Part 15

After the ceremonies at Duesseldorf came the solemn reception of the remains here. Early in the evening the streets were thronged with an immense but quiet, patiently waiting crowd, and, along the line where the procession was to pass, burning tar cast a fitful light over the mass of people: and the flickering flames, fanned by the night breeze, now would illumine the Residenz and Schloss Platz and the fine outline of the "Old Palace," in the chapel of which the duke was to lie; now, subsiding, would leave the scene in half gloom. The slow, sad voice of the dirge announced the approach of the procession, the whole effect of which was intensely solemn and impressive. Outriders with flickering torches, the escort of cavalry, Uhlans of the Wuertemberg regiment in which he had served, floating streamers of black and white, the hearse drawn by coal-black horses, slowly passing, with the loud ringing of all the bells, made one hold one's breath as the black figures went by in the lurid light. The inevitable hour had, indeed, awaited him, and snatched him from his worldly honors and family affection, and "der edle Ritter," in spite of all the "boast of heraldry and pomp of power" that so lately had surrounded him, lay silent and cold, while the flames burned strong and warm and the loud bells clanged, and he rode slowly on to the chapel in the old castle, beneath which he now rests with others of his race.

This is not the first sad, stately night-procession that has occurred here. Wilhelm, father of the present king, was a strong, original nature, averse to form, and gave strict orders concerning his own burial. They were to bury him on a hill, some miles from the city, between midnight and dawn, and simply fire one gun over him, he had said. His son, however, while observing his wishes as to time and place of burial, took care that the state and dignity of the procession should befit royalty dethroned by death. At midnight the train left the palace, and, with its long line of nobles, cavaliers, and soldiers, swept slowly out of the city amid the constant ringing of bells and booming of cannon, and wound through the soft summer night along the Neckar's banks, over the bridge at Cannstadt, while great fires blazed on every hill-top, and the old king, in the majesty of death, was borne on, past the fair vineyards and soft fertile slopes of the land he had loved so well, to the Rothenberg, on the summit of which they laid him to rest and fired one gun just as the morning star dropped below the horizon.

"And had he not high honor? The hillside for his pall, To lie in state while angels wait With stars for tapers tall, And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, Over his bier to wave--."

Certainly, nothing less than the "Burial of Moses" can have been so grand as this last dark ride of the strong old king! We behold the train in its magnificent gloom winding along the Neckar and up the vine-clad hillside, so often as we see its route, after nightfall. Dusky, stately forms ride by, and the wail of the dirge sounds on the evening breeze. Why may we not all be laid at rest at night? Sunlight is cruel to eyes blinded by tears, and glaring day hurts grieved hearts. The Night is so solemn and tender, why may she not help us bury our dead?

The next procession that we saw with earnest eyes, after the Duke Eugen's, was that of a student of the Polytechnic School, who died from the effects of a sword-wound. There was no anger, no provocation, nothing which according to the student code might perhaps soften the memory of the deed. It was simply a trial of skill with the _Degen_, a slender, murderous-looking sword. Both were expert fencers. The presence of friends incited them to do their best. Their pride was roused; neither would yield, and in the excitement one received a cut in the head, from the effects of which he died in a few days. He was a promising scholar and a favorite with the students, and the affair seems very shocking in the cruel uselessness of such a death, though the more bitter fate of course is his who unwittingly did the deed and must live with the memory of it in his heart.

These student funerals occur now and then. We have had three or four this winter. Our countrymen, not sympathizing with student ways and student traditions, are sometimes apt to call such spectacles "comedies," but to us the comic element has never been apparent. First come the musicians, playing a dirge,--on this last occasion a funeral march from Beethoven. Near the hearse walk the students of the corps of which the deceased had been a member. They wear their most elegant uniform,--black velvet blouses or jackets, buff knee-breeches, high boots, the cap and sash of the color which distinguishes the corps, long buff gauntlets, and swords,--altogether quite striking. On the draped coffin are the dead student's cap, sash, and sword. The other corps walk behind, the professors also, and friends.

The last funeral of the three was hardly grand enough to be called a procession. It was only a few carriages winding slowly out to the new _Friedhof_. A touching little story preceded it, perhaps not uncommon, yet, to those who watched its close, invested with a peculiar pathos. A young American girl came here last fall, with high hopes and unbounded energy and courage. She was in the art-school, and it may be her eager spirit forgot that bodies too must be cared for, and it may be that her naturally frail constitution had been weakened by overwork before she came; but at all events a cold, which she ignored in her zeal and devotion to her studies, led to an illness from which she never recovered. She was entirely alone and unknown, and at first no one except the people in her _pension_ knew of her sickness. Patient, uncomplaining, and reserved, she bore whatever came, and was finally taken, as she grew worse, to a hospital, where she could command better and more exclusive care. As the facts became known in the American colony, she was ministered to most tenderly, and flowers and delicacies of every description were sent daily to her little room at the _Olga Heil Anstalt_. Indeed, the good sister who nursed her there found it difficult to guard her from the visits and kindly proffered administrations of newly made friends, who came full of tender sympathy for the lonely girl. Of her loneliness she never made complaint. When asked by our consul why she had not at once sent for him when she was first ill, she replied, smilingly, "Because I knew you had quite enough to do without taking care of me." In fact, she sent for no one, and only through accident did the English clergyman and the consul hear of her case. And, lying in her bare room in a foreign hospital, hearing only the foreign tongue of which she was not yet mistress, and at best, when her countrywomen came to cheer her, seeing only new faces, instead of her own home-people, her brave, bright smile was always ready to greet the visitor, even when she was too languid to utter a word. Her one confessed regret was that her illness took her from her art-studies; and her eyes would beam with delight when a fellow-student in the art-school would speak of it, of the professors, and the work there. Her whole enthusiastic soul was absorbed in this theme, so that her suffering seemed, to her, of no account in comparison with her high aims and ideal. Utterly single-hearted, she lay there, brave and uncomplaining to the last, and seemed the only one unconscious of the pathos of her position. Her thoughts were so given to the beautiful pictures she longed to make, and to the beautiful pictures others had made, she had none at all left for the poor girl dying alone in a strange land, who was filling so many eyes with tears and so many hearts with pain. She faded away very gently, and, for a long time before her death, suffered more from extreme languor than from acute distress. After it was all over, there was a little, solemn service in the hospital chapel, attended by the many who had interested themselves for her, and some of the professors and pupils of the Kunst Schule, who added their exquisite wreaths to the lovely flowers about her. And then she was taken to the new _Friedhof_ and laid beneath the pavement of the Arcade, while a little band of wanderers stood by--united, many of them, only through their sympathy with her who was gone--and listened to the solemn words of the English service, and looked thoughtfully out through the arches upon a tender gray sky, a wide expanse of land--now almost an unbroken surface, but one day to be filled with graves--and off upon the hills rising softly beyond; and the last violets and tuberoses were strewn upon her resting-place, and the little band separated, each going his way, but in many hearts was a tender memory for the young girl whose brief story was just ended,--a sad thought for her who never seemed sad for herself.

SOME CHRISTMAS PICTURES.

A few days before Christmas the three kings from the Orient came stealing up our stairs in the gloaming. They wore cheap white cotton raiment over their ordinary work-a-day clothes, and gilt-paper crowns on their heads. They were small, thin kings. Melchior's crown was awry, Kaspar felt very timid, and was continually stumbling over his train; but Balthazar was brave as a lion, and nudged his royal brothers,--one of whom was a girl, by the way,--putting courage into them with his elbows; and the dear little souls sang their songs and got their pennies, and their white robes vanished in the twilight as their majesties trudged on towards the next house. There they would again stand in an uncertain, tremulous row, and sing more or sing less, according to the reception they met with, and put more or less pennies--generally less, poor dears!--into their pockets. Poor, dear, shabby little wise men,--including the one who was a girl,--you were potentates whom it was a pleasure to see, and we trust you earned such an affluence of Christmas pennies that you were in a state of ineffable bliss when, at last, freed from the restraint of crowns and royal robes, you stood in your poor home before your Christmas-tree. It may have been a barren thing, but to your happy child-eyes no doubt it shone as the morning star and blossomed as the rose.

Other apparitions foretelling the approach of Christmas visited us. One was an old woman with cakes. Her prominent characteristic is staying where she is put, or rather where she puts herself, which is usually where she is not wanted. Buy a cake of this amiable old person, whose breath (with all the respect due to age let it be said) smells unquestionably of _schnapps_, and she will bless you with astounding volubility. Her tongue whirls like a mill-wheel as she tearfully assures us, "God will reward us,"--and _how_ she stays! Men may come and men may go, but the old woman is still there, blessing away indefatigably. She must possess, to a remarkable degree, those clinging qualities men praise in woman. Indeed, her tendrils twine all over the house; and when, through deep plots against a dear friend, we manage to lead her out of our own apartment, it is not long before, through our dear friend's counter-plots, the old woman stands again in our doorway with her great basket on her head, smiling and weeping and bobbing and blessing as she offers her wares. Queer old woman, rare old plant!--though you cannot be said to beautify, yet, twining and clinging and staying forever like the ivy-green, you were not so attractive as the little shadowy kings, but you, too, heralded Christmas; and may you have had a comfortable time somewhere with sausage and whatever is nearest your heart in these your latter days! That she is not a poetical figure in the Christmas picture is neither her fault nor mine. She may, ages ago, have had a thrilling story, now completely drowned in _schnapps_, but that she exists, and sells cakes according to the manner described, is all we ever shall know of her.

Then the cakes themselves--"genuine Nurembergers," she called them--were strange things to behold. Solid and brown, of manifold shapes and sizes, wrapped in silver-paper, they looked impenetrable and mysterious. The friends in council each seized a huge round one with an air as of sailing off on a voyage of discovery, or of storming a fortress, and nibbled away at it. As a massive whole it was strange and foreign, but familiar things were gradually evolved. There was now and then a trace of honey, a bit of an almond, a slice of citron, a flavor of vanilla, a soupcon of orange.

Gazing out from behind her cake, one young woman remarks, sententiously,--

"It's gingerbread with things in it."

Another stops in her investigations with,--

"It is as hard as a brownstone front."

"It's delightful not to know in the least what's coming next," says another. "I've just reached a stratum of jelly and am going deeper. Farewell."

"Echt Nuernberger, echt Nuernberger!" croaked the old dame, still nodding, still blessing; and so, meditatively eating her cakes, we gazed at her and wondered if any one could possibly be as old as she looked, and if she too were a product of "Nuremberg the ancient," to which "quaint old town of toil and traffic" we wandered off through the medium of Longfellow's poem, as every conscientious American in Europe is in duty bound to do. It is always a comfort to go where he has led the way. We are sure of experiencing the proper emotions. They are gently and quietly instilled into us, and we never know they do not come of themselves, until we happen to realize that some verse of his, familiar to our childhood, has been haunting us all the time. What a pity he never has written a poetical guide-book!

These unusual objects penetrating our quiet study hours told us Christmas was coming, and the aspect of the Stuttgart streets also proclaimed the glad tidings. They were a charming, merry sight. The Christmas fair extended its huge length of booths and tables through the narrow, quaint streets by the old _Stiftskirche_, reaching even up to the _Koenigstrasse_, where great piles of furniture rose by the pavements, threatening destruction to the passer-by. Thronging about the tables, where everything in the world was for sale and all the world was buying, could be seen many a dainty little lady in a costume fresh from Paris; many a ruddy peasant-girl with braids and bodice, short gown and bright stockings; many types of feature, and much confusion of tongues; and you are crowded and jostled: but you like it all, for every face wears the happy Christmas look that says so much.

These fairs are curious places, and have a benumbing effect upon the brain. People come home with the most unheard-of purchases, which they never seriously intended to buy. Perhaps a similar impulse to that which makes one grasp a common inkstand in a burning house, and run and deposit it far away in a place of safety, leads ladies to come from the "Messe" with a wooden comb and a string of yellow-glass beads. In both cases the intellect is temporarily absent, it would seem. Buy you must, of course. What you buy, whether it be a white wooden chair, or a child's toy, or a broom, or a lace barbe, or a blue-glass breastpin, seems to be pure chance. The country people, who come into the city especially to buy, know what they want, and no doubt make judicious purchases. But we, who go to gaze, to wonder, and to be amused, never know why we buy anything, and, when we come home and recover our senses, look at one another in amazement over our motley collections.

At this last fair a kind fate led us to a photograph table, where old French beauties smiled at us, and all of Henry the VIII.'s hapless wives gazed at us from their ruffs, and the old Greek philosophers looked as if they could tell us a thing or two if they only would. The discovery of this haven in the sea of incongruous things around us was a fortunate accident. The photograph-man was henceforth our magnet. To him our little family, individually and collectively, drifted, and day by day the stock of Louise de la Vallieres, and Maintenons, and Heloises, and Anne Boleyns, and Pompadours, and Sapphos, and Socrates, and Diogenes, etc.,--(perfect likenesses of all of them, I am sure!)--increased in our _pension_, where we compared purchases between the courses at dinner, and made Archimedes and the duchess of Lamballe stand amicably side by side against the soup-tureen. Halcyon, but, alas! fleeting days, when we could buy these desirable works of art for ten _pfennig_, which, I mention with satisfaction, is two and one half cents!

But, of all the Christmas sights, the Christmas-trees and the dolls were the most striking. The trees marched about like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. There were solid family men going off with solid, respectable trees, and servants in livery condescending to stalk away with trees of the most lofty and aristocratic stature; and many a poor woman dragging along a sickly, stunted child with one hand and a sickly, stunted tree with the other.

As to the doll-world into which I have recently been permitted to penetrate, all language, even aided by a generous use of exclamation-points, fails to express its wondrous charm. A doll kindergarten, with desks and models and blackboards, had a competent, amiable, and elderly doll-instructress with spectacles. The younger members were occupied with toys and diversions that would not fatigue their infant minds, while the older ones pored over their books. They had white pinafores, flaxen hair, plump cheeks. I think they were all alive.

Then there were dolls who looked as if they lay on the sofa all day and read French novels, and dolls that looked as if they were up with the birds, hard-working, merry, and wise,--elegant, aristocratic countess dolls, with trunks of fine raiment; and jolly little peasant dolls, with long yellow braids hanging down their backs, and stout shoes, and a general look of having trudged in from the Black Forest to see the great city-world at Christmas. Such variety of expression, so many phases of doll-nature,--for nature they have in Germany! And in front of two especially alluring windows, where bright lights streamed upon fanciful decorations, toys, and a wonderful world of dolls, was always a great group of children. Once, in the early evening, they fairly blockaded the pavement and reached far into the street, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, not talking much, merely devouring those enchanted windows with their eager eyes; some wishing, some not daring to wish, but worshipping only, like pale, rapt devotees. And we others, who labor under the disadvantage of being "grown up," looked at the pretty doll-world within the windows and the lovely child-world without, and wished that old Christmas might bring to each of us the doll we want, and never, never let us know that it is stuffed with sawdust.

HAMBURG AGAIN.

It seems almost like having been in two places at once to be able to tell from observation a Christmas Tale of Two Cities. First there was Stuttgart, where the sun was pouring down warm and summerish on the hills around the city, and where we were borne away on the glad tide that went sweeping along towards Christmas under the fairest skies that ever smiled on saint or sinner in mid-winter, until it grew so near the time we almost heard the Christmas bells. And then there was Hamburg, to which place--having consigned ourselves to the tender mercies of a sleeping coupe--we went rushing off through the night, and found the dear, glad Christmas just going to happen there, too, and the great Northern city seemed very noisy and bold and out-in-the-world after Stuttgart, nestled so snugly among its hills.

Hamburg has, however, its quiet spots, if you seek them under the great elms in the suburbs, or among the quaint streets in the oldest portions of the city. One of the very stillest places is a paved court by St. George's Church, where the little, old houses of one story all look towards three great crosses in an octagonal enclosure, on which Christ and the two thieves hang, and Mary and John stand weeping below. It has always been still there when we have passed through, though close to the busy streets. It is a place with a history, I am sure. Indeed, what place is not? But it is reticent and knows how to keep its secrets. Perhaps Dickens might have made something out of the grave, small houses that have been staring at the crosses so many long years.

A very good place for moralizing, too, is down by the Elbe, where the great ships from all quarters of the earth lie, and you hear Dutch and Danish sailors talking, and don't understand a word. There commerce seems a mighty thing, and the world grows appallingly great, and you feel of as much importance in it as the small cat who sits meditatively licking her paws down on the tug-boat just below you.

But this was to be more or less about Christmas. Christmas in general is something about which there is nothing to say, because it sings its own songs without words in all our hearts; but a story of one particular Christmas may not be amiss here, since it tells of a pretty and graceful welcome which Germans knew how to give to a wanderer,--a welcome in which tones of tenderness were underlying the merriment, and delicate consideration shaped the whole plan.

In a room radiant, not with one Christmas-tree, but with five,--a whole one for each person being the generous allowance,--stood a lordly fir, glistening with long icicles of glass, resplendent with ornaments of scarlet and gold and white. The stars and stripes floated proudly from its top; unmistakable cherries of that delectable substance, Marzipan, hung in profusion from its branches; and at its base stood the Father of his Country. George, on this occasion, was a doll of inexpressibly fascinating mien, arrayed in a violet velvet coat, white satin waistcoat and knee-breeches, lace ruffles, silver buckles, white wig, and three-cornered hat, and wearing that dignified, imperturbable Washingtonian expression of countenance which one would not have believed could be produced on a foreign shore. He held no hatchet in his hand, but graciously extended a document heavily sealed and tied with red, white, and blue ribbons.

This document was written in elegant and impressive English. A very big and fierce-looking American eagle hovered over the page, which was also adorned by the arms of the German Empire and of Hamburg. The purport of the document was that George Washington, first President of the United States, did herewith present his compliments to a certain wandering daughter of America, wishing her, on the part of her country, family, and friends,

"A merry Christmas and happy New Year,"

and "all foreign authorities, corporations, and private individuals were enjoined to promote, by all legal means of hospitality and good-will, the loyal execution of the above-mentioned wishes." It displayed the names of several highly honorable witnesses, and concluded:--

"Given under my hand and seal at my permanent White House residence, Elysium, 24th December, 1876.

---- "_George Washington._"

And the seal bore the initials of the mighty man.

The tree yielded gifts many and charming, but the sweetest gift was the kindly thought that prompted the pretty device. Though one had to smile where all were smiling, yet was it not, all in all, quite enough to make one a little "teary roun' the lashes," especially when one is very much "grown up," and so has not the remotest claim upon the happy things that, "by the grace of God," belong to the children? Such scenes make one feel the world is surely not so black as it is painted.