the pursuitof pleasure. You will see him at the most frequented beer-houses every night. If you go to the opera, you will observe him also stalking thither, shiveringly, through the wind, his tight pantaloons striking his crane-like legs about midships between his feet and knees, and his shoulders shrugged up in the vain attempt to get more warmth out of an extremely short coat. He looks more like the impersonation of Famine, striding about among men, than the good, honest-hearted fellow that he is.
For with all his faults, as our more Puritanical education may lead us to call them, the German studentisan honest, generous, noble-hearted fellow. He sees beyond the smoke of his own pipe, and has deeper thoughts than those inspired by beer. His heart swells beyond the bounds of his petty state. His sympathies are as broad as the old German Empire.
It is too true, perhaps, that when, in maturer manhood, he becomesangestelltin some life-office in the gift of his little prince, his liberalism slumbers or dies out; but that does not affect the sincerity of his youthful sentiment. I am sure that I never spoke with one of them, on the subject, who had not some dream of a great united Germany.
There was no more interested watcher of our late civil strife than the German student. He felt that the battle then waging for the right of self-government had a connection with his hopes for the future of his own severed land. Germany’s wrongs and the sigh for universal liberty are the burden of his many songs. No higher and no more appropriate eulogy on the German student can be pronounced than to say that, in his university days at least, he is true to the spirit of one of his most beautiful and most popular melodies, “To the bold deed, the free word, the generous action, woman’s love, and the fatherland.”
By the laws of German universities, a matriculated student is not obliged to pay for more than the lectures of one professor during a semester,—that is, six months. I managed, therefore, to pay for the cheapest, and attended as many more as I liked; so about ten dollars a year were my collegiate expenses.
To confess the truth, my calendar and that ofthe University did not always agree. I often took vacations in session time, in the shape of long excursions on foot, and sometimes disappeared from Heidelberg for weeks together. MyHausfrau—she that received the princely income of eighty cents a month for my room—at first showed symptoms of anxiety about me; but she soon learned to be surprised at no wild freak of her aerial lodger.
By these tours on foot,—the only philosophical way of travelling,—and by the occasional aid of the cheap third-class cars of that country, I visited all parts of Germany, and learned more of the language, character, and habits of its odd, warm-souled people than I ever could have learned at the great hotels and in the first-class railway carriages. During the long vacations, and especially after leaving Heidelberg altogether, I extended my explorations into remoter parts,—into the Tyrol, Switzerland, Italy, and France.
I travelled in a way in which probably no American has ever travelled before or since, namely, disguised as a Handwerksbursche,—a wandering tradesman. Any one who has been in Europe will not ask why a stranger in thatland should need to pass himself off as a poor native, if he wants to save money. On the Continent, as a general rule, a man in broadcloth, not personally known to the shop or hotel keeper, pays two prices; whereas a person speaking English, even if clad in fustian, pays three prices; and I should like to see him help himself. The English language has come to be mistaken for a gold-mine all through Europe.
These wandering tradesmen, these Handwerksburschen, let me say,—for they are unknown to nations under free, constitutional governments,—are a sort of fossil remains of feudalism. They are young fellows, half journeymen, half apprentices, who are obliged to wander for two or three years from city to city, working at their trades. They finally return to their homes, weary and poor; having learned little but the rough side of the world,—to make what is called their “masterpiece.” If this pass muster, they are entitled to style themselves masters of their trades.
They grow out of that old illiberal principle which compels the son to follow in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather. Yet, for allthe narrow-minded enactments and regulations to crush their spirit and make them miserable, they always walk on the sunny side of nature. They are a jovial set of vagabonds, who have rarely the chance to be dishonest, if they had the inclination.
Disguised in the blouse of their class,—something like our Western “warmus,” except that it is of thin blue stuff,—I have spent many a happy hour, toiling along the same road with them, listening to their stories and merry songs. If I meet one of them on the highway, he stops, offers me his hand, and exchanges a kindly word. He takes out his pipe, asks me to fill mine from his tobacco-pouch, and tells me all he knows of the road passed over.
He never lodges in a city, unless he has work there. The village inn is his castle; here he obtains his bed at night and his breakfast in the morning for seven kreutzers,—not quite five cents; and trudges on, smoking and singing, through all Europe. This is the Handwerksbursche, poor, but merry; the knight-errant of the bundle and staff; the troubadour and minnesinger of the nineteenth century.
In Switzerland, for instance, where almost every one travels as a pedestrian, and where hundreds of our countrymen every year blister their inexperienced feet at the rates of from ten to thirty francs a day, I have journeyed sumptuously—thanks to my disguise—for thirty sous. When addressed in French, if my broken speech was noticed, it was supposed that I was from one of the German cantons; and, in the same manner, if my bad German was detected, I was set down as from one of the French cantons.
This gratuitous naturalization on one day and expatriation on the next had no bad effect whatever on my health, whereas it had the best possible result on my purse.
My blouse was a protection, not only to the respectable suit of clothes which I wore under it, but against all the impositions practised upon travellers. When I arrived at a large city or watering-place, I generally hired a little room for a week, found a cheap place to get my meals, and, after settling prices for everything in advance, divested myself of my disguise, and “did” the galleries and promenades, to the accompaniment of kid gloves and immaculate linen.
But the glory of pedestrianism is not in cities; it is in the broad highway, on the banks of mighty rivers, or in the narrow footpath winding over mountains. There is such pleasure and pride in the consciousness that one can go where and when one will, without waiting on coaches or trains. Thirty, forty, or fifty good miles left behind in one day, by the means of locomotion nature has given to every one, are not only a consolation to sleep upon at a village inn, but make the sleep sounder and sweeter. I defy any man not to be proud of his strength, when he finds—as almost every one will, after a little practice—that he can make thirty miles on foot, day after day, with perfect ease.
It is, however, just to state that village inns are not always paradises. The hostess sometimes has more lodgers in her beds than she receives money for; but a practised eye generally detects such places at a glance, and rarely exposes the body to their perils. Every village has at least one respectable inn. Before my personal history had taught me this wisdom by excruciating example, I had good reason to believe that the tortures of the Vehmgericht, the old secret tribunal of Germany, were not the things of the past which the world thought them. I had frequent occasion, too, for what might be called an equanimity of stomach.
I arrived one evening, for instance, at a small desolate village in the remote eastern part of Bavaria, near the Austrian border. I was weary and hungry, but before mine host of the inn would have anything to do with me, he sent me on a wild chase through innumerable narrow, crooked alleys, in search of the burgomaster to deliver my passport into his hands and obtain his gracious permission to remain over night in the place.
The entrance to the mansion of that dignitary was through a cattle-yard. He had probably never before in his life heard of the language of my passport, but that did not prevent his looking at it with an official air of infinite wisdom. I returned to the inn at last, fortified with the requisite credentials.
The hostess now appeared, and asked me what I would eat, addressing me familiarly in the second person singular. Her long lank frame was attired in the abominable costume of the Bavarian peasantry. I could compare her to nothing buta giant specimen of the Hungarian heron, which I need hardly say is not a pretty bird.
The same room served as parlor and kitchen. I sat patiently and watched her kindling the fire in the great earthen stove, indulging my mind as hungry people are wont to do, with rich visions of imaginary banquets. What was my horror to see her take the eggs, which I had ordered, break them one by one into her greasy leathern apron, and commence beating them vigorously with a pewter spoon!
As soon as I recovered my presence of mind, I considered the folly of remonstrating with her, and, with a great effort, I mildly remarked that she had misunderstood me; I wanted my eggs boiled. By this stratagem, I preserved my disguise and achieved a cleanly meal in defiance of the leathern apron.
IN the mean time, the condition of my finances was becoming hourly more desperate. I had written to innumerable American newspapers, offering to produce a letter a day for five dollars a week, and making all sorts of struggling tenders of brain-work, from which, as a general rule, I heard nothing at all.
At last Christmas came, and found me back at Heidelberg, utterly penniless; over five thousand miles from home, in a country where for a stranger to obtain work was simply hopeless; since the boys in that densely populated land have to pay for the privilege of learning to carry bundles,—a pursuit which is there for three years a necessary introduction to becoming a salesman of the smallest wares. To obtain a situation as beggar was still more hopeless, the competition of native dwarfs and cripples beingaltogether too powerful for an able-bodied alien.
So here was the end of my one hundred and eighty-one dollars in currency. I had made what is called the tour of Europe; and I now had the prospect of immediate starvation for my pains.
And yet that Christmas day was, by all odds, the happiest day of my life. For, just at fifteen minutes past eleven o’clock,A.M., the postman knocked at the door and handed me very unexpectedly a letter, containing about twenty-five dollars in our money. It came from an American paper, to which I had written, at least, twenty letters for publication, and twenty-five letters asking for money; so it was undoubtedly the twenty-five dunning letters that were paid for. And I shall never be so rich or happy again.
So much has been written about the holidays in Germany, that I cannot be expected to say anything new on the subject. It may, however, have been forgotten by some that theWeinachtenof the fatherland commence on what we call“Christmas eve.” This is the great night for children. It is their feast. It is the time they have been looking forward to with such wild, glad, gorgeous anticipation. It is the night of the Christmas-tree; and, in all Germany there is no child so poor as not to get something from its green boughs.
Besides this night, Christmas has two whole days, to which respectively there seems to be a logical apportionment of two very important kinds of enjoyment. The first day is assigned to boundless eating, and the second—mildly speaking—to getting drunk; and it is due to the zeal of the Southern Germans, at least, to say that they observe this order of ceremonies with scrupulous exactness.
Now, it may be sentimental, or something worse, but I confess I like to dwell upon the time when twenty-five dollars made me perfectly happy. Memory, you may have observed, has a way of painting frescos with the clouds of distant skies that are even prettier than the lay-figures and life-forms which served for the real models. It was, for instance, a quiet little scene of domestic joy, that Christmas of my student life in Germany; yet, somehow, it has grouped itself in my remembrance, like the masterpiece of Cornelius, the largest fresco of them all.
Frau Hirtel was the domestic little body of whom I rented my airy apartment. Fräulein Anna was her rosy daughter, and this little sunbeam in the house was the only child of the family that I had ever seen; though many and many a time, the name of Karl, the only son and brother, was upon their lips. Karl was a Handwerksbursche,—one of those houseless tradesmen, before dwelt upon; and on this Christmas Karl was expected home from his long, long wanderings.
The illuminated tree on the night before had been laden with many a gift of affectionate remembrance for the absent Karl. As we sat down to the Christmas dinner, there was a vacant place at the table, and in the hearts of the disappointed mother and sister. They could not touch a morsel.
“Are you sure he will come, mamma?” asked the little Anna, after a long silence.
“Yes, my child, unless something has happened; for the way is long from Frankfort, andthe poor boy’s feet must be sore with his long, long journey.”
“What, mamma, if he shouldn’t come?”
Frau Hirtel’s face became very pale, whether at the little Anna’s question or at the sudden ringing of the shop-bell, as the door swung open and shut. The next instant Karl was in the middle of the room. His pack and staff fell at his feet, and Frau Hirtel and the Fräulein Anna sprang into his arms.
It was not the merry dinner that succeeded, or theGlühweinthat made the evening glad, but this one picture which dwells most in my memory. The joy that shone on the careworn and dust-stained face of the returned wanderer, reflected in those of his mother and sister as they stood in that long embrace, has no parallel that I know of in the history of the return of exiled kings.
With my twenty-five dollars I lived cheaper than ever, and for some months longer continued my studies at the University. But one morning I received a letter from the same generous American newspaper, enclosing a draft for fifty dollars, together with a very earnest request that the editor should hear no more from me on any account whatever.
This good fortune was too much for my mental equilibrium. Heidelberg was too small for me. I started the next day for a trip down the Rhine, deck passage.
At Rotterdam I betook myself again to the third-class cars, and occasionally to the bundle and staff. Thus I went through Holland and Belgium, walking leisurely one day over the historic dead of Waterloo.
Arriving finally at Paris, I resolved there to take up my residence. By means of a cheap lodging in the old Latin Quarter, and of a cheaper restaurant on the Boulevard Sevastopol, I managed to subsist for several months.
It was here in Paris that I first met my good friend, George Alfred Townsend, the well-known war-correspondent. To him I was afterward indebted for a short, romantic sketch of my life, in which he says, I believe, among other complimentary things, that the faculty of Heidelberg gave me my tuition for nothing, but that I would not stay with them and study, because I thought it too dear!
But, seriously, I owe Mr. Townsend a real debt of gratitude, for it was he who suggested that I should write an account of certain of my experiences for one of the London magazines. After the questionable success of my multifarious attempts with American newspapers, I trembled at the temerity of the idea. Yet my money was becoming daily and by no means beautifully less. Neither Mr. Townsend nor anybody else but myself was aware that, at the time of his suggestion, my cash capital consisted of one gold napoleon, a silver five-franc piece, and some three or four sous; and even this sum had dwindled considerably before I could muster courage to make the attempt.
At last, in a fit of desperation, I sat down one morning, with the equivalent of about two dollars in my pocket, and commenced my article. In three days more it was on its way to London with an enclosure of British stamps, enough to pay for the letter which should tell me whether it was accepted or rejected.
I shall not dwell longer than I can help upon the painful suspense of the succeeding five or six days; though I do not remember now mygrounds for expecting an answer in so short a period.
Up to that time I will venture to say there was not a happier person in the gay capital of France than I had been; for it is one of the peculiar charms of Paris that it affords abundant amusement for him who spends forty francs a month, as I did, or forty thousand a month, as some do.
I cannot explain now, any more than you can believe in, my happiness then. I know only that the beautiful city was delightful, and that I was delighted. The palaces, the galleries, the gardens, the parks, the music, and the wonderful diorama of the evening Boulevards were free,—as free to me, the vagabond stranger, as they were to the greatest prince; and I had the additional, though not necessarily comfortable, assurance that I always carried away from them a better appetite for the next meal than did even his inscrutable majesty, the Emperor himself.
But now that I had the growing cares of authorship on my mind, it dwelt more and more upon the waning disks of my franc-pieces, asthey swelled for a time illusively into sous, and then tapered into centimes and disappeared from my gaze forever.
At this period I found myself occasionally strolling down to the Seine, and looking over from Pont Neuf at the flood below, swollen with the late rains, and listening to the strange sound it made in the wake of the old stone arches, as it rushed on toward the Morgue,—the famous dead-house, where hundreds of suicides are displayed every year.
Have you ever heard the last “bubbling groan” of a drowning man? If you have, you will understand the feeling with which, after listening long and steadily to the low rumble of the eddying water, I have received the impression more than once on that old bridge, that I heard the same fatal gurgling sound in the river beneath; and you will understand the feeling, also, I think, with which, at such times, I cast a hasty glance at the Morgue, not far distant, and hurried on to the more cheerful neighborhood of the garden of the Tuileries.
I would not have you believe that the idea of suicide ever crossed my mind. I merely wentand looked into the Seine, on that queer, unexplained principle which impels miserable people, the world over, to haunt wharves and bridges, and to gaze listlessly into water. I have sometimes thought, when I saw servant-girls and others out of employ looking, for instance, from the bridge of boats at Manheim into the Rhine, as into the window of an intelligence-office,—I have sometimes thought, I say, that if dogs do go mad from gazing into water, as I think was once believed, they are very miserable dogs, and very much disgusted with the world, before they do it.
One day,—the fourth of my suspense, if I remember,—when I was more despondent and hungry than usual, I went and looked in through the grating of the Morgue itself. If I had ever had the least thought of throwing myself into the Seine, this horrible sight would have cured me as thoroughly of it as it did of my appetite for the rest of that day.
I feel some diffidence about mentioning a plan—happily abandoned, as you shall see, before put into further execution—which suggested itself to my mind during that hungry week, namely, to visit the Morgue once a day for purposes of economy; but, luckily, I discovered about this time that the smoking of cigarettes made of cheap French tobacco would perform the same service of taking away the appetite, and I adopted the latter more agreeable means to that end.
The fifth and sixth days after sending my article I did scarcely anything but wait about the office for my letter. Finally, a note arrived from Paternoster Row, with just one line of the worst penmanship in it that has ever yet met my eyes; and the painful suspense was only intensified. The writer evidently said something about my article, but what I despaired of making out.
I took the note to my friends, and they were divided about it; some said that the article was rejected, and some that it was accepted. The majority, however, favored the latter opinion, to which, at last, myself was brought, and I was happy.
Not long afterward I received a draft from the publishers for a sum which seemed to me at that time almost fabulous, for the amount of work done. After a hearty meal, and as soon as Ihad time to think, I considered my fortune made. I was now arrived at the appalling dignity of magazinist,—contributor to the widest-circulated periodical in the language.
I packed my trunk immediately, and started for Italy.
ISTAYED at Florence all winter, living on the cheapest of food, indeed, but with the very best of company. I haunted the galleries and studios so much that the artists took me for a devotee of art, and never asked me how I lived.
At dusk it was my custom to steal away toward my dinner, passing Michael Angelo’s David, forever about to throw the stone across the famous old Piazza, and gliding down a by-street till I came to the market. There, in a little cook-shop, amid the filth and noise of the very raggedest of Florence, I partook of my macaroni, or, if I was fastidious, of my boiled beans and olive-oil, for seven centesimi,—one cent and two fifths of a cent; my bread made of chestnuts for two centesimi,—two fifths of a cent;and my half-glass of wine for seven centesimi,—my dinner, with a scrap of meat, averaging five cents, and rarely exceeding ten.
My glass of wine may be considered an extravagance. It was not. I could stand the bustle, the uncleanliness, and even the staring at a passably well-dressed person in such an unaccustomed place; but I could not stand the positive amazement expressed by young men and old women, old men and young women, beggars and organ artists, the day when I omitted wine. It was too much for endurance. Public opinion was against me. I pretended to have forgotten to order my wine, and turned off the whole affair with a laugh.
Many and many a time I have seen a poor old creature, who was often my next neighbor at table, pay two centesimi for bread and seven centesimi for wine, and that was her whole meal.
This experience has always helped me to believe the account of that strange incident in the history of the Florentines, given, I think, by Macchiavelli, in which it is related that during the Republican days of Florence, when there was a hostile army making an inroad on theirterritories, the doughty republicans, having gone out to meet it, lay encamped some time not far from Lucca; and that, suddenly, when the enemy was almost upon them, they revolted, turned around, and marched home again, to let their territory and the fortunes of their city take care of themselves, because the Florentine army had unfortunately got out of wine!
Sometimes I spent my evenings at thecafé, where I always took my breakfast, and where for three soldi,—three cents,—invested in coffee or chocolate, I could sit as long as I liked, reading the papers, or listening to the talk of my artist friends. It was always cheaper for me to go to the opera—taking a very high seat, by the way—than to have a light and a fire in my room. I have seen an opera with a hundred or more people on the stage at a time, in a theatre as large as, and some say larger than, there is in London or Paris, and all it cost me was eight cents.
Thus I lived on in the city of art and olives. When my money began to give out again, I thought I would condescend to transmit another article to the London magazine which had mademy fortune before. I transmitted another article; and at the time when I ought to have heard from it I was reduced to the sum of forty francs.
Receiving, at last, an envelope with the Paternoster mark upon it, I restrained my joy, and opened it leisurely, making merely the mental resolution that I would dine in state that day; for this was a longer article than the first one, and the sum which it would bring must be simply enormous. Then I proceeded to read the following letter:—
“Dear Sir,—Your article entitled —— is respectfully declined”!
“Dear Sir,—Your article entitled —— is respectfully declined”!
This time starvation was sure; but I had set my heart on seeing Rome. I thought there would be a sort of melancholy satisfaction in having visited the capital of the ancient world before going to any other new one. I therefore took the next open-topped car for the sea-shore, having previously put my first rough draft of my unfortunate article into a new wrapper, and shipped it off to the editor of a less pretending periodical, published at Edinburgh.
I do not remember how or why, but the nightafter I left Florence I had to lie over at Pisa, where I came near being robbed of what little money I had at a miserable, cheaptrattoria, not far from the famous Leaning Tower. I found a fierce-moustached bandit of a fellow in my room in the middle of the night, stealthily approaching the head of my bed, and scared him away, I shall always believe, by the bad Anglo-Italian in which I expressed my sense of surprise and concern at his untimely and extraordinary conduct.
Two days afterward I took a fourth-class, that is, deck passage on the French steamer, sailing down the Mediterranean from Leghorn. I stayed a week at Rome, and came very near staying much longer. It was, indeed, by a miraculous chance that I ever left the Eternal City. I had not money enough to pay the Pontifical tax on departing travellers.
It is too long a story to tell here, but I slipped through the fingers of the police, and, arriving at Leghorn again, I had not the ten cents to pay the boatman to take me ashore from the steamer.
My trunk, by the way, I had left at Leghorn before starting for Rome; so that was out of danger, and came properly to hand afterward.
As my lucky star would have it, an American bark was lying at anchor in the bay. It was the first time I had seen the “star-spangled banner” for two years, and I flew to it for protection. I directed the boatman to take me to the American ship.
Standing in the bow of the smaller craft, as soon as she reached the greater one I sprang up the side, and the boatman sprang after me. He detained half of my coat, but I reached the deck, where I kept him at bay with a belaying-pin till some one on the ship was roused; for it was early in the morning. The ten cents were paid over to the clamorous Italian by a hearty tar, who was moved to see an American in distress, “with his mainsail carried away,”—I think that is the way the tar phrased it.
The captain of the ship was a warm-hearted old fellow from down in Maine. He offered to take me home before I asked him. I had a boyish love of independence, and proposed to work. He said he wouldn’t be bothered with me; he would take me as his only passenger. We settled the matter at last by my contracting grandly to owe him fifty dollars in “greenbacks.”
Our vessel was about twenty years old, and laden with rags and great blocks of marble. We had a terrible storm in the Mediterranean, in which we came near going down. The old craft seemed, however, to have some secret understanding with fate; for, having shifted her cargo, she floated, wellnigh on her beam-ends, the rest of that desolate ten weeks through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.
I arrived at Boston finally, without a cent. I had directed that all letters should be forwarded from my address at Florence to the care of the merchant to whom our ship was consigned. What was my surprise, then, to be handed by that gentleman an envelope enclosing a draft on London, in pay for the almost-forgotten article which I had sent in sheer desperation, if not in comprehensive revenge, to that Edinburgh magazine!
Greenbacks were then at their heaviest discount, and English exchange at its highest premium. And thus it happened that I sold my draft for American money enough to pay the good-hearted captain and the patriotic tar, and to take me back to Toledo, my starting-place, afteran absence of over two years, at the total expense of a little more than three hundred dollars.
Here, at the proper end of my pilgrimage and of this book, while I am figuratively taking off my sandal shoon and hanging up my pilgrim staff, let me say that, although I did not set out with any higher purpose than to tell just such a story as I might tell under oath, still I think I discern in these European adventures what I may term anex post factomoral. Let not the reader, however, practise and amuse his ingenuity by attempting to detect this in the earlier chapters of the present work, or by any manner of means in the pilgrim himself; for, personally, he feels as free from a moral as any pilgrimhehas ever seen has been free from superfluous linen.
While, therefore, I would not advise any young man to follow directly in my footsteps, yet I hope I have shown that there are means and modes of travel unknown to the guide-books; that there are cheap ways for the student and man of limited means to see and learn much for little money.
The sight of a sunrise from the Righi is certainly more than compensation for putting upwith a poor breakfast. And the candid traveller, however light his purse, needs never return dyspeptic or misanthropic. Pure air and hearty exercise in the Alps and on the Danube cannot fail to do him physical good; while he will find in the human nature with which he comes in contact in every land the sum of the good invariably preponderating over that of the evil.
THE END.
Cambridge: Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company.