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 SAN DIEGO

 
 FATHER RHINE
 

 
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 {To 
 H. V. E. S. 
 
 TO WHOM BOOK AND AUTHOR OWE SO MUCH
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The following pages are intended to show 
 how much can be done and seen in three 
 weeks for twelve pounds. We started 
 from London on the night of August l, 
 and were due back in England on the 
 morning of the 20th ; but within this short 
 space we were able to get to the very 
 source of the Rhine and back, mostly by 
 boat and bicycle. Nor did our economy 
 compel us, as a pessimistic friend sug- 
 gested, to live on sausage and sauerkraut, 
 and sleep one night at the " Hotel Norfolk 
 Howard,'' and the next at the " Grosser 
 Floh " or the " Bacillus von Deutschland." 
 Our quarters, however modest, were always 
 clean, and generally very roomy : our food 
 was plentiful and good. 
 
 Here and there I have altered names and 
 incidents for discretion's sake, and here and 
 there the reader's own judgment may sug- 
 gest a pinch of salt ; but I have kept faith- 
 fully all through to my main purpose of 
 giving a just impression of a Bohemian tour 
 on the Rhine — its charms and varied chances, 
 the beauty of the river, and the good nature
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 of the people. I have passed quickly over 
 such well-known places as Cologne and 
 Heidelberg, to describe more fully other 
 spots which are still less known than they 
 deserve. 
 
 There will be found in the Appendix a 
 fairly complete list of distances and ex- 
 penses, with a few other practical hints for 
 the journey.
 
 FATHER RHINE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 " Nil ego praetulerim jucundo sanus amico." 
 — Horace, 
 
 On the night of the 1st of August 1898, 
 two cloaked horsemen might have been 
 seen on the platform of the Parkeston 
 Quay Station, speaking in commanding 
 tones to the knaves and varlets who 
 pressed obsequiously round them, and 
 exhorting these rapscallions, under peril 
 of their ears, to see the iron steeds safe 
 on board the boat for Rotterdam. The 
 taller of the two, who twists half a dozen 
 links from the heavy gold chain round his 
 neck, and casts them among the rabble — 
 forgive me, dear reader ; this strain is 
 above me : I took them out of my right- 
 hand pocket, and they were only coppers ; 
 but the porters, if not slavishly deferential, 
 were at least civil and handy, and our 
 machines were soon on board. Let me 
 introduce you now to my travelling com« 
 panion and old college friend. 
 
 A *
 
 2 FATHER RHINE 
 
 Henry Schultz has nothing German 
 about him but his name (and on this 
 occasion, I must add, his straw hat). An 
 accompUshed mathematician, he is also 
 familiar with the noblest poets, orators, 
 and historians of antiquity, and more 
 especially with such portions of them as 
 are commonly set for a Pass Degree at 
 either university. French he will talk you 
 classically, if not fluently ; but he never 
 could bend his tongue to the rough Teutonic 
 idiom, any more than Mrs Battle could 
 condescend to the ignoble phraseology of 
 cribbage. A cricketer of fame (was not I 
 myself present some ten years ago, when 
 a public-school boy at the Cologne table 
 d'hote asked him whether he was the 
 Schultz, and quite forgot the rest of his 
 ice pudding on receiving an affirmative 
 ansver !) ; a golfer of almost equal profi- 
 ciency ; a painfully energetic cyclist, as in 
 due time you shall see — these are but a 
 few of his superficial accomplishments, for 
 I make no attempt here to catalogue his 
 genuine virtues. You will understand now 
 why I chose this motto for my first chap- 
 ter ; for you doubtless remember, dear 
 reader, that it is with reference to his own 
 little tour with Virgil and Maecenas that 
 Horace tells us he knows nothing like an 
 old friend — a sentiment which will be 
 heartily echoed by all who have tried
 
 FATHER RHINE 3 
 
 travelling in the same way — uncondition- 
 ally by the single, and by the married with 
 all proper marital reservations. 
 
 Our plan this time is ambitious — no less 
 than to trace and retrace the whole course 
 of the Rhine within the only eighteen clear 
 days we have at our disposal. We knew 
 it must needs be a great rush, but the idea 
 had fascinated us ; we felt that even this 
 dizzy succession of changing scenes would 
 have a charm of its own, and that thus, in 
 some ways, we should learn more of the 
 characteristics and contrasts of land and 
 people by a plan which enabled us to see 
 it all, as it were, at one sweeping glance. 
 Nearly all of the route we had already seen 
 in detail at other times ; the rest we knew 
 by books ; and in these eighteen days we 
 hoped rapidly to skim the cream of it all. 
 That in this we succeeded to our own 
 complete satisfaction, is my best excuse 
 for publishing an account of our tour as a 
 guide for future tourists. We ourselves 
 spent eighteen days of bliss, only so far 
 alloyed as to give it the necessary human 
 consistency. Yet, among one's later 
 memories of even the happiest holiday, 
 few things stand out in brighter colours 
 than those first moments of anticipation ; 
 and few men ever started with more con- 
 fident hopes of enjoyment than we, as the 
 ship ploughed her way through the tran-
 
 4 FATHER RHINE 
 
 quil starlit sea ; and we sat recalling 
 memories of former holidays until prudence 
 warned us to go below and snatch that some- 
 what unquiet sleep, which is the most that 
 mortals dare hope for, even on the most 
 unruffled passage.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 " Now the world is all before us," 
 
 Aug. 2, 1898. 
 The Hook of Holland : six o'clock on a 
 brilliant morning : a calm passage behind 
 us, and the whole Continent before us ! 
 Not even twenty years ago, when we first 
 travelled together in our undergraduate 
 days, did the world seem fresher to us, 
 or fuller of pleasant surprises. Here is 
 the well-ordered little station, with every- 
 thing as trim and as Dutch as can be, built 
 and arranged for our exclusive use who 
 have come over in the Great Eastern boat: 
 here are the two trains snorting with im- 
 patience, ready to hurry us off to Hanover 
 or Cologne at our choice — nay, even to 
 Switzerland, if w^e care to make our way 
 into the through carriage for Bale : but we 
 don't care, for we are going to " do" the 
 Rhine by boat. However, for the moment 
 we must desert the river, for our time is 
 limited, and this morning we must catch 
 the Netherlands Steamship Co. boat which 
 starts from Rotterdam at seven. So we 
 creep rather reluctantly into the train ; and 
 I, for my part, cannot help looking wist- 
 
 5
 
 6 FATHER RHINE 
 
 fully at the broad waters that come down 
 from Rotterdam, and thinking of the lazy 
 voyages I have made on their bosom in 
 days gone by, after all the perils of the 
 deep. And I see again that first cross- 
 ing, nineteen years ago — how we passed 
 a steamer that had been cast on the stone 
 bank, and how the big waves raced along 
 her sides, and swept her deck, and lifted 
 her and banged her down again on the 
 stones ; and how our own captain hove-to 
 outside the bar, and for ten mortal minutes 
 debated whether he dare risk to cross it, 
 or whether we must put back again and 
 pitch for a few hours more on the pitiless 
 sea that had tossed our souls out all that 
 night ; and how at last he risked it, and 
 we were soon in calm water, and gradually 
 the souls came back to our bodies ; and 
 presently three pale and haggard brothers 
 staggered ashore upon a heaving quay, and 
 crept wide-legged, sailor-fashion, along the 
 heaving pavement of the Hoogstraat, and 
 even partook with some appetite, at the 
 Hotel St Lucas, of veal chops which 
 bobbed up and down so erratically be- 
 fore our eyes that it seemed almost a 
 miracle when we picked a bit up on our 
 forks. How often since, in peril of the 
 deep, have I thought of that first crossing 
 in 1879, ^"*^ ^^^^ ^^ myself, " o passi 
 graviora — "
 
 FATHER RHINE 7 
 
 And then the last of all, on New Year's 
 morning, 1891, when the whole broad river 
 was a mass of floating ice, and the sun rose 
 like blood through hard lines of mist that 
 looked like a prison grating, until he 
 gradually burst the bars and flamed up 
 over the whole sky, and the thin threads 
 of clear water made a wonderful arabesque 
 of crimson and orange in and out of the 
 colder grey of the great ice-floes. And up 
 we pushed among it all, and jostled and 
 charged and splintered through the heavy 
 masses ; and at last, a mile or two from 
 Rotterdam, behold one huge floe that 
 stretched almost across the river ! Yet we 
 charged through it merrily enough at first, 
 but gradually the engines laboured more 
 and more heavily, and it seemed as though 
 the panting ship could hardly wag, and the 
 trees all but stood still on the bank ; and 
 then suddenly a great rending crack, and 
 the last hundred yards of the mass split in 
 front of our bows, and the engines galloped 
 on again, and I was able to catch my train 
 and skate all day in the sunshine among 
 the holiday-makers at Gouda, and reached 
 Emmerich at night, to find the river frost- 
 bound at last into a solid mass. 
 
 But that was in the old days, when there 
 was no cause for hurry ; to-day we must 
 press on to catch the Rhine boat. So we 
 get in, and take our morning coflee cold
 
 S FATHER RHINE 
 
 in the train, with chunks of real English 
 holiday-cake, prepared by the same pro- 
 vident maternal hands that have stocked 
 so many school hampers in the old days. 
 We press a slice upon a youth in the 
 opposite corner, who had produced a small 
 dry bun from its paper bag ; he accepts 
 it coyly, but eats it with the appetite of 
 sixteen years. Upon my word, I have 
 the appetite of sixteen too ; give me 
 another chunk, and let me have another 
 pannikin of coffee with plenty of milk, 
 and I'll drink to the health of those who 
 provided us with both ! A German, our 
 other fellow-passenger, declines the cake, 
 but will not be outdone in politeness : he 
 offers us his one remaining peach out of 
 a basket of three. I declined, prudent 
 even in holiday time for my stomach's 
 sake and mine often infirmities ; but 
 Schultz accepted with frank alacrity, and 
 the German tried not to watch the juice 
 dripping out of the corners of his mouth, 
 as Sir P. Sidney must have turned his eyes 
 away from the cold water he had sacrificed. 
 Poor beggar, he was going to Cologne ! 
 
 Meanwhile we had hurried over the flat, 
 fresh, dewy fields ; past Schiedam, girt 
 with its great ring of windmills that stand 
 and swing their arms on the ancient ram- 
 parts ; and now we come to Rotterdam, 
 and run for a few minutes level with the
 
 FATHER RHINE 9 
 
 second stories of the houses, and see the 
 inmates as busy in their rooms as any 
 colony of working ants at the Crystal 
 Palace ; and then the market-place heaped 
 with cool green garden - produce, and 
 thronged with figures in the cleanest white 
 and blue linen : and here is the station, 
 and we must get out. A brief but bitter 
 struggle with the porters, who know just 
 enough English to be a nuisance to us ; and 
 now at last we are allowed to carry our 
 own modest luggage in peace to the boat. 
 In ten minutes we are there ; our luggage 
 is stowed in the cosy little cabin we had 
 written to engage ; and we are free to 
 stroll about the deck and take stock of our 
 fellow-passengers before the boat starts. 
 A double Dutch family — by which I mean 
 a grandmother with two daughters and two 
 sets of grandchildren — with English books 
 and magazines to read, and a healthy, pleas- 
 ant, English look about them all, (for we 
 are both insular enough to find no word of 
 greater praise in all our vocabulary) — a 
 honeymooning couple — a clergyman in 
 mufti with his wife — half a dozen second- 
 class passengers — ^just enough, in fact, to 
 give life to the boat, but with plenty of 
 elbow-room for us all. 
 
 Presently we cast loose from the quay, 
 and steamed out of Rotterdam in the same 
 steady sunshine 5 and the ship turned her
 
 to FATHER RHINE 
 
 head south-eastward, and pounded up 
 stream, straight in the eye of the sun, 
 while we found a deHcious shady nook 
 for ourselves just in the stern, " with 
 seats for two but not for three," and a 
 little round table all to ourselves, and the 
 Netherland flag flapping lazily over our 
 heads, and the Rhine water swirhng away 
 almost at our feet. We brought out grapes, 
 packed up for us by kind sisterly fore- 
 thought ; we brought out cameras and 
 sketch-books and diaries ; the fragrant 
 pipe of morn was kindled, and a misan- 
 thropic-looking waiter brought us coffee 
 — how it must stir his bile to see our 
 childish enjoyment of the journey ! Men 
 came round our way, and looked, and de- 
 parted in envy of us : girls tripped round, 
 and looked, and tripped off again : the 
 honey-mooning couple mooned stealthily 
 round our corner, scenting out a nest for 
 themselves, and turned away quickly like the 
 rest, envying us in our little nook of Eden. 
 It is very pleasant to settle oneself into a 
 corner like this, when there is none other 
 so snug on board the whole ship ! We 
 were conscious that this quiet retreat had 
 been predestined for us from all eternity ; 
 it was for us, and us alone, that the good 
 ship was ploughing her way straight to- 
 wards the sun and the Alps, and the water 
 was dancing so merrily away from under
 
 FATHER RHINE il 
 
 our feet, and the sparkling waves faded 
 into a thin white streak of foam that 
 seemed like the clue we were drawing 
 from England behind us. Dort with its 
 square-topped tower came and went, as 
 sleepy-looking as its name seems to imply ; 
 and the ship turned due east for a while 
 now ; but we lolled still in the shade, 
 thinking of that old sketch of John Leech's, 
 and heartily pitying " those pore nobs in 
 their kerridges, this 'ot weather." Those 
 whom we had left in the train at Rotter- 
 dam — where were they now ? That pros- 
 perous fat man, with several pounds of 
 gold chains and seals ; the whole flock 
 of liberated schoolmasters whom I had 
 watched into the Bale carriage, thinking 
 with momentary envy that they had seven 
 clear weeks of Switzerland before them — 
 where were they ? In what stifling heat ! 
 what jar, what rattle, what dust, what em- 
 anations ! what shifts to get away from the 
 sun that yet beats pitilessly through the thin 
 curtain, and to make the most of the draught 
 that is so hot and dry at the best ! Our 
 own compassionate German of the juicy 
 peach, what would he give at this moment 
 for a drop of Pilsener to wet the tip of his 
 tongue .'' And we ? one word — one nod — 
 to the misanthropic waiter, and he would 
 bring us gallons ! But we don't even want 
 it J here are our grapes, our coflTee, our cool
 
 12 FATHER RHINE 
 
 breeze down the broad Rhine ; and this is 
 the first day of our holiday, and everything 
 is as bright and new as a shilling straight 
 from the Bank. The Dutch family looks so 
 fresh home from the wash, as if it had 
 been laid up in lavender to be brought out 
 as an ornament for to-day. Bright flags 
 on all the masts, and from cottage win- 
 dows ; and it was almost with a sense of 
 disappointment that we learned this was in 
 honour of the Queen Regent's birthday, 
 and not merely to grace the river for our 
 journey. 
 
 Dort is far behind now, and we have 
 passed the waste of reedy waters, flecked 
 with white sails, that leads into Holland 
 Diep, and Haringvliet, and the vast mouths 
 of the greater Rhine. We no longer coast 
 under the lee of long islands, where our 
 swell careers in miniature breakers over 
 the tiny beach, or swishes among the 
 reeds, making them bow, and jerk up 
 again, and bow once more, as if they 
 enjoyed the fun. It is all one broad 
 channel now, and we are in the midst of 
 rural Holland. Little villages glide past 
 us on either hand, each with its little quay 
 on its own little creek, where the reeds 
 and purple loose-strife die away for a 
 moment, and leave a narrow inlet of 
 smooth water. The cottages all look 
 clean and well-to-do, mostly with white-
 
 FATHER RHINE 13 
 
 washed walls and green shutters, and rich 
 red-tiled roofs. Here and there a better 
 house, shaded by verandahs of rose or 
 clematis, with a tiny lawn like a billiard- 
 table, and masses of geraniums, seen by 
 glimpses through the spick and span rail- 
 ings, and a tiny summer-house, like a 
 little thatched stable-lantern at the very 
 water's edge. And then neat little cot- 
 tages again, and blue and white linen hung 
 out to dry, with long-drawn reflections on 
 the oily stream ; girls that come down to 
 dip their pails into our Rhine ; one sturdy, 
 middle-aged woman striding down the 
 street with a bucket in each hand, and a 
 muslin cap on her head ; we pass almost 
 near enough to see the gold corkscrew 
 horns at her ears. Here again a ship- 
 wright's yard, with heavy old-world boats 
 on the stocks, and the air all alive with the 
 busy tapping of the caulkers' mallets ; a 
 foreman who has leisure to shout greetings 
 to the passing boats. And here, on the 
 river, are little steam-tugs that race us for 
 fun when they have no other work to do ; 
 crowds of sailing barges with their great 
 tanned sails; heavy lighters that have 
 brought down hewn stone from the Upper 
 Rhine, and are being towed back now with 
 Dutch goods on board; hay-boats big 
 enough to carry a whole stack like those 
 we see along the bank, under their queer
 
 14 FATHER RHINE 
 
 movable bed-testers of thatch ; for by this 
 time the little village is growing small in 
 the distance, and we have flat green fields 
 full of lazy cows, almost as many wind- 
 mills as trees, and distant church towers 
 all round the horizon. But now another 
 creek, another village ; white and blue 
 linen again, and a formal Httle summer- 
 house, and masses of scarlet geraniums, 
 and the pleasant music of the caulkers' 
 mallets. Nay, even the same sturdy woman 
 with her two pails and her muslin cap — or 
 are we dreaming it all again ? for dreamily 
 it all passes through the blue wreaths from 
 our pipes, and time is only marked by the 
 ding-dong of our ship's bell, and the an- 
 swering bell over the water, that announce 
 at wide intervals the approach of some 
 landing-place. We bring out our chart to 
 convince ourselves of the reality of it all, 
 and pore over the queer old-world names : 
 Zaltbommel, with its strange group of 
 towers ; Lbvestein, whence Grotius was 
 smuggled out of prison in a chest by his 
 wife ; Gorcum facing Worcum across the 
 river ; Heukelum and Geliicum, just away 
 to the right ; and here some familiar string 
 is touched, and Schultz begins to hum, in 
 memory of college days : — 
 
 From Heukelum to (Jellicum is nineteen miles, 
 From Geliicum to Heukelum is nineteen miles, etc. etc.
 
 i6 FATHER RHINE 
 
 and we feel to know now at last why the 
 absurd old refrain about Wimbledon and 
 Wombledon used always to be chosen for 
 a Dutch chorus in those convivial days 
 when Plancus was consul.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 " This hill is dangerous : the cyclist is requested to 
 use all possible precautions." 
 
 Royal Netherlandish Cyclists" Union. 
 
 Lunch came in due time, and, after lunch, 
 Nymegen ; and as by this time it was three 
 o'clock, and we were sated with lotus- 
 eating, we made up our minds to leave the 
 boat for a while and ride through Cleve to 
 Emmerich. We photographed Nymegen 
 with all its towers as we came up to the 
 quay, and sighed to think of all the 
 colour that the camera would fail to 
 record — the rich crimsons and purples of 
 wall and roof, and the forest of gay 
 flags, and the fresh green woods that 
 clothe the hill behind the town. "We 
 found the old church in its rich late- 
 gothic brick courtyard, with elaborate 
 gateway of the same date : and then 
 we rode up through the town, and on by 
 a gradual ascent, through cool suburbs 
 and woods ; wondering at the neat villas 
 and chateaux whose gardens lay practically 
 open to the road •, pelted with so-called 
 confetti by a party of girls and men in a 
 char-a-bancs, who painfully resembled a
 
 I8 FATHER RHINE 
 
 crew of English beanfeasters. A halt to 
 drink "spuitwater" at a wayside cottage 
 among the trees (it was plain unalcoholic 
 seltzer, and cost but one halfpenny a 
 bottle) : presently the crest of the hill, 
 with a large hotel in the wood by the 
 roadside, and crowds of gaily-dressed 
 patriots celebrating the Queen Regent's 
 birthday with other than spuitwater, and 
 the trees hung thick with paper lanterns 
 for the evening's dance ; and then the 
 road began to slope gently downwards, 
 still through cool woods. Presently the 
 trees thinned away, and we approached 
 the brow of something like a real hill ; 
 and here, to our surprise, we found this 
 startling red-and-yellow caution-board. I 
 interpreted this to Schultz, not a little 
 pleased in my heart to think how much 
 Dutch I knew, and how useful it might 
 be in an emergency. He needed no warn- 
 ing, for he rides a "Whippet" with a free 
 wheel and rim brakes, and can therefore 
 coast anywhere with his feet on the pedals; 
 but I was sufficiently impressed by the red- 
 and-yellow board to go on gingerly for the 
 next half mile, after which I realized how 
 matters stood, and rattled off half a dozen 
 Dutch place-names to relieve my feelings, 
 and put my feet up, and soon caught sight 
 of Schultz again at the bottom of a delicious 
 slope some mile and a half long. I have
 
 FATHER RHINE 19 
 
 read since that Nymegen is the only place 
 in Holland (barring church towers) whence 
 a view is to be obtained ; so, as patriotism 
 no doubt dictates that there should be one 
 danger-board in Holland, that is plainly the 
 right place for it. 
 
 I, who belonged to no cycling associa- 
 tion, had my misgivings about the German 
 frontier, which we knew we were to cross 
 at a place called Wilde ; but, in fact, we 
 crossed it unawares, and were still looking 
 out for Wilde when we found ourselves at 
 Cranenburg, in undeniable German terri- 
 tory. Here we found a fine Gothic church 
 of brick and grey stone. On again over 
 level country, planted mainly with unripe 
 rye, and with oats that compared very un- 
 favourably with those I had seen between 
 Newmarket and Bury, enormous bushes of 
 wild chicory, with its hard, blue flowers, 
 among the roadside grass ; in front, a long 
 sandy ridge covered with fir-woods, at the 
 end of which we could already see the towers 
 of Cleve. Beyond, a distant fringe of trees 
 marked the course of the Rhine ; and the 
 two fine churches of Elten and Eltenburg 
 stood out behind, on the side and the summit 
 of a really respectable hill. Presently the 
 road ran for two or three miles through an 
 avenue of limes, still faintly fragrant with 
 the relics of their midsummer blossoms ; 
 and here we felt justified in stopping a
 
 20 FATHER RHINE 
 
 few minutes for tea at a wayside garden- 
 restaurant, under the sign of *' All Heii ! " 
 — the German cyclist's password. Hence 
 we rode on, through delightful woods 
 again, to fashionable Cleve. At Cleve 
 we paused only to admire the so-called 
 Lohengrin's tower, and to photograph that 
 view of its reflection in the water which 
 looks so fascinating to the traveller by 
 night from Cologne to Rotterdam, And 
 then we started again, in the slanting 
 evening sunshine, for the Rhine ferry, 
 since we were anxious to get within sight 
 of Emmerich while there was still light for 
 the camera. The storks were already 
 flapping homewards for the night ; one 
 fine fellow got up almost at our feet, 
 dragging his legs lazily between us and 
 the great lazy sun ; but we could not get 
 our cameras out in time. Presently we 
 came among a network of old dykes, 
 marking the successive stages by which 
 the backwaters of the Rhine had been re- 
 claimed century by century ; then the 
 last bank of all, and half a mile of rolling 
 waters, and Emmerich, with its two fine 
 churches and its line of purple-brown 
 brick houses, on the other side. The 
 steam-ferry soon brought us across, and 
 landed us where the river almost washes 
 the buttresses of the minster, whose bell 
 had been calling to us all this while over
 
 FATHER RHINE 21 
 
 ,the waters, and bidding us make all speed 
 if we wished to see anything of the in- 
 terior. So we hurried under the old town 
 walls, now all overbuilt with houses, and 
 through the nearest river-gate ; then up 
 we tramped among a network of streets, 
 and across the ill-paved, tree-planted old 
 square, to the minster porch. But the 
 sleepy old town seemed as busy this even- 
 ing as Heine's phantom city, " alterthlimlich 
 niederlandisch," in the depths of the North 
 Sea. Here were the same ancient streets 
 of sober brick, and the square with its 
 formal trees, and the crowd of worship- 
 pers in faded old-world dress, hurrying to 
 the sound of the bells — a picture whose 
 low tones were relieved by the profusion 
 of snowy caps and collars, and the sunlight 
 that struck over the housetops and gilded 
 just one edge of the spire. We dared not 
 go in as sightseers among those worship- 
 pers, and it seemed profane even to linger 
 about the door, and copy the huge deep- 
 cut Gothic letters on mediaeval tombstones 
 which some ruthless restoring hand had 
 cast out to the wind and rain. We noticed 
 this expulsion of tombstones especially 
 in these Prussian Rhenish lands, where 
 Roman Catholicism seems so enterprising 
 nowadays, and the churches are so elabor- 
 ately restored and painted. It almost 
 seemed as though the spick and span
 
 22 FATHER RHINE 
 
 Romanism of to-day felt ill at ease in the 
 presence of these memorials to men who 
 lived and died centuries before Papal In- 
 fallibility, in the days when even com- 
 munion in one kind was only a pious 
 opinion and a general practice, not yet 
 made binding on the whole Church by the 
 decrees of a Council which had deposed 
 one Pope and was as yet in no special 
 hurry to elect his successor, finding how 
 well they could regulate ecclesiastical 
 affairs without one. Perhaps we need 
 not have been so scrupulous about copy- 
 ing the epitaphs, for those who stood in 
 the doorway seemed bent rather on gossip 
 than on worship, and the more earnest 
 passed through into the church without 
 paying any attention to our strange garb 
 and our unaccountable interest in tomb- 
 stones. But we thought it best to go 
 away for the present : and meanwhile it 
 was very good time for supper, so we 
 went back to the quay, where our boat 
 had been lying for the last hour or more. 
 Here we ordered a steak and a flask of 
 Rhenish, and sat watching the sun go 
 down as the viands were preparing. It 
 seemed as if the generous god had lingered 
 awhile for our sakes ; he was still half an 
 hour above the horizon, just sloping 
 behind the minster spire, and gilding sky 
 and river with all the glories of a lowland
 
 FATHER RHINE 23 
 
 sunset. Half a dozen ragged boys, who 
 sat and fished by the water-side, were 
 transfigured into cherubim dipping their 
 Hnes into liquid gold ; if they had drawn 
 anything from those enchanted waters, it 
 must have been the jewelled fishes of the 
 Arabian Nights, that stood on their tails 
 in the frying-pan and spoke with a human 
 voice. The figures sauntering up and 
 down the western quay moved dimly in a 
 halo of light, like glorified spirits in the 
 Elysian fields ; and my mind went back 
 to that second of January seven years ago, 
 when I came down to this same quay after 
 breakfast, with the thermometer at some 
 twenty degrees below freezing, and found 
 it crowded with hard-working men that 
 had no work to do, pinched and blue in 
 their threadbare cotton clothes and their 
 sabots stuffed with straw, trying to warm 
 their hands in their breeches pockets, and 
 chattering with their teeth, as they tried 
 to find a melancholy distraction in watch- 
 ing the gang of roadmakers break a 
 practicable cart-road across the river, 
 through the huge crags and hummocks 
 of ice into which the Rhine had jumbled 
 itself as it froze.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 " Occulta est Batavae quaedam vis insita terrae." 
 
 The steak was passable, but the misan- 
 thropic waiter was so slow with it that we 
 regretted the feeling of loyalty which had 
 brought us back from the town on purpose 
 to patronise the cuisine of the S.S. Hollandia. 
 We sallied forth again after our meal to 
 the minster, which was now shut •, but the 
 sexton's son took the keys and a candle, 
 and showed us all round. It is a very fine 
 church still, though its chancel was pulled 
 down (he told us) in the fourteenth cen- 
 tury. He showed us a splendid Roman- 
 esque crypt, which looked still more 
 picturesque by the light of our candle j 
 he was communicative about the special 
 service of that evening, which turned out 
 to be a Plenary Indulgence in honour of 
 the Portiuncula of Assisi. I am afraid to 
 say how many years of purgatory were 
 remitted to those who attended : let us 
 hope that good St Peter will spare a few 
 even to those who stood and gossiped in 
 the porch — even to us, for our heretical 
 interest in the fabric of the church, and 
 
 «4
 
 FATHER RHINE 25 
 
 for the care with which (our subsacristan 
 holding the light in tolerant patience, for 
 we had paid him liberally) we copied the 
 inscriptions upon those outcast tombs by 
 the door, and found them to commemorate 
 former deans and dignitaries of the minster. 
 Our English time-table had given us fair 
 warning. " Emmerich : German time and 
 customs." German time warned us now 
 that it was an hour nearer bed time than it 
 would have been at home, while German 
 customs were displayed in the multitude 
 and popularity of the beershops. In fact, 
 by this time there were no others open ; 
 so we had no farther interest in the town. 
 For it had been one of our first vows on 
 starting that we would steer as clear as 
 possible of beer on this journey, drinking 
 it only at our evening meal. So we made 
 our way now to another of the mouldering 
 old gates, and came out upon the river 
 side, to find the full moon just risen upon 
 the Rhine. There was a pleasant old- 
 fashioned inn close by us on the quay, 
 with the usual German verandah, and 
 seats screened from the road by a row 
 of laurustinus in tubs. The evening was 
 delicious ; not a breath now to ripple the 
 swift oily stream ; the air warm, and the 
 west still flushed with a dark red glow 
 from the sunset ; just a dozen or so of the 
 brightest stars in the velvety sky ; the
 
 26 FATHER RHINE 
 
 moon was too brilliant for the rest. "We 
 stood and looked at her, and she seemed to 
 me to say, " Yes, I would, if I were you." 
 " It's a wonderful sight, isn't it ? " said I ; 
 and again, feeling very sentimental, (for cer- 
 tainly this is a sentimental climate), I began, 
 " Art thou pale for weariness — " " Yes," 
 interrupted Schultz absent-mindedly, . . . 
 "aren't you thirsty, old man?" I could 
 only avow reluctantly that I was not, 
 though I wished I had been. " That's 
 right, then ! " cried he, tucking my arm 
 under his in the old hearty undergraduate 
 way ; " that's right, then we'll go in and 
 have a glass of beer apiece ! " 
 
 The moon peeped in at us through the 
 laurustinus leaves, and wove her track of 
 fretted quicksilver across the rushing 
 waters ; the boats, dark and silent by 
 the quayside, rocked their masts gently, 
 as though they lay asleep ; the cries of 
 our own men loading the Hollatidia with 
 bales for Cologne and Mainz sounded 
 mellow in the distance ; the moon peeped 
 in, and watched us approvingly as we 
 sipped our beer. On such a night it was 
 that Circe tempted Odysseus, and, but for 
 his magic herb, he would have been be- 
 witched with the rest. "Take another," 
 whispered the pale, pure temptress ; "just 
 look at that German who is going out, be 
 has just paid for seven!" For a moment
 
 FATHER RHINE 27 
 
 Schultz's eyes met mine again, but he 
 thought of his wife and five small bairns 
 at home, and I thought of my liver. So 
 we only sat a few minutes longer, and 
 watched the moonlight on the river and 
 the nodding masts until we felt ready to nod 
 ourselves, and then I called for our reckon- 
 ing. Our business-like, hard-featured 
 hostess came at the summons ; it was a 
 penny a piece, if we pleased. What was 
 this ? No, no, thanks ; she never accepted 
 tips. So Schultz took my arm again, and 
 we strolled off towards the boat ; and then 
 and there my heart overflowed into song : 
 
 " Know'st thou the land where the writing is Runic, 
 And the smack of the sausage is strong in their 
 speech, 
 But their drink is the nectar of Pilsen and Munich, 
 
 Supplied at a price that the poorest may reach ! 
 Know'st thou the land where the tip is unknown — " 
 
 " I say, easy all ! " interrupted Schultz ; 
 " those confounded Dutchmen will think 
 we are both drunk." There, indeed, stood 
 two Germans, open-mouthed, one of them 
 being he whom we had just seen pay his 
 70 Pfennige as he went out. 
 
 " I beg your pardon," said I, as we 
 passed ; " this is the exhilarating effect of 
 the foreign air ; it quite gets into one's 
 head at first." 
 
 *' I know it," he replied in fluent Eng- 
 lish ; " I have felt the same myself in
 
 28 FATHER RHINE 
 
 London. But then your English beer is 
 stronger, and you have also whisky." 
 
 I passed on abashed, knowing that he 
 gave me credit for one or two dozen 
 glasses at least, and that any further ex- 
 planation would only lower his estimate 
 of English veracity. We came on board, 
 our little cabin looked very snug, and the 
 berths very inviting ; for we had not slept 
 our fill the night before, in spite of the 
 calm passage. The sailors were quiet 
 enough over their loading, the Rhine 
 murmured soothingly as it rippled along 
 the ship's side, and there was a pleasant 
 undertone of girls' voices chattering and 
 laughing in Dutch next door. Schultz, 
 who is a kittle sleeper, did indeed protest 
 that he should never get to sleep while 
 those girls were jabbering like that ; yet 
 the voices soon sounded faint and distant 
 to our drowsy ears ; then our eyelids 
 closed gently of their own accord, and 
 Father Rhine rippled us to sleep.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 " Rested we now, where, uncontrolled, 
 The Rhine his bursting billows rolled ; 
 And ever, ever fierce and free 
 Bore broadly onward to the sea." — Ruskin. 
 
 August 3. 
 
 Woke at five o'clock, by our unregen- 
 erate English watches ; huddled on an 
 ulster, and went on deck. The sun was 
 just rising, as red as blood ; the pale 
 moon hung on the opposite horizon, and 
 looked shockingly worn^and dissipated, as 
 well she might, I thought, remembering 
 last night. Light wisps of mist curled up 
 here and there from the river ; on either 
 hand, the flat Netherland landscape, with 
 big white poplars and unlopped willows 
 looming bigger still out of the haze ; they 
 and their quiet reflections showing very 
 dark and velvety against the light j the 
 river running swiftly with oily eddies. 
 Having reported the weather to Schultz, 
 I went to bed again and slept till 7.30, 
 when the Dutch girls began to twitter at 
 our eaves again, and the sun was already 
 high and hot, and we felt it full time to 
 
 get up. We ordered chocolate for break- 
 
 19
 
 30 FATHER RHINE 
 
 fast — a great improvement on the coffee — 
 and felt very comfortable and very virtu- 
 ous, watching out of one corner of our 
 eyes how the quiet landscape glided past 
 the saloon windows, and with the other 
 how rapidly (almost as rapidly as ours) 
 the huge pots of chocolate, and rolls and 
 butter, disappeared before the healthy 
 growing appetite of those Dutch families. 
 It is one of the beauties of foreign travel 
 that it makes one so contented with oneself. 
 If I see my neighbours unappreciative, I 
 hug myself with a happy sense of superi- 
 ority ; if, on the other hand, they seem 
 thoroughly to enjoy everything, then their 
 enjoyment doubles mine ; for we are all 
 of us somewhat of Sganarelle's mind : 
 " Quand j'ai bien bu et bien mange, je 
 veux que tout le monde soit soul dans 
 ma maison." After breakfast we made 
 their acquaintance, and sat all in the stern 
 together for most of the morning. One 
 of the mothers had married a Scotchman 
 settled in Rotterdam ; the eldest daughter 
 was at Cheltenham Ladies' College ; and 
 all were as wonderfully well up in all lan- 
 guages and all histories as the educated 
 Dutch always seem to be. They were 
 greatly interested in the Emmerich inscrip- 
 tions which I had just been deciphering. 
 Perhaps I began by ** pontificating " a 
 little. " You would be amused to hear
 
 3i
 
 32 FATHER RHINE 
 
 C. gassing away all this time to those 
 Dutch people," records Schultz, who at 
 that moment, treacherously hidden round 
 the corner, was writing home to his 
 wife. They remarked on some lin- 
 guistic peculiarities of the epitaphs, and 
 I quoted Grimm's law, adding, perhaps 
 with conscious dignity, " the Lautver- 
 schiebung, you know." Oh yes, they 
 knew ; even Hannah, a little chubby crea- 
 ture of eight or nine, with the plumpest 
 little naked arms and knees, looked as if 
 she had learnt about all that long ago ; 
 and the healthy, sunburnt boys gave me 
 a gloomy glance of recognition, which as- 
 sured me that they too, if they had been 
 willing in holiday time to betray the secrets 
 of the prison-house, could have told me all 
 about " the beastly Lautverschiebung." 
 I made no further attempt to instruct our 
 new friends, but listened with humble 
 interest to what they had to tell me ; and 
 presently Schultz came out of his hiding- 
 place and joined us. They sympathised 
 good-naturedly with our disappointment 
 in the matter of the Royal Netherlandish 
 danger-board ; they took the intensest 
 feminine interest in all that Schultz vouch- 
 safed to tell them about his five boys at 
 home ; then the talk came round to the 
 young queen and her approaching corona- 
 tion, and here at last I got an innings again.
 
 FATHER RHINE 33 
 
 for I was able to tell how, in April 189 1, 
 I went up the Rigi by the first train of 
 that season, and travelled in the same car- 
 riage with a pretty, interesting-looking girl 
 of twelve or thereabouts, dressed in deep 
 mourning, as were also her mother and the 
 rest of the party ; how the little girl had 
 held in her arms an immense doll, to whom 
 she communicated all the Bompardesque 
 information just as it was told to herself. 
 ** Vous voyez a gauche le Finsteraarhorn 
 ... la Jungfrau, dont je signale a ces 
 demoiselles les proportions elegantes ! " 
 etc., etc. ; and how we found out later 
 that this was the young Queen of Holland, 
 staying incognita at Gersau. Our friends 
 at once began complaining in chorus of an 
 article they had just been reading about 
 Holland in some English magazine. The 
 ignorance of the writer ! said Eighteen. 
 And she laughs at things because she 
 doesn't understand them ! chimed in Six- 
 teen. And yet she professes to know all 
 about everything ! added Fourteen ; and 
 she has even found — and here they all 
 joined in chorus — yes, she has even found 
 a husband for our Queen ! She will not 
 marry yet ! pursued Fourteen, in a tone of 
 the utmost decision. They did their best 
 to explain to us the Dutch system of edu- 
 cation, and we tried to palliate the short- 
 comings of our own ; and the time passed 
 c
 
 34 FATHER RHINE 
 
 very pleasantly till we reached Diisseldorf, 
 where, to our great regret, the party 
 landed. We helped them to get their 
 luggage ashore, and came back hoping 
 that we might meet equally pleasant travel- 
 ling acquaintances later on. 
 
 The Rhine itself is not specially in- 
 teresting between Diisseldorf and Cologne, 
 but the easy motion of the boat is always 
 restful ; and we wrote up our diaries till 
 we came to the little town of Zons, 
 whose picturesque towers we had admired 
 in former years, and had long dreamed 
 of landing some day to explore. There is 
 no pier there, but the ship's bell sum- 
 moned a boat to our aid, and we got in 
 safely with our bicycles and a clergyman 
 and his wife who had resolved to explore 
 the town with us. The sailors cast the 
 the boat off, and the stream swept us 
 down at once ; we might have been three 
 hundred yards away from the shore on 
 starting, and, though the boatman tugged 
 at his crazy old oars, he did not reach the 
 slack water among the reeds till a good 
 quarter of a mile below our starting-point. 
 Then he took to his punting pole, and we 
 worked slowly up and landed at a little 
 paved causeway that sloped down into the 
 stream. 
 
 The town was all we had dreamed : 
 old brick walls with brick turrets and
 
 FATHER RHINE 35 
 
 great flanking towers of black basalt ; 
 walls that had once stood at the water's 
 edge, but overshadowed now with poplars, 
 and cut off from the river by half a 
 mile of meadows ; ragged, unpointed for 
 the last two hundred years, but ripened 
 into that deep crimson brown that comes 
 only with centuries of exposure to wind 
 and weather, and overgrown with mosses 
 and wall-flowers. We passed through 
 the main gate and down a little street 
 between the town wall aid a row of 
 whitewashed houses with boldly project- 
 ing second stories. Here we found the 
 main inn of the place, with a fine oak 
 staircase, heavily balustraded and heraldic- 
 ally carved. We were ravenous for lunch 
 by this time, and made short work of the 
 ham and eggs, with bread and butter, 
 salad, and half a litre of white wine and a 
 bottle of Apollinaris between the two of us. 
 The reckoning came to just is. 3d. apiece, 
 and would have been less than a shilling 
 but for the Apollinaris, which was by far 
 the heaviest item in the bill. I enter into 
 these details only because the meal was 
 typical of what one finds everywhere in 
 the small German towns. We looked 
 round the town after lunch, and found the 
 old tombstones again cast out from the 
 church, which had been rebuilt and new- 
 painted inside, and looked as hopelessly
 
 36 FATHER RHINE 
 
 self-satisfied and tasteless as the show- 
 window of a modern religious image-shop. 
 Then we started for Cologne, regretting 
 already even our very moderate indulgence 
 in wine, to which we had been driven in 
 self-defence, for our very delight in the 
 old-world streets of Zons had inspired us 
 with a wholesome distrust of its water. 
 Our wheels drave heavily now ; the air 
 was sultry, and the roads deep in dust, 
 and not always of the smoothest. At 
 Dormagen we stopped to look over the 
 fine Romanesque church ; and soon after 
 leaving the village the road rose a few 
 feet, and brought us suddenly to the side 
 of the Rhine, which here made a sweep 
 inwards in our direction. Just ahead, the 
 road was shaded by a long avenue of 
 white poplars, and followed the gentle 
 bend of the river : the whole view was 
 very grand in its simplicity, with long 
 sweeping curves that blended together on 
 the horizon, and a broad contrast between 
 the dark green foliage and the gleaming 
 river. At Worringen we found a nice 
 old church with tower and lych-gate of 
 brick ; then a picturesque old watermill ; 
 and then the spires of Cologne, which we 
 had already just seen above the treetops, 
 came full in view. It was almost im- 
 possible to realise that the map was right, 
 and we were still five miles ofi'. I know
 
 FATHER RHINE 37 
 
 of no approach which makes one so feel 
 the overwhelming height of those towers ; 
 kilometer after kilometer goes by, and 
 they scarcely look any nearer. Gradually 
 the houses and the other spires of the city 
 came into view, but still, to the very last, 
 even when you are inside the gates, these 
 great twin spires tower over all the fore- 
 ground.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 " Es sassen die alten Germanen 
 An beiden Ufern des Rheins ; 
 Und als sie genug getrunken, 
 
 Da riefen sie immer ' Noch Eins ! ' " 
 
 German students' song. 
 
 I LEFT Schultz with our bicycles at the 
 Hotel de I'Europe, where the wise can 
 enjoy their refreshments in a tiny but 
 picturesque bit of garden, two sides of 
 which are bounded by the Gothic walls 
 of St Andreas' church. So, leaving him 
 there, I took our two passports to the 
 post-office for letters. This was a slow 
 business, though the post was only some 
 two hundred yards off; and, on rejoining 
 my friend, I saw at once by a certain guilty 
 look on his usually open countenance that 
 something had happened. My first idea 
 was that he had drunk up all the first pot 
 of tea to his own cheek, and sent for more. 
 I was ready to pardon him, for had he not 
 complained as we rode through the town 
 that he was suffering from a sort of bilious 
 headache ? and did I not know from my 
 own thirst that his must have been almost 
 harder than he could bear ? But I was 
 38
 
 FATHER RHINE 39 
 
 far from suspecting the real facts, which 
 I transcribe here from the account sent that 
 night to the recording angel at home. 
 
 " Opposite me were three men drinking 
 beer, and one of them — the middle one — 
 was my undoing. You must understand 
 that beer is strictly forbidden by the Com- 
 pany, except at the last meal of the day, 
 and it was as yet but four o'clock ; but C. 
 was away, and the exasperating way in 
 which that red-bearded man drained his 
 glass, sighed with supreme content, and 
 ordered another — to say nothing of the 
 golden glint of the bright liquid in the 
 queer-shaped glasses, and a thirst that had 
 been solidly growing along thirteen miles 
 of dusty road — all these made me feel 
 with Odysseus that * it was by no means 
 pleasant to refrain.' So, casting away all 
 shyness, I summoned the blooming Kellner, 
 and demanded ' ein Schoppen Bier.' C. 
 sighed over my fall at his return ; but I 
 laughed softly to myself, while I hugged 
 the memory of that cooling nectar — an oasis 
 in a burning waste of sun and dust." All 
 this he told me in much the same words on 
 my return, and showed me the very man 
 with his red beard — a Judas-face if ever 
 there was one ! I bethought me again of 
 the v/arning on our time-table, " German 
 Time and Customs." O tempora, mores I 
 — a pint of beer at four o'clock in the
 
 40 FATHER RHINE 
 
 afternoon, by way of medicine for a bilious 
 headache ! Yet, as we strolled out arm 
 in arm after tea to see a little of the town, 
 I heard him again, with an unrepentant 
 chuckle, quote Browning under his breath : 
 
 " How sad and mad and bad it was 1 
 But ah ! how it was sweet ! " 
 
 We had very little time for sight-seeing 
 proper, but we both knew the town fairly 
 well already. It was very hot even at half- 
 past six, when we took our cycles down 
 to leave them on board ; and I stopped to 
 bathe by the way. Schultz declined ; he 
 feared it might make his head ache again ; 
 at which I, like a true friend, exclaimed, 
 "I told you so!" and then went in, feel- 
 ing offensively virtuous, and renewed old 
 memories of swooping down for eighty 
 yards with all the Rhine current at my 
 back, and then beating painfully up stream 
 again. To-day I was often tempted to 
 give up, and should certainly have done 
 so but for the sight of two or three 
 Germans who toiled up phlegmatically 
 beside me ; for patriotism urged that 
 what a mere Dutchman with a beer 
 barrel under his belt can do, no English- 
 man must shrink from. I wish I had 
 taken a snapshot of all the bodies in that 
 bath ; for what words can convey any 
 idea of such monstrous corporations !
 
 FATHER RHINE 41 
 
 After even a very short absence from 
 Germany, one is apt to think that one's 
 memories must be exaggerated, and that 
 one has got a sort of stage German into 
 one's head. But the stage German falls 
 far short of the real native in these large 
 towns, both in his consumption of liquor 
 and in his manifest symptoms of such in- 
 dulgence. When, after the bathe, we 
 walked down the bank to a modest little 
 Garten - Restaurant where one can eat 
 fresh fried fish and bread and cheese at 
 a nominal price, we found at our table 
 a good-natured old hoiirgeoise, evidently 
 a small shopkeeper, enjoying her even- 
 ing meal and her evening glass withal. 
 Schoppen after Schoppen, during the 
 twenty minutes that we were privileged 
 to sit near her, disappeared beneath that 
 well-worn rusty black gown : she shifted 
 a few inches to make more room for us 
 on a bench that was built for five or 
 six : ** Oh, no, we weren't crowding her 
 at all, thanks ; " and indeed there was 
 just room for the three of us ! So she 
 smiled affably again, and back went her 
 black bonnet, and her many chins opened 
 out like an accordion, and her little eyes 
 twinkled good-naturedly at us through 
 the bottom of the tankard. She rose 
 and waddled off a short time before we 
 had done, and we made a hasty calcula-
 
 42 FATHER RHINE 
 
 tion : the first piece of ground she could 
 have seen must have been about four feet 
 in front of her toes. Probably she takes 
 no exercise all day long but to waddle 
 backwards and forwards to her supper ; 
 and one may see hundreds like her among 
 the sedentary populations of the towns. 
 Yet it all seems natural enough here. 
 There is something in the climate : — the 
 warm evenings when one can sit for 
 hours under the trees without fear of 
 rheumatism, and watch the lights come 
 out as the twilight fades, and follow 
 their long reflections on the stream. 
 Then also everybody is drinking round 
 you ; and this is the mildest of all alco- 
 holic beverages, and the coolest to the 
 thirsty palate. The stars wink at you, 
 the moon looks down with approval ; and 
 you soon find that, however little you 
 may have approached the local standard, 
 you have taken more than you would 
 have dreamed of drinking in England. 
 Not that the actual days on the Rhine 
 are so very much warmer than in 
 England ; but between their nights and 
 ours there is no comparison. We came 
 back to the boat at about 10.30, quite 
 heated by the very mild exertion of rid- 
 ing up into the town and back again ; and . 
 there were our poor firemen, all begrimed 
 with coal-dust and furrowed with perspira-
 
 FATHER RHINE 43 
 
 tion, stretched upon the cotton bales that 
 lay about the wharf, and trying to cool 
 down a little before the boat should start 
 again. And we who, from the standpoint 
 of our own modest three glasses, had just 
 been talking with some Pharisaical unction 
 about German habits, felt now that many 
 gallons of the mild liquor might be par- 
 doned, in this climate, to such martyrs of 
 civilization as these.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 "Tacitae per arnica silentia lunae." — Virgil. 
 
 Although I had seen the Seven Mountains 
 often enough before, and the flesh was glad 
 enough to lie down and rest, yet the spirit 
 felt certain twinges of regret for all the 
 beautiful scenery which was doomed to be 
 wasted on mere stokers and look-out-men, 
 before our own eyes opened to the mor- 
 row's dawn. Still, one can't have one's 
 cake and eat it, even on a holiday ; so I lay 
 down with philosophic resignation. But, 
 in the middle of the night, some kindly 
 spirit woke me from my first sleep, and 
 whispered in my ear to rise and look out 
 of the little cabin window. We were just 
 passing the Drachenfels : the moon almost 
 at her full, and the river flowing broad and 
 strong, a mirror of grey polished steel, 
 with just a thin line of silver at its edge, 
 where it frayed along the shore. I went 
 on deck and looked round : not another 
 boat was in sight, nor any wave on the 
 whole stream, except the track of our own 
 vessel. There were Rolandseck and Non- 
 nenwerth ahead, and Godesberg faint in 
 
 44
 
 FATHER RHINE 45 
 
 the distance behind us, where Heine sat, 
 watching the white sails on the Rhine and 
 the glow of evening on the Seven Moun- 
 tains, and holding his friend's hand while 
 she talked to him of the little dead Ver- 
 onica. I had seen that sunset glow in 
 former years, but it was not to be com- 
 pared with the breathless quiet of this 
 moonlight. Nothing was really hidden, 
 not even the farthest distance, but only 
 bewitched into the tenderest silver greys. 
 The Drachenfels rose higher and steeper 
 from the water ; while the other hills, 
 which push forward by daylight, fell back 
 now into their proper places, and the whole 
 was softly mirrored in a tide that " moving, 
 seemed asleep, too full for tide or foam." 
 It was all as dreamlike as the dim memories 
 of our childhood, that were once garish 
 and prosaic enough, but mellowed now by 
 distance into silver seven times refined ; 
 memories that still have power to thrill us 
 with a quickening pulse of life, while they 
 soothe us with all the tranquillity of sleep. 
 For here the tide of life seemed for a while 
 to move on as calmly as this river ; out of 
 darkness into darkness, but with as steady 
 a purpose and as little fretting in its ap- 
 pointed channel. Here was that unbroken 
 peace of earth and sky under which the 
 soul dares " bare its bosom to the moon," 
 and let the full tide of thoughts come
 
 46 FATHER RHINE 
 
 flowing in ; far-off recollections that throng 
 too thickly now for separate recognition, 
 mingled with vague hopes and yearnings, 
 and tender inarticulate regrets. There is 
 no jarring note in all the harmony of 
 nature, but only whisperings of divine 
 comfort — 
 
 " Sur la face des eaux, sur la face des monts ; 
 
 Sur le fleuve argente, sur la foret oil roule 
 
 Comme un hymne confus des morts que nous aimons. 
 
 Mais moi, sous chaque jour courbant plus bas ma tete, 
 Je passe ..." 
 
 The very foretaste of eternity comes as a 
 reminder of our own littleness. Ye are 
 gods, and ye are all the children of the 
 Most Highest ; but ye shall die like men, 
 and fall like one of the princes. Drachen- 
 fels, Nonnenwerth, and Rolandseck, — 
 little by little their long reflection shud- 
 dered and broke in the wake of our boat ; 
 two o'clock chimed from some church 
 tower across the water, and the sound 
 brought me back to earth. An involun- 
 tary shiver reminded me that flesh was 
 flesh, after all. I hngered a little longer, 
 but the spell was broken, and the thought 
 of the morrow's task became more and 
 more importunate ; sixty miles to be ridden 
 at Schultz's pace, and under Heaven knows 
 what burning sky ! So I crept below, very
 
 ON THE WALLS, BACHARACH, 
 
 47
 
 48 FATHER RHINE 
 
 grateful for the revelation which had been 
 vouchsafed to me, and in a few minutes 
 the stokers and look-out-men were again 
 the only waking beings on that moonlit 
 Rhine.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 "With fields that promise corn and wine." 
 
 ScHULTz M'oke me at sunrise ; he had 
 slept rather feverishly, and w^as not in a 
 mood to blame me for omitting to wake 
 him on account of the moonlight. "We 
 were now close upon Rheinbrohl, where 
 the volcanic hills suddenly hem the river 
 into a narrow gorge until Andernach. 
 The sky was dappled with soft clouds, 
 heliotrope lined with peach-blossom ; but 
 the colours soon faded, and we went down 
 again to dress and break our fast, since 
 at Andernach we were to leave the boat 
 for the day. Thanks to supplies prud- 
 ently taken on board last night, we break- 
 fasted luxuriously in our cabins, and were 
 soon on deck again. There was a light 
 mist now in the gorge, and every sign of 
 a hot day to come. The haze thickened 
 as we approached Andernach, and, though 
 the sun still struggled bravely through it, 
 the light was rather faint for snapshots. 
 The fine old church was full of wor- 
 shippers at morning mass, so we only 
 lingered outside to admire its sculptures, 
 
 D 49
 
 50 FATHER RHINE 
 
 and then on to the Franciscan church and 
 the ruined palace, and then out upon the 
 Coblenz road. The way was dusty, and 
 it soon parted from the Rhine, which 
 disappeared altogether in the haze. We 
 passed one fairly picturesque village, 
 Weissenthurm ; but otherwise the ride 
 was rather uninteresting. We quenched 
 our thirst with a second edition of coffee 
 at a baker's shop by the Moselle bridge 
 at Coblenz, and then rode on. A mile 
 and a half beyond Coblenz the road rejoins 
 the river, and never leaves it again till 
 beyond Bingen. The sun by this time 
 had burst through the mist, and flashed 
 merrily on the waves of the Rhine by our 
 side J it was still early, and we had forty 
 more miles of this scenery to look forward 
 to •, castle and rock, and towns like 
 museums of the Middle Ages, and moun- 
 tains and woods and terraces of vines — the 
 much-abused Rhineland vines, which at 
 least have fresh green leaves to show in 
 the late summer, when all the woods are 
 burnt with the heat. The clouds rolled 
 up bigger as the day wore on, giving us 
 exquisite contrasts of light and shade on 
 the hills and reflections on the river. At 
 Boppard we laid in provisions for lunch, 
 but Schultz was not yet Bohemian enough 
 to approve of our cooking our lunch in 
 so public a place as that which I had
 
 FATHER RHINE 51 
 
 chosen under the poplars at the end of 
 the quay, so we rode on a few miles to 
 Salzig. 
 
 On these Bohemian meals depended 
 much of the cheapness, and later on, even 
 to Schultz, much of the pleasure of our 
 tour. There are few German villages so 
 poor but that one can raise good bread and 
 butter, cheese, and a ham which, at the 
 very worst, can be minced into a pleasant 
 flavouring for an omelette. If there is 
 no shop in the village, the innkeeper is 
 just as willing to sell the raw materials 
 at about the same price. Fresh milk 
 cannot be counted on with the same cer- 
 tainty, though even this can generally be 
 got ; but we mostly carried it with us, 
 in a tin bottle protected by a cloth case. 
 This we washed out well with a little Izal 
 from day to day, and in spite of the heat 
 and the jolting the milk was generally 
 quite right and never actually sour, though 
 it had sometimes turned to honest curds 
 and whey. Even then we found it a 
 welcome addition to our tea, and, in 
 default of anything of the kind, we always 
 carried .a lemon. Our cooking apparatus 
 consisted of a light tin pint-and-a-half 
 saucepan, into which fitted two large tin 
 mugs, one inside the other, and inside 
 these a tin box for butter ; there was 
 room in the interstices for two smaller
 
 52 FATHER RHINE 
 
 tins of salt and tea ; two deep tin dishes 
 fitted as a lid to the saucepan, and the 
 whole packed closely into a strong canvas 
 bag which was strapped to one of the 
 cycles. We were thus able to take all 
 our meals in the open air, by the water- 
 side or under the trees, and it was only 
 for supper that we condescended to fall 
 back upon the resources of civilisation. 
 We took out with us half a pound of first- 
 rate China tea, and there is no beverage 
 so really thirst-quenching and so stimu- 
 lating in the midst of hard work as weak 
 China tea, boiling hot, with a slice of 
 lemon in it. 
 
 All this we unpacked under the trees at 
 Salzig, by the ferry side, to the intense in- 
 terest of two damsels who were waiting 
 to be carried over, and who watched us 
 break our eggs and shred the ham, and 
 put in a lump of butter, and stir the 
 whole together in one of the tin dishes 
 over the spirit-lamp, with that compas- 
 sionate amusement with which women 
 always observe a man who ventures to 
 trespass upon their special domain. They 
 offered us their best advice, and shrugged 
 their shoulders — how well I knew that 
 shrug ! — to see that we persisted in fol- 
 lowing our own rough-and-ready way for 
 our own purposes. At last Charon came 
 and wafted them away, laughing and wish-
 
 FATHER RHINE 53 
 
 ing us " besten Appetit," and calling out 
 a last warning over the waters that we 
 should do well to beat up the eggs a 
 little more thoroughly, another time. Then 
 came the owner of the cottage in front of 
 which we had camped : betrayed the usual 
 interest in our nationality and profession, 
 married or single state, etc., etc., and had 
 plenty to tell us in return about himself 
 and his neighbours. Although he saw 
 from the first that Schultz was Jupiter, 
 and I Mercurius, the chief speaker, yet he 
 was slow to be dissuaded from his belief 
 that my friend understood him well enough, 
 and was only too dignified to reply : for it 
 was evident that he took me for a more or 
 less professional courier, engaged to save 
 Schultz the trouble of opening his mouth. 
 He could not believe that so sensible a man 
 as Schultz evidently was would ever ven- 
 ture into a foreign land without having 
 first learnt the language. " Sehen sie 
 'mal : — wenn Einer die Sprache nicht kann, 
 da sitzt er wie im Dreck," ^ — a form of 
 locution which amused me immensely, 
 though it appealed less to my friend. 
 We asked him for a pennyworth of the 
 small apricots that hung on a tree above 
 our heads : he fetched a ladder and plucked 
 us a dozen or so, but we found them so 
 
 * " Look here — if a man can't talk the language, he 
 has to sit in the muck, so to speak."
 
 54 FATHER RHINE 
 
 unripe still, that we left him money and 
 fruit with our blessing, and mounted to 
 ride onwards. 
 
 A heavy shower came on at Hirzenach ; 
 and we had to take shelter in a shed in- 
 stead of going in search of the keys to 
 look inside the fine old church. By St 
 Goar, the sky drew dark again, and the 
 great bastions of Rheinfels stood out black 
 against billows of silver-lined clouds, and 
 a handsbreadth of bright blue sky. An- 
 other heavy shower overtook us in the 
 town, and we stopped to make tea in 
 the secularised crypt of the great red 
 sandstone church by the roadside, whose 
 open door invited us to shelter. At Ober- 
 wesel it was bright sunshine again, and 
 we had time to loiter round the old walls, 
 and peep into the little gem of a chapel 
 that is built upon the very ramparts, in 
 which some service was then going on. 
 "We found the building full of white- 
 capped nuns, who huddled together like 
 fluttered doves at our entrance, so that 
 we hastened to relieve them of our sacri- 
 legious presence, and rode on. Off 
 Caub, the shadow of the hills had already 
 crept half-way up the walls of the Pfalz : 
 and at Bacharach we felt a healthy appe- 
 tite ; so I looked in and ordered supper 
 at the old familiar Hotel Bastian, and we 
 spent the interval in looking over the
 
 FATHER RHINE 55 
 
 church, and the Chapel of St Werner, 
 most graceful and delicately-tinted of all 
 Rhineside ruins, and the fascinating old 
 timber houses, covered with slates like 
 a dragon's scales, that are built out upon 
 the walls. Then back to Bastian's, where 
 we found so good a dinner, and paid so 
 small a price for it, that we sighed again 
 to think how impossible it is to travel like 
 this in England. 
 
 We could not sit long after dinner, for 
 it was evident that we should not be in 
 time to catch the Hollandia at Bingen, 
 but must take the train from thence to 
 Mainz ; and I wished to show Schultz a 
 little of the Morgenbacher Thai on the 
 way. Castles to right of us and castles 
 to left of us again, but looming dim and 
 dimmer in the deepening dusk. At last 
 the mouth of the Morgenbacher Thai ; a 
 merry party drinking beer in the verandah 
 that overlooked the corner, and trolling a 
 catch thereto, to which Schultz answered 
 as we passed with a catch of his own, 
 remembered from school cricket-suppers in 
 bygone days — 
 
 " And here's to you, John Brown. 
 To you with all my heart, 
 And as we're in good company, 
 We'll drink before we part." 
 
 The narrow road turns under the ruin of 
 Falkenburg, and toils upwards between the
 
 56 FATHER RHINE 
 
 hills, among whose irregular buttresses it 
 has to wind, by the side of a little brook 
 that has worn itself a deep channel from 
 cascade to cascade, down into the living 
 rock. We had no time to see the finest 
 part of the valley, but stopped for a 
 quarter of an hour to take a twilight 
 photograph and to enjoy the perfect peace 
 of the evening. The air was warm, the 
 brook murmured gently over its rocky bed, 
 and there was such a chorus of crickets, 
 far and near, in the silence of the dusk, as 
 we had never heard before. But the vil- 
 lage clock warned us that our time was 
 growing short, so we mounted reluctantly 
 and rode down again to join the high road ; 
 and here we spun on at full speed, up and 
 down, betwixt wood and water, the trees 
 throwing a deeper and deeper shade as they 
 overhung more closely from the rocks on 
 the right, the Rhine glimmering fainter and 
 fainter on our left, with lights like glow- 
 worms from the houses on the further 
 bank. At intervals we run into warm 
 gusts of air, eddying with midges almost 
 in a solid mass, like the whirling drift of 
 lovers among whom Dante saw his Paolo 
 and Francesca, we shut our eyes, and they 
 patter like soft rain against our rushing 
 faces. Still no Bingen ; it is further off 
 than we had sanguinely hoped. At last 
 we come to that long island in the Rhine,
 
 FATHER RHINE 57 
 
 where the Mouse Tower just shows above 
 the trees : a red moon looming out of the 
 haze over RUdesheim, and creeping slowly 
 along the black battlements, and in and out 
 of the poplars, as we hurry on ; not that 
 lurid red, almost as of a London suburban 
 harvest moon, which we had noticed in her 
 yesterday as she rose through the smoke 
 of MUlheim, but a tender tint of orange 
 crimson, that went admirably with the 
 faint blue haze over the upper reaches of 
 the river, and the dark green foliage in the 
 foreground. But there was no time to 
 linger, for we knew that we must ride our 
 hardest for the train ; and in a moment the 
 road had plunged again into a black tunnel 
 of trees, through which the moon fluttered 
 in shreds and snippets at our side ; and 
 then out upon the first pavements of the 
 town, and blinding lights in the darkness ; 
 and here we lost each other, and arrived 
 separately at the station, breathless, to find 
 that the train for which we had been 
 racing ran only on Sundays ! There was 
 a sort of consolation-train, however, half 
 luggage and half passenger, for which we 
 had to wait three-quarters of an hour, and 
 which even then crawled so slowly, and 
 stopped so long, that we dozed off, and 
 only woke up at intervals to look feverishly 
 at our watches. At last a toothless and 
 palsied old peasant mumbled out to me
 
 58 FATHER RHINE 
 
 that it was no good being impatient. The 
 train was timed to take an hour and a half 
 over these twenty miles, and was generally 
 late at that ! " What's that ? " enquired 
 Schultz ; " is the old beggar saying that 
 he hopes to get to Mainz before he dies ? " 
 I explained the true state of the case, and 
 we dozed off again amid mutual recrimina- 
 tions, and woke in the glare of the Mainz 
 electric lights. Half-asleep still, we 
 trundled down a beautifully-paved sort 
 of boulevard to the quay, and got on 
 board just as the clocks were striking 
 midnight.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 " Alt Heidelberg, liu feine, 
 Du Stack an Ehren reich ! " 
 
 SCHEFFEI.. 
 
 August 5. 
 We were not due at Mannheim till 
 eight o'clock next morning, but we woke 
 at seven to find our boat just coming up 
 to the quay ; the sun was already high 
 and warm. We had comfortable time to 
 dress and pack our belongings — partly to 
 be taken with us and partly to be left at 
 the Company's warehouses and picked up 
 on our return journey — and to get our 
 breakfast before our train for Heidelberg, 
 where Schultz went to see the sights 
 again and I to call on an old friend. We 
 met again at the station for lunch and 
 took the train at about two o'clock for 
 Bruchsal. The train was a nuisance in 
 itself, but a necessary part of our plan, 
 since it was only thus that we could find 
 time to turn aside and see Maulbronn, one 
 of the best-preserved mediaeval monasteries 
 in Europe. Schultz was jubilant at lunch, 
 he had thwarted an attempt on the part 
 of the tramway-conductor to give him 
 
 53
 
 6o FATHER RHINE 
 
 change for a two-mark piece as if it had 
 been a single mark. He described to me 
 how he had laid his hand on the man's 
 arm and fixed him with a glittering eye, 
 and held up two fingers until the guilty 
 wretch had pretended suddenly to under- 
 stand, and produced the missing coin. 
 The waiter stood by us and listened with 
 smiling interest. I beckoned to him to 
 bring us our bill, while Schultz still 
 pursued his tale. 
 
 " And the beggar didn't seem the least 
 bit abashed about it either ! I'll tell you 
 what, Kellner, they aren't a very honest 
 lot on your tramways here." 
 
 "Oh, we none of us are in Heidel- 
 berg ! " answered the waiter with a shrug 
 of his shoulders and a cynical smile. 
 " You see, we have too many strangers 
 and rich people." His addition differed 
 by a mark in his own favour ; but he 
 rectified the error very affably directly we 
 pointed it out, and rattled on so pleasantly 
 as he counted out my change, that nobody 
 could have been angry with him. After 
 all, a poor man must live somehow, and 
 wages were very low in Germany ; did 
 he look fat on what he earned ? For a 
 German he certainly did not, and I gave 
 him a slight extra tip by way of com- 
 pensation for the mark of which we had 
 just robbed him, nor was it until we
 
 FATHER RHINE 6i 
 
 arrived at Bruchsal that I found he had 
 given me a Belgian five-franc piece by mis- 
 take for the indigenous coin of five marks. 
 
 The porters at Bruchsal tried to wheel 
 Schultz's Whippet out backwards, with 
 the result that the hind-wheel brake 
 locked, and he was only just in time to 
 save them from using further violence to 
 get the machine along. A majestic in- 
 spector came up at the moment, and 
 addressed him very affably. 
 
 ** There is something wrong with your 
 cycle ? " 
 
 " Sorry I don't talk German ; can't you 
 say it in English ? " 
 
 "Jawohl, an English bicycle! I hope 
 the porter has not done it any harm," 
 pursued the official in his own tongue. 
 
 " Oh yes, isn't it a ripping fine day ! " 
 answered Schultz, who had managed at 
 last to loosen the brake. 
 
 ** I see, it is a special pattern of machine. 
 A special machine" he added, with an 
 emphasis which gave my friend a clue. 
 
 " Yes, and a jolly good machine too. 
 This is what we call a Whippet ; just look 
 how it goes." His gestures spoke plainer 
 than his words, and the inspector bent 
 down. " You see, the moment I cease 
 pedalling, the thing goes out of gear, so I 
 can coast with my feet on the pedals ; see 
 how I spin it round."
 
 62 FATHER RHINE 
 
 " Ach Gott ! " 
 
 " And then when I want to put the 
 brake on, I've only got to back-pedal, and 
 it hooks on to a sort of catch ; there ! " 
 
 " Kolossal ! " 
 
 " And on goes a rim break." 
 
 " Ach du lieber Gott ! What is that 
 for a contrivance ! A brake like a real 
 railway train ! " 
 
 "Only you must take jolly good care 
 not to back-pedal too hard." 
 
 " Kol — OSS — al ! You can stop it all 
 in one second, and have no accident ! " 
 
 " Or the beast stops dead, and down 
 you come on your blooming nose." 
 
 " Ach du lieber, lieber Gott ! That is 
 the cycle for me ! What might be the 
 price of such a machine ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, we're pretty good at machines : 
 only this idea is as old as the hills : it's 
 just the old Cheylesmore clutch. The 
 Cheylesmore clutch ! " he repeated, em- 
 phasising his words with a slap on the 
 shoulder, which the inspector took quite 
 in friendly part. " Of course you don't 
 understand a word of all this, old cock ; 
 but it amuses you to jabber, and so it does 
 me. You've got a rascally lot of thieves on 
 your trains and your stations ; but I dare- 
 say they're not worse than our directors. 
 And then you've got a first-class Emperor." 
 The inspector saluted solemnly in answer
 
 \^^I^^^^5P 
 
 ^^g^t 
 
 
 TWILIGHT IN MORGENBACHER THAL
 
 64 FATHER RHINE 
 
 to our bows ; and we heard him apostro- 
 phising his divinities and his colossi again 
 as we rode off. 
 
 Bruchsal is a quaint old town, but sleepy 
 to the last degree. I went in on the way 
 to buy a cheap hair-brush, and found in 
 the shop a girl of fifteen or sixteen, of 
 very singular beauty, with eyes like dark 
 amber, and hair to match, only tinged with 
 a darker shade of chestnut, and a complexion 
 of brilliant transparency. At the Academy, 
 people would have turned round to look 
 at her ; but here she knitted quietly behind 
 the counter, and sold me a fourpenny brush 
 without any airs whatever ; and probably 
 her Bruchsal friends, like Maggie Tulliver's 
 aunts, fear that her singular appearance will 
 stand in her way through life. We started 
 up a valley that rose gently south-eastwards 
 towards a ridge of hills on the far horizon ; 
 a green peaceful valley, with a trout-stream 
 winding down it, lively enough by nature, 
 but dammed at every mile into sleepy mill- 
 pools : rich meadows ready now for the 
 second harvest j tilled land in strips of every 
 variety of crops — corn, roots, coleseed, and 
 great pink-and-white poppies for oil. Tall 
 poplars stood in the moist land by the river 
 side, and fruit trees, of course, all along the 
 road. Sleepy old-world villages, Heidel- 
 sheim, Gandelsheim, Diedelsheim, with tall 
 white gables jostling each other side by side,
 
 FATHER RHINE 65 
 
 and elaborate wrought-iron signs projecting 
 over the roadway, and relics of mediaeval 
 masonry; great patient oxen in the carts; 
 sunburnt men and women ; children half- 
 naked in this almost tropical sunshine. 
 Gradually we parted from our little river, 
 crossing a ridge into the next valley : then 
 we coasted deliciously down into I3retten, 
 the birthplace of Melanchthon. "We had 
 come at the wrong time ; for the great 
 man's house had been pulled down and 
 not yet rebuilt, in honour of the quater- 
 centenary of his birth ; but we consoled 
 ourselves with tea and rice-cakes in a de- 
 serted garden just outside the town. After 
 Bretten, we crossed into yet another valley, 
 to Knittlingen, most picturesque village of 
 all ; and hence the road rose steadily up- 
 wards, fetching a wide compass to wind 
 round the end of the steep wooded ridge 
 which we had seen from the first on our 
 horizon. Just as we dismounted in the 
 steepest part, a party of Germans came 
 coasting down, with shouts of** All Heil ! " 
 as they swept by. Five minutes later, our 
 own turn came ; for the road wound gently 
 round the end of the ridge, and we put up 
 our feet and ran down a couple of miles 
 into Maulbronn, while the harvesters stood 
 still among their corn to watch us pass, 
 and held up their sickles to shade their 
 eyes from the level sun. 
 
 E
 
 66 FATHER RHINE 
 
 Maulbronn lies in a fertile hollow be- 
 tween two ridges, one of which — that 
 which we had just turned — is clothed to 
 the top with vines, all but the last twenty 
 feet of sheer rock, and the wood that 
 crowns the actual crest. Half of the 
 village is inside the old abbey walls, a 
 great square moated enclosure, with 
 many of its towers still standing. The 
 abbey itself is, and has been ever since 
 the Reformation, a seminary for Protest- 
 ant clergy, who occupy the conventual 
 buildings proper ; while the rest are let 
 out, apparently as ordinary dwelling- 
 houses. Except that one more of the 
 flanking towers has disappeared, every- 
 thing stands now practically as it stood 
 in the sixteenth century. 
 
 We left our cycles at the "Post," just 
 outside the abbey gate, and strolled out to 
 look round and take one or two photo- 
 graphs while there was still light. Then 
 back to supper, which was so excellent 
 (and, as we learned next day, so cheap) 
 that I cannot refrain from recording its 
 praises here. An hour afterwards we 
 were loitering arm in arm round the 
 precincts, in and out among the irregular 
 deep-buttressed walls that loomed twice 
 as big in the dusk -, then sitting to watch 
 the bats flit about the lindens, picturing 
 ourselves as students in these cloisters,
 
 FATHER RHINE 67 
 
 and recalling old college memories of our 
 own. " Do you remember little Black 
 and the stewed kidneys ? " says Schultz ; 
 and I know now that he is happy. When- 
 ever Schultz's heart overflows with healthy 
 animal spirits, the first memory that comes 
 to the surface is always that of Black and 
 the stewed kidneys.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 " Im Winterret'ectorium 
 
 Zu Maulbronn in dem Kloster, 
 
 Da geht 'was um den Tisch herum, 
 
 Klingt nicht wie Paternoster." 
 
 SCHEFFEL. 
 
 August 6. 
 
 Breakfasted early, and went out to see 
 the Abbey. The church in itself would 
 have been worth a day's ride ; but far 
 more unusual is the perfect preservation 
 of other arrangements for monastic life. 
 The cloisters are literally paved with 
 effigies of knights and monks in low 
 relief, framed in deep-cut Gothic inscrip- 
 tions ; and the great fountain still spouts 
 out water into its triple basin in the old 
 place opposite the refectory door, where 
 the monks used to wash their hands. The 
 Chamber of Flagellation is still painted 
 over in black and white with appropriate 
 texts : — ** If thine eye or thine hand offend 
 thee — "j "Whom the Lord loveth. He 
 chasteneth — " etc., etc. ; the hot-air bath 
 looks ready for use at any moment. No 
 remains in England can give so vivid a 
 
 68
 
 FATHER RHINE 69 
 
 conception of mediaeval monastic life as 
 this Abbey of Maulbronn. 
 
 It was just nine when we mounted at 
 last ; the sun was sweltering hot already ; 
 a pale wasted moon looked down upon us 
 out of the sultry sky. Our way led 
 through Bretten again ; wearily we toiled 
 up the hill, but merrily we rattled down 
 on the other side, shouting our '* All 
 Heil ! " to parties reaping in the field or 
 breakfasting by the roadside. At Knitt- 
 lingen, while I was exploring, Schultz sat 
 by the bridge and watched the peasants 
 coming out for the second time to their 
 work. He described to me afterwards 
 how he had seen them, a whole family 
 at a time : father with reaping-hook, 
 mother with a heavy hoe ; a slender 
 girl of fourteen, perhaps, staggering 
 under another, and the little boy trot- 
 ting barefooted in the dust with a basket 
 on his back. " Just think," he kept say- 
 ing, " think of 77iy kiddies sweating like 
 that all day long, and never knowing what 
 cricket is ! " Nor would he be consoled 
 by any of the old platitudes about the 
 essential equality of all human fortunes. 
 Yet, however unwilling to exchange at 
 that moment our lot for theirs, I, for my 
 part, can never wholly divest myself of a 
 lingering belief in the Virgilian ^^ f dices 
 nimiuin " ; and, when it comes to our turn
 
 70 FATHER RHINE 
 
 to go the way of Er, the son of Armenius, 
 and to stand among that multitude that no 
 man can number, and choose the lot of our 
 next life on earth, it may be that we could 
 do no better than take such a peasant's life 
 as this. And then the tourists of that new 
 world will come hurrying through our little 
 corner of the universe, and we shall meet 
 them on the road, and pass them with this 
 same look of primeval indifference on our 
 brown wrinkled faces, trudging steadfastly 
 homeward with our implements of labour 
 over our shoulder, and the setting sun in 
 our eyes. 
 
 By four o'clock we had a still more 
 definite notion of what it is to work 
 through the heat of the day under an 
 August sun by the Rhine, and we stopped 
 for tea in an orchard at Bergsheimer. I had 
 no more spirit for my lamp, and went into 
 a tiny shop to get some, for nearly every- 
 one in Germany sells methylated spirit. 
 I found two wrinkled old crones gossiping 
 there, and a wizened girl of thirteen behind 
 the counter, ready to offer me lemons or 
 penny whistles, stockings or cheese, any- 
 thing I liked in a small, tarnished, fly- 
 blown way. She went down into the 
 cellar for my spirits, and one of the old 
 women entered into conversation with me. 
 She knew what I wanted the spirits for ; 
 they were to work the machine that made
 
 FATHER RHINE 71 
 
 my bicycle go. No ? Well, she herself 
 could never see what was the advantage of 
 one that one had to work with one's own 
 legs. The other day, only, a gentleman 
 came riding through the village — ** aber 
 er hatte wirklich Pech ! ^ for it suddenly 
 went crack, just by my door, and I was 
 standing there ; and he took it up against 
 the stable wall there, and wouldn't let any- 
 one else come near him. Ach Gott ! what 
 language he did use to the children ! and 
 he took the whole breeches off the wheel, 
 and blewit up with a great pump that he had 
 with him; and then it went crack again, 
 and he sat down and said to me, * That's 
 the fifth time to-day,' he says ; * and now I 
 must take the train; ich habedoch wirklich 
 Pech ! ' " 
 
 The road was bad from here to Durlach, 
 but there was an excellent footpath, on 
 which we took the liberty to ride. A 
 mile or so from the town an official road- 
 sweeper stopped me, and threatened the 
 vengeance of the law. Possibly he hoped 
 for a tip ; at any rate, he left me under the 
 impression that I had had a narrow escape, 
 and I stopped fifty yards further on to be 
 ready to help Schultz out of the hobble, if 
 necessary. But Schultz simply addressed 
 the man in his best English : " A hot 
 day ! don't you find it dusty work ? rotten 
 ^ It really was hard lines on him 1
 
 72 FATHER RHINE 
 
 roads you've got here in Baden ! " and the 
 official let him pass like a lamb. After 
 all, perhaps it is best not to know German 
 in Germany ! 
 
 I had bent one of my pedals by running 
 carelessly against a post on that footpath, 
 and at Durlach I went into a shop to ask 
 where I could get it put right. A some- 
 what over-dressed German, who was talk- 
 ing with the shopman, turned round at the 
 sound of my voice. " You spik Engleesh .'' 
 I too. ... I show you. ... I ride the 
 wheel." Then, as we went out of the 
 door, he asked : " Where come you .'* " 
 
 *' Do you mean, where do I come from? 
 or where am I going to ? " 
 
 " Ye-es. . . . Alright. ... I show 
 you — ." He had evidently not understood 
 a word of my question, and off he rattled 
 as hard as he could down a lot of side 
 streets paved with the most impossible cob- 
 bles. Respect for our own laden machines 
 forbade our following at the same pace ; 
 but presently we found him waiting at the 
 door of a workshop, and I apologised for 
 having kept him, explaining that the cob- 
 bles had been too much for us. He looked 
 so blank that I had to repeat it in German, 
 in which language he told us that we 
 might get our machines mended here, and 
 rode off. The smith had soon put me 
 straight, and was much interested in
 
 FATHER RHINE 73 
 
 Schultz's Whippet, which we had to ex- 
 plain again for his benefit. Towards the 
 end, several other German cyclists came 
 in, and, after listening for a moment, one 
 of them said to Schultz : 
 
 " Barlez-vous vran9ais, Monsieur ? " 
 "Mais oui. Monsieur," answered 
 Schultz, delighted for once to find a 
 stranger with whom he could converse. 
 The little man stood and hesitated, and 
 my friend added : " Voiis desirez quelque 
 chose ? " But the other was already at the 
 end of his tether. He gibbered helplessly, 
 and something like a blush struggled into 
 his muddy cheeks ; so we saluted the 
 party, and hurried away to get a good 
 laugh by ourselves. After one's first 
 surprise at the number of excellent lin- 
 guists one meets in Germany, there is 
 always room for astonishment at the 
 brazen effrontery with which the rest 
 plunge into unknown tongues. 
 
 Durlach, when you have passed through 
 the modern suburbs, is just such another 
 quaint sleepy old town as Bruchsal. We 
 rode out through a mediseval gate built 
 over with houses, and crossed the first of 
 the real Black Forest waters — a broad, 
 clear trout-stream rippling swiftly over 
 the brown stones, with gardens pressing 
 down to its brink and fruit-trees dipping 
 into the water. Then over the plain
 
 74 FATHER RHINE 
 
 towards the setting sun, the usual chequer 
 of crops on either hand, the usual fruit- 
 trees all along the road, the first peasants 
 beginning to come home from their work, 
 a long line of woods in the distance mark- 
 ing the course of the Rhine. Twice we 
 passed through such woods on our way ; 
 thick masses of beech and firs, with a 
 broad strip of lawn on either side of the 
 road, and just room for the sinking sun 
 to slant in and gild the trunks on our left. 
 Hunger spurred us on, till at last we saw 
 a group of towers above the trees ; then a 
 third strip of forest, all dark by this time 
 against the afterglow ; and thence we 
 emerged upon a bit of public garden, a 
 great grassy bastion standing in dark 
 green against an orange sky, a railway- 
 station, and a good modern hotel just out- 
 side the town-gate. This was Rastatt, 
 and here we sat down to a hearty supper 
 on the terrace, and felt that it was good 
 to have done ten hours' work in the open 
 air before our evening meal. 
 
 We started again in the late twilight, 
 meeting squads of weary soldiers tramping 
 home to barracks, and listening to the far- 
 off chorus of innumerable frogs among 
 the marshes by the Rhine. The air was 
 delicious now ; to the eye, all was blurred 
 together in the dusk, but the scent told 
 us plainly " here are pines, this field is
 
 FATHER RHINE 75 
 
 clover, there is meadow-sweet and new- 
 mown hay." Presently the moon rose in 
 red behind one of the mountains of the 
 Black Forest, and flamed for a few 
 moments on the summit like a volcano ; 
 but the roads were not good enough for 
 night riding, even under her light, so we 
 gave up our purpose of pushing on to 
 Achern, and turned in to the "Stern" at 
 Oos. There was a merry party in the 
 great room, mostly of peasants rejoicing 
 in the freedom of Saturday night. We 
 were tempted for a moment to linger 
 half an hour among them, but prudence 
 prevailed, and we went straight to bed.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 " Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease ! " 
 
 Goldsmith. 
 
 August 7- 
 
 Woke at 5, out by 5.30 ; bright sun- 
 shine again. Two miles onwards we 
 stopped by the side of a Black Forest 
 streamlet to make tea for breakfast. 
 Troops of women, boys, and dogs passed 
 us, pushing great hand-carts full of milk- 
 cans for Baden-Baden, which lies close by 
 among the hills ; so we had our milk fresh 
 from the cow. But there was no time to 
 linger by the little stream, for we had to 
 catch the 10.7 from Offenburg, and to 
 stop for service somewhere on the way if 
 possible, and to pick up our heavier luggage 
 at Achern and re-direct it to Neuhausen. 
 
 The road led us through neat well-to-do 
 villages, while the Black Forest rose higher 
 and higher on our left : the Hornisgrinde 
 by Achern, nearly 4000 feet high, and 
 many others that loomed scarcely Jess big 
 out of the morning haze. Just to our left 
 were terraces of little hills, one above an- 
 other, washed up there in past times by 
 
 the river, when it filled the whole bottom 
 76
 
 FATHER RHINE 77 
 
 from the Schwarzwald to the Vosges. 
 Then, again, a thick wood like those of 
 yesterday, with fifty yards of lawn on both 
 sides of the road ; and here a niche of 
 living green cut out of the thicket to shield 
 a great white crucifix twelve or fifteen feet 
 high ; at its foot, on either side, a low 
 stone bench ; on one of them a man is lying 
 asleep. We are already grateful for this 
 cool shade, though it is scarcely eight o'clock 
 yet. On and on, the roads more and more 
 dusty, the flies importunate and shameless ; 
 groups of worshippers pass us in their Sun- 
 day best, many of them barefooted and in 
 their shirt sleeves, carrying their best boots 
 and black coat on their arm. Again we 
 took to the footpath, where we found our- 
 selves much incommoded by worshippers 
 of the better class, who, not going bare- 
 foot, insist on the path, and compel us to 
 steeplechase up and down the little bank 
 by the roadside. We look out all the way 
 for the spire of Strasburg to the right ; 
 there it is at last, dim in the mist above 
 the poplars ; but we dare only glance and 
 pass on, for ten o'clock is nearing rapidly, 
 while OfFenburg seems to recede. At last, 
 after an exciting race, we find ourselves at 
 the little station with just three minutes to 
 unload our machines,^ and book them, and 
 
 ^ Obligatory on German railways, and to some extent 
 on the Swiss : all movables must be taken off, even to
 
 78 FATHER RHINE 
 
 get our own tickets ; yet, by a skilful 
 division of labour, we find even time to 
 rush to the refreshment room as well, and 
 lay in " belegte Brodchen " and apricots 
 and a bottle of red wine for our journey 
 up the mountain railway. 
 
 If you can stand something of a crowd, 
 there are few more cheerful places than 
 a Black Forest train on a fine Sunday 
 morning in summer. These honest happy 
 people have all been working hard from 
 Monday to Saturday ; and to-day they 
 were up at six, and have already heard 
 mass, and will spend the rest of the day 
 in not too uproarious merry-making. Here 
 one may still see just the simple old-world 
 prosperity that Goldsmith describes ; but 
 these are no deserted villages, for at every 
 stoppage the platform is crowded with 
 cheerful faces and picturesque costumes, 
 and many get in, while few as yet go 
 out. " Trecentos inseris eheu ! Jam satis 
 est ! " And yet how can one find fault 
 with such a mass of happiness and good- 
 nature : here is toothless Darby opposite 
 to me, in an Eton jacket of dark blue 
 broadcloth, and a scarlet waistcoat glit- 
 tering with gilt buttons ; there is tooth- 
 less Joan by his side, a thick double pigtail 
 
 the lamp, before the cycle is put into the van. This 
 seems absurd ; but it will be seen that we found a good 
 reason for it at Rorschach.
 
 The Abbey of Maulbronn 
 
 in the X VI "" Cent; 
 
 jrom d conternpordrij drMiKl'-'^^ 
 
 79
 
 8o FATHER RHINE 
 
 of quite young brown hair escaping from 
 under her Phrygian cap of gold-embroid- 
 ered black silk ; a smart red lining to her 
 black gingham jacket, the collar of her vest 
 stiff with overlapping scales of silver. How 
 she chatters and how she laughs till her 
 nose almost touches her chin ! and the old 
 man takes his great pipe out of his mouth 
 and laughs with her, while their honest 
 brown eyes twinkle as merrily as the stream 
 by which we breakfasted this morning. 'Tis 
 merry in hall when the chins wag all ! 
 
 Meanwhile the train leaves the broad 
 valley and climbs up into the hills ; the 
 river has become a torrent, poplars give 
 way to pines and beeches, with walnuts 
 in the fields and fruit trees, of course, all 
 along the roads. I believe we are an 
 express train, but we stop charitably at 
 every station ; men dash out desperately 
 across the line as we draw up, and loiter 
 reluctantly back a few minutes later, 
 wiping their mouth with the back of their 
 hand ; the guard is not hurried as on 
 week-days, but gives them plenty of time 
 to get in, before bawling out the 
 " Errrrrr — " which stands convention- 
 ally for " Fertig ! " (Right away !). Here 
 comes one passenger bringing a foaming 
 tankard for his wife, followed by a 
 waitress in costume, with sleeves fit for 
 a bishop. " Ach, du guter lieber Mann ! ''
 
 FATHER RHINE 8i 
 
 exclaims the grateful spouse with her first 
 breath ; and now the Episcopal waitress 
 may take back the empty vessel, with an 
 extra penny for her pains. We have 
 worked hard all week, and heard mass at 
 six o'clock this morning, and ours is no 
 fin-de-siecle liver to sicken at an honest 
 draught of malt by the way ! 
 
 We are soon in the heart of the hills, 
 among pine woods and cliffs of granite, 
 with huge stray boulders lying about in 
 the meadows. At Hornberg we are 
 already looo feet above the sea ; and now 
 the train pants and winds along the hill- 
 side, villages and farms scattered along 
 the torrent-side below, and nothing but 
 pines and granite above us. Triberg 
 comes, and brings a longer halt than 
 usual, and our old couple rise here from 
 their seats. " Ade ! " says Darby to us all 
 collectively, and " Ade ! " says Joan ; and 
 we watch them walking away, shoulder 
 to shoulder, through the crowd of bright 
 Sunday scarlets and whites and greens 
 that is thicker on Triberg platform than 
 elsewhere j but presently our attention is 
 diverted to the episcopal handmaidens 
 who come down the train with baskets of 
 fruit worthy of the Goblin Market, and 
 offered at a less ruinous price. 
 
 The train labours upwards again, crawl- 
 ing like a tortoise and doubling like a
 
 82 FATHER RHINE 
 
 hare. We left Triberg ten minutes ago, 
 suddenly it appears down below us on 
 our left ; another quarter of an hour and 
 here it is again, far away on the right. 
 We are more than 2000 feet up by this 
 time, and the scenery grows still wilder ; 
 granite and pines still, but plenty of 
 colour to relieve them ; masses of fox- 
 glove, mountain-ash, elder in profusion — 
 not our common dark-berried elder, but 
 loaded with bright scarlet fruit like 
 bunches of coral — great sulphur butter- 
 flies flitting in and out of the sunshine, 
 and making more visible by contrast the 
 darkness of the pines that run sharp up 
 from the ridges into the sky. Our com- 
 partment is nearly empty now ; only a 
 commercial traveller opposite us, and a 
 graceless youth reading Zola in German, 
 and a young married couple in the far 
 corner, who have just finished feeding 
 their baby, and have laid it down now on 
 a tiny little mattress brought for the 
 purpose, and bend over in adoration to 
 watch it sprawl its naked feet and clutch 
 in the air with its fingers. The train 
 begins to quicken at last, and we plunge 
 into a longer tunnel than any before ; 
 hence we emerge upon Sommerau, the 
 highest point of the line (2730 feet). 
 Here the way begins to slope very gently 
 downwards, and we speed on through a
 
 FATHER RHINE 83 
 
 delicious cool breeze along the bottom of 
 a shallow trough of meadow land patched 
 with long stripes of rye and potatoes, 
 and rising gently on either side into dark 
 pineclad ridges. The lazy brooks wind 
 along through thickets of rush and purple 
 loose-strife, and the red roofs of St 
 Georgen contrast vividly with the sub- 
 dued purple-grey shingles to which our 
 eyes had grown accustomed all up the 
 valley. '* This is very pretty country," 
 I remarked to the commercial traveller, 
 who had just been explaining to me how 
 the oil is extracted from the poppy-seeds. 
 *' Yes, yes," he answered doubtfully ; 
 ** but I don't want to live in it. In 
 summer it's colossally hot ; and then 
 again, in winter, it's colossally cold." 
 No doubt he was altogether right ; but 
 it is none the less a delightful country to 
 travel through.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 " Ecce suburbanus clivoso tramite tostor 
 Volvitur, immissisque pedes securus habenis 
 Tollit: at hunc facilis fallit punctura ruentem. 
 Raucisonans late crepat, inflarique recusal 
 Pneumaticum : hie silices, sua sanguinolentaque fata 
 Increpat, infestosque deos." 
 
 P. Verg. Maronis Bicolicon vii. 47. 
 
 We alighted at Donaueschingen, and 
 went to see the source of the Danube, 
 tantalisingly cold and clear in its deep 
 basin of stone ; and then we started in 
 intense heat for Schaffhausen. The 
 road led us gradually uphill towards the 
 edge of the great plateau ; and at Behla, 
 the last village before the pine-woods, I 
 went into an inn to buy milk for our tea. 
 I found mine host in a great room on the 
 first fioor, with the shutters half-closed 
 to keep out the heat ; and here sat all 
 the fathers of the village, assembled in 
 their Sunday afternoon conclave round a 
 huge oaken table that groaned with 
 flagons of beer. They were discussing 
 some question of an acqueduct or irriga- 
 tion scheme, evidently the burning ques- 
 tion of local politics, and I wished I could 
 84
 
 FATHER RHINE 85 
 
 have waited to hear the matter out. 
 There was a big sort of Benjamin Franklin 
 of a man at one end of the table to whom 
 they all listened with the greatest respect, 
 more especially a sort of Boswell who sat 
 next him. It was interesting to hear how, 
 after he had spoken, there was silence for 
 a minute, until one of the others hazarded 
 an objection, which was taken up by the 
 rest until the conversation broke into 
 groups ; and then, when Franklin threw 
 in another weighty word, the rest gradu- 
 ally fell into silence to hear him speak, 
 and the host stood behind his chair and 
 listened, and the housewife flitted to and 
 fro on tiptoe, busying herself about my 
 milk. Three or four of the heads would 
 not have done discredit to any assembly ; 
 and there was a solid Roman gravity about 
 the whole conclave in that big dim heavy- 
 beamed room, that suggested the rustic 
 republic whose dictator came straight 
 from his plough to lead the army, and 
 where all the senators were trained in 
 the same school of " stern poverty, and 
 a modest homestead handed down from 
 father to son." 
 
 We found a delightful spot for tea under 
 the pines on the ridge ; but first we leaned 
 up our cycles, and went forward a few yards 
 into the open. There was another ridge 
 some five miles off to the southwards,
 
 86 FATHER RHINE 
 
 crowned like ours with sombre pines. 
 We turned our eyes that way, and ** sud- 
 denly — behold — beyond ! . . . 
 
 There was no thought in either of us 
 for a moment of their being clouds. . . . 
 Infinitely beyond all that we had ever 
 thought or dreamed, the seen walls of 
 lost Eden could Hot have been more beauti- 
 ful to us ; not more awful, round heaven, 
 the walls of sacred Death." There were 
 the Alps as Ruskin saw them for the first 
 time from the terrace above Schaflhausen, 
 only dimmer in the heat, and with no tinge 
 of sunset on them yet, for it was scarcely 
 half-past four. 
 
 We went back and cooked our tea, and 
 enjoyed our last look over the plateau we 
 were about to leave. Vast undulations 
 of bright green pasture and yellow corn, 
 dotted with brilliant red and white vil- 
 lages ; a great gap in the hills through 
 which the infant Danube fiows ; we could 
 see gleams and loops of water here and 
 there, that would never rest till they 
 reached the Black Sea. 
 
 The spin down to ZoUhaus was de- 
 lightful ; in the Danube basin pastures 
 had preponderated, but here it was all 
 corn, and such corn as one seldom sees for 
 richness and depth of colour ; orange-gold, 
 with the dark blue of the distant forests 
 for a background. The road was bordered
 
 FATHER RHINE 87 
 
 by morella cherry trees ; and all the budd- 
 ing Roman senators of the next generation 
 were up among the branches, or eating the 
 fruit out of their hats as they came along. 
 A whole bevy of young girls coming arm- 
 in-arm up the road, bareheaded and bare- 
 armed, in fresh pink Sunday gowns, 
 scattered in well-feigned panic to let us 
 coast by. We ran down more than 600 
 feet in about four miles ; but after ZoU- 
 haus, the road mounted again, for there 
 was that second ridge of 600 feet to be 
 crossed before our final downhill began. 
 We were glad to find that the road went 
 up with uncompromising directness, at an 
 angle down which I, at least, could not 
 possibly have ridden ; for, though it was 
 a stiff bit of work for the time, we were 
 soon at the top ; and then we laughed in 
 our hearts to think that SchafRiausen was 
 only eight or nine miles off, and 1 500 feet 
 below us. Schultz, on his Whippet, rode 
 in front, coasting serenely with his feet on 
 the pedals and his machine under perfect 
 command. I followed him backpedalling, 
 and here and there even putting on the 
 brake for fifty yards ; plunging down a 
 devious gorge among meadows and pine- 
 woods, too busy to look out for the Alps 
 again, but delighting in the rush of air and 
 the rapid succession of beautiful views, for 
 the sun was just at the right angle to give
 
 m FATHER RHINE 
 
 us the happiest effects of light and shade. 
 Bander, a pretty little village between the 
 cliffs and the torrent, was a pleasant sight 
 to-day, all had crept out by this time to 
 make the most of the evening sun. Girls 
 arm-in-arm again, boys cherry-stained and 
 dishevelled ; the elders at their windows 
 or tabled outside the inn. Not a trace 
 of the Custom-house officers, who should 
 have been here to levy a duty on our 
 bicycles ! So down we ran to Moris- 
 hausen, as pretty and as etidimanche as 
 Bander ; but here our misfortunes be- 
 gan ; for, alighting ill-advisedly to doctor 
 Schultz's leaking tyre, we (or rather I, in 
 my misplaced zeal), burst it in the pump- 
 ing up. A sympathetic pastor assured us 
 that it was only about three-quarters of a 
 " Stunde" to Schaffhausen, which, on the 
 analogy of previous information, we took 
 to mean three miles. We were late 
 already, and it seemed quicker to walk 
 so short a distance ; but after walking 
 three solid miles and then meeting a sign- 
 post that announced five kilometres more, 
 Schultz saw that he had best patch up and 
 have done with it ; so he set his bicycle 
 against a tree, and stuck manfully to his 
 work, in spite of the flies, which had 
 become appallingly aggressive in propor- 
 tion as the sky grew overcast with every 
 symptom of a thunderstorm. I had gone
 
 FATHER RHINE 89 
 
 on to find water and brew a jorum of 
 Bovril, wherewith to stay our already 
 clamorous appetites ; and I found him with 
 his arms literally bleeding from the horse- 
 flies, but just finishing, and triumphant. 
 In five minutes we were able to go on 
 again, and in twenty more we came down 
 suddenly from our narrow valley upon 
 Schaflhausen and the Rhine. We had 
 heard the waters long before we saw 
 them : and now a fresh breeze, with quite 
 an unmistakable scent of spray in it, came 
 to meet us like a gust from the sea. 
 Then, suddenly, through a gap in the 
 houses, we saw the broad rapids of the 
 Alpine river, here carded into long white 
 fleeces among the rocks, and there leaping 
 high into the air ; but mostly sweeping 
 down in masses of cool jade-green, with 
 a steady roar that resolved itself, as we 
 listened, into something like the patter 
 of innumerable small feet and the babble 
 of innumerable voices. It was like a sud- 
 den plunge into a new world. A sharp 
 turn to the right, and then we followed 
 the racing waters to our night's quarters 
 at Neuhausen, where we alighted very 
 hungry and tired, less from the distance 
 than from the heat. "We secured a room 
 from whose balcony we could catch a 
 glimpse of the Falls below us, and were 
 very glad to get our legs under the table
 
 90 FATHER RHINE 
 
 at last, and feel that the labours of the 
 day were over. 
 
 I shall not attempt to describe the Falls ; 
 those who have seen them will always re- 
 member, and those who have not will never 
 know. We went down to them after dinner. 
 An hour ago we had watched from our 
 balcony how the thunderclouds were mass- 
 ing round the snow mountains ; and now 
 the sky was pitchy dark, and big with 
 floods of rain. We scrambled down to 
 the edge of the Falls and drank in the 
 sound, and cooled our faces in the spray ; 
 there was barely light enough to see 
 the white masses tossing mountain-high 
 in that reverberating darkness. Even 
 Nature generally does best by leaving 
 something to the imagination ; and that 
 roaring deluge seemed more prodigious 
 under the inky thundercloud than I had 
 ever thought it by day. We climbed up 
 again just in time to escape the first sullen 
 splashes of the storm, and slept once more 
 like tired children, to the distant roar of 
 the Rhine.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 August 8. 
 
 Woke at 6.30, to the roar of the Rhine 
 again. Floods had fallen in the night, and 
 the sky was still overcast ; but the sun's 
 heat beat through, and presently the day 
 grew as sultry as though no storm had 
 been. We were to look round the Falls 
 again, and see after our luggage, and then 
 train on to Zurich, whence we hoped to 
 ride to Arth and sleep the night on the 
 Rigi. But it was a day of muddles ; what 
 between the Swiss station and the Baden 
 station, with a mile and a half of hilly 
 road between them, and the Douanier 
 who wouldn't leave his breakfast in time 
 to pass our luggage through, and the 
 porter who wouldn't hurry him up, and 
 my own dawdling in a shop over post- 
 cards and balsams for fly-bites : at any 
 rate, the net result was that we ran our 
 train too close, and while I was fighting 
 the baggage and bicycles through, Schultz,
 
 92 FATHER RHINE 
 
 commissioned to secure our places, had 
 taken them by a natural error in the near- 
 est train ; and when I had rushed into the 
 right one, and walked from end to end 
 in search of him, it became evident that, 
 while I was travelling to ZUrich, he was 
 going in the opposite direction to SchafF- 
 hausen. I managed to send off a telegram 
 at our first stopping-place, addressed to 
 "The Englishman in light grey flannel 
 jacket and knickers, Station Platform, 
 SchafFhausen," and spent the rest of the 
 morning at Zurich hanging about the 
 post-office for a reply from him. I 
 imagined him infringing unconsciously 
 some law of the Medes and Persians, 
 and an officious gendarme, and my poor 
 friend fighting desperately against fear- 
 ful odds on a foreign platform, and 
 hauled off at last to some mediaeval 
 dungeon; but at 1.30 the next train 
 brought him in safe and sound, and we 
 were too glad at meeting again to think 
 more of the hours that were gone. His 
 only fight, it appeared, had been with 
 a stout Swiss who had good-naturedly 
 tried to restrain him from jumping out 
 when he found the train beginning to 
 start without me. " I gave him a shove, 
 and he doubled up into a corner ; but 
 all our baggage went on to the floor ; 
 and before I could pick it up again, the
 
 FATHER RHINE 93 
 
 train was off the platform : so I could 
 only say, 'What the!'" But you need 
 to have seen my friend Schultz, and to 
 hear him begin, '* What the ! " and then 
 stop short in his great soul, to realise 
 how that honest Swiss must have felt. 
 Our one consolation was that each had 
 had enough faith in our speedy meeting 
 to enjoy without undue anxiety the beauty 
 of the journey from Schaffhausen to Zlirich 
 in bright sunshine. 
 
 But before we had seen all the sights of 
 Zlirich the black clouds came up again, 
 with sudden torrents of rain that sent us 
 scuttling into the shelter of an arcade, 
 where we found a confectioner's shop. 
 The patissiere gave us tea worthy of 
 England, with fresh cream and ambrosial 
 little cakes, at a price so moderate that 
 we wondered whether it wouldn't pay to 
 come and live at Zlirich for the sake of 
 what one would save on afternoon tea 
 alone. The rain ceased again for just 
 long enough to let us see the Cathedral 
 and fetch our bicycles across from station 
 to station ; then, at about 5.30, it began 
 again in grim earnest. At the main station 
 cloakroom we found our bicycles side by 
 side among some thirty, leaning against 
 each other like cards in a pack. The 
 porter, " schort schuldred, brode, a thikke 
 knarre," had no sooner identified them than
 
 94 FATHER RHINE 
 
 he seized the next machine on the right, 
 and with one mighty wrench sent the 
 whole dozen on that side to the right 
 about, flat on the floor, jangling together 
 like a cartload of old iron. We hastened 
 to seize our own and wheel them off, but 
 were yet in time to see him bend down, 
 and grip the undermost, and set the whole 
 pack upright again with a second crash 
 against the rest. 
 
 The rain and the loss of time had com- 
 pelled us to give up the Rigi ; and we 
 determined to spend the night on the 
 Uetliberg instead, and ride on next day 
 to Brunnen. The Uetliberg rises 1500 
 feet above Zurich ; it was interesting to 
 watch our engine pant up through the 
 steep meadows and pine-forest ; but little 
 by little the rain thickened upon us ; soon 
 we were in a cloud j before we reached 
 the station it was almost dark, and no 
 sunset to be thought of, our only idea 
 was to get to our inn as dry as might be. 
 We had boldly decided, for cheapness' 
 sake, on the Uto-Staffel Hotel, five minutes 
 further on, but very comfortable, as we 
 were told. Those were five long minutes, 
 for we lost our way in the dark among 
 a network of paths through the wood, 
 and toiled up braes and slid down banks, 
 cycles and baggage and all, and the rain
 
 95
 
 96 FATHER RHINE 
 
 dripped double from the soaked pines over 
 our heads ; and we fell into wrath and 
 mutual recriminations, until one went for- 
 ward to spy, and came upon our haven of 
 refuge not fifty yards off, and in a moment 
 rain and depression were forgotten like a 
 dream. 
 
 On coming down to dinner we found 
 that our places had been laid at one end 
 of a long table, away from the half a 
 dozen ladies who were our fellow-guests. 
 " A tabby party ! " whispered Schultz 
 across to me, in a loud aside, as we sat 
 down, and I really blushed for him ; mar- 
 ried men grow so brutal in those ways ! 
 Personally I should have been very glad 
 to move up and talk to them, for they 
 seemed very pleasant, and in one way at 
 least one is always pretty safe with a lady ; 
 they don't talk golf over their dinner. 
 After the soup, to my surprise and relief, 
 Schultz himself moved up towards them 
 and remarked in a firm voice that it was 
 a very rainy evening, and hereupon the 
 conversation became general. The ladies 
 went out after dinner, leaving us to enjoy 
 our wine and cigars, and the pleasant mur- 
 mur of their chatter and laughter from the 
 adjoining room. We went out for five 
 minutes upon the balcony, the rain had 
 ceased, and the clouds had broken enough 
 to show a few stars here and there in the
 
 FATHER RHINE 97 
 
 velvety depth of sky : just enough light 
 to betray a dim suspicion of green in the 
 black, forest over which our balcony looked 
 out. Below and beyond, a study in pure 
 indigo ; the lake, the woods, and the dis- 
 tant mountains all visible through the 
 transparent rain-washed darkness, while 
 Zlirich at our feet was alive with infinite 
 coruscations of light — millions of micro- 
 scopic needle-points from the streets, and 
 long-drawn quivering reflections on the 
 river. This sight alone would have re- 
 warded us for the journey up ; but the 
 cold soon drove us in again, and we sat 
 down in silence to write our letters home. 
 Presently the door opened gently, and one 
 of the ladies glided in like a mouse, saw 
 us, and was gliding out as swiftly again 
 when a word from Schultz stopped her, 
 polite in form but unconsciously impera- 
 tive in tone. 
 
 " You were coming to play." 
 
 She confeesed she was. 
 
 " And to sing." 
 
 Confessed again, in a subdued apologetic 
 tone : I half expected to see her drop a 
 curtsey as she spoke. 
 
 " Oh, please do, then ; we are both very 
 fond of music ; and if our cigars " 
 
 Oh, no, they were as fond of cigars as 
 we were of music. 
 
 " That's right ! I'm sorry not to be
 
 98 FATHER RHINE 
 
 accomplished enough to offer to turn over 
 the pages for you ; and if you will ex- 
 cuse my going on with my letter to my 
 
 wife " 
 
 Oh, they would excuse anything from a 
 man who showed so plainly, in polite and 
 considerate language, that he was accus- 
 tomed to know what he wanted, and to 
 get it. Four of the rest had come in and 
 taken their seats by this time ; and now" we 
 heard a scurry down the passage, and a 
 little gasp of " Katie, you're wanted — you 
 and your songs." And in the twinkling of 
 an eye Katie was singing her heart out at 
 the piano, while Schultz wrote, and puffed, 
 and stared up at the ceiling for inspiration, 
 and puffed and wrote again. 
 
 '* Bravo ! Thank you — thank you ! 
 "Won't you give us another .'* From the 
 * Geisha ' ? Yes, thank you ; I'm very 
 fond of that." He resumed, even while 
 speaking, the interrupted thread of his 
 letter. And yet I think he did really 
 enjoy the music ; and I am sure they 
 enjoyed playing and singing to him. My 
 own poor words of studied and deferential 
 appreciation were as dust in the balance ; 
 neither did it profit me that I laid aside 
 my letter and put on my best concert 
 behaviour all the time. By the time they 
 had played their fingers into a palsy, and 
 sung themselves hoarse, he had finished
 
 FATHER RHINE 99 
 
 his letter ; after which he unbent very 
 prettily, and related my various crimes 
 and misadventures with a verve which 
 amused even me, who laboured under 
 the double disadvantage of being the 
 victim, and knowing the bare truth of 
 these entertaining romances. If these 
 pages should ever meet the eye of any 
 one of those kind and gracious ladies 
 who were at the Uto Kulm on the even- 
 ing of this 8th of August, I hope that, 
 amid her pleasant recollections of the im- 
 perious gentleman who elicited such a dis- 
 play of her musical talents, and amused 
 her with such lively pictures of my imbe- 
 cility, she will spare one sigh of pity for 
 the retiring fellow-traveller who sat in 
 the corner and was butchered to make her 
 holiday.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 " Seven weary up-hill leagues we sped, 
 The setting sun to see ; 
 Sullen and grim he went to bed, 
 
 Sullen and grim went we. 
 Nine sleepless hours of night we passed, 
 
 The rising sun to see ; 
 Sullen and grim he rose at last, 
 Sullen and grim rose we. " 
 
 The Laureate of the Rigi. 
 
 August 9. 
 
 We had ourselves called at 3.30 ; and, 
 in spite of the unpromising weather, 
 we rose doggedly by the cold glimmer 
 of approaching dawn, and packed our 
 luggage, and wheeled up a couple of 
 hundred feet to the summit. The morn- 
 ing air was raw, and the mountain wet 
 under foot, with a strong wind from 
 the S.W, ; but we lingered nearly an 
 hour on the summit, making hot coffee 
 to help out our breakfast, and trotting 
 about from one point of view to another 
 in the faint hope of a clearing. The lower 
 heights were plain enough — Black Forest 
 and Vosges, and hills beyond the lake 
 of Ziiricii ; even Rigi and Pilatus were 
 clear at first ; but before sunrise they too
 
 FATHER RHINE loi 
 
 were wrapt in cloud, and our one hearty 
 thought of consolation was, that we had 
 wasted no time or money on that ascent 
 yesterday. About daybreak we were re- 
 joiced by one fine effect of cloud-masses 
 in the sky ; but the cold was nipping, and 
 we saw rain falling here and there in the 
 distance ; so we were glad to pack up 
 hurriedly and get on. Our path led at 
 first along the very ridge of the mountain, 
 in and out of woods, with a wide view on 
 either side. Presently, we met a sort of 
 bailiff or keeper, with a huge St Bernard, 
 who showed us how to get down to the 
 main road, an expeditious path enough for 
 walkers in decent weather ; but, for us, 
 it ended in our taking our cycles on our 
 backs, baggage and all, and so stumbling 
 down some three-quarters of a mile at 
 an angle of sixty degrees. So long as 
 the path was only the bed of a small 
 torrent, all went well enough, but when 
 it led over smooth slopes of wet clay, 
 it was beyond words. However, we 
 escaped without any serious slips, and at 
 last we found ourselves perspiring and 
 exhausted, but safe, on the high road by 
 Stallikon Church. The rest of our ride 
 would have been delightful in sunshine, 
 and was very enjoyable even under these 
 gathering clouds. First up the trough of 
 a valley, with meadows until half-way up
 
 102 FATHER RHINE 
 
 the sides, and pines on the ridges ; beauti- 
 ful marsh plants in the flat fields by the 
 streamlet — flowering rush, and the pale 
 scented marsh-pink, and masses of meadow- 
 sweet. Then, at Kloster, the road divided, 
 leading to the right in zigzags over the 
 ridge, or following the gentle slope of 
 the valley to the left. We chose the 
 left : and here we stopped for our second 
 breakfast, at a chalet - farmhouse - post - 
 office-inn, where we found the quarters 
 just tolerable until towards the end of 
 our meal, when our host came in fresh 
 from the cow-stall, and so painfully hos- 
 pitable and familiar and garlicose, that 
 we hastened from his presence into the 
 fresh air. A steepish climb brought us to 
 the shallow lake of Turl, whose margin, 
 white with cotton-rush and grass of Par- 
 nassus, we skirted for nearly a mile ; after 
 which the road began to dip, and ran plea- 
 santly down to Kappel. Here is an unusu- 
 ally tall church, rising above a picturesque 
 group of buildings on a knoll somewhat 
 aside from the road ; and here the Swiss 
 reformer, Zwingli, died fighting for his 
 faith in battle ; but we had no time to 
 look for his monument, for at this point 
 the first shower came on. However, it 
 soon left oflT again, and we wheeled down- 
 wards once more, along a charming road 
 into Zug.
 
 FATHER RHINE 103 
 
 Zug is a very pretty town — even since 
 the great landslip of 1887 that swept so 
 many of its towers into the lake — and the 
 view across the water to Rigi and Pilatus 
 must be magnificent on a finer day. But 
 with us it was still chilly, and threatening 
 rain : so we only stayed to look round the 
 town, and then pushed on again for 
 Brunnen. We skirted the lake, with cold 
 grey waves chasing each other to the 
 shore, and clouds settling lower and lower 
 upon the Rigi. At Arth we took in 
 water for lunch, but hardly had we begun 
 to bivouac outside the village when the 
 drizzle began again. A cellar under a 
 house, the nightly abode of goats, soon 
 proved an impossible place of refuge ; and we 
 were very glad to come across a little sort 
 of tavern some quarter of a mile further 
 on, where we ordered coffee and bread and 
 butter, and consumed therewith the tongue 
 which we had bought at Zug. Hostess 
 and guests were all definitely of the 
 labouring class, but the whole place was 
 clean and fresh ; one often finds this in 
 Switzerland and Germany. At last a lull 
 came in the rain, and we started once more. 
 We stopped presently to have a good look 
 at the enormous masses of earth and 
 boulders that swept down from the Ross- 
 berg and buried four villages in 1806; 
 but the drizzle came on again, and this
 
 104 FATHER RHINE 
 
 time for good. The clouds sank lower 
 and lower, and our spirits with them ; a 
 melancholy owl hooted at intervals down 
 from the forests of the Rigi, echoing 
 dismally from cliff to cliff along the 
 valley j the water began to trickle down 
 our necks, and our wheels dragged in 
 the deepening slush. Near Lowertz, we 
 overtook a little man on a Bantam, after 
 whom laboured a sorry parson on a 
 tricycle, with a dripping wideawake and 
 drenched black clothes that clung to his 
 skin. The little man raced us gallantly, 
 and, misled no doubt by the Teutonic 
 shape of Schultz's straw hat, called out 
 to him in German as he passed. There 
 was something familiar to me about the 
 back and the voice, and Schultz looked 
 hard at the speaker before answering : — 
 " You mustn't try me in Greek ; I was 
 a mathematical scholar, you remember." 
 For it was none other than Blake, our 
 senior tutor of old ; Blake, most indolent 
 and sarcastic of Dons, to whom, twenty 
 years ago, steamed up our lamentation 
 and our ancient tale of wrong, of extor- 
 tionate cooks and unappetising dinners 
 in Hall, of dull lectures and dreary 
 chapels, while he lay beside his nectar 
 and hurled his bolts, and found, no doubt, 
 a music in our doleful song. How often, 
 looking back on those times, Schultz and
 
 FATHER RHINE 105 
 
 I had wished we might meet old Blake 
 some day on neutral ground, and be able 
 to give him a piece of our mind ! And 
 here at last, in Switzerland, Playground 
 of the Nations, most neutral of all neutral 
 grounds, we had fallen upon our prey ! 
 . . . And yet I was not altogether com- 
 fortable now ; and it came back to me 
 that I used to be a good deal afraid ,of 
 him at St Christopher's. But meanwhile 
 Schultz had spoken again : " You don't 
 know me, Mr Blake, but I haven't for- 
 gotten you. My name is Schultz : I 
 stroked the College boat in '78, and 
 took a Senior Op. next year." 
 
 *' Oh yes, Schultz, of course ! " He 
 had not lost his lisp nor the pathetic 
 tremor in his voice which had impressed 
 me so the first few times I heard it. 
 " His words are softer than butter," we 
 used to quote as we came down the steps 
 after an occasional interview : " His words 
 are softer than butter, having war in his 
 heart." 
 
 " And this is Coulton," proceeded 
 Schultz j " he was a classical man, but 
 you won't remember him." 
 
 *' Oh yes, perfectly ! it is very pleasant 
 to meet you both. Let me see, what are 
 you doing now, Schultz ? . . . Ah yes, 
 a good profession ; there's no lack of raw 
 material for you, at anyrate, I read that
 
 io6 FATHER RHINE 
 
 column of the Times with bated breath 
 every morning. And you are doing well, 
 no doubt, and married, by this time." 
 
 " I have five boys of my own," answered 
 Schultz with a touch of pardonable pride. 
 
 " Five boys ! Why, there you have 
 plenty to do, if all else should fail. I'm 
 always glad to hear of St Christopher's 
 men doing well in life." 
 
 " Well, to be quite frank with you, Mr 
 Blake, I never reckon that we owe much 
 of it to the College. The only tutor I can 
 remember ever getting the least help from 
 was the late Bishop of Wapping." 
 
 The little man made a wry face for a 
 moment, but his rugged features returned 
 at once to their habitual ironical smile ; 
 and he answered in his pleasant pathetic 
 little voice, '* Ah, yes, the Bishop ! You 
 were a mathematical man, and of course 
 the mathematical teaching of the College 
 was under his especial supervision. I am 
 glad to hear that you felt — as indeed I'm 
 sure we all felt — the better for his genial 
 and manly influence." 
 
 '* That wasn't quite the way I put it." 
 
 " No ? But you'll see it that way now, 
 my dear Schultz. Under the responsi- 
 bilities of so vigorous a family as you speak 
 of, you yourself must have learnt by this 
 time how hard it is for all of us to in- 
 fluence the young — and may I add, the
 
 FATHER RHINE 107 
 
 thoughtless ? — just as one would wish. 
 But I am glad you are doing so well, 
 perhaps I may some day have the pleasure 
 of an introduction to Mrs Schultz." 
 
 I exchanged glances with my friend, and 
 we understood each other. Evidently there 
 was no getting the better of Blake in these 
 days, any more than of old, when we were 
 worms beneath his feet. And besides, we 
 began to realise that this little grizzled old 
 fellow on his bantam was quite keeping us 
 on the stretch ; and we remembered how 
 his black coat used to keep up with us 
 down the towing-path on race days, and 
 what trophies of past aquatic triumphs 
 hung in his rooms among the Raphael 
 Morghens and the Arundels. There was 
 no quarrelling with such a case-hardened, 
 imperturbable little Don, even though 
 kinder memories had not intervened. And 
 suddenly another recollection came into 
 my mind : " Oughtn't we to call you ' Mr 
 Dean ? '" I asked ; " didn't I see, a week 
 or two ago . . ." 
 
 " Oh you needn't be so formal with me 
 for the present. I have not yet entered 
 into possession, and here, on our holidays, 
 ... to tell the truth, I have already had 
 occasion to regret that they have found me 
 out at my hotel. ... By the bye," he 
 broke in, " I am afraid we are riding away 
 from my companion."
 
 io8 FATHER RHINE 
 
 We looked round. The dank and drip- 
 ping parson was a good quarter of a mile 
 in the rear, struggling along on foot, so 
 far as we could see, through the rain. 
 " What's the matter ? " shouted our com- 
 panion, and turning to Schultz, he added, 
 '* perhaps you can shout louder than I 
 can." 
 
 ''What's — the — matter?" bellowed 
 Schultz. The unhappy man made no 
 answer, but seemed to be mending his 
 pace. "What's — the — matter?" No 
 answer again, only by this time he was 
 evidently trotting. 
 
 " Ah, I see he has plenty of work still 
 left in him ; perhaps we had better mount 
 again, and give him a lead as before. 
 There is after all no tie between us be- 
 yond our common cloth, and the persist- 
 ency with which he has fastened himself 
 upon me at the hotel. I started this morn- 
 ing from Brunnen to ride round the Rigi, 
 and I found it difficult to decline his com- 
 pany." But we had hardly mounted, when 
 we heard such a heartrending wail from 
 the poor derelict that there was nothing 
 for it but to dismount and wait for him. 
 
 "Well?" asked Blake with some im- 
 patience, as soon as he was within speaking 
 distance. 
 
 " Oh, Mr Dean ! " The poor wretch 
 had no breath for more. All our machines
 
 FATHER RHINE 109 
 
 were fairly clogged with mud, but his 
 tricycle seemed to have taken up whole 
 tracts of Canton Schwyz upon its wheels. 
 
 " I'm afraid my chain is going wrong," 
 he gasped, as he came up with us. " You 
 see, the gear-case got a little broken at one 
 
 end in the train ." The thing was in 
 
 fact half full of mud. 
 
 ** Yes, yes, we must put that to rights 
 at once. It's very simple." 
 
 "Oh it's very good of you, Mr Dean; 
 I'm only sorry to think that I should be 
 giving you so much trouble ! " 
 
 " Not at all, not at all ! You will only 
 have to stop a bit and take off the gear- 
 case. You know how to do that ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, . . . that is . . ." 
 
 " Then why didn't you say you didn't ? 
 Look here, now, while I explain." 
 
 " Oh, thank you, Mr Dean ! " 
 
 "... and that's all you'll have to do," 
 ended the Dean. " Of course you'll have to 
 stop once or twice afterwards to clean the 
 chain again when it clogs. But there's no 
 reason why you shouldn't be able to get to 
 Brunnen by dinner-time." And he turned 
 to his own machine again, and the poor 
 victim's face fell. 
 
 " But, Mr Dean, I am not ... I don't 
 think I know the way." 
 
 " Ah, that's right •, you know you don't 
 know this time -, that's the first step.
 
 no FATHER RHINE 
 
 Look here now, that's the direction, and 
 you can't miss the road without turning 
 aside to ride up one of these two moun- 
 tains, which I presume you won't be 
 tempted to do. You pass through Schwyz, 
 there in front of us ; or rather through 
 Seewis, which lies a little lower down ; 
 and then, I believe, you have the choice of 
 two roads. One is long, and I'm afraid it 
 may be rather heavy in this weather ; the 
 other is a short cut down by the river. 
 You'll have to ride through an inch or so 
 of water here and there, but that's the road 
 we are going to take, so you see you can't 
 miss the way." 
 
 The other was profuse in abject apolo- 
 gies, and he could never forgive himself 
 for having given Mr Dean so much trouble. 
 
 " Oh, don't mention it. If you find it 
 very hard work, perhaps you had better 
 stay at Seewis ; they are sure to be able to 
 lend you dry clothes — they always do at 
 these Swiss hotels. And be sure you take 
 something warm. Good-bye ; God bless 
 you ! " 
 
 He shook his victim affectionately by the 
 hand ; and as we rode on, he turned to me 
 again, and murmured in his pathetic little 
 voice, with the lingering emphasis of 
 genuine emotion — 
 
 ** Sic . . . me . . . servavit . . . Apollo ! 
 Translate that to Schultz."
 
 ^^i^.jli^^^ v\ .. :>..'->Tf; , 11,;,, 
 
 "=;^F&f/te:: ..." !'.{{ 
 
 i s 
 
 4<«
 
 112 FATHER RHINE 
 
 " Thank you ! " replied Schultz, who 
 knows his Horace pretty well by heart. 
 
 We all wheeled on together to Brunnen, 
 chatting pleasantly the while, and not too 
 conscious of the rairi or of the few inches 
 of water here and there across the lower 
 road. I think our companion had spoken 
 the truth ; he was glad to meet us again, 
 if only for the salvation we had brought 
 him. We parted on the quay at Brunnen, 
 knowing that he was sure to be staying at 
 the " Waldstlitter Hof," and explaining 
 that this did not suit our pocket. No ; he 
 had, indeed, been staying at the Wald- 
 statter Hof; but he had made up his mind 
 now to go on to Bellinzona by the even- 
 ing train. He thought the air of Italy 
 might suit him better just now, he ex- 
 plained, with his gently ironical smile. 
 He was very glad to have met us. Good- 
 bye ! I think he would have added his 
 benison, but perhaps he saw a twinkle in 
 our eyes ; at any rate, he only repeated his 
 good-bye, and we went on to our humbler 
 quarters at the " Hirsch."
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 " Insomuch that Rhasis doth not only commend, but 
 enjoin travel and such variety of objects to a melancholy 
 man, 'and to lie in diverse inns, to be drawn into 
 several companies.' "—Anaiomij of Melancholy. 
 
 Brunnen looked dismal enough, to be sure ; 
 the streets swimming with water ; lake 
 and mountains blurred almost out of sight 
 in the drizzle; the " Grand Bazar" simply 
 jammed full of dripping tourists waiting to 
 be off by the next boat. Even when I had 
 fought my way through to the counter, 
 not an English paper was to be bought 
 there ; we were obliged to fall back on 
 the French and the German, and read with 
 gnashing of teeth how the whole Continent 
 supposed us to have had our tail twisted 
 in some Chinese negotiation, and to have 
 retired precipitately. It is not inspiriting 
 to have to spend most of the afternoon in 
 bed, on the prettiest spot of the Lake of 
 Lucerne, while your clothes are drying for 
 dinner. Even at dinner they were a trifle 
 damp ; but by this time we had summoned 
 all our philosophy to our aid. After all, 
 we had come to Switzerland to enjoy our- 
 selves, and rain is one of the kindly dis-
 
 114 FATHER RHINE 
 
 pensations of Providence, falling alike on 
 the just and the unjust — and the soup was 
 undeniably good, to begin with ; and our 
 fellow-guests looked very happy, and so 
 by this time were we. 
 
 My neighbours on the left were two 
 maiden ladies, jocund and well-liking in 
 their middle-aged spinsterhood, of whom 
 the elder was very voluble, while the 
 younger listened in dutiful silence, only 
 assenting to every remark of her sister's 
 with nods and wreathed smiles. I soon 
 learned, among other information of in- 
 terest, that they came from Cambridge- 
 shire, where there were not so many 
 mountains as here, nor so many mosquitoes. 
 
 Miss was inclined to connect the 
 
 mosquitoes in some way with the moun- 
 tains. Not that she had been up any of 
 the mountains yet, but they looked as if 
 they might breed mosquitoes. She had 
 heard that bears and chamois were not yet 
 wholly extinct. 
 
 At the mention of mosquitoes, Schultz 
 pricked up his ears. He gave an eloquent 
 sketch of his own sufferings — described 
 the state of his ankles especially — in lan- 
 guage of vivid directness, but, I must own, 
 of studious propriety. He had a numer- 
 ous audience here ; the subject lay near to 
 his heart ; and I have seldom heard him so 
 eloquent. Why, he concluded, should
 
 FATHER RHINE 115 
 
 all the flies of Baden and Switzerland, 
 countries teeming with animal life, single 
 his body out for torture ? and why in par- 
 ticular his ankles ? 
 
 My neighbour was sympathetic and 
 motherly. She only feared it might have 
 some connection with his diet. Was it 
 wise, for instance, to drink beer under 
 such circumstances ? (for the -waiter had 
 just brought us our third and final glasses). 
 Beer inflamed the blood ; beer was a slow 
 poison, and the very root of all infirmities. 
 Above all things, beer was rheumatic, and 
 rheumatism always flew to the ankles, as 
 she herself had reason to know, for — 
 
 But Schultz had not started the subject 
 
 of flies in order to hear about Miss 's 
 
 rheumatism. He reminded her that we 
 also had lived some time in the very 
 capital of Cambridgeshire, and had there 
 indulged moderately but regularly in beer, 
 without being eaten up by mosquitoes. 
 
 " Oh, but you were younger then." 
 The argument was unanswerable, and 
 our neighbour pursued: "Well, / never 
 take beer nowadays. Not that I have so 
 very much to complain of myself from the 
 flies after all : it's my poor sister who's 
 such a martyr ! " And she drew back an 
 inch or two to allow full sight of the 
 younger lady, who nodded and simpered 
 assent, the incarnation of good-tempered
 
 ii6 FATHER RHINE 
 
 martyrdom. " You see," continued the 
 elder, " so long as she^s there, they never 
 care so much for me, and that's why we 
 always sleep together. But they do so 
 plague her, poor thing ! I often wonder 
 how she can bear it ! " 
 
 The remedy was ingenious and no 
 doubt effectual, but it was not within 
 everybody's reach ; and I could not help 
 smiling inwardly to think how little the 
 neighbourhood of my tough and un- 
 appetising carcase had availed to divert 
 the plague from my friend. 
 
 By this time the discussion had become 
 general. Each complained of his own 
 wounds, and each had a different remedy 
 to suggest. A lady on the other side 
 suggested eau-de-cerises, she believed it 
 was called Kirchtuasser in this part of 
 Switzerland — not cherry-brandy, that was 
 quite different — but a drop or two of 
 eau-de-cerises, now, on a lump of sugar 
 whenever the bites were particularly 
 irritating. ... In any case, she also 
 felt that beer could hardly be the right 
 thing. . . . And the kind advice poured 
 in from all sides, till Schultz was a thou- 
 sand times sorry to have spoken, and 
 retired abruptly to smoke his cigar in 
 peace. I joined him presently in the 
 verandah, a soothed and chastened man. 
 The rain had ceased for a while ; the
 
 FATHER RHINE 117 
 
 cool air soothed his burning ankles, and 
 as our evening smoke went up to heaven, 
 we talked over the day's adventures, and 
 laughed till the waiters came out to see 
 what was the matter. Do not all mis- 
 adventures work together for mirth in the 
 long run, to those who have cut the same 
 lectures, and quaffed from the same sconce- 
 pot, and ploughed together in prehistoric 
 ages the inky waters of Barnwell Pool !
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 'Wliere the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions 
 spread, 
 And force a churlish soil for scanty bread." 
 
 Goldsmith. 
 
 August lo. 
 
 Up again at 4.30; raining hard; to bed 
 again for a while. I looked out at about 
 6.30 again ; the mountains were still 
 clouded, but no actual rain ; so after a 
 consultation we dressed more or less 
 under protest, and started without m.uch 
 enthusiasm, though the weather already 
 looked more promising now than half an 
 hour ago. We rode half a mile, and 
 then took our breakfast on the parapet 
 by the roadside, dropping crumbs into 
 the water for the fishes, and watching 
 the wreaths of cloud as they curled over the 
 Rothstock at the end of the lake. Even 
 on this unpromising morning the grandeur 
 of the view impressed our dull souls, and 
 our spirits rose rapidly as we bowled on 
 again along that marvellous road between 
 the precipice and the lake, gladdened first 
 by one ray of sunshine and then by 
 another, until, by the time we had
 
 FATHER RHINE 119 
 
 reached Fluelen, the clouds promised to 
 break for the day. A French Swiss 
 accosted us on the platform, grizzled 
 and military-looking, in great wide zouave 
 knickers that reminded us painfully of a 
 " divided skirt" ; he had caught sight of 
 the two fellow-bicyclists, and came over 
 to tell us that we might effect a consider- 
 able saving by taking one ticket for the 
 three machines ; would I do so ? We 
 were nothing loth : I took the ticket, and 
 he looked at the amount. "Pardonnez- 
 moi, monsieur ; combien ? Ah, c'est 9a ! 
 vingt-six sous. Ca fait neuf, et neuf, et 
 huit ; voila, monsieur." And he handed 
 me his eight sous, and went off with un- 
 concealed delight at having scored a sou 
 out of us, and several more out of the 
 railway company ; we saw him no more 
 until he came to claim his machine under 
 shelter of my ticket at Goeschenen. 
 
 Our compartment was full of Roman 
 Catholic seminarists — professors and pupils. 
 To-day was the feast of St Lawrence the 
 Martyr ; and Schultz, who had never been 
 in Italy, was especially amused to observe 
 the na'i've simplicity with which they 
 jumbled up breviary and Baedeker and 
 scenery, quite as a matter of course. 
 Donee ponam inimicos tuos scahellum pedum 
 tuorum. . . . Voila la Maienreus. . . . 
 Non, c'est plutot le Kerstelenbach : re-
 
 120 FATHER RHINE 
 
 gardez un peu la carte \ . . . de torrente 
 
 in via bibet, propterea exaltabit caput. Amen. 
 We had enough sunshine already for 
 the foreground, but the higher peaks 
 were still in the clouds, and we missed 
 especially the splendid pyramid of the 
 Bristenstock from the end of the valley. 
 Before we reached Goeschenen, it was 
 unmistakable broiling sunshine, and we 
 had hard work pushing our laden machines 
 up to the Devil's Bridge. "We lunched 
 half a mile beyond Andermatt, on a slope 
 that overlooked the whole Urseren valley, 
 and the three great passes of Furka, St 
 Gotthard, and Oberaip. It was after lunch 
 that the worst part of the ascent began : 
 we had come up igoo feet from Goes- 
 chenen, and had still 3000 more to climb 
 in the seven miles that separated us now 
 from the summit of the Oberaip Pass, 
 But we trudged on manfully at nearly 
 four miles an hour, with fresh glories 
 opening upon us as we rose, and " paced" 
 by a sturdy matron of fifty or sixty, bare- 
 footed and heavy-laden, who went straight 
 up by the short cuts. For all our efforts, 
 the stout old dame never failed to appear 
 just above us again at each fresh zigzag, 
 showing a not unshapely ankle and a sun- 
 burnt calf which any athlete might have 
 envied. At the top of the pass we found 
 a barren passage between the rocks, a
 
 FATHER RHINE 121 
 
 dreary lake, snow by the wayside, and a 
 N.E. wind that raked us through and 
 through ; hurriedly we mounted and 
 pressed on, and were soon plunging down 
 upon the other side, where a thread of 
 white foam rushes in leaps and bounds 
 down a thousand feet of precipice ; this 
 is the infant Rhine, fresh from his cradle 
 in the Toma See. 
 
 There is a peculiar intoxication in the 
 ride down a real Alpine pass ; — the 
 rush through the air, the dizzy zigzags 
 of the road, in among the pines and out 
 into the sunshine, while the white torrent 
 roars after you far below, and the moun- 
 tains shift like a pageant as you pass — 
 
 " The hills are shadows, and they flow 
 
 From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
 They melt like mists, the solid lands ; 
 Like clouds they shape themselves and go." 
 
 Yes, and good luck go with them ! One 
 moment you saw them, and now here is 
 some fresh and lovelier picture, fit for a 
 day's contemplation at any other time ; 
 but here the wheels bound under you 
 like a living thing, and your pulse so 
 quickens with the intoxication of the race 
 that not a sight or sound passes unheeded 
 in all this giddy whirl. No doubt, in an 
 ordinary way, dame Nature brews her 
 nectar to be sipped ; but there are moments 
 when it repents not to have seized the cup
 
 122 FATHER RHINE 
 
 and drained it greedily to the dregs : tip 
 up your elbow, and never breathe till the 
 last drop is gone, and then wipe your lips 
 and thank God for the draught. It is 
 good to have cycled down an Alpine pass ! 
 We pass through fields of rye — Chiamut 
 is the highest corn-growing village in all 
 Europe, says Baedeker — and mark the 
 great frames of pine-trunks in the fields, 
 on which the corn is hastily tossed to dry 
 before the early winter storms come on. 
 Then village after village of purple-grey 
 timber, each nestling round a slender 
 spire; gaunt weather-beaten peasants 
 whose voices sound strange and sonorous 
 as they call to each other across the way ; 
 for they still speak a Latin dialect. These 
 are the descendants of those who, in 1799. 
 having surprised and cut in pieces a body 
 of French invaders, decked their altars 
 with the bloody uniforms of the slain ^ ; 
 and whose very women, during the Thirty 
 Years' war, played the Jael by a whole 
 village at a time, and in one night cut the 
 throats of some hundreds of Austrian 
 soldiers who had come in all charity, 
 with pike and musket, to lead the wan- 
 derers back into the Catholic fold.^ 
 
 ' H. Zschokke. Die Schweiz. Dritte Auflage, 
 1871, p. 36. 
 
 ^ See Bp. Burnet's " Letters from Switzerland and 
 Italy," 3rd ed., Rotterdam, 1687, p. 70.
 
 FATHER RHINE 123 
 
 We turn a sudden corner and behold 
 a flock of goats right in our path. Must 
 we dash into the midst of them and deal 
 (or receive) death and destruction ? They 
 skip aside under our very wheels ; in the 
 twinkling of an eye they are dispersed to 
 the four winds, and next moment even 
 the cries of the herdsman sound faint 
 behind us, as he calls back his flock from 
 the precipice and the forest. Masses of 
 Alpine flowers and fruit — barberry, coral- 
 like scarlet elderberry, the yellow fox- 
 glove, Canterbury bells, monkshood, a 
 blaze of crimson pinks — just time enough 
 to mark each with fresh pleasure, as we 
 pass. A sudden fragrance, laden with 
 memories as sweet as itself; a mile onward 
 you know that it was mountain thyme. 
 
 But now the descent slackens percept- 
 ibly, and we become aware that the sun is 
 westering fast. The shadows creep up 
 the hillsides ; the blue smoke of evening 
 curls up from the villages below; a glacier, 
 seen for a moment in the opening of the 
 hills, shows cold and grey ; only the peaks 
 still catch the rosier light. At Trons, sheer 
 hunger compels us to stop ; for the road 
 has become heavy, and this is our last 
 chance of a square meal for some miles 
 to come. But the landlady is dilatory 
 and exasperating ; nor do her viands, 
 when at last they appear, come up to
 
 124 FATHER RHINE 
 
 the ideal which our hungry fancy had 
 painted. The sun set while we were at 
 dinner, and we had still twelve miles 
 further to ride. All went well enough 
 at first, and the valley looked its best in 
 the early dusk ; but presently we crossed 
 the river and came among the woods ; and 
 here we found the road not only greasy, 
 but badly cut up by the diligence and 
 other vehicles. Schultz, straightest of 
 riders, goes on gaily at his usual pace, 
 even in the dark j while I can only bend 
 painfully over my lamp, and bump along 
 somehow among the hoof-tracks in the 
 middle ; until suddenly some accursed 
 wheel has cut right across the road, and 
 sends me flying, with the precision of a 
 railway " switch," right among the laby- 
 rinth of ruts, where I scramble off just 
 in time to avoid plunging into the river on 
 the left or charging the solid cliff on the 
 right. It gives one a strange feeling to 
 ride at ten miles an hour in the dark, with 
 one's hind wheel curveting and caracoling 
 all the time like a vicious horse; and I could 
 not help thinking of poor Lucretius : — 
 
 " But now it seems some unseen monster lays 
 His vast and filthy hands upon my ivheel, 
 Dragging it backwards into his " 
 
 But I set my teeth, and gripped the handles 
 till my wrists ached again, and strained my 
 eyes to catch the dim gleam of the lamp-
 
 FATHER RHINE 125 
 
 light on the track, and consoled myself 
 with the reflection that the Gods would 
 give an end to these evils also — whether 
 by sudden extinction, or by a successful 
 arrival at our journey's end. I remember 
 dimly that there were glowworms by the 
 wayside ; I remember that the river was 
 always just beneath the road, roaring for 
 my bones in the darkness ; then suddenly 
 a few scattered lights, a plunge into a 
 black tunnel which turns out to be only 
 a covered bridge ; and now I emerge upon 
 a broad street, in which my friend stands 
 waiting for me. This is Ilanz, the ancient 
 capital of the Grey League. Schultz tells 
 me that we have done the twelve miles in 
 eighty minutes ; I wouldn't do it again for 
 five pounds. 
 
 A fortunate chance — or perhaps the 
 instinct of experienced travellers — led us 
 to the Hotel Rheinkrone, from whence 
 issued sounds of music. We opened the 
 door, and found ourselves in a large 
 saloon, lighted only at one corner by a 
 lamp over the piano ; grandmother play- 
 ing valses, mother dancing with her 
 eldest son, and the two girls partnering 
 each other ; a very pretty picture in this 
 Rembrandt light. The piano is silent at 
 our entrance •, and the hostess comes for- 
 ward — tall, graceful, unembarrassed, only 
 a little flushed and breathless, and a little
 
 126 FATHER RHINE 
 
 amused to have been caught like this. 
 Why, certainly she can give us rooms ! 
 and she names a price reasonable even to 
 our modest purses ; and the tail, broad- 
 shouldered host, with black eyebrows and 
 grizzly beard, sits down to chat with us 
 over our glass of beer, and shows us with 
 pardonable pride the silver cups won by 
 his Choral Society ; after which he leads 
 us up to a clean and spacious room that 
 overlooks the Rhine. For a few minutes 
 we lean out of the window to look at the 
 stars, and their reflection in the rushing 
 grey waters, and the dim outlines of snowy 
 peaks which we shall see in purple and gold 
 at to-morrow's dawn ; then we lie down 
 and sleep once more to the music of the 
 river, and the rustling of tall poplars by 
 our window side.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 " Sweet day 1 so cool, so calm, so bright ; 
 The bridal of the earth and sky ! " 
 
 G. Herbert. 
 
 August II. 
 
 Woke at six, and rose as fresh as daisies 
 to salute the rising morn. The sun was 
 already over the hill-tops, flooding the 
 whole valley with light ; silver mists 
 floated down the river, and wove deli- 
 cate wreaths in and out of the forests 
 on the mountain-side. We went down 
 to the bridge before breakfast, and saw 
 in all its perfection the view at which 
 we had only guessed the night before. 
 Beyond and above all those pine -clad 
 ridges that dovetailed into each other 
 towards the head of the valley, cut out 
 in sharp dazzling snow against the forget- 
 me-not blue of the morning sky, stood 
 the two fangs of Brigelserhorn and Todi, 
 buttressed with purple masses of rock 
 whose rugged outlines were softened here 
 and there by faint lilac clouds — the whole 
 so ethereal, and yet so clear and solid, as 
 only distant mountains can appear. Pre-
 
 FATHER RHINE 129 
 
 sently one of the daughters of the house 
 came and called us in to our chocolate and 
 creamy butter and fragrant honey, which 
 Frau Castelberg set before us with smiling 
 unfeigned hospitality, and stood by with 
 her husband to wish us good appetite and 
 to hear our enthusiastic praise of their 
 town and their inn ; while the girls lin- 
 gered and listened in the background, pro- 
 bably wondering all the while what sort 
 of country we came from, that we could 
 get so excited over half a dozen hills, each 
 garnished with a sufficient pine-forest, and 
 a couple of barren mountain-peaks behind 
 them. We took leave of them all like old 
 friends, and went to look at the upper 
 town — steep narrow streets ; houses of 
 rough-hewn stone with the family scut- 
 cheon rudely sculptured over the door ; 
 this is the town which, from the fifteenth 
 century down to our own days, was the 
 capital of the Grey League — a group of 
 tiny independent republics, in which each 
 man had a like vote, and was equal to all 
 his fellows before the law, at a time when 
 even in England there was far less liberty 
 and self-government than this. 
 
 The road rises fairly steeply upwards 
 from Ilanz, and already the sun was high ; 
 but we were still 2300 feet above the sea, 
 and his heat was further tempered by a just 
 perceptible breath from the N.E., full in
 
 130 FATHER RHINE 
 
 our faces. We agreed that, if the Clerk 
 of the Weather had spread out his whole 
 assortment before us, we could have chosen 
 no more delightful pattern than this for 
 to-day's ride. The views were charming, 
 both up and down the valley, and the 
 villages perfect ; each planted on its own 
 little eminence amid a mass of fruit trees, 
 and looking down over steep slopes of 
 standing corn and meadows, to where the 
 Rhine tumbled along between ragged preci- 
 pices, thinly clothed at intervals with pines. 
 Presently our road turned inwards, and 
 dipped rapidly into a ravine deep in the 
 hillside, where a single arch of narrow 
 stone spanned the torrent at a dizzy 
 height. We put our feet up, and car- 
 eered past a company of soldiers in a cart, 
 one of whom bawled out to us that our 
 wheels were going round; at which the 
 cliffs echoed with stentorian laughter, and 
 we laughed ourselves to think that the 
 time-honoured friends of our youth should 
 still be so fresh in these Rhaetian fastnesses. 
 We had a steep climb out of the ravine, 
 and stopped on the way to drink at a little 
 spring in a wood, and look back for the 
 last time at Ilanz and its two silver pyra- 
 mids behind. It makes me thirsty again, 
 here as I write, to think of that spring; 
 the mossy trough of hollowed pine-log 
 that might have grown thus, without axe
 
 FATHER RHINE 131 
 
 or hammer, for the free service of the 
 wayfarer j the cool lush leaves, full-fed 
 from its overflowings, through which we 
 waded knee-deep to come at it — wild 
 mint and marjoram, and all fragrant wild 
 herbs, steaming with morning dew like 
 incense in that tepid air — and then the 
 childish delight of drinking with mouth 
 and nose and eyes, plunging face and all 
 into the water, and finally our very arms 
 up to the elbows, coolest of sedatives to 
 the heated rider ! And yet the day had 
 all the freshness of early spring, with 
 something added from all the best of the 
 seasons ; an April air, the freshness of 
 May in foliage and flowers, and Autumn 
 gossamer, frosted with silver dew, wher- 
 ever the day had not yet touched the 
 meadows. The corn stood nearly ready 
 for the sickle ; the second grass-crop was 
 mowing all down the valley ; and the 
 whole world was scented with standing 
 clover, and new-mown hay, and fresh- 
 cut pine-logs by the forest side. 
 
 We had come into another bend of 
 the valley, and a downward road ; other 
 masses of mountain opened out now in 
 front, lazily putting off fold after fold of 
 diaphanous cloud as the sun climbed higher 
 into the sky. Then the village of Versam, 
 prettier than all its fellows, with taller 
 spire and richer orchards on a more com-
 
 132 FATHER RHINE 
 
 manding eminence ; and here again we turn 
 sharply inwards into a deep and savage 
 gorge. The road zigzags rapidly down 
 the mountain side — alternate glimpses of 
 Versam spire, right, left, right, left, rising 
 higher and higher into the sky — and then 
 the pines fall away, and we find ourselves 
 crossing a light iron bridge, under which 
 the torrent rushes 260 feet below us to 
 join the Rhine, close by, but still invisible 
 among its pine-clad precipices. This was 
 the finest sight of its kind that we had 
 ever seen, and we lingered on the bridge 
 to drink it in. 
 
 The ascending zigzags were cut in the 
 face of a steep cliff, and afforded us several 
 other splendid views of the gorge behind 
 us ; then we rounded a corner and ran 
 downhill again, and the road itself became 
 more monotonous, though we had still an 
 endless variety of cloud and mountain in 
 the background. We come to Reichenau, 
 refuge of Louis-Philippe, where we cross 
 the Hinterrhein and get a glimpse up its 
 valley towards the Via Mala ; then Ems, 
 with its tiny church perched on a steep 
 rock in the middle of the village ; then 
 on to Coire, where we rest for lunch. 
 Schultz sallied forth after the meal to 
 explore the town ; while I, who suffer 
 from a plusquam virgilian inactivity at these 
 times, took my siesta in the sun, on the
 
 FATHER RHINE 133 
 
 parapet overhanging that very stream which 
 for so many years had been hallowed in my 
 ftnagination by Thackeray's " Lazy Idle 
 Boy." It was nearly an hour later that my 
 friend came back and piloted me to see the 
 tit-bits which he had discovered ; and we 
 both agreed that Coire well deserves the 
 immortality bestowed on it by the first of 
 the Roundabout Papers. 
 
 It was evident, when we started again, 
 that the wind had freshened very consider- 
 ably ; it blew hard in our faces now, and 
 made a good two miles an hour difference 
 to our pace. From Coire to Ragatz is 
 very beautiful ; but we were somewhat 
 sated with the greater glories of the 
 morning, and, having lost time to make 
 up, we plodded along too steadily to do 
 full justice to the scenery. At Ragatz 
 we had hoped to turn aside and see 
 the Tamina Gorge, but by this time it 
 was plain that we must not only ride 
 straight on, but, even thus, give up the 
 hope of getting to Buchs for dinner ; since 
 the sun was visibly declining and we had 
 still fourteen miles to go. We had turned 
 westward now, and the slanting rays struck 
 into our faces, filling the whole air with 
 floating gold-dust, through which the 
 mountains rose in huge vague masses 
 under the dazzling light. The wind had 
 fallen as if by enchantment j tall poplars
 
 134 FATHER RHINE 
 
 stood motionless against the golden sky ; 
 sunburnt peasants trudged homewards in 
 quiet content from their day's work ; the 
 first peace of evening was come upon the 
 valley. So we gave ourselves up to pure 
 enjoyment of the scene, and rode at our 
 leisure to Sargans. Here we took the train 
 for Rorschach, enjoying a frugal meal of 
 bread and cheese on the way, and watching 
 a buzzard wheeling in great circles up into 
 the sky, while the quiet shadows crept 
 over the distant masses of the Vorarlberg, 
 and, on our left, the snows of the Sentis 
 kindled into a sudden glow of crimson 
 that smouldered on, through dull reds 
 and purples, far into the dusk. 
 
 We had taken our tickets for Rorschach 
 town, the main station, and had naturally 
 had our bicycles labelled to " Rorschach " 
 simply. What was our surprise, then, on 
 enquiry at the luggage office, to learn that 
 the plain label of "Rorschach" did not 
 mean the main station, but the harbour, 
 where we should find our machines if we 
 were lucky enough to get in before the 
 train had started. We rushed back and 
 jumped in just as the train moved on; the 
 guard came in due time to snip our tickets, 
 and, after he and I had exchanged one or 
 two sentences at cross-purposes, I suddenly 
 realised that we must have jumped into the 
 Zurich train. The guard, naturally mis-
 
 FATHER RHINE 135 
 
 interpreting my blank dismay, began to 
 bawl louder and louder, by way of making 
 this benighted foreigner understand that 
 he wanted his ticket ; and a well-meaning 
 native came across to explain that he could 
 " spik Engleesh — what want you, sir ? " 
 and my cup was full ! I explained to 
 the guard, possibly with unnecessary heat, 
 that most civilised persons who booked 
 to plain Rorschach would assume their 
 tickets to be for the main station, and not 
 for the harbour ; that my friend and I were 
 cives Romani; that wild horses should not 
 compel us to buy tickets for this involuntary 
 and preposterous journey — when luckily 
 the train stopped at Goldach, and he al- 
 lowed us to alight, though not without 
 calling together his colleagues and " thank- 
 ing God that he was rid of a knave." 
 
 It transpired that there was no train back 
 to Rorschach for a couple of hours, but 
 Schultz, whose spirits always rise to an 
 emergency, only burst into a hearty laugh 
 at the sight of my dismal face ; for, in cold 
 blood, I could not but see that it would 
 have been wiser to make full enquiries 
 when I took the tickets. His laughter 
 was contagious ; after all, we had only 
 three miles to walk, and our baggage was 
 small ; and here were the lights of a 
 friendly Wirthshaus, where we could wash 
 down our bread and cheese. So to the
 
 136 FATHER RHINE 
 
 Lamm we went forthwith, and sat down 
 to our mug of beer ; and again he laughed 
 out loud at the recollection of my helpless 
 fury in the train. **Upon my word, I 
 thought you were going to slay old Gig- 
 lamps with his * spikengleesh ! ' — and then 
 again, when you got up and began adminis- 
 tering your best German in solid slabs to 
 the guard ! " The recollection inspired 
 him with fresh appetite, and he demanded 
 a plate of sausage, "like those men are 
 eating in the corner" — o dura messorum 
 ilia ! Twenty minutes later, we were 
 tramping under the cool canopy of night 
 to Rorschach, where we put up at the 
 " Green Tree," and slept the sleep of the 
 just. It was not until next morning that 
 we found how Schultz's handsome lamp 
 had been stolen from his bicycle while we 
 were wrestling with principalities and 
 powers in the Ziirich train.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 "Tidings came daily, how our Holy Father Pope 
 John XXIII. was on his way hither to Constance. 
 Now as he came over the Arlberg, in tlie midst, by 
 the convent, his chariot was overset and lay in the 
 snow. And as he lay thus, up ran his servants and 
 courtiers, and said to him : — ' Holy Father, hath your 
 Holiness taken any hurt ? ' To which he made answer 
 in Latin: — ' Hie jaceo in nomine diaboli, ' wWlch. is, being 
 interpreted, here lie I, in the Devil's name." 
 
 Ulrich V. RichentaVs Chronicle, MCCCCXIV. 
 
 August 12. 
 
 Up at 5.45 ; got our luggage off for 
 Bale, and caught the 6.30 boat for Fried- 
 richshafen, breakfasting on board. There 
 is no better way of beginning a day than 
 to breakfast on the deck of a lake steamer 
 in the early sunshine. The Sentis and 
 other snow mountains were only just 
 visible through the silver haze ; but the 
 waves danced brightly in the sunshine ; 
 the wind was still easterly, and we knew 
 we had another fine day before us. Here 
 — rarest of all continental experiences ! — 
 the steward boggled at our English sover- 
 eign. Even after he had accepted it, not 
 without consultation with the captain and 
 the mate, he came back ten minutes later, 
 
 137
 
 138 FATHER RHINE 
 
 and said : " Do you know, this coin of 
 yours has a very great defect ? " '* What 
 defect ? " I asked, fearing that he meant to 
 squabble over it again. " Why, this ; 
 that there's not a word on the whole coin 
 to tell you what it's worth. And yet you 
 are a practical people ! " We were forced 
 to admit the justice of the criticism ; it 
 could do no harm, and would at least have 
 spared one poor steward many searchings 
 of heart. 
 
 From Friedrichshafen we followed an 
 undulating road that ran mostly parallel 
 to the lake, from half a mile to a mile 
 distant, and one or two hundred feet 
 above it. The country was like one 
 great orchard ; apple-trees with corn and 
 roots growing beneath them, and vines 
 on every slope. A vine-dresser with 
 whom we stopped to chat, was delighted 
 to hear of the fearful tempest of hail and 
 thunder which had just ravaged the wine 
 districts of the middle Rhine. *' Our 
 grapes have never done better than this 
 year," he said ; " and now they will be 
 worth twice as much I " It reminded me 
 of the French farmer's comment on the 
 horrors of the Crimean war : " Que 
 voulez-vous .'* il y a trop de monde, et 
 nous autres, sans cela, nous n'aurions pas 
 de quoi vivre ! " The villages were as 
 pretty and well-to-do as the land, with
 
 FATHER RHINE 139 
 
 those tall white saddle-back towers that 
 are so characteristic of this part of Switzer- 
 land. At about ten o'clock we came to 
 Meersburg, once an imperial city, but 
 now a mere village, yet withhold gates 
 and walls and a strong castle — another 
 of those living museums of which one finds 
 so many in out-of-the-way parts of Ger- 
 many and Switzerland. The upper town 
 stands on a steep height by the side of 
 the lake, looking straight across to 
 Constance. There was a nice-looking 
 butcher's shop just inside the gate, and 
 we went in to cater for lunch. We 
 resisted the temptation of "Jlingstes 
 Ochsenfleisch a 54 pf.," and bought half 
 a pound of a very appetising ham. " How 
 much ? " " Flinf und achtzig Pfennige." 
 *' That's cheaper than last time," remarked 
 Schultz : at which the butcher, hearing 
 him speak English and anxious to come 
 down to our level, added, " Ye-es ! Five- 
 and-eight pennies. . . . Alright ! five- 
 and-eight pence," he repeated, shovelling 
 the coin into his till, and vastly pleased 
 to have shown so intimate an acquaintance 
 with the English currency. 
 
 We had a couple of hours before the 
 boat for Constance was due ; and, after 
 we had wandered about a while, Schultz 
 sat down by the lake side to write his 
 letter home, while I prowled about again to
 
 140 FATHER RHINE 
 
 find subjects for camera and pencil. Then I 
 went back to join him at lunch, which we 
 ate on his bench under the trees, while 
 the pale green waters careered in tiny 
 waves of a few inches high, up a sandy 
 beach at our feet. Then to an inn by the 
 quay where we could sit outside in the 
 shade and take our refreshment at leisure 
 till the boat should come in. Presently 
 we saw her a mile and a half down the 
 lake. ** How distinctly one hears her 
 paddles ! " I remarked, and Schultz as- 
 sented absent-mindedly ; and we watched 
 the boat dreamily as it crept nearer and 
 nearer through the palpitating heat. Sud- 
 denly a whistle, a snort, a very loud 
 splash of paddles close by us — we had 
 not noticed till this moment how the first 
 sound of paddles, erst so strangely loud, 
 had lately died away altogether. A horrid 
 light dawned upon us ; we rushed round 
 the corner of the custom-house, and there 
 was our boat just cast off from the pier 
 and slewing round to paddle off for Con- 
 stance ! She had sneaked in behind our 
 backs from the other end of the lake ; 
 hers were the paddles that had sounded 
 in our ears as we watched the other boat, 
 and now we had lost her ! For the sake 
 of our national honour we put on a mask 
 of stern indifference before the grinning 
 loafers on the quay, and went slowly back
 
 FATHER RHINE 141 
 
 to the verandah with despair in our heart, 
 for we had arranged everything so beauti- 
 fully for the day, in dependence on that 
 boat. It seemed no good studying the 
 timetable ; each fresh combination seemed 
 more intractable than the last, when 
 suddenly we discovered again that two 
 boats leave Meersburg at five minutes' 
 interval for Constance, and that our honest 
 visible friend was ready to take us over 
 after all. With what relief of heart we 
 sipped our last mouthful and strolled down 
 to the quay to meet her as she came in, and 
 took places in the bows, from whence we 
 could watch the spires of Constance rising 
 from the lake as we paddled across ! 
 
 Constance is a beautiful old town, but 
 rather too like an oven between two and 
 three o'clock on a cloudless August day ; 
 it was difficult even to take enough in- 
 terest in the old cloisters and refectory of 
 the Insel Hotel, an old Dominican monas- 
 tery. So, after a little perfunctory sight- 
 seeing and necessary shopping, we rode 
 out to see the stone where poor Huss 
 was burned — cool enough now under the 
 shadow of the trees in a public garden — 
 and then on towards Stein am Rhein. 
 The road parts for a while from the river 
 and crosses a spur of hill, from which we 
 had a fine view of the city behind us, and 
 Gottlieben with its twin castle-towers by
 
 142 FATHER RHINE 
 
 the riverside on our right. After a few 
 miles we came upon the river, which had 
 widened out again by this time into a 
 small lake ; and here the air was 
 already fresher, and the trees taller and 
 cooler in shade ; rich crops, fine vil- 
 lages, and delightful glimpses over the 
 water to the historic abbey buildings of 
 Reichenau, with Hohentwiel and the great 
 cones of the Hegau rising on the horizon 
 behind, and, still far ahead, the castled 
 hill that looks down from its 600 feet 
 upon the little town of Stein. 
 
 It was just outside one of these pretty 
 villages that we halted to make tea, in a 
 tongue of orchard that jutted out into the 
 lake, sitting on the grass with our feet 
 almost in the water, and watching the 
 tiny waves swirling round the big black 
 boulders that show their heads in the 
 shallows. Here on our right was the 
 spire of Berlingen, with its attendant 
 poplars, jutting out on just such a little 
 promontory as our own, framed into a 
 picture by the branches of our orchard, 
 and reflected vaguely in the rippling water. 
 We reached Stein at 5.20 : time enough to 
 admire the old towers, and the stately old 
 houses round the market-place, with carved 
 oriel windows and dim frescoes : but not 
 quite enough to allow us to look round 
 inside the secularized monastery of St
 
 FATHER RHINE 143 
 
 George, whose mediaeval gables and bright 
 colours, mirrored in the rushing river, are 
 so conspicuous as you cross the bridge into 
 the town. 
 
 Stein is a beautiful old town at any time, 
 and it looked its best as we left it in the 
 evening light, with its long reflections 
 of red and white and green in the clear 
 stream, and its grey castle of Hohenklingen 
 perched high on the hill, and still higher 
 ridges of pine forest rising in the back- 
 ground. I know nothing quite so charm- 
 ing in its own way, on all the navigable 
 Rhine, as this stretch of fifteen or sixteen 
 miles between Stein and Schaffhausen. 
 The river runs so swiftly that the steamer 
 takes twice as long over the up journey as 
 over the down ; the water, fresh from the 
 quiet lake, is so clear that you can plainly 
 see the bottom, fifteen or twenty feet 
 below ; only in one or two great holes, 
 where the little steamboat reels and stag- 
 gers with the eddy, there is nothing but 
 a vague green depth as far as the eye can 
 pierce. On this pellucid stream you are 
 borne smoothly along, but with sudden 
 capricious windings, between hills that 
 come down at one moment to the very 
 edge, in precipitous cliffs fringed with 
 overhanging woods, or again fall back 
 and slope away, through rising terraces 
 of pasture land, higher and higher into
 
 144 FATHER RHINE 
 
 the pines and the clouds. Here and there 
 are villages, white walls and purple roofs, 
 with a tiny church spire on a rising knoll. 
 One is built on a narrow level of meadow 
 and orchard at the very edge of the water : 
 three girls in white linen stand up to their 
 shoulders in the cool stream, not a dozen 
 yards from their own door, and cling to 
 branches of osier for support : one dips her 
 head for a moment, and diamonds run from 
 her hair in the sunlight. Then again a 
 water-mill, half hidden in poplars, where 
 a little stream brings down its tributary 
 waters into the Rhine ; and one tiny town, 
 Diessenhofen, with its covered bridge on 
 oaken piles that seem to stagger in the 
 rush of the current. At last, a castle, its 
 white walls gleaming in the last rays of 
 sunlight, and perched on a hill round 
 whose base we sweep ; and here, at the 
 foot, lies Schaffhausen. We take up a 
 hawser from the bank by way of pre- 
 caution ; for there are the rapids close 
 below us, with their tossing fleeces of 
 foam, just as we saw them after our ride 
 in the Black Forest six days ago. Now 
 we drop gently down to the quay, and 
 here at last, on the very point of leaving 
 Switzerland, our cycles are pounced upon 
 by a doium'ter. Schultz, armed with C.T.C. 
 and T.C.F. tickets, is passed free ; I have 
 to pay a deposit of pf. 50, which will be
 
 146 FATHER RHINE 
 
 returned to me when I cross the frontier 
 again at Bale. 
 
 SchafFhausen is a larger Stein, with 
 bigger towers, quainter and more numer- 
 ous oriels, a wilder rush of Rhine beneath 
 it walls, and a great cathedral bell in- 
 scribed with the mediaeval legend 
 
 bibca boco, moxtxxos plango, fnlgnra frango. 
 
 We rode slowly through the narrow 
 streets, and then raced the river again to 
 Neuhausen. The sun was set by this 
 time, and we went straight down to the 
 Falls. It was too late to cross over to the 
 Castle of Lauffen, but we took the public 
 path that leads by the northern corner of 
 the cataract, and there sat and watched 
 the waters to our heart's content. "We 
 were healthily tired with the day's ride — 
 less from the distance than from the heat 
 — and the sound of the waters fell on our 
 ears with so drowsy a charm that it seemed 
 quite an effort to us to climb up to our 
 early bed at nine o'clock. 
 
 Yet we stood for a while on our balcony 
 to watch the coloured electric lights which 
 are flashed nightly upon the Falls, in the 
 season, for the benefit of hotel visitors ; 
 not without a feeling of desecration at the 
 sight, though in Schultz's case it was 
 mingled with the softer thoughts of home. 
 He wished he could have "the kiddies"
 
 FATHER RHINE 147 
 
 here for a few minutes, and hear their 
 clapping of hands, and their cries of 
 ** Ripping ! — I say. Father, isn't it rip- 
 ping!'^ and the admission even from 
 " Sammy," most critical of nine-year-olds, 
 that, for a German show, this was •' beastly 
 decent ! "
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 " In Gottes hochstem Tempel steht's, 
 Und iiber schroffe Felsen geht's : 
 Es donnert wie der letzte Tag, 
 Schlag auf Schlag." — Hebel. 
 
 August 13. 
 
 Rose at 4.30, jocund to drive our wheels 
 afield in this fresh and dewy air, for we 
 had sixty-one miles' ride before us. We 
 breakfasted by the roadside, under a wood, 
 and within sight and hearing of the Falls — 
 not without some impatience on the part of 
 Schultz, who finds it hard to realise that 
 a bohemian meal can in fact be cooked with 
 as little delay as at an hotel, and to whom 
 motion is one of the prime necessities of 
 life. He can never quite forgive Provi- 
 dence for having brought him prematurely 
 into a world as yet unprovided with flying- 
 machines. " Sling the tea round, old 
 man j never mind about the water boiling ! 
 I say, aren't those eggs done yet ^ Con- 
 found your silly one-horse spirit-lamp ; 
 what on earth can be the matter with it 
 this morning ! " I attempted to distract his 
 thoughts by quoting an apposite paragraph 
 
 from one of the English papers we had found 
 148
 
 FATHER RHINE 149 
 
 waiting for us last night : how a distin- 
 guished Viennese professor had discovered 
 some process for making artificial albumen, 
 and promised presently to provide the 
 world with a whole meal in one little pill ; 
 and what a boon this would be to Cyclists, 
 Legislators, Arctic Explorers, Extension 
 Lecturers, and Ladies' Schools, etc. etc. etc. 
 He seemed to take quite kindly to the 
 idea ; it might be one step further towards 
 the era of flying-machines ; at the very 
 least, if this tea and eggs and bread and 
 butter could have been compressed into a 
 globule, should we not be already speed- 
 ing on towards Waldshut ? . . . Here the 
 kettle boiled audibly, and diverted his 
 thoughts ; and soon we had breakfasted 
 to our hearts' content, and pushed on 
 without further delay. The way led 
 gently uphill through cool woods, glisten- 
 ing with heavy dewdrops ; then through a 
 deep trough of meadowland, crowned with 
 wood on either hand ; and finally, out 
 upon a great plateau, bare of trees, but 
 rich with luxuriant crops, sloping far away 
 on the left towards the sinuous line of 
 forest that marked the course of the 
 Rhine, and rising on the right into a long 
 ridge, clothed to the very summit with 
 vines, and flecked with tiny white villages 
 and white saddlebacked towers. One of 
 those on our road, Neunkirchen, was forti-
 
 150 FATHER RHINE 
 
 fied, with a tall gate-tower at each end of 
 the street : and inscriptions had been cut 
 on either side of the main arch, to record 
 the price of corn and wine in 1572 and 
 1574, perhaps the years in which the walls 
 had been begun and finished. 
 
 After about five miles of this plateau, 
 we came among woods again, and dropped 
 down into Oberlauchringen, most pictur- 
 esque of small villages, with its trout- 
 stream fresh from the Forest, and clump of 
 huge poplars by the wooden bridge, and 
 rustic galleries to the houses, approached 
 by stairs from the roadside. Then Thien- 
 gen, boldly planted on a steep bank ; after 
 which the road runs again between mea- 
 dowland and woods ; and, suddenly, at this 
 point, we see the Rhine again, coming to 
 meet us, after all this interval, from be- 
 tween two leafy hills on the left — jade- 
 green, tantalisingly cool under this burn- 
 ing sun, swift and deep and wrinkled into 
 oily eddies. It comes and runs for a while 
 close by our side ; then we climb, and 
 leave it gradually far below under our 
 precipitous bank, but still visible at inter- 
 vals between the thick acacias that fringe 
 the road ; then downward again, and here 
 are the white towers and purple roofs of 
 Waldshut, standing on a cliff over the 
 river, with a deep ravine for further 
 defence on one side, and a rapid slope
 
 FATHER RHINE 151 
 
 beyond. This is a town of some import- 
 ance, but it is all built practically in one 
 great street, like the main street of Berne ; 
 broad, deep-eaved, with many carved and 
 painted fountains, and a runnel of pure 
 water at the edge of the footways, and a 
 tall gate-tower to close it at either end. 
 We bought the materials for a luxurious 
 lunch in the town, and ate it under the 
 trees in the ravine, not without some 
 twinges of envy at the youthful Wald- 
 shuters who strolled down past us, with 
 towels, for their midday bathe in the 
 river. By half-past one we were well fed 
 and rested, and rode through the town, 
 and then down a delicious slope to the 
 level of the Rhine. From hence to Bale, 
 except for a short space here and there, 
 we never lost sight of it again. The pine- 
 clad mountains of the Black Forest come 
 down here almost to the water's edge ; on 
 the other side, smaller hills rise rapidly to 
 about 1500 feet above the river, which 
 itself runs nearly looo feet above the sea, 
 due westward, with gentle windings that 
 follow the contours of the greater hills. 
 We passed the mouth of the Albthal, one 
 of the most beautiful of Black Forest 
 gorges, and reached Laufenburg about 
 four o'clock. Laufenburg is not so well 
 known as it ought to be, for it is one of 
 the most remarkable little towns on the
 
 152 FATHER RHINE 
 
 whole course of the Rhine. Here the 
 river bed contracts suddenly between lofty 
 walls of rock, that narrow it to less than 
 a quarter of its former breadth — so narrow, 
 in fact, that in times of flood the waters 
 have been known to heap themselves up 
 to sixty feet above their lowest level ; and 
 even in its mildest moods the vast mass of 
 river, rushing down already at racing speed 
 from the Alps, and swollen near Waldshut 
 by the not less boisterous Aar, thunders 
 through these iron gates with a wild fury 
 of disorder that is only less impressive 
 than the cataract of Neuhausen. In the 
 later spring, when the first great meltings 
 of Alpine snows have begun, I have stood 
 for hours to watch the huge rafts of timber 
 sent down and broken up in the rapids ; 
 one of them jammed for a moment at the 
 narrowest point, and suddenly huge trunks 
 reared up thirty or forty feet from the 
 water, and waved desperately in the air, 
 and plunged again, and were whirled down 
 as the whole obstacle was swept away. 
 
 The town is built on the cliffs that 
 overhang these seething waters ; roof 
 above roof on the steep hillside ; with a 
 church spire high up on either bank, and 
 a ruined castle looking down from its rock 
 upon the Swiss town ; for the river is here 
 the boundary of two nations, and the old 
 irregular wooden bridge is guarded at one
 
 FATHER RHINE 153 
 
 end by an officer of the Baden customs, and 
 at the other by a Swiss. The German houses 
 offer an almost Italian depth of light and 
 shade, with their broad eaves, and tier 
 upon tier of irregular balconies over the 
 river, propped upon every variety of post 
 and slanting bracket : almost Italian, too, 
 are the steep stairs, vaulted over here and 
 there, that zigzag up from the main street 
 of the Swiss town to the top of the castle 
 rock. A Switzer who saw us prying about 
 his native streets insisted on attaching him- 
 self to us as cicerone : had we seen this ? had 
 we seen that .-' had we noticed the Garlic ? 
 We had indeed, for the last few minutes, 
 been painfully conscious of that impor- 
 tunate odour ; but I assured him with 
 all politeness that, if we hurried away 
 from him, it was not so much on that 
 account as because we had very little 
 time, and wanted to climb down among 
 the rocks and get a nearer view of the 
 water. "That's just it!" he exclaimed 
 triumphantly : " then just look out for 
 the Garlic ! You will find it growing 
 wild on both sides, exactly alike to look 
 at ; only on the German side it is the com- 
 mon rank wild stuff, and on ours it tastes 
 like the garden herb — it is the garlic that 
 we eat with our food ! " We held our 
 breath and waved him a courteous fare- 
 well J and he bawled after us as we hurried
 
 154 FATHER RHINE 
 
 away, " That is the difference between 
 Switzerland and Germany ! " We were 
 able, at this distance, to thank him in 
 words, and hurried down, by common 
 consent, among the rocks on the German 
 shore. Here, by the side of the wildest 
 rapids, we dipped up water for our tea, 
 and watched the labyrinth of rushing green 
 waters, and the brilliant purple shadow of 
 the bridge across them, and the pigeons 
 that flew out and circled round our heads, 
 and then back to their perch among the 
 beams. But at last we had our fill even 
 of tea . and with a sigh we packed up and 
 turned our backs on Laufenburg, yet still 
 consoled by the thought of Rheinfelden 
 to come.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 " For never, to my mind, was evening yet 
 
 But was far beautifuller than its day." 
 
 R. Browning. 
 
 The road was bordered still by typical 
 Black Forest farms — huge roofs that 
 shelter house, barn, stable and sheds under 
 one broad span. Nowhere had the country- 
 folk been so busy with their hay-harvest as 
 we found them on this afternoon's ride, and 
 nowhere more happy and prosperous-look- 
 ing. We rode through Sackingen with its 
 twin abbey spires, the scene of Scheffel's 
 ** Trompeter " ; through Brennet, and with- 
 in sight of the castled rock that guards the 
 savage gorge of Wehra : Beuggen among 
 the meadows by the water side, where 
 stands an ancient Lodge of the Teutonic 
 knights, with gates and towers and high- 
 stepped gables that gleam white in the 
 evening sunlight against their dark green 
 background. And now the road mounts 
 steadily for a while : then a sudden turn 
 to the left through the fruit trees, and 
 we find ourselves looking down upon the 
 rapids, and the irregular covered bridge, 
 and the quaint roofs and towers of Rhein-
 
 156 FATHER RHINE 
 
 felden, immortalised by Turner and Ruskin. 
 We had often pored over those illustra- 
 tions in the fifth volume of " Modern 
 Painters " ; and more than once I had 
 been hurried past the place in the train, 
 catching just one glimpse of the warm 
 tiled roofs that nestle cosily together like 
 little birds under the shelter of their 
 guardian towers — catching one glimpse, 
 unable to stop, yet feeling myself a bar- 
 barian for passing by. Now at last we 
 were to see the town itself; and we found 
 it worthy of all we had dreamed, though 
 still, of course, the best view of all is 
 that first sight from the Rhine bank which 
 Turner found out a century ago. We 
 hastened to the eastern gate, the "Peace" 
 of that last chapter in " Modern Painters," 
 and there stood the tower, just as Ruskin 
 drew it, with its stork's nest and projecting 
 wooden balcony, and S-shaped iron braces 
 to keep the old walls together. When we 
 had seen our fill of the town, we began to 
 think of dinner ; I had heard of a famous 
 brewery here, and to this we asked our 
 way. We found it in the main street, 
 and passed through to the back of the 
 house, where the tables were spread in 
 a little garden by the Rhine side, and one 
 on a balcony that jutted right out over the 
 stream, for our own special benefit. There 
 we laid down our healthily-tired limbs with
 
 FATHER RHINE 157 
 
 a sigh of relief; Phyllis arrived unbidden 
 with two tankards fresh from the cow, 
 and desired to know what it would be 
 our pleasure to eat. " Cold meat to begin 
 with ? Then bringus agood plate of tongue, 
 and an Omelette mit Kirsch to follow. — 
 Have you ever tried a kirsch omelette, 
 Schultz ? " 
 
 " No," replied my friend, adding doubt- 
 fully, "is it good ?" 
 
 " Just you waitandsee,oldman." I spoke 
 confidently, yet not without a misgiving 
 in my inmost heart that my depraved cos- 
 mopolitan taste might again be at fault here. 
 He has never forgiven me for tempting him 
 on at Reims to a dish of escargots — 
 " black undisguised reptiles ! " as he ex- 
 claimed, after smuggling the first from his 
 mouth into his handkerchief, and swallow- 
 ing several mouthfuls of the local wine to 
 get the taste out of his palate ! 
 
 The sun was on the very horizon now, 
 yet quite hot on our faces still : the river 
 rushed under our balcony in green and 
 gold, flecked with white foam over the 
 sunken rocks : the quaint irregular bridge 
 straddled dark across the sunset. Schultz 
 sipped his beer thoughtfully between the 
 mouthfuls of tongue. " He is thinking of 
 wife and children," I said to myself, and 
 respected his silence. Yes, there are our 
 home friends — there under the setting sun,
 
 158 FATHER RHINE 
 
 which will linger nearly an hour longer for 
 them than for us. But we shall soon be 
 with them again ! 
 
 The omelette arrived, scenting the 
 evening air, and its approach seemed to 
 wake Schultz from his reverie. I watched 
 his face anxiously, but the first mouthful 
 reassured me. At last he broke silence : 
 " I should put the man into the lowest pit 
 of Tartarus ! " 
 
 '* What man .'' " I asked in surprise. 
 
 " That professor — the fellow you were 
 jawing about at breakfast. I should make 
 him bicycle all day in the sun, and then 
 put him up to his waist in beer and kirsch 
 omelettes, and they should turn to tabloids 
 when they touched his lips ! Wasn't it 
 Tantalus' crime that he had betrayed the 
 secrets of Zeus to mortals ? . . . After 
 all," he added with a sigh, " we are 
 human ! . . . How long do you think 
 she would take to make us another of 
 these .? " 
 
 Phyllis assured us of her best speed, and 
 brought fresh beer unbidden. The sun 
 had dipped under the bridge, and was half 
 sunk behind the hills, quickening the pine 
 ridges into millions of needles of purple 
 light. No doubt it is not logical, but 
 somehow the soul seldom feels so inde- 
 pendent of the body as when we are just 
 satisfying our most clamorous bodily needs;
 
 FATHER RHINE 159 
 
 and at this moment it seemed to me as 
 though there could be no fairer heaven on 
 earth than to sit at Rheinfelden and watch 
 the sun go down, and let these living waters 
 ripple peace and pardon through my soul. 
 The towers and gables rose in gold, to my 
 ecstatic vision, against a golden afterglow, 
 and a voice whispered down the river, 
 " This is the unregretful city, the home of 
 purified memories, over whose portal is 
 written, ' And if you will, remember : and 
 if you will, forget.' Here you may live 
 in heaven as in your own hired house, with 
 all your good friends around you, — home 
 first of all, with the beech woods, and the 
 water, and the spring flowers in the grass 
 under the trees — school and college chums 
 — colleagues, good men and true, once as 
 penniless as yourself, and now rich beyond 
 their heart's desire, with but one boy to 
 teach among them all, and governors to 
 run their errands and black their boots. 
 Here are all your books, and no sacrilegious 
 hand to dust them. You may read for days 
 and weeks at selfish leisure, with your feet 
 on the fender, and your dog breathing hard 
 on the rug, and a perennial coffee-pot by 
 your side ! Or, if honours have power 
 to tempt you, and you would care to 
 accept the Prime Ministership of Rhein- 
 felden?" . . . 
 
 The town, the red band of sunset, the
 
 i6o FATHER RHINE 
 
 black bridge, looked infinitely small and 
 distant through the hollow bottom of my 
 glass ; and, from my lofty pinnacle of con- 
 templation, all human greatness looked as 
 small as they. " Thine honours perish with 
 thee ! " I murmured in my heart : — " Give 
 me just a cottage and an orchard out there 
 by the Rhine side — modus agri non ita 
 magnus — just three acres and a cow — and 
 when I come to milk her, may she yield 
 me such milk as this ! . . . Noch Eins, 
 Fraulein, noch Eins ! " . . . 
 
 " That'll be your third ! " remarked 
 Schultz sternly but regretfully, and, 
 looking at his watch, he added, " Fm 
 afraid we shall have to be starting soon." 
 Yet we sat half an hour longer, looking 
 up and down the river, and watching the 
 sunset fade, and talking of home. 
 
 The clock struck a quarter to nine as 
 we crossed the bridge again : and we had 
 still ten miles to go. We rode on leisurely 
 through the growing dusk, with the scent 
 of new-mown hay and clover in our nostrils, 
 and the chirrup of innumerable crickets in 
 our ears, and our eyes turned steadfastly 
 towards the evening star. The last hay- 
 carts were coming home ; we had met the 
 first as we rode away from Laufenburg. 
 The Rhine started with us, gleaming in 
 the dusk, and murmuring gently under its 
 steep and shadowy banks ; then gradually
 
 FATHER RHINE l6l 
 
 it faded into a thin streak, far away on the 
 left, while our road kept on through the 
 upland villages. No more perfect day 
 could have had a more perfect close than 
 this, where everything breathed of peace 
 and happiness : — girls and old folk sitting 
 at their doors to drink in the cool and 
 quiet of Saturday night ; whispers and 
 shy laughter at the fountains and under 
 the shadow of the eaves j a group of 
 Italian workmen tramping in step down 
 the road, and singing the songs of Zion 
 even in this strange land ; just light enough 
 to distinguish their red sashes and blue 
 shirts, and a white gleam of eyes and 
 teeth from under their shaggy hair. Here 
 again a wayside shrine under its little 
 roof-, one peasant woman pleading at the 
 foot of the cross, while half a dozen more 
 knelt behind her along the road, with 
 flickering gleams of light on their up- 
 turned faces, and on their lips a chant 
 of passionate unreasoning devotion, that 
 stirred our heart strangely in the silence of 
 the night. The leader, — hollow-cheeked, 
 black-eyed, hard-featured, — was pouring 
 forth from the bottom of her soul the 
 verses of some litany to the Virgin, and 
 the rest in chorus after her — HeiligeMaria- 
 M utter Gotteshetej ii rimsu/idfurunsereSu rtden — 
 with a rapid utterance that ran the whole 
 sentence into a single word : some almost 
 
 L
 
 l62 FATHER RHINE 
 
 as passionately as herself, others more 
 mechanically, and with side-glances at the 
 strangers in the roadway : but all in the 
 same sonorous cadence as of a Gregorian 
 chant. Far and far away we heard their 
 voices, rising and falling on the quiet air, 
 and the sound recalled our evening drives 
 to church in old days, when the Methodists 
 still held their open-air service on the hill- 
 side by "Westacre Ford, and the echo of 
 their hearty hymns, mellowed by distance, 
 would follow us even to the church porch. 
 The evening star sinks in a purple mist, 
 and the last faint sounds of human voices 
 die away behind us ; only the melancholy 
 hoot of an owl echoes at intervals from 
 the distant Forest. Suddenly the Rhine 
 comes again to our side, guiding us to- 
 wards a lurid glow that lowers on the 
 south-western horizon, and presently we 
 catch the first outlying gaslights reflected 
 on his waters. This is Bale : and here we 
 find our way to my old quarters at the 
 Krone, and once again we lie down to 
 sleep with the Rhine flowing under our 
 window.
 
 i^rM^^^. 
 
 163
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 " Basle : belle ville de la grandeur de Blois 
 environ. " — Montaigne. 
 
 August 14. 
 
 To most people, Bale means simply hot 
 
 coffee at six in the morning, and the next 
 
 train to Somewhere Else : they see the 
 
 station and are carried on, and never dream 
 
 of the real beauties of the town. And yet 
 
 it would be hard to find anything finer 
 
 in their way than the Cathedral cloisters, 
 
 planted with trees and looking on the 
 
 Rhine ; the museum contains an unrivalled 
 
 collection of Holbeins ; grand relics of 
 
 the old fortifications are still to be seen ; 
 
 and a network of picturesque streets climb 
 
 up and down a steep ridge in the centre 
 
 of the town, on whose brow stand the 
 
 church and cloister of St Leonard, looking 
 
 out over roofs and churches below. We 
 
 tried in vain to hear of an early service in 
 
 English, and fell back upon St Leonard's 
 
 instead. By ten o'clock the streets were 
 
 crowded with people ; for this was a great 
 
 holiday in Bale — a day of athletic sports 
 
 and an evening of dancing, which we had 
 164
 
 FATHER RHINE 165 
 
 seen advertised all over Switzerland. It 
 was a pity we could not stop to see some- 
 thing of all this : but we were to sleep 
 that night at Freiburg in Breisgau, and 
 Bale was already like an oven for heat, 
 surpassing anything that we had hitherto 
 felt. This was the first of our absolutely 
 tropical days ; and all my memories of that 
 day seem to swim in a heat-mist. I re- 
 member lunching by the roadside, half a 
 dozen miles out of Bale, and watching the 
 villagers trudge in even from this distance 
 to the great festivities. Also, how a 
 ragged wayfarer came and stopped at the 
 next tree to ours, and walked round once 
 or twice like a dog on a hearthrug, and 
 then lay down to sleep the sleep of the 
 tramp, so indistinguishable outwardly from 
 that of the just. My next memory is 
 Istein : the road had divided, we had re- 
 fused to go over the hill, and had chosen 
 the way by the river instead ; and here we 
 found Istein on a steep slope, with quaint 
 old houses (one especially fine oriel sup- 
 ported on an oaken pillar) and above the 
 village a great cliff, on whose perpen- 
 dicular face a tiny hermitage and chapel 
 were scooped out, like a martin's nest 
 under the eaves. Then we rounded this 
 promontory of rock, and here we found 
 steep slopes of vine basking in the sun- 
 shine on our right, and down on our left
 
 i66 FATHER RHINE 
 
 the backwaters of the river, and the great 
 plain planted as thick as a cornfield with 
 rank upon rank of Lombardy poplars ; — 
 those same backwaters and poplars that 
 greet the waking eyes of the night-tra- 
 veller from Heidelberg to Bale, and tell 
 him that Switzerland is near. 
 
 It was somewhere here that, climbing 
 among the vines to take a photograph, I 
 rashly left my machine for ten minutes 
 in the sun, and found the handles so hot 
 that I could scarcely bear my hands on the 
 metal. I hurried onwards to catch up my 
 friend, and suddenly found him just out- 
 side a little village, mending a puncture, 
 with half a dozen children round him. 
 To my intense relief, he declined all offers 
 of assistance ; and I lay down on a bank 
 to watch the water at our feet, transparent 
 no longer, for the drought had cut it off 
 from the main current, but still green and 
 cool-looking, and not wholly forgetful of 
 its descent from mountain torrents ; with 
 golden masses of Aaron's rods grow- 
 ing among the reeds at its margin, and 
 great granite boulders half sunk in the 
 shallow pools, and then the vast sea of 
 poplars, and the summits of the Vosges 
 dimly visible through the throbbing heat- 
 mist beyond. The repair proved a tedious 
 job ; and the village children began to 
 transfer their attentions to me. They
 
 FATHER RHINE 167 
 
 took stock of my baggage, my lamp, my 
 tyres — and here a gimlet-eyed little girl 
 spied the number on my Dunlop, and 
 jumped to her own conclusions. " Du ! 
 komm 'mal her ! Herrje ! sieh 'mal wasch 
 dasch koschtet ! Dreiszig — . . . ach, nein 
 . . . drei hundert . . . vier und achtzig 
 tausend, sechs hundert zwei und flinfzig ! 
 . . . An— na ! " 
 
 *' 'St unmoglich ! " ^ objects a small 
 sceptic by her side ; nor will he be con- 
 vinced even by her appeal to the written 
 word. 
 
 " Well, just ask him, then." But the 
 village Didymus firmly declines to take 
 my word for such a fact, even supposing 
 me to be civilised enough to understand 
 and answer a question in plain German. 
 He would not even consent to the sug- 
 gestion that the units represented only 
 Pfennige. It was notorious that bicycles 
 could be bought in Bale for 1 000 marks, 
 more or less. A chorus of shrill girls' 
 voices arose to rebuke his unbelief; but 
 here — fortunate diversion! — Schultz began 
 to adjust his pump. 
 
 "Sieh — sieh! da will er aufblasen ! 
 . . . Lieschen — Grethe — Anna ! Ann . . . 
 nna ! Der Herr will aufblasen ! " And up 
 runs Grethe, with a poultice under her 
 chin, and Lieschen tottering under an 
 
 1 Impossible.
 
 i68 FATHER RHINE 
 
 enormous baby, and poor Anna limping 
 last of all, with her club foot and wizened 
 old-woman's face, just as Schultz has 
 finished. Her look of disappointment was 
 so pathetic that he screwed on again, and 
 professed to blow up for a few minutes 
 more, with a pretence of enormous effort, 
 and violent contortions of feature, which 
 first alarmed and then delighted the chil- 
 dren, as the joke filtered slowly into the 
 Teutonic brain. 
 
 There sat two Bauers in the bow-window 
 of an inn close by, looking over the river : 
 I went to ask them our way. Others sat 
 behind in the shade of the room, each with 
 his great glass mug in front of him, stolid, 
 monosyllabic, the picture of ruminating 
 content. One of these latter, as I was 
 pressing for something more precise in 
 the way of directions, called out from the 
 darkness of a further corner, " What does 
 he want ? What's he doing here ? " Those 
 at the window made him no answer, and to 
 me also only the curtest of replies, dropped 
 syllable by syllable with contemptuous 
 indifference. " All the fellows want is, 
 to go riding about all day — what on earth 
 does it matter which road they take .'' What 
 are they doing about here at all, at a time 
 when all honest men, who have done their 
 week's work under the sun, ought to be 
 sitting indoors with their beer ! " We
 
 FATHER RHINE 169 
 
 had noticed this feeling all along among 
 the populations through whom we passed y 
 it was evidently as suspicious to them that 
 a man should ride all day in the heat, as it 
 was that he should venture about after 
 dark among the filthy streets of a medieval 
 city, in those palmy days when all univer- 
 sity men were clerics, and when it proved 
 cheaper at Oxford to shoot an arrow at a 
 Proctor with intent to injure, than to keep 
 late hours at night. At this moment, I 
 could not help feeling that there was some- 
 thing in the Bauer's point of view, and that 
 it might be the part of a good citizen and 
 a wise tourist to go and sit in that cool 
 parlour, and watch the shadows creeping 
 from poplar to poplar, and the sun sinking 
 at last behind the Vosges, over towards 
 the land of our birth. Some such senti- 
 ment I even uttered out loud ; but my 
 companion received it in cold silence; in- 
 exorably he mounted his self-appointed 
 treadmill; and I mounted mine and followed 
 him.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 Die entsetzlichen Rheinschnaken. — Goethe. 
 
 Right, left, right left, right, left ! — good 
 heavens, what a sun ! . . . " Water, for 
 anguish of the solstice ! " . . . and here, to 
 be sure, is a village fountain, fresh from 
 nature's granite vaults in the Black Forest ; 
 and here again we drink with mouth and 
 eyes and arms, and carry off a kettle-full 
 for our tea under the cherry-orchard by 
 the roadside. After all, if one is to be 
 out of doors on a day like this, there is no 
 cooler place than the saddle. Here, even 
 in the shade, we sadly miss already the 
 ten-mile breeze which we had made for 
 ourselves as we rode : and then the flies — 
 great Beelzebub, the flies ! For we are 
 on the great Rhine plain again, where 
 these same harpies, a century ago, rurfled 
 even Goethe's Olympian composure, sting- 
 ing his young calves through the thin silk 
 stockings as he made love to his Friderike, 
 and goading him even to injurious doubts 
 of the Creator's beneficence, and to theolo- 
 gical controversy with his prospective 
 
 father-in-law. 'Hie worst of all was a 
 170
 
 FATHER RHINE 171 
 
 kind of horsefly, whose wounds ooze 
 blood after he has left you — the ten-horse- 
 power fly, as we called him, and half sus- 
 pected him of certain otherwise inexplic- 
 able punctures in our tyres. One of these 
 I now enticed to settle on my left hand, 
 holding in my right a pill box which my 
 nephew had given me at parting, for such 
 rare insects as I might be able to catch him. 
 He was a magnificent beast, now that I 
 came to look closer at him ; dark green on 
 the back, like an antique bronze ; his 
 breastplate and leg-armour of blue steel, 
 all damascened with arabesques in bur- 
 nished gold. He fixed me with a million 
 glittering eyes ; and I thought what a brute 
 beast I was to plot the destruction of so 
 superb a specimen of God's handiwork, for 
 the mere amusement of a scientific nephew, 
 and to the further corruption of the air in 
 his bedroom. But when the monster, after 
 preliminary gestures as though he were 
 tucking up his shirt-sleeves, began to let 
 down his proboscis for the work ; and when 
 I saw it made like a shipwright's auger, 
 with a screw at the end to penetrate, and 
 a hollow edge all the way down, to scoop 
 out the flesh — then my nerve failed me 
 utterly, and I struck too soon. Next 
 moment he was sitting Celaeno-like on 
 the edge of a leaf just out of my reach, 
 droning out an angry chant as of distant
 
 172 FATHER RHINE 
 
 bagpipes, and only interrupting himself 
 at intervals to put his claws to his nose. 
 Even at this distance I could see his million 
 eyes glittering with devilish malevolence ; 
 my flesh crept with horror, nor could I 
 relish my tea until I had driven him forth 
 from my presence with clods of earth. 
 
 Right, left, right, left, again ! Flatter 
 land now, all cornfields and orchards ; the 
 Vosges and Black Forest stretching ahead 
 on either hand into the grey distance ; the 
 same wilderness of poplars fringing river 
 and backwaters as far as the eye can see. 
 The sun sinks fast, but the air is scarcely 
 cooler yet ; at every fountain we have 
 stopped again for a moment to dip our face 
 and hands ; but now the road runs straight 
 on without heeding the villages j and we 
 see neither water nor immediate hopes of 
 supper without going out of our way. 
 The shadows of the poplars stretch to our 
 very feet ; the whole valley swims again 
 in a golden haze ; here and there, on some 
 white tower, the last light lingers still ; 
 but now the sun has touched the hills, and 
 now the last thin edge of gold has dis- 
 appeared. 
 
 " A whisper from the west 
 Shoots — ' add this to the rest, 
 Take it and try its worth ! here dies another day.' " 
 
 Yes, take it and try its worth ! Will 
 it be put to our account in the end that
 
 FATHER RHINE 173 
 
 we rode all these hours in the heat, when 
 we might have sat at an inn-window and 
 watched the Rhine run by? will it be set to 
 our credit as a piece of work honestly done, 
 like the stubbing of Thurnaby Waste? 
 Will it be counted to mine that I quell for 
 an hour the growing pangs of hunger, and 
 never suggest turning aside to one of these 
 inviting villages for supper, until at last we 
 come to Krotzingen, a miserable hamlet, 
 but right on our road ? Here are several 
 inns, but each less promising than the last, 
 until at length one sign holds out hopes of 
 a garden restaurant, watered perhaps by a 
 brook from the forest, as no doubt some 
 water must run through even this frowzy 
 village. We enter, and enquire for the 
 Gartenwirthschaft as per advertisement ; 
 it turns out to be a stuffy courtyard be- 
 tween barn and stable, with just one 
 ghmpse of green through an open gate- 
 way towards the plain ; and I doubt not 
 that my friend would have mounted at 
 once and ridden on, but for his sympathy 
 with the clamours of my inner man. We 
 ordered a supper of the best they could 
 raise us, and went out to look round the 
 village. 
 
 Travellers who content themselves with 
 the ordinary sights of the Rhine country 
 have very little idea of the wealth of quaint 
 mediaeval relics that are to be met with
 
 174 FATHER RHINE 
 
 among these out-of-the-way villages. Even 
 here we found, against the south wall of 
 the church, an elaborate calvary of the 
 fifteenth century, under its own little 
 vaulted roof — the garden of Gethsemane, 
 the olive-trees, the disciples sleeping, and 
 Christ wrestling in prayer with God ; 
 while Judas and his band peep over the 
 embattled wall to see whether their time 
 is come, and one who mocks at the praying 
 Christ is being pulled down from the wall 
 by a more reverent comrade. All this we 
 took in hastily, for the venom of the flies 
 was beginning to work again in poor 
 Schultz's veins, and my ravenous hunger 
 made me as impatient as he was ; and yet 
 it is just these glimpses, when the body is 
 so ill at ease, that leave the deepest (if not 
 the distinctest) impressions on the travel- 
 ler's mind — the first sight of a foreign port 
 after sea sickness — the dim landscapes that 
 greet one's eyes when the carriage window 
 " slowly glows a glimmering square," and 
 when, after an unquiet night in the train, 
 one would be ready to sell one's birthright 
 for a cup of hot coffee ! 
 
 Unfortunately, our Gartenwirthschaft 
 did not belie its first promise. Our neigh- 
 bours at the next table were drunk, most 
 Teutonically drunk, burning to know who 
 we were and what we were doing here, and 
 breathing forth beer and onions against us
 
 FATHER RHINE 175 
 
 for our slowness to gratify their curiosity. 
 The soup in which we had trusted was 
 not forthcoming •, cheese and eggs one can 
 generally reckon upon in a Rhenish village, 
 yet here the omelette suggested the con- 
 sulship of Plancus, and the cheese was as 
 rich in saponaceous constituents as any 
 American cheddar. The veal cutlets, how- 
 ever repellent to the sight, turned out, to 
 our surprise, just eatable ; but one's appe- 
 tite for meat is easily quenched amid un- 
 savoury surroundings ; and I was fain, after 
 all, to stay my hunger mainly with the solid 
 rounds of black bread which had come up 
 with the cheese. Again I thought of that 
 Celaeno-fly — 
 
 " Sed vos dira fames nostraeque injuria caedis 
 Ambesas subiget malis absumere mensas " 
 
 — and, contrary to my wont, I was glad to 
 leave the table and mount for our evening 
 ride. 
 
 There was still a crimson afterglow over 
 the Vosges as we started, and glimpses 
 between the trees of the same warm tints 
 upon the Rhine ; but this soon faded away ; 
 and, though we made what haste we could 
 in the dark, it was late before we reached 
 Freiburg. My old comfortable friend the 
 Rheinischer Hof was quite full, and the 
 hostess sent Boots with us in search of 
 other likely hotels ; but even so she feared 
 we might have some difficulty, since to-
 
 176 FATHER RHINE 
 
 morrow was the Assumption of the B.V.M, 
 This, I remarked, accounted for the quan- 
 tity of beer taken on board by our neigh- 
 bours at Krotzingen. Yes, she answered 
 serenely, the Assumption of the Blessed 
 Virgin was a great popular holiday ; we 
 might find it hard to get beds in Freiburg. 
 However, we found a room at last at the 
 Markgrafler Hof — good beds too, and not 
 too dear, with a branch of the Dreisam 
 rippling over its granite pebbles past the 
 windows of our passage.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 Die Deutche trinken zuviel bier. 
 
 This wrote an englisch Ass. 
 
 Whoever wrote this is a silly idiot, and doesn't know 
 English. 
 
 Mural Inscriptions at Freiburg im Breisgau. 
 
 August !<,. 
 
 We wished to start early this morning and 
 get most of our riding done before the 
 worst heat of the day ; but we found time 
 to look into the Cathedral first, and found 
 it crowded for the early mass ; broad beams 
 of sunshine slanting in like a Jacob's ladder 
 through the eastern windows of the choir, 
 and falling in a glory on the heads of 
 the worshippers. The whole square was 
 thronged with peasants in their holiday cos- 
 tumes ; and we met fresh groups pouring 
 in by every street as we rode out of the 
 town towards Strassburg. Many times 
 we looked back at the cathedral spire 
 and the grey hills behind, softer and 
 fainter each time in the morning mist ; 
 but presently our road ran into a forest, 
 and we saw Freiburg no more. After a 
 few miles, the land of wood and streams 
 
 K '77
 
 178 FATHER RHINE 
 
 changed again into a land of cornfields 
 and orchards ; and the dull haze crept up 
 into the sky, which grew grey and pale 
 with mist and heat. The first two vil- 
 lages were full of worshippers waiting for 
 church ; all the unmarried women dressed 
 in bright blue, with wreaths of white 
 flowers in their hair, in honour of the 
 Virgin. It was a strange and pathetic thing 
 to see a young mistress, in black silk gown 
 and cap, followed by some wrinkled old 
 handmaiden decked out like a child in a 
 staring blue frock, of a generation ago, 
 visibly faded in spite of all the care with 
 which it had been locked up for 364 days 
 of every year, while the artificial jasmine 
 in her grizzled hair had taken the tint of 
 old ivory. The men were all in Sunday 
 black ; mahogany-complexioned, with keen 
 features that looked more French than Ger- 
 man ; one of them with three medals on 
 his coat, hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed, a 
 splendid picture of a man. 
 
 Schultz's tyre went seriously wrong 
 again in the hottest part of the road ; 
 and it was nearly midday before we 
 reached Alt Breisach, a mass of cathe- 
 dral towers and crumbling walls and steep 
 red roofs crowded together on a rock by 
 the side of the Rhine. Here the tyre 
 went wrong again ; and I had ample 
 leisure to take stock of the town and
 
 FATHER RHINE 179 
 
 the river, and the soldiers coming in from 
 their morning duty j one party carried a 
 man on a stretcher, who had just been 
 struck down by heat - apoplexy. Neu 
 Breisach, on the left bank, is a cruel 
 mass of earthworks and brick walls, with 
 half a dozen houses huddled together in- 
 side, round a tiny square that glows like 
 a furnace ; every door and shutter closed 
 to keep out the heat ; and indeed we find 
 the same in all the villages now. The 
 heat is probably responsible for a third 
 bad breakdown of the tyre, of which I 
 take advantage to creep under a tree and 
 prepare lunch for the two of us ; then 
 on again to Colmar, whence we must 
 now take the train for Strassburg. We 
 had hoped to ride to Rappoltsweiler and 
 see the three castles ; but these break- 
 downs have run away with all our spare 
 time. 
 
 There are beautiful old houses at Col- 
 mar, and at least one very fine church ; 
 and there is the hottest railway-platform 
 on which it was ever my fate to broil. 
 Not that we could not find seats in the 
 shade ; but the heat seemed to float in 
 upon the air, and ooze up from the asphalt, 
 and beat down from the roof. We called 
 for coffee, and watched a fat man oppo- 
 site finishing his lunch ; he had got some 
 Gruyere, and called for butter. " Butter
 
 i8o FATHER RHINE 
 
 ist keine da," answered the languid hand- 
 maiden with a shrug of her shoulders ; 
 " sie thlit' uns halt verlaufen." ^ And in- 
 deed it was so ; the cheese ran grease upon 
 the plate, and our FalstafFs own too solid 
 flesh was melting visibly ; we ourselves, 
 in spite of our last fortnight's training, 
 were poured out like water in that exceed- 
 ing heat. It was almost as hot, and a great 
 deal stuffier, in the train ; and we were too 
 languid even to notice the three castles of 
 Rappoltsweiler as we passed. Only one 
 thing I remember ; half a dozen small 
 children up to their necks in a running 
 brook, one of them with long yellow hair 
 like a mermaid — the only creatures we had 
 seen looking cool and comfortable since 
 about nine o'clock this morning. 
 
 We repaired at Strassburg to the well- 
 remembered inn on the Place Kleber, and 
 took the same upper room that looks out 
 over treetops and houses upon the Cathe- 
 dral spire. Then tea under the awning 
 outside on the Place, and a chat meanwhile 
 with the hostess — but a new hostess this 
 time. By this time we had recovered 
 energy enough for the Cathedral, where 
 we found the evening shadows already 
 creeping half way up the forest of statues 
 on the western portals ; and, to our dis- 
 appointment, all services were over for the 
 
 ^ We haven't got any — it would simply melt away.
 
 FATHER RHINE i8i 
 
 day, and the whole building shut up. But 
 we were able to go up the tower and out 
 upon the platform, and gaze our fill upon 
 the steep grey roofs below us, with their 
 myriads of dormer windows, and storks' 
 nests on the broad chimneys. The smoke 
 of the town rose in a transparent mist be- 
 tween us and the setting sun ; the Vosges 
 and Black Forest stretched to the farthest 
 horizon through fading shades of blue and 
 grey ; here and there a stretch of river 
 gleamed among the lines of trees. 
 
 We had fetched our letters from the 
 post on the way up ; and here we sat down 
 and enjoyed them, looking up every now 
 and then from our reading to watch the 
 great sun that was hastening away towards 
 where the writers were. 
 
 '* What a wonderful thing this post is ! " 
 exclaimed Schultz, for the dozenth time 
 on our tour. " Here I have at my service 
 all these trains and steamboats, with their 
 army of stokers and guards, clerks, sorters, 
 and postmen — I put on a paltry twopence- 
 halfpenny — or a penny for a postcard — in it 
 goes at this end — " 
 
 ** And out it comes at the other with a 
 fine for the recipient. That's what my 
 sister writes me about the postcard I sent 
 my nephew, * S^- ^^ P^y> ^'^'^ so.i'of course 
 I refused to take it in.'" 
 
 "No, honour bright, I do think it's a
 
 i82 FATHER RHINE 
 
 wonderful thing, and we aren't half grateful 
 enough for it. Here I am six or seven 
 hundred miles away from home, and yet 
 almost daily I have the pleasure of learning 
 every little thing that goes on there — a 
 budget worth all the printed stuff in the 
 world — and all for twopence-halfpenny ! 
 . . . Hm, hm ! . . . and so I gave her 
 warning; she has alivays been more trouble 
 than she was worth. . . . Monday very 
 hoty and now cold again ; all got colds . . . a 
 great deal of measles about noiv ; hope ours 
 won't catch them . . . such a fright yester- 
 day ! . . . temperature I03. . . • Doctor says 
 a chill on the liver. . . . Hul-lo ! " 
 
 "Well, what?" I enquired, after a 
 pause. 
 
 ** Oh, never mind," he answered drily, 
 folding the letter up. 
 
 " Sorry ; I didn't mean to pry into private 
 affairs." 
 
 " Don't be an ass ! . . . But I can't 
 make out how it can be. . . . Didn't 
 I put stamps on that letter at Maul- 
 bronn ? " 
 
 " I supplied you with them." 
 
 " And I don't think it can have been over- 
 weight, for I put double on it ; and yet 
 here my wife writes, * We had to pay 
 eightpence for your last letter, and three 
 of the children's postcards have been five- 
 pence each.' "
 
 W- -?i - 
 
 183
 
 i84 FATHER RHINE 
 
 I had been thinking it over after my 
 sister's letter ; we had evidently put our 
 letters in at a Wurttemberg post-office 
 with stamps brought from Rhenish Prussia 
 and Baden, relying on the fact that all be- 
 longed alike to the German Empire — a 
 mistake which I ought to have remembered 
 and guarded against. Upon me, as the 
 responsible person, Schultz now opened 
 the floodgates of his wrath ; in vain I 
 reminded him that, after all, a shilling or 
 two more or less would still be an absurdly 
 small sum for the multitude of officials 
 whom he had just been reckoning up — let 
 alone the value of the budget received. 
 He pocketed his letters moodily ; and this 
 time, for once, it was he who first remem- 
 bered that it must be time to go and look 
 for dinner. We took the tram to a garden 
 restaurant by the river side at Kehl, where 
 huge poplars stood dark between us and 
 the afterglow, and the water was shot 
 with pinks and purples that lingered on 
 until the last colours had faded from the 
 sky. 
 
 Even our convivial neighbours were 
 charmed for a few minutes into silence 
 by the faint tinkling of a far off bell — 
 that ** squilla di lontano," whose sound 
 Dante has connected for ever with the 
 traveller's thoughts of home. But the 
 twilight is briefer here than in England,
 
 FATHER RHINE 185 
 
 and the sky was already quite black in the 
 spaces between the stars, when the Cathe- 
 dral clock warned us that it was time to 
 go back to bed, if we meant to be up before 
 sunrise next day.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 " Among Topics or outward Medicines, none are 
 more precious than Baths." — Anatomy of Melancholy. 
 
 August 1 6. 
 
 Poor Schultz slept but feverishly this night, 
 suffering worse agonies than ever from the 
 flies. The barometer at Bale had given us 
 such certainty of fine weather, that we had 
 sent on our luggage straight to Worms ; 
 and, though he now realised that his stock- 
 ings were far less protection to his ankles 
 than a pair of loose trousers would have 
 been, there was for the present no help for 
 it short of buying a pair of German pan- 
 taloons — a remedy from which his soul 
 shrank. Meanwhile, his poor ankles were 
 throbbing masses of swellings and irrita- 
 tion, and the back of one hand showed 
 such serious signs of festering that he 
 accepted quite humbly a small bottle of 
 Izal which I produced from my tool-bag, 
 and forgot this once to chaff me about the 
 " White Knight." 
 
 The half-clad misshapen scullion, all 
 head and no body, woke us punctually 
 at 4 A.M., and took our tip with a look 
 
 i86
 
 FATHER RHINE 187 
 
 of grateful surprise — it is one of the plea- 
 sures of these unpretending hostelries, that 
 the modest tip which one's slender purse 
 is glad enough to spare for real services 
 rendered, gives a genuine visible pleasure 
 to the recipient. The morning was de- 
 liciously cool — in fact, before we had 
 finished our breakfast under the trees by 
 the canal, we were glad to stamp about 
 a little for warmth's sake, for the sun had 
 even then only just begun to peep out of 
 the Rhine mists. We had tried to get 
 something warm on the way, seeing one 
 or two early taverns open in the suburbs ; 
 but all alike were deboshed and half-asleep 
 still, with the stale beer and schnaps of 
 last night's orgie slopping about, and bar- 
 maids that only raised their heavy eyelids 
 a little in dumb surprise, when we talked 
 of hot coffee. The native goes to his 
 work on the strength of a glass of schnaps. 
 A mile or so before the first village, we 
 had to get off and walk among fresh-laid 
 stones, and here a man in black caught us 
 up and entered into conversation. He was 
 going to this village, his old home, to 
 arrange for the funeral of the last of four 
 sons, all carried off by lung-disease. And 
 this, the youngest, had always been so 
 stout and healthy looking — but he was too 
 stout ; he had too much blood. A sudden 
 bleeding at the lungs had attacked him.
 
 i88 FATHER RHINE 
 
 apparently in the midst of health, and in 
 twenty-four hours he was dead. Perhaps 
 the baker's life had not been favourable to 
 them ; yet he, the father, was a baker, 
 hale and hearty still. But his poor wife 
 had died young. It is sad, all the same, 
 to have had four great strong sons, and 
 now to bury the last of them ... it is 
 sad, all the same. He parted from us at 
 the entrance to the village, shaking our 
 hands heartily as if to thank us for the 
 sympathetic silence with which we had 
 listened to him — we could do no more. 
 
 The road led through frequent woods 
 to Marienthal and Hagenau. The flies 
 were worse than ever here under the 
 trees — not that they attacked me much, 
 but poor Schultz's agony was almost 
 greater than he could bear. This day 
 we met more travelling apprentices than 
 on any other ; barefooted, with their boots 
 slung over one shoulder, and the scanty 
 bandana bundle over the other, they 
 trudged on stolidly through the dust and 
 heat, seeking work from town to town. 
 We bought a pamphlet and some pewter 
 tokens from the pilgrims' booths at Marien- 
 thal ; but the spick-and-span church did 
 not tempt us to go in and look at the 
 miraculous image of the Virgin. Hagenau 
 is an ancient town on the edge of the great 
 forest, with walls built by Barbarossa in
 
 FATHER RHINE 189 
 
 the twelfth century, and the usual quaint 
 timber houses, and a very line church, 
 mostly Romanesque, gloomily gorgeous 
 with rich frescoes and jewelled glass. The 
 long ride through the forest of Hagenau 
 was delightful to me, but Schultz had 
 again to do battle with his old enemies 
 the flies. At Surburg, we bought a 
 pennyworth of plums from the trees — 
 more than we could comfortably carry 
 with us — and sat down for lunch and a 
 siesta in the shadow of a cemetery just 
 outside the village. We found we had 
 bought a good deal more lunch than our 
 appetite warranted : so I offered the 
 decent remains of our ham and sausage 
 to a poor woman who came past, toiling 
 at a heavy wheelbarrow. I shall never 
 forget the undisguised loathing with which 
 she refused it, turning her head and 
 motioning me away with outstretched 
 hand ; now at last we realised what un- 
 mitigated tramps we must appear, to the 
 common folk at least. 
 
 The heat had been tremendous to-day, 
 and we felt it most after our siesta, during 
 the ride from Surburg to Weissenburg, 
 over a pretty road, but one which bobbed 
 up and down among the outlying spurs of 
 the Vosges, and could boast no shade but 
 that of the usual fruit-trees. At Weissen- 
 burg, we adjourned at once to a little inn
 
 190 FATHER RHINE 
 
 opposite the station, and sat there for half 
 an hour drinking soda and milk, and gradu- 
 ally cooling down to something like mere 
 fever-heat. We found the old town pic- 
 turesque even beyond our expectations, 
 with crumbling towers and walls ; the 
 river running through the streets, under 
 the irregular white gables of real mediaeval 
 houses ; a magnificent Gothic church of red 
 sandstone, with ancient glass in the win- 
 dows ; and behind the town a spur of the 
 Vosges, whose forests come down almost 
 to the walls. It was under cover of 
 these woods that the Crown Prince's forces 
 massed on the night of the 3rd of August 
 1870, and burst out at dawn upon the too 
 confident French, who were cooking their 
 breakfast when the first shells fell into 
 their camp. Here, since there was a river, 
 it must be possible to bathe again ; and in 
 fact we learnt that we had the choice of 
 two baths — a public establishment close 
 by, or a private one half a mile off. We 
 elected the latter, and found a footpath 
 that led us up from the Abbey church, 
 and past an old water-gate, into the 
 meadows above the town, where wo pre- 
 sently came across a characteristic German 
 country inn, half-mill, half-hostelry, with a 
 little shed for bathers near the dam. Here 
 we paid only a penny each for our towel 
 and private cell, all as neat and clean as
 
 FATHER RHINE 191 
 
 could be. No doubt they calculate that 
 he who comes to bathe remains to booze ; 
 and it was evident that this was usually 
 the case ; but they made no attempt to 
 press drink upon us, and took it quite 
 naturally when we gave up our towels 
 and went straight away. 
 
 Poor Schultz's legs were a terrible 
 sight in that cell, and my heart bled for 
 him; yet I hastened in self-defence to 
 plunge first into the water, lest I should 
 find it so many degrees the hotter after 
 his entrance ; I fully expected to see it 
 hiss when he dipped his ankles in, and 
 indeed, at this distance of time, I am not 
 at all sure that it did not. It was already, 
 they told us, at 19" Reaumur, which 
 would correspond to about 75° Fahren- 
 heit ; but it was heavenly all the same, and 
 we only mourned to think that in half an 
 hour's time we should be as hot as before. 
 
 Schultz went to get shaved after our 
 bath, and I to forage for pate de foie gras. 
 We had meant to allow ourselves this 
 extravagance at Strassburg, but all the 
 shops had been shut on that holiday 
 evening. Indifferent as a rule to the 
 needs of the llesh, Schultz does frankly 
 admit to a weakness for this particular 
 delicacy, and exhorted me to leave no 
 stone unturned while we were yet in 
 Alsace, and there was some chance of
 
 192 FATHER RHINE 
 
 success. I enquired diligently, and was 
 directed at last to a certain confectioner's 
 — one of those shops which still survive 
 in Cathedral cities and suchlike old-world 
 places — long established, too proud to 
 advertise themselves with new shop- 
 front and big show-windows, but supplying 
 the best article at a not too extravagant 
 price. So I went in and had a very 
 pleasant chat with the presiding genii of 
 the establishment, a mother of about 
 sixty and a daughter of about forty, 
 strikingly like each other, with handsome 
 dark grey eyes and low purring voices, 
 and dignified old-world manners. They 
 brought me up their smallest size of pate 
 from so cold a cellar that the case felt 
 like a delicious lump of ice in my hands j 
 also, from the same storehouse, a bottle 
 of kirsch — " le vrai kirsch de la Foret 
 Noire," which they bought every year in 
 considerable quantities, mainly for the 
 use of their relations, who were officers 
 in the French army. They spoke French, 
 as the banker had done when he changed 
 my £^ note : they evidently did not care 
 to go into reminiscences of the war, but 
 the younger lady explained to me the 
 direction of the Geisberg — I could not 
 fail to recognise it by the three poplars — 
 "mais c'est une bien triste histoire ! " she 
 added, with a shrug of her shoulders.
 
 FATHER RHINE 193 
 
 We went back to our little inn-garden 
 by the station, and there ordered bread 
 and beer wherewith to enjoy our pate. 
 The mother was still ironing — she had no 
 doubt been at it all day long — under a 
 sort of large open shed, with her elder 
 daughters helping her or sewing at the 
 same table. The father came round for 
 a moment with one of the sons from the 
 barn where he had been unloading a cart 
 full of fresh-dried sheaves ; they sat down 
 for two or three minutes together, and 
 then rose up and went each to his own 
 work again. It was a sight that at once 
 heartened and rebuked us, to see this 
 busy untiring housewife — she didn't look 
 strong, poor woman, but how could 
 she be, with this dozen or more of 
 children ! — but to see how she kept to 
 her work through all this heat, only 
 pausing now and then to wipe the beads 
 from her forehead ; and how beautifully 
 neat she kept all her brood in their clean 
 print dresses, down to the very youngest 
 that was playing with the baby in its 
 cradle. 
 
 We started for Speyer happily enough ; 
 the sun was just down, and the Geisberg 
 with its memorial poplars stood out dark 
 against the sky. There was only one old 
 Bauer in our compartment, a man betweeu 
 sixty and seventy, big and rawbonedj
 
 194 FATHER RHINE 
 
 with a face like an enormous monkey ; 
 as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, with 
 broad cheek-bones and enormous ears, 
 and perfect white teeth in his wide 
 mouth, and little eyes that puckered 
 almost out of sight when he smiled. We 
 asked him about the battle, and plied him 
 with cigars — a rather small and dainty 
 brand, which he accepted with great 
 condescension, and despatched in half a 
 dozen huge puffs, and accepted again 
 with a half shrug of his shoulders. But 
 as to the battle he was communicative 
 enough. Yes, that was the Geisberg, 
 where the thickest of the iight had raged. 
 He had seen a good deal of it himself, 
 from his own fields where he had just 
 gone out to work — and the noise of the 
 cannon ! . . . 
 
 Then he hadn't fought in it himself .'' 
 
 No ; he was already in the reserves by 
 then ; but he had fought in ^66. 
 
 In ^66 ? But where did the French 
 fight in '66 ? 
 
 He wasn't a Frenchman, but a Bavarian; 
 his farm was over there, some two miles 
 away from the frontier. This little 
 stream here was the frontier. 
 
 "Then you had lots of French friends 
 about .? " 
 
 ** Oh yes, plenty ! There was my 
 sister, for instance ; she was married in
 
 FATHER RHINE 195 
 
 Weissenburg, and of course she was 
 French. Look at this house now " (a 
 cottage some two hundred yards away 
 from the station). " I went there after 
 the battle, and saw the dead piled like 
 logs of wood in the garden and round the 
 house, one on the top of another. . . . 
 And that next farmhouse, there ; they 
 picked up two hundred shakos in that 
 farmyard alone ! . . . Look at this great 
 liat field out towards the Geisberg. 
 That's where the French cavalry came 
 across ; they came springing across down 
 that gentle slope — but they had to go 
 back ; they couldn't face the bullets. . . . 
 I tell you, the French fought well, but 
 the Prussians came down as thick as 
 snowflakes, and they fought well too." 
 ** You found that out in ^66, of course." 
 " Oh yes, in '66 ! " He made a wry face, 
 and in two or three puffs the rest of the 
 cigar melted away. I offered him another, 
 but he thanked me and said the train 
 was just at his station. He got out with 
 a friendly farewell, and left us to ruminate 
 on the life of these border folk, who till 
 their fields up to the very edge of a little 
 stream that separates them from another 
 country, and rise up one morning as 
 usual ; and behold instead of work a 
 battle, and a harvest of dead men's shakos 
 in your neighbour's farmyard !
 
 196 FATHER RHINE 
 
 Three or four others got into our stuffy 
 little compartment at this station ; we found 
 the heat stifling, and twice we had to 
 change trains ; but we reached Speyer at 
 last, at about ten o'clock. Here again, 
 as at Freiburg, we found all the better 
 inns crowded, and were fain to content 
 ourselves at last with a most unangelic 
 " Engel," and a bedroom exposed to such 
 influences as old Burton reckons among 
 the prime causes of melancholy, viz., 
 those of a stableyard under the windows. 
 Of all our cheap lodgings during the whole 
 tour, this alone was in any degree nasty ; 
 and even here, though we lay down in 
 some trepidation, and nothing but extreme 
 weariness had kept us from passing on to 
 try our chances elsewhere, yet the bed- 
 clothes were clean to the eye, and no 
 hidden beasts of prey fell upon us while 
 we slept.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 " Every Englishman seems to be born with the 
 instinct to get away from his home, and yet at the 
 same time to love it better than the strange town or 
 country in which he seeks his fortune." 
 
 Neues IViener Tageblatt, I 858. 
 
 There is a fine old gate at Speyer, and 
 a cathedral which for nearly five centuries 
 was the burial-place of the German emper- 
 ors ; but everything else of any antiquity 
 was destroyed by the soldiers of Louis 
 XIV., and again by the armies of the 
 French Revolution, who threw the Im- 
 perial ashes into the Rhine. We started 
 at leisure, since we had little more than 
 twenty miles to ride ; but the day was 
 even hotter than any of our previous ex- 
 periences, and poor Schultz could only 
 just endure his ankles by stuffing his 
 stockings with fresh cool leaves. I took 
 oiF my socks at the same time and stuffed 
 my shoes with grass ; an arrangement 
 which seemed to work admirably, though 
 Schultz told me later on, with malicious 
 glee, that he had watched me riding 
 through the streets of Worms with a 
 conspicuous frill of grass round each ankle 
 
 »97
 
 198 FATHER RHINE 
 
 and several inches of bare flesh also vis- 
 ible. A little way before we got to 
 Mannheim, a native cyclist picked us up 
 and stuck close behind me — for the road 
 was only practicable for one abreast. He 
 was so anxious to get up a conversation 
 that he kept overlapping my wheel, and 
 once or twice even touched it, with his 
 own. He was an engineer in one of the 
 large works at Ludwigshafen ; I need not 
 speak German to him, for, though he had 
 never been in England, yet he could spik- 
 engleesh a little •, just as, without having 
 learnt it since more than one month, he 
 could already ride the wheel pretty well, 
 as we might see. I asked him one or two 
 questions about the road to Worms, and 
 had just begun to realise that it was 
 hopeless to make him understand in Eng- 
 lish, when I heard a great clatter behind 
 me, and looked round to see him grovelling 
 in the dust, and an old market-woman run- 
 ning to pick him up. 
 
 We got our left luggage out of the 
 office at Mannheim, and put it in charge 
 of the boat officials, who warned us that 
 the boat would start late to-day j then we 
 started again for Worms. A stall in the 
 market-place invited us to alight and drink 
 milk and soda at about i|d. a pint; and 
 here, with incautious forethought, I bought 
 eggs and butter for our lunch at Worms,
 
 FATHER RHINE 199 
 
 and tied the paper parcel behind my tool- 
 bag, feeling too lazy to pack it in any 
 other way. The ride to Worms is dull 
 enough ; we could only say that, after all, 
 it was a few degrees better than the train. 
 We went round the town, and then bought 
 fruit and came down to the waterside to 
 cook our lunch on the grass, under a great 
 poplar avenue. Here, I was more pained 
 than surprised to find that my butter and 
 eggs had been jolted and baked into a 
 rudimentary omelette, part of which had 
 trickled down upon my camera-case, but 
 the greater part, fortunately, into the road. 
 Schultz enjoyed the joke far too thoroughly 
 to regret the loss of part of our lunch ; and 
 indeed it was almost too hot to eat, and 
 we were in a hurry to get the luggage we 
 had sent on from Bale, whereby we might 
 enjoy another change of clothes. I draw a 
 veil here over my friend's raptures at casting 
 off those Nessus-stockings and getting into 
 cool clean flannels that no longer left his 
 ankles defenceless to every fresh tormentor. 
 It was plain from what they told us at 
 the office that our Netherlands boat would 
 not bring us to Mainz before the post- 
 office closed ; so we made up our minds 
 to take the Koln-Dlisseldorfer, which was 
 just about due. After waiting half an 
 hour or so, we began to doubt whether 
 even this would do, and went along the
 
 200 FATHER RHINE 
 
 quay to make fresh enquiries at the office. 
 The ginger-headed youth was sitting at a 
 desk in his shirt sleeves, with papers spread 
 in front of him. Both windows were open, 
 but his face and bare arms ghstened with 
 perspiration, and the smoke of his cigar 
 curled straight upwards. I tapped at the 
 little glass wicket to attract his attention ; 
 he turned his head languidly for a moment, 
 and then looked out of the window again, 
 with a faint puff at his cigar. I tapped 
 again. " Wollen Sie so gut sein . . ." 
 but he did not deign to look round this 
 time. I was contemplating stronger mea- 
 sures, when I heard a voice behind me. 
 "Won't come to the window, won't he? 
 I can see he wants some plain English, he 
 does ! " The words came from a tall, 
 sporting - looking youth in a very stiff 
 straw hat and very high collars, and a 
 yellow homespun suit, with bright blue 
 bird's-eye waistcoat. He opened the office 
 door and walked straight in, and I after 
 him. 
 
 " I say, when's this Damp Ship of yours 
 coming up for Mayns ? " 
 
 " It is to start at two-twenty." 
 " I know that ; but when is it going to 
 start .'' that's what I want to know." 
 *' The boat is sometimes a little late." 
 " Well, look here, I've missed one train 
 already, counting on your Damp Ship "
 
 FATHER RHINE 201 
 
 ** It is one word in German," remarked 
 the clerk, " and we call it Dampfschiff " 
 
 " Well, I call it a Dampfschame, and if 
 
 . . ." but at this moment we heard 
 
 Schultz calling out that the boat was in 
 sight, and the newcomer followed me out, 
 growling as he went about DampfschiiF and 
 Dampfschame and Dampfdutchmen. 
 
 It turned out to be a false alarm, but we 
 found Schultz philosophising with a glass 
 of beer under the inn verandah, and our 
 friend forgot his wrath at the sight. " Get 
 me a glass, Miss ! " he called out to the 
 wide-eyed German waitress, "and another 
 for this gentleman." She understood his 
 gestures, if not his words ; and he sat 
 down with a sigh of content, and begged 
 me to introduce my friend and myself. 
 His own name was Jackson — William 
 Burrows Jackson — and he would feel 
 honoured if we would allow him to stand 
 drinks all round. He liked to see English 
 faces — though my friend had a rather Ger- 
 man-looking hat, if we would excuse the 
 remark. Schultz apologised for the un- 
 patriotic shape of his straw ; he had chosen 
 it for protection against the heat. 
 
 " Well, yes, it is hot for these kind of 
 clothes. I feel a bit warm myself; but 1 
 shall be in a warmer place before long, I 
 can tell you . . . No, no, not that " (catch- 
 ing a smile on our faces) -, " but I hail from
 
 202 FATHER RHINE 
 
 Argentina, I do ; and I guess I shan't be 
 long getting back there, now. I like this 
 here beer, but I don't like their nightshirts 
 and their other ways. Here, miss! another 
 glass of the same ! " And William Bur- 
 rows Jackson wiped his moustache with a 
 sigh. 
 
 " But you're English, aren't you ? " 
 ** Down to the backbone ; only I ain't 
 ever been over here before. Father's got a 
 big ranche out there; went out in 1 8 — •, 
 found there was nothing to do at home ; 
 he bowled for Rugby, father did, only he 
 didn't seem to find anything to do in Eng- 
 land, so he's been out there ever since, 
 except when he came home to get married. 
 It don't do to marry those Spanish women. 
 . . . Yes, they're mostly Spanish round 
 us; but lue don't trouble ourselves about 
 them. Father don't talk Spanish ; I don't 
 neither, except you must know a word or 
 two for the cowboys and that sort of thing. 
 Mother, she talks a little ; but when they 
 come to us, they talk English fast enough ; 
 they always can if they like, so why the 
 Dickens should we go and take the trouble 
 to learn theirs ? That's what I always say 
 to the Spanish chaps, and they can't find 
 anything to say agen it. . . . Look at that 
 fellow in the office here ; what did you get 
 out of him with your German ? Now, they 
 understand English, they do ; they know
 
 FATHER RHINE 203 
 
 that means business. I've been about a 
 good deal these three months, and I never 
 cared a blow about any foreign language 
 except once, and that was in Paris. ... I 
 say, you fellows aren't getting on with 
 your liquor ! Here, Miss ! " 
 
 We assured him that he mustn't mind 
 us ; and I asked him how he had liked 
 Paris. 
 
 " Oh, middling ; that ain't half a bad 
 town of theirs, if it wasn't for the foreigners. 
 I don't like foreigners. But I chummed up 
 one day with a young chap that had been in 
 England — Jewls Dewboy his name was — 
 he gave me his card and wanted me to go 
 and put up at his hotel in the Quarter 
 Latin — I came across him outside the Pal- 
 lyroyl and stood him a deejewner. . . . 
 Oh yes, I do talk a little French some- 
 times J that pleases them ; it's like with 
 the cowboys. Besides, that ain't any meal 
 that you can call with a decent English 
 name, a deejewner isn't — same as this 
 Damp Ship — you can't call it like an 
 honest steamboat ! ... So we arranged 
 to meet again and have dinner at the same 
 place j and he turned up right enough and 
 another fellow with him, that he called 
 Asheel. He had a cycle with him this 
 time, and wanted me to look and see what 
 was the matter with it ; and I said I'd never 
 been on one. And they said they thought
 
 204 FATHER RHINE 
 
 every Englishman could ride. * So he 
 can,' says I, ' if he wants to.' You may 
 bet your boots I wasn't going to give the 
 old country away like that ! They only 
 laughed, and I said to Jewls — 'Look 
 here,' says I, ' I've never had my legs 
 across one of them machines in my life -, 
 but what'll you bet I don't get straight up 
 on yours and ride a hundred yards ? ' He 
 only laughed again, and said something in 
 French to Asheel, and he laughed too ; so 
 I up and caught hold of the handles, and 
 shinned up somehow, and the brute shied 
 and ran right across the road all among the 
 cabs and buses ; but I stuck on by the skin 
 of my teeth, and it landed me a good way 
 down on the other pavement, with the 
 drivers pulling up their beasts right on 
 their haunches and yelling at me like mad. 
 So now I knew a bit how it worked ; and 
 I got up again, and kept the whole thing 
 well in hand this time, and came back to 
 the proper side, and right into a fat 
 foreigner that was slinking along close 
 by the pavement, and buckled up his 
 front wheel and came right off again my- 
 self. He looked at his wheel and began 
 
 to jabber ; and I said, 'What the were 
 
 you doing on your wrong side ? ' and then 
 Jewls and Asheel came up, and I said, 
 
 ' Ask him what the he was doing on 
 
 his wrong side ! ' They said he wasn't ;
 
 '^1^
 
 206 FATHER RHINE 
 
 everybody kept to their right in France ; 
 and the fat beggar grabbed me by the arm, 
 and shook his fist in my face — regular 
 blubbering, he was — I'd have given him 
 a couple of quid and welcome if he'd been 
 civil, but he went on cussing at me so, I 
 said I'd be shot if I would ! Just then 
 there came a big crowd all down the 
 street, shouting and waving flags and 
 hustling the people all off the road ; and 
 I knew what that was, because I'd seen it 
 every day in Paris, and read all about it in 
 the papers. So just as they came up to 
 us, I shook the old fellow's hand off, and 
 yelled out ' Conspewey Dreyfus ! Con- 
 spewey Dreyfus ! ' and knocked his hat 
 off. One of the beggars trampled on it 
 and caught the old fellow by the collar ; 
 and I saw the fat was on the fire, so I just 
 shinned off round the corner as fast as I 
 could. To tell the truth, I didn't feel very 
 comfortable just then ; they did go for him 
 something cruel, and I thought they might 
 find out their mistake and go for me in- 
 stead ; so I took care to get on a good 
 way before I stopped. There was a sort 
 of square, with a railway station at one 
 end, and a big statue of a woman with 
 
 a ribbon bonnet on her head " 
 
 " The statue of Strassburg .'' " 
 " Ah, then that explains it all ! I sat 
 down outside a hotel there, and had a good
 
 FATHER RHINE 207 
 
 honest dinner ; and the waiter'd just gone 
 off to get me change for half a sov., when 
 who should I see but Jewls, sneaking into 
 the other corner of the square with one of 
 those French bobbies after him, and look- 
 ing all round. They couldn't see me, be- 
 cause I was in a corner behind one of those 
 tubs ; but they went inside the first hotel 
 they came to, and then out I slipped, just 
 across into the station — it wasn't two steps 
 — and stuck down a fiver and said to the 
 ticket clerk, * Charing Cross ; first single ! ' 
 Weil, the fellow jabbered at me ; but I 
 stuck to my guns, and said, 'First single 
 to Charing Cross, and look sharp, please ' 
 — for all the bells were ringing, and fellows 
 running through with bags in their hands, 
 and I was afraid every moment of seeing 
 Jewls after me. So at last the clerk 
 shrugged his shoulders, and gave me a 
 ticket and a whole lot of change ; and I 
 hadn't hardly scooped it all up, when a 
 fellow comes and catches me by the arm 
 and bundles me into the train ; and then I 
 
 knew I was safe enough " 
 
 " Here we are at last," cried Schultz, 
 rising from his seat ; and there, sure 
 enough, was our boat coming round the 
 corner. William Burrows Jackson clung 
 to me and besought me to take his ticket 
 for him. *' Look here — I've got a pocket 
 chock full of money that none of these
 
 208 FATHER RHINE 
 
 beggars will look at — I don't know how 
 the deuce I came by it all ! They're most 
 awful liars and swindlers out here ; they 
 almost beat the Spaniards for that. Just 
 fancy their saying that this Damp Ship was 
 going to start at 2.20 ! "
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 " Hanc ego praetuleiim toti nostalgicus orbi." 
 
 Horatius ad mum Maritorum. 
 
 I CAME back with the tickets to find our 
 new friend continuing his story to Schultz. 
 The train had, of course, landed him next 
 morning at Strassburg, where he had been 
 taken in hand by a traveller in the wine 
 trade, Karl by name, who had begun 
 explaining to him how he could get back 
 to England. There was a train in three- 
 quarters of an hour — " but I said, ' Not if 
 I know it, young man ! I want a good 
 bath and breakfast first, and not one of 
 your roU-and-coifee breakfasts either.' So 
 he took me to a good slap-down hotel, and 
 we had a regular blow-out together ; and 
 then I went down into the cellars with him. 
 They're jolly good fellows at Strassburg ; 
 they regular take you by the arm, and 
 down into their cellars, and you can drink 
 as much as you like." We intimated that 
 we had been more than once at Strassburg 
 without experiencing any such violent 
 hospitality. *'Well," he owned, "I did 
 give the beggar a quid as a sort of present 
 
 O »09
 
 210 FATHER RHINE 
 
 when we cleared out ; the cellar seemed a 
 mile long, and all up and down — they said 
 it ran right under the Cathedral — but I 
 couldn't stand that sort of thing every day ; 
 you want to be a German for that ! . . . 
 And then Karl he went on to Heidelberg, 
 and I went with him. That's a ripping 
 place, I can tell you. . . . Look here. . . ." 
 But while we were all attention, he broke 
 in with sudden caution, ** Have you ever 
 been at Heidelberg ? " 
 
 ** I lived there for a year and a half." 
 " Ah ! " he replied ; and as it was 
 evident that he meant to spare us further 
 revelations about that ripping town, Schultz 
 asked him how he had found his way hither. 
 "Well, that's just it. Karl, he had to 
 get up early, and go round to a lot of little 
 places ; so I said I'd come on quickly and 
 meet him this evening at Mayns. But 
 when I'd got into that train, I tell you I 
 was well-nigh smothered ! It wasn't so 
 bad at first, but we stopped at two big 
 towns and took crowds of people on board; 
 and they all came squeezing into my car- 
 riage. And then at last we came to this 
 place, and I looked out to see whether we 
 weren't at Mayns, and there I saw a great 
 WORMS written up. So I said to the fel- 
 low next me, ' That's a queer name for a 
 station ! that's worse than round us, where 
 they're all * Saints' and ' Angels.' Well, he
 
 FATHER RHINE 2ii 
 
 was too lazy to let on that he knew ; but 
 there was a little black, hairy fellow, like 
 a monkey, in the other corner, and he said, 
 ' I spikengleesh.' So, I said, ' Why do 
 they call this place Worms ? ' ' They 
 don't,' says he ; ' they call it Warms.' 
 ' Well,' says I, * you don't need to tell me 
 why they call it warms ' (for it was fit to 
 split the roof off the carriage in that station); 
 so I said, ' Here's for something wet, or 
 else I shall choke in here.' ' You'll miss 
 the train,' says he. ' Well,' says I, ' I've 
 missed better things before, and never 
 cried over it ! ' So I came along and got 
 a glass of beer ; and I hadn't got it half 
 down before the guard came in and reeled 
 off a whole list of stations, and then he 
 shook me by the arm and pointed to the 
 door. * You go to Jericho ! ' I says; for 
 I'd got my legs well under the table by 
 then ; ' I mean to punish this here beer 
 considerable before I've done with it,' and 
 out he went ; and I made the waiter bring 
 me something to eat. He talked English, 
 he did ; and he told me I might go by water 
 if I liked ; I'd only got to come down to 
 the river and ask after the Damp Ship — so 
 here I am ! Look here, what are you 
 going to have aboard here ? Won't you ? 
 then I will ! " 
 
 He entertained us with many stories of 
 Argentina on the way down to Mainz.
 
 212 FATHER RHINE 
 
 He was pretty well sick of Germany at 
 last ; for one thing, he wanted his luggage, 
 which ought to be in London by now ; he 
 had sent word to his hotel in Paris from 
 Strassburg. Meanwhile he had bought a 
 new dressing-bag ; and every day he got 
 fresh linen and left the old behind. It 
 was not a cheap way of travelling, but 
 father didn't so much mind what he spent 
 so long as he kept his eyes open and 
 looked out for business. For the present, 
 his main business ideas seemed to be that 
 German nightshirts weren't fit for a dog to 
 sleep in, but their beer was ripping, and 
 no mistake. However, he was about sick 
 of it all, and wanted to go home. It was 
 jollier at home than it was here. Look 
 here, would Schultz go with him ? He 
 would pay his passage out, meals and all, 
 and give him champagne on Sundays, and 
 any other wine he chose to name on week- 
 days. Was it a bargain ? And when 
 Schultz declined, he fell back even on 
 me. He was sick of finding nobody to 
 talk real English to ; even Karl now . . . 
 well, it wasn't the same as a real English- 
 man. We must positively come and dine 
 with him and Karl at Mainz. We explained 
 that we had to go to the post, and see the 
 Cathedral, and lots of things which would 
 have no interest for him ; but nothing 
 availed us until at last we promised to
 
 FATHER RHINE 213 
 
 dine with him at Cologne next day in- 
 stead ; for he was now resolved to bid 
 farewell to Karl, and come on by boat 
 with us. 
 
 I have a great affection for the Cathedral 
 and the older streets of Mainz ; but, to the 
 reader who has not been there, I can only 
 say. Go and see. The whole town was de- 
 corating for the Emperor's visit at the end 
 of the week ; and, coming back at dusk to 
 the public gardens by the quay, we found a 
 great fair going on, with the usual gor- 
 geous illuminations and unrivalled monsters 
 on view. We dined on the terrace looking 
 over the river ; and here another faulty 
 addition, and an attempt to foist Italian 
 coin upon us, warned us that we were 
 coming back to civilisation. Our Dutch 
 boat, with all its delays, had been expected 
 here about nine o'clock ; but we now 
 learned that it was certain not to come 
 in before ten ; so we sauntered into the 
 town again before coming back to the 
 wharf. She might arrive at any moment 
 now ; and we waited for her at our ease, 
 lolling on a heap of cotton bales, watching 
 the stars, and the lights on the stream, and 
 our smoke that curled straight upwards in 
 the warm night air. After a long silence, 
 Schultz suddenly burst out, "Poor beg- 
 gar ! how homesick he was getting ! " 
 
 " Not a bit of it, if only he had English
 
 214 FATHER RHINE 
 
 nightshirts, and two or three men to talk 
 to all day." 
 
 "No, that's not it. . . . He's a sociable 
 beggar, and you're not. . . . You don't 
 know how homesick I've been getting, 
 these last few days ! . . . I've never been 
 so long away since we were married. . . . 
 You don't know, old man ! " 
 
 I did not know ; but I listened reverently 
 to all that my friend had to say under the 
 silent stars, reflecting all the while that 
 even Solomon had found three things that 
 puzzled him, yea four that he never could 
 make out ! 
 
 The boat came in about 10.30; and we 
 went into the saloon to write up our diaries 
 and letters. Just as we were thinking of 
 bed, a Scotchman came on board with his 
 bag, and, after observing us for a moment, 
 said that he believed he had a message for 
 us. He had met at a restaurant a Mr 
 Jackson from Argentina, who had insisted 
 on entertaining him at dinner, together with 
 many other guests of various nationalities, 
 and had finally offered to all and sundry 
 of them a free passage to Argentina, etc., 
 etc. Finding that our Scotchman was going 
 to take the Dutch boat, he had sent a mes- 
 sage to us ; he couldn't leave Karl that 
 night, because Karl was a jolly good fel- 
 low ; but he would go on by train next 
 day, and catch us up at Cologne.
 
 FATHER RHINE 215 
 
 " Did he tell you any of his adventures?" 
 I enquired. 
 
 " Well, if ye ask me, I think the young 
 man is just a wee bit touched in the head. 
 But he gave us a gude dinner for a' that ; 
 though I'm not sa sure that ye'll find him 
 at Cologne to-morrow."
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 " The brain of a true Caledonian." — C. Lamb. 
 
 August I 8. 
 
 Woke to find the boat just dropping 
 from her moorings at Mainz ; the sun 
 shining through a bright haze that deepens 
 as we proceed, and softens all the land- 
 scape into charming silver greys j no 
 chance of snapshots, however, though 
 we have a whole-plate camera planted 
 ready on deck after breakfast. Bacharach, 
 Oberwesel, Boppart glide past us between 
 nine and ten, looming faintly through the 
 mist which has thickened suddenly again 
 in the gorge of Bingen, and only begins 
 to clear away a little when we emerge 
 upon Coblenz. Even Schultz, for the 
 present, has had enough of cycling in 
 the sun ; and we loll together at the 
 stern and feel very grateful again to our 
 slow, comfortable, Dutch old ship. Not 
 that she is very slow either, to-day ; for 
 she spins down on this current at a good 
 fifteen miles an hour, sweeping round 
 the corners with a swish of her great
 
 FATHER RHINE 217 
 
 rudder that raises a delightful whirlpool 
 in the water at our feet, and I for one 
 would gladl)' hold her back a little, that 
 we might linger a little longer among the 
 old familiar castles and towns. Some 
 Philistine has been restoring the " Katz " 
 and daubing it all over with plaster, so far 
 as we can sec from the boat. We are a 
 fortnight too early for the first autumn 
 tints — the poplars standing in pale yellow 
 up that little gorge behind St Goar, 
 and the wild cherries that splash the 
 woods with crimson all the way down. 
 Boppart drops astern now, and then the 
 twin castles of the Two Brothers-, and 
 then the Marksburg, and Rhens with its 
 quaint river front and the inn garden on 
 the ramparts where we stopped of old 
 to eat grapes and look up and down the 
 river from castle to castle. One by one 
 we pass the dear familiar sights, glad and 
 sorry to see them again for a moment, 
 and in that same moment to bid them 
 farewell. Even Schultz, now that his 
 ankles are no longer so painful — even 
 Schultz, I suspect now of being one 
 degree less vehement in his longing for 
 wife and children. 
 
 By three o'clock we were in sight of 
 the Drachenfels, and went upon the upper 
 deck to make the best of the view. Here 
 we found our Scotch friend of the night
 
 2i8 FATHER RHINE 
 
 before, finishing a late lunch and lost in 
 hearty admiration of the Seven Mountains, 
 which looked twice their usual size in the 
 silvery haze. 
 
 "D'ye know Arrrrrrrrn ? " he said to 
 me. 
 
 "No," replied I, never suspecting for 
 the moment that he could be referring to 
 that picturesque island in the Firth of 
 Clyde which, even in its native wilds, is 
 usually contented with a less extravagant 
 superfluity of R's. 
 
 " Weel, there's something in the con- 
 forrmation o' these lines that always re- 
 minds me of Goat Fell and a little veelage 
 at its fute, as ye see them on the way to 
 Rothesay. . . . Only of course Arrrrrrrrn 
 is the finer view." 
 
 Now that we were in the Firth of 
 Clyde, I knew that the anecdote of the 
 minister of Great and Little Cumbrae was 
 inevitable, and that I must prepare myself 
 to express an opinion on the statue ot 
 Hielan' Mary at Dunoon. Our friend's 
 own opinion was that Burrns was a good 
 deal overrated — in comparison with other 
 Scotchmen, that is ; for of course there 
 was no question of his superiority to mere 
 Southern poets. This reminded us of 
 his compatriot who thought that " Shakes- 
 peare's abeelity might warrant the sup- 
 poseetion " of his being a North Briton j
 
 FATHER RHINE 219 
 
 and we gently led him on to express an 
 opinion on the works of the national bard. 
 Well, he liked them well enough to read, 
 but he thought some of them were a bit 
 too depressing to see acted — too many 
 murders, and suchlike. When he went 
 to the theatre, he didn't want to be 
 ** raxed " all over ; that was waste of 
 tissue and waste of money at the same 
 time. On the stage he preferred Sheridan 
 — " She stoops to Conquer," Lady Teazle, 
 and all that — but above all, " Our Boys." 
 Had we ever seen "Our Boys"? Well, 
 he'd been to see it ten or a dozen times — 
 and in Edinburgh, mind you, with the best 
 of actors and scenery ! And once he had 
 taken his wife and his aunt — " let me see 
 now, what year would that be ? — and they 
 were so amused — although I'd explained it 
 all beforehand with the most exact pre- 
 ceesion — but they were just as amused as 
 if it had been quite a different play ! " 
 
 He paused here to rectify a trifling 
 omission. The lady above referred to 
 was not, strictly speaking, his aunt, but 
 the second wife of his father's brother, 
 who had been a minister of the Established 
 Kirk. His own half of the family had 
 stuck to beesiness ; but this uncle and his 
 sons had preferred the learned professions 
 — a meenister, a headmaster, a contributor 
 to the Britannica Encyclopedia, etc., etc.
 
 220 FATHER RHINE 
 
 They were learned men, and therefore 
 unpractical ; and, at the best, the so-called 
 professions were miserably paid. Here I 
 joined in with him heartily, explaining 
 with some warmth how many years I had 
 spent in teaching the youth of Great 
 Britain, and what was my present balance 
 at the bank. Schultz, on the other hand, 
 took strong exception to the assumption 
 that idealists were necessarily unpractical ; 
 but here we came to Bonn, and I ran 
 ashore to buy milk, postcards, etc., etc. 
 I came back half an hour later to find 
 them still at it, Schultz puffing at his 
 cigar with contemptuous violence ; the 
 North Briton clenching his fists in a 
 desperate effort to remain calm, but foam- 
 ing at the mouth as he exhorted my friend 
 to "just tak' a braad view of the question 
 at eessue ! " I feared imminent personal 
 violence, and hastened to divert Mr Mac- 
 Ewan's thoughts by asking him to give me 
 change for ten marks. The tinkle of the 
 siller soothed him ; he too had had one 
 outlandish coin palmed off upon him, at 
 the fresh sight of which he began to 
 inveigh against German waiters and Ger- 
 man ticket-clerks, and so the bitter dispute 
 was assuaged — " pulveris exigui jactu," as 
 I thought to myself, and chuckled over 
 my successful diplomacy. 
 
 We arrived late in Cologne, and could
 
 FATHER RHINE 221 
 
 not count upon starting correspondingly 
 late ; so we had only time to buy one or 
 two presents, and fetch our letters, and 
 get a somewhat hasty dinner at our old 
 friend the " Prinz Karl" at Deutz, where 
 you can sit listening to the band and watch 
 the sunset fade behind the Cathedral spires, 
 while the big bells ring for the Angelus, 
 and the lights come out upon the Rhine. 
 Needless to relate, we saw no more of 
 William Burrows Jackson ; only, as we 
 returned breathless to the boat, a couple 
 of minutes before she cast off, we found 
 our Scotch friend quite concerned to think 
 she might have gone without us, and 
 wondering what could have induced us 
 to run things so close. Schultz explained 
 that he was a married man, and it had 
 taken him some time to find a suitable 
 present, at which Mr MacEwan chuckled 
 audibly. " Oh, yes, me friend ; I used to 
 do that too — at your age. But now I just 
 get a couple of bottles of Oder Collong at 
 Edinburgh, one for me wife and one for 
 me eldest daughter, and they like it every 
 bit as well. . . . May I trouble ye for a 
 light ? " 
 
 This was the last of our warm Rhine- 
 land nights, and we lingered long on the 
 upper deck, Schultz talking about his five 
 children, and Mr MacEwan giving us the 
 most detailed history of his fifteen sur-
 
 222 FATHER RHINE 
 
 vivors. My pen shrinks from betraying 
 family confidences, or I could record very 
 exactly the ups and downs of Janet's first 
 love, and the gradual downward steps by 
 which Aleck, at the age of twenty-five, had 
 already accumulated debts to the amount 
 of more than seven pounds sterling.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 " Et non omnia pertusum congesta quasi in vas 
 Commoda perfluxere atique ingratum interiere." 
 
 Lucretius. 
 
 August 19. 
 
 We woke again among the flat banks and 
 great white poplars and brick churches of 
 the Lower Rhine. Bright sunshine again ; 
 we had grown to look upon that as a matter 
 of course. We found our old place in the 
 stern, and placidly the whole skein of 
 pleasant memories unwound itself once 
 more. Emmerich, broiling now in the 
 morning sunshine ; Nymegen, with its 
 warm purple brick-tints and fresh green 
 foliage; Heukelum and GelUcum, Wor- 
 cum and Gorcum ; Holland Diep dotted 
 with white sails, and Dort asleep again in 
 the heat-haze. But to-day we sweep down 
 on a flowing current j no time now to ex- 
 change greetings with the shipwrights, so 
 swiftly do the trim little villages pass away, 
 and are gone. Hardly, after Dort, have 
 we stepped below to pack up our belong- 
 ings, and here already is Rotterdam in 
 sight ! Again we load our patient machines 
 and walk them across to the station ; again
 
 224 FATHER RHINE 
 
 we beat off the swarms of porters who 
 gather round to hinder us and to collect 
 baksheesh ; and now our good steeds are 
 registered through to their destination and 
 our luggage safe in the cloakroom, and 
 we have more than five clear hours to 
 enjoy Rotterdam. We loiter through the 
 crowded, cheerful market, and buy an 
 excellent little hothouse melon for four- 
 pence. We meet our friend MacEwan 
 again, and pilot him to a sort of A. B.C. in 
 the Hoogstraat, where he studies the tariff 
 with the deliberation of his race, and finally 
 elects " Koffie met Room," and makes no 
 attempt to disguise his disappointment 
 when the drink is brought, and Room 
 turns out to be mere cream. Then we 
 loafed about the town again, and watched 
 the preparations for the approaching cele- 
 bration of the Queen's majority ; and finally 
 came to anchor at a restaurant where we 
 could eat our dinner and look out upon 
 the throng of cheerful Dutch faces that 
 streamed by us along the pavement. At 
 last the hand of our restaurant clock creeps 
 on to ten, and we have to make our way 
 back to the station ; and, as we squeeze 
 ourselves and our luggage into the already 
 somewhat crowded train, and cockney 
 voices force themselves again upon our 
 ear, we feel that our holiday is really 
 drawing to a close.
 
 FATHER RHINE 225 
 
 The clouds had come up at sunset, after 
 all this hot weather ; but the sea was as 
 smooth as glass, and we had soon collected 
 wraps, and packed ourselves comfortably 
 side by side upon a seat on deck. Here 
 we waited for sleep to come at her good 
 pleasure, talking over the past three weeks, 
 and already planning other tours for the 
 long bye-and-bye. Just one thin paring 
 of a new moon had peeped out from the 
 clouds after sundown, and sent back our 
 thoughts to the night when we saw her 
 last at her full, behind the Emmerich 
 laurustinus-leaves : 
 
 Yon rising moon that looks for us again — 
 How oft hereafter will she wax and wane, 
 
 How oft hereafter rising look for us 
 In that same garden — and for both in vain ! 
 
 "Will she ever see us again there, and watch 
 our boat pass under the Drachenfels,and rise 
 in crimson before us through the evening 
 mist at Bingen ? But it seems too ungrate- 
 ful to ask the question now, after three 
 weeks as full of pleasure as three weeks 
 can hold, and while the meat is still in our 
 mouths ! That is the worst of travelling, 
 that it makes you so restless to travel 
 again ! 
 
 We were on the verge of sleep when a 
 soft patter of rain drove us down below j 
 and at our next waking the ship was 
 already almost within sight of Harwich
 
 226 FATHER RHINE 
 
 spire, and English fishing-boats flitted about 
 us in the thin morning mist. The ship 
 was a little late, and we found our trains 
 already snorting to be off; so here on the 
 platform we parted with a hurried word of 
 farewell, Schultz to London, and I to the 
 North ; but to meet again in a few weeks' 
 time. 
 
 And now we have traced the Rhine 
 from mouth to source, from source to 
 mouth again : day by day we have watched 
 the changing faces of fresh lands and fresh 
 people, drinking at the same stream, but 
 strangers to each other. For these three 
 weeks the waters had seemed to be our 
 very own, flowing to grace our summer holi- 
 day. We have parted from them now, and 
 the mere memory is a reminder of man's 
 transience in the face of Nature. 
 
 Labittir et labetur. — Thousands of years 
 hence, when our bones are fossilized, and 
 future students shall pore over our skulls, 
 wondering that such an antiquated build of 
 a man can ever have existed, and future his- 
 torians shall rack their brains to piece 
 together some sort of patchwork idea of 
 nineteenth century civilisation — thousands 
 of years hence, those clear green waters 
 will flow as fresh from the mountains as 
 they ran for us this August, and as we 
 hope they will some day run for us again.
 
 FATHER RHINE 227 
 
 Yet, whether we visit them or whether 
 we forbear, none the less will they flow 
 on, as near an example of eternity as any- 
 thing that we can see on earth. And, to 
 those who have once lingered by the upper 
 waters of the Rhine, the memory remains 
 from that time forth as an unfading posses- 
 sion. Negretti and Zambra may mark 
 90° in the shade ; we may creep out to 
 lunch, and sit despondingly in face of the 
 liquefied butter ; and crawl back again 
 along the shady side of the street, de- 
 voutly hoping that the man who first 
 invented the " silk hat " is at present 
 wearing one of red-hot steel ; but we can 
 never be utterly forlorn, with this memory 
 in our soul. Some trifle suddenly recalls 
 the old days — if only the two wizened 
 laurels in tubs, as unhappy in their exile 
 as Tartarin's baobab, that stand by the 
 door of some tavern, under an advertise- 
 ment of Munich beer — if only some glaring 
 railway advertisement of Swiss tours — some- 
 thing is sure to strike the right cord, and 
 then it all comes flooding back upon our 
 soul ; the colour, the rush of it, the cool 
 spray on the breeze, and the dark pines, and 
 blue distance, and faint white peaks among 
 the clouds, and the pleasant, friendly, sun- 
 burnt people — and we know once more that 
 there is balm in Gilead. " Do I view this 
 world as a vale of tears ? Ah, reverend
 
 228 FATHER RHINE 
 
 sir, not I ! " I see Sentis and Glarnisch, 
 and the great lakes ; the falls, the rapids, 
 the thousand quaint old towns ; I hear 
 the murmur of the river as it lulled me 
 to sleep night after night ; amid these 
 crowded streets and ungrateful occupa- 
 tions the memory has suddenly welled up 
 again as fresh and green and cool as 
 ever ; the very wilderness of London 
 blossoms as the rose — 
 
 " Bright volumes of vapour down Lothbury glide, 
 And a river Hows on through the vale of Cheapside."
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 It may be worth while to add here a 
 few items of information for anyone who 
 might think of following our route. 
 
 (1) Travdiiiig Expenses — 
 
 (By boat and rail, 1 400 miles in 
 all; including tips, and car- 
 riage of bicycles and of such 
 light luggage as we gener- 
 ally sent on to await us in 
 the evening) . . ^540 
 
 (2) Hotel Bills— 
 
 (Including cabins and food on 
 board steamers, together 
 with all expenses for food, 
 washing, waiters, sightsee- 
 ing, etc. — 19 nights, from 
 London to London) . , 6 18 6 
 
 Total . £12 2 6 
 
 By rail we travelled third class, except 
 on the expresses to and from the Hook 
 and Rotterdam, and from Colmar to Strass- 
 burg. Third class is perfectly comfortable 
 for all but very long journeys. 
 
 2t9
 
 230 APPENDIX 
 
 On the Rhine boats we travelled first, 
 and had a very comfortable little cabin 
 with two berths and a couch. 
 
 Our cheapest beds were at Ilanz (is. 3d. 
 each), and our dearest at Schaffhausen (2s. 
 6d. each). By asking prices and looking 
 at rooms beforehand, one can find clean 
 and cheap rooms at all but the most tourist- 
 haunted places. 
 
 The above statement accounts for every- 
 thing spent on the tour, except stamps 
 and postcards, photographs, cigars, and 
 presents. 
 
 (3) Distances. — From London to Mann- 
 heim and back is roughly 800 miles, and 
 we did a further 600 miles by rail and 
 boat, and 591 by bicycle (of which about 
 90 covered the same ground as the boat). 
 I subjoin detailed bicycle measurements, 
 carefully recorded at the time from the 
 cyclometer ; the discrepancy between these 
 details and the total gives a measure of the 
 extra work we did in wandering about 
 towns, turning aside for views, etc., etc. — 
 extras amounting sometimes to 8 miles a 
 day. 
 
 Nymegen- Emmerich, 22 ; Zons- Co- 
 logne, 25 ; Andernach-Bingen, 59 ; Bruch- 
 sal-Maulbronn, 19; Maulbronn-Oos, 47; 
 Oos - Offenburg, 28 ; Donaueschingen- 
 Neuhausen, 28 ; Uetliberg-Brunnen, 36 ; 
 Brunnen-Fluelen, 8| ; Goeschenen-Ilanz,
 
 APPENDIX 231 
 
 42 ; Ilanz-Sargans, 39 ; Friedrichshafen- 
 Meersburg, 1 2 ; Constance-Stein, 1 8 ; 
 Schaffhausen-Neiihausen, 3 ; Neuhausen- 
 Bale, 62 ; Bale-Freiburg, 41 ; Freiburg- 
 Colmar, 29 ; Strassbnrg-Weissenburg, 41 ; 
 Speyer- Worms, 28. 
 
 We very seldom found the roads really 
 bad, but equally seldom really first-rate, 
 from a bicyclist's point of view.
 
 PRINTED BV 
 
 TURNBULL AND SPEARS, 
 
 EDINBURGH
 
 UC SOUTHI UN HI (.lONAl I IlillAHY I ACII ITY 
 
 AA 000 921404 
 
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 L, San Diego 
 
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