as he sat regarding the softly plashing waves, and the high, drifting
clouds, and the old Roman tower by the bridge which connects the
Island of Lindau with the mainland, and thinking perhaps, if stone
lions ever do think, of the time when Roman galleys sailed on Lake
Constance, and when Lindau was an imperial town with a thriving
trade.

On board the little steamer was an American, accompanied by two
ladies, and traveling, I thought, for their gratification, who was
very anxious to get on faster than he was able to do,--though why any
one should desire to go fast in Europe I do not know.  One easily
falls into the habit of the country, to take things easily, to go
when the slow German fates will, and not to worry one's self
beforehand about times and connections.  But the American was in a
fever of impatience, desirous, if possible, to get on that night.  I
knew he was from the Land of the Free by a phrase I heard him use in
the cars: he said, "I'll bet a dollar."  Yet I must flatter myself
that Americans do not always thus betray themselves.  I happened, on
the Isle of Wight, to hear a bland landlord "blow up" his glib-
tongued son because the latter had not driven a stiffer bargain with
us for the hire of a carriage round the island.

"Didn't you know they were Americans?" asks the irate father.  "I
knew it at once."

"No," replies young hopeful: "they didn't say GUESS once."

And straightway the fawning-innkeeper returns to us, professing, with
his butter-lips, the greatest admiration of all Americans, and the
intensest anxiety to serve them, and all for pure good-will.  The
English are even more bloodthirsty at sight of a travelere than the
Swiss, and twice as obsequious.  But to return to our American.  He
had all the railway timetables that he could procure; and he was
busily studying them, with the design of "getting on."  I heard him
say to his companions, as he ransacked his pockets, that he was a
mass of hotel-bills and timetables.  He confided to me afterward,
that his wife and her friend had got it into their heads that they
must go both to Vienna and Berlin.  Was Berlin much out of the way in
going from Vienna to Paris?  He said they told him it was n't.  At
any rate, he must get round at such a date: he had no time to spare.
Then, besides the slowness of getting on, there were the trunks.  He
lost a trunk in Switzerland, and consumed a whole day in looking it
up.  While the steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout
porters came on board, and shouldered his baggage to take it ashore.
To his remonstrances in English they paid no heed; and it was some
time before they could be made to understand that the trunks were to
go on to Lindau.  "There," said he, "I should have lost my trunks.
Nobody understands what I tell them: I can't get any information."
Especially was he unable to get any information as to how to "get
on."  I confess that the restless American almost put me into a
fidget, and revived the American desire to "get on," to take the fast
trains, make all the connections,--in short, in the handsome language
of the great West, to "put her through."  When I last saw our
traveler, he was getting his luggage through the custom-house, still
undecided whether to push on that night at eleven o'clock.  But I
forgot all about him and his hurry when, shortly after, we sat at the
table-d'hote at the hotel, and the sedate Germans lit their cigars,
some of them before they had finished eating, and sat smoking as if
there were plenty of leisure for everything in this world,




A CITY OF COLOR

After a slow ride, of nearly eight hours, in what, in Germany, is
called an express train, through a rain and clouds that hid from our
view the Tyrol and the Swabian mountains, over a rolling, pleasant
country, past pretty little railway station-houses, covered with
vines, gay with flowers in the windows, and surrounded with beds of
flowers, past switchmen in flaming scarlet jackets, who stand at the
switches and raise the hand to the temple, and keep it there, in a
military salute, as we go by, we come into old Augsburg, whose
Confession is not so fresh in our minds as it ought to be.  Portions
of the ancient wall remain, and many of the towers; and there are
archways, picturesquely opening from street to street, under several
of which we drive on our way to the Three Moors, a stately hostelry
and one of the oldest in Germany.

It stood here in the year 1500; and the room is still shown,
unchanged since then, in which the rich Count Fugger entertained
Charles V.  The chambers are nearly all immense.  That in which we
are lodged is large enough for Queen Victoria; indeed, I am glad to
say that her sleeping-room at St. Cloud was not half so spacious.
One feels either like a count, or very lonesome, to sit down in a
lofty chamber, say thirty-five feet square, with little furniture,
and historical and tragical life-size figures staring at one from the
wall-paper.  One fears that they may come down in the deep night, and
stand at the bedside,--those narrow, canopied beds there in the
distance, like the marble couches in the cathedral.  It must be a
fearful thing to be a royal person, and dwell in a palace, with
resounding rooms and naked, waxed, inlaid floors.  At the Three Moors
one sees a visitors' book, begun in 18oo, which contains the names of
many noble and great people, as well as poets and doctors and titled
ladies, and much sentimental writing in French.  It is my impression,
from an inspection of the book, that we are the first untitled
visitors.

The traveler cannot but like Augsburg at once, for its quaint houses,
colored so diversely and yet harmoniously.  Remains of its former
brilliancy yet exist in the frescoes on the outside of the buildings,
some of which are still bright in color, though partially defaced.
Those on the House of Fugger have been restored, and are very brave
pictures.  These frescoes give great animation and life to the
appearance of a street, and I am glad to see a taste for them
reviving.  Augsburg must have been very gay with them two and three
hundred years ago, when, also, it was the home of beautiful women of
the middle class, who married princes.  We went to see the house in
which lived the beautiful Agnes Bernauer, daughter of a barber, who
married Duke Albert III. of Bavaria.  The house was nought, as old
Samuel Pepys would say, only a high stone building, in a block of
such; but it is enough to make a house attractive for centuries if a
pretty woman once looks out of its latticed windows, as I have no
doubt Agnes often did when the duke and his retinue rode by in
clanking armor.

But there is no lack of reminders of old times.  The cathedral, which
was begun before the Christian era could express its age with four
figures, has two fine portals, with quaint carving, and bronze doors
of very old work, whereon the story of Eve and the serpent is
literally given,--a representation of great theological, if of small
artistic value.  And there is the old clock and watch tower, which
for eight hundred years has enabled the Augsburgers to keep the time
of day and to look out over the plain for the approach of an enemy.
The city is full of fine bronze fountains some of them of very
elaborate design, and adding a convenience and a beauty to the town
which American cities wholly want.  In one quarter of the town is the
Fuggerei, a little city by itself, surrounded by its own wall, the
gates of which are shut at night, with narrow streets and neat little
houses.  It was built by Hans Jacob Fugger the Rich, as long ago as
1519, and is still inhabited by indigent Roman-Catholic families,
according to the intention of its founder.  In the windows were
lovely flowers.  I saw in the street several of those mysterious,
short, old women,--so old and yet so little, all body and hardly any
legs, who appear to have grown down into the ground with advancing
years.

It happened to be a rainy day, and cold, on the 30th of July, when we
left Augsburg; and the flat fields through which we passed were
uninviting under the gray light.  Large flocks of geese were feeding
on the windy plains, tended by boys and women, who are the living
fences of this country.  I no longer wonder at the number of
feather-beds at the inns, under which we are apparently expected to
sleep even in the warmest nights.  Shepherds with the regulation
crooks also were watching herds of sheep.  Here and there a cluster
of red-roofed houses were huddled together into a village, and in all
directions rose tapering spires.  Especially we marked the steeple of
Blenheim, where Jack Churchill won the name for his magnificent
country-seat, early in the eighteenth century.  All this plain where
the silly geese feed has been marched over and fought over by armies
time and again.  We effect the passage of, the Danube without
difficulty, and on to Harburg, a little town of little red houses,
inhabited principally by Jews, huddled under a rocky ridge, upon the
summit of which is a picturesque medieval castle, with many towers
and turrets, in as perfect preservation as when feudal flags floated
over it.  And so on, slowly, with long stops at many stations, to
give opportunity, I suppose, for the honest passengers to take in
supplies of beer and sausages, to Nuremberg.




A CITY LIVING ON THE PAST

Nuremberg, or Nurnberg, was built, I believe, about the beginning of
time.  At least, in an old black-letter history of the city which I
have seen, illustrated with powerful wood-cuts, the first
representation is that of the creation of the world, which is
immediately followed by another of Nuremberg.  No one who visits it
is likely to dispute its antiquity.  " Nobody ever goes to Nuremberg
but Americans," said a cynical British officer at Chamouny; "but they
always go there.  I never saw an American who had n't been or was not
going to Nuremberg."  Well, I suppose they wish to see the
oldest-looking, and, next to a true Briton on his travels, the oddest
thing on the Continent.  The city lives in the past still, and on its

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