CHAPTER II.

TAKING TO EUROPEAN WAYS.

At New York I found that I should be obliged to pay 130 for exchange on my money. This I did, after buying a through third-class ticket to London for thirty-three dollars in currency.

My memories of a steerage passage across the Atlantic are rather vivid than agreeable. Among all my fellow-passengers in that unsavory precinct I found only one philosopher. He was a British officer who took a third-class ticket that he might spend the difference between that and a cabin fare for English porter, which he imbibed from morning to night. He announced as his firm belief, after much observation upon the high cheekbones of our countrymen, that the Americans in a few years would degenerate to Indians,--the natural human types of this continent.

It was during the World’s Fair that I arrived in London. My whole life there might be written down under the general title of “The Adventures of a Straw Hat,” for the one which I wore was the signal for all the sharpers of that great city to practise their arts upon me. They took me for some country youth come up to see the Exhibition, and the number of skittle-alleys and thief dens into which they enticed me was, to say the least, remarkable.

Through the friendly advice of a police detective, I was finally prevailed upon to purchase a new English hat, and with this, as a sort of ægis, I passed out of the British dominions, without being robbed,--and, indeed, without much of which to be robbed.

At Paris I witnessed the magnificent _fêtes_ of the Emperor, and took the third-class cars for Strasbourg and Heidelberg. At this latter city, with a sum equal to nearly eighty dollars in gold, I proposed for an indefinite series of years, to become a student of the far-famed Karl-Rupert University.

I was not happy in Heidelberg, therefore, till I had experienced the mystery of academic matriculation. All I can recall of that long ceremony now is, that I had the honor of shaking hands--_sancte dataque dextra pollicitus est_ is the language in which my diploma speaks of me, commemorating, I believe, that impressive moment--over my passport with a large-moustached German official; and that I furthermore had the privilege of paying a fee of eleven guldens and twenty-six kreutzers,--a little over four and a half dollars.

After much search and many unintelligible appeals in bad German, through wellnigh every dingy street of Heidelberg, I finally secured a room for two guldens--eighty cents--a month: and such a room! It was on the story next to the clouds. It seemed to be cut into the high gable of the gray old German house by some freak or afterthought of the architect. It was reached by interminable staircases and through a long hall, or passage-way, whose unplastered walls were hung with the rubbish of many generations. It was just large enough to permit of my turning round, after furnishing nooks and corners for a bed, bookcase, wash-stand, and small, semicircular table; but all was neat and clean, for my room was subject, like the rest of the German world, to the regular Saturday’s inundation of soap and water.

Directly opposite, on the other side of the narrow street, but far, far below, was the shop of a sausage-maker. If I had been an enthusiast in mechanics, I should have found much consolation in this fact, as well as a great deal “to lead hope on”; because a sausage-maker’s apprentice is really, if not perpetual motion itself, a strong inductive argument in favor of its future discovery. The one to whom I have alluded kept up a continual hacking, day and night, week-day and Sunday. The sound of his meat-axe met my ears the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night; it was, in fact, my matin and my angelus bell.

But, by a principle of compensation, which is one of the kindliest things in nature, this little nook had advantages of which prouder apartments could not boast. I never had, before or since, a room in which I could apply myself to study so assiduously or with so great a zest. It seemed to be haunted with the great spirits of those who have trimmed their lamps in garrets and left the world better for their toils.

This may have been a boyish hallucination, but I shall always believe that the most glorious view of the famous Heidelberg castle, the Molkenkur, and the lofty peak of the Kaiserstuhl, is to be had from the one narrow window of my aerial niche in the dark German gable.

The old castle frowned down upon me from the brow of the mountain just above my head; and often of an evening have I leaned upon my little window-sill, and gazed up at its ruined battlements and ivy-mantled towers. As they grew dimmer and grayer in the waning light, the rents and seams of centuries disappeared, and the palace of the old Electors used to stand before me in its ancient pride.

It may not be generally known that the day-laborer of America has better food and more of it than many a wealthy burgher of Central Europe. Only the very few, in Germany, can indulge in beefsteaks for breakfast. I soon learned to conform myself to the cup of coffee and piece of dry bread of the German’s morning repast.

But as I became better acquainted, and gradually more impecunious, I left the _café_ where I had before partaken of these luxuries, and betook myself to a baker’s shop, where a breakfast of the same kind was furnished me, in company with market-women and others, for four kreutzers,--about three cents. If I could sometimes have wished for a more liberal allowance of sugar in my coffee, in this humble refectory, I never could complain of a lack of sweetness in the morning gossip of the baker’s red-cheeked daughter.

* * * * *

The search for the very cheapest place to get my dinner was not the work of one day, or unattended with some difficulty and much skirmishing. I bethought myself of my sausage-making friend across the way. Indeed, it was a long while before I became so used to the _staccato_ music of his meat-axe as to keep from thinking of him most of the time. Engaged as he was in the active production of food, he must certainly, I argued, know something of cheap dinners. I therefore made a descent on the meat-shop one day.

No notice whatever was taken of my knock; so, pushing the door open, I stood before a dwarfed, long-aproned, pale-faced boy, who turned his hungry eyes upon me, but did not cease his hacking. I launched forth in the kind--I may say, the peculiar kind--of colloquial German I had learned in my three weeks’ sojourn in his country. After I had talked some time, the boy, giving no rest to his meat-axe, but every once in a while looking furtively over his shoulder, asked,--

“Do you want any _Wurst_?”

“Sausage? No, no.”

And I began again, in my original German, and explained at greater length that I was in search of a place to get a cheap dinner. The boy laid down his meat-axe, eyed me a few seconds in awful silence, then glanced apprehensively over his shoulder, took up his meat-axe again, and went to work more lustily than ever.

There was this much about it: either the boy was deaf, or we stood somewhat in the relation of the two English girls in Hood’s story,--he could speak German and did not understand it, and I could understand German and not speak it. Still, rather pleased than otherwise at such a chance to air my newly acquired speech, and on the whole not a little gratified with my quick mastery of the language, I began in a higher key, and, approaching nearer and nearer, demanded in the sausage-maker’s ear whether he knew of a place to get a cheap dinner.

Down went the meat-axe again, and, with eyes and mouth wide open, the boy stood speechless before me.

Thus we were both inanely staring at each other when the back door flew open, and a burly lump of tumid humanity stumbled through it with a curse, wanting to know why the boy was not at work. The poor apprentice caught up his cleaver again, and I faced the man who had just entered.

“Do you want any Wurst?” he asked.

“No, no.” And I went over the whole story once more with such perspicuity as shipwrecked patience would naturally inspire in a person thoroughly at sea in a language. In the thick of my oration I detected a cloudy gleam of intelligence spreading itself over the red face of my hearer. My eloquence had touched him at last. I had not quite reached my peroration when--

“_Doch!_” interrupted my fat friend, as he pulled me briskly to the door. “You see that shop, three houses farther down the street?”

“Yes,” said I.

“You are sure you see the right one?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, you go right down there. There is a Frenchman down there. His wife is from Italy. I think, maybe, he can understand the Russian language: _I_ can’t!”

It was at that moment, I think, I learned to make the distinction between the degrees of benefit one derives from a book-knowledge of a language: it may help you to understand others, but it can hardly be said to help others to understand you.

* * * * *

While on this subject I may be pardoned, I hope, for telling of the more expeditious way I adopted to acquire the other modern tongues, which my subsequent poverty rather than any extraordinary ambition induced me to learn, in order to preserve the disguise of which I shall tell you presently.

On going into an unfamiliar country for the first time, I shut myself up in some cheap garret, with a grammar, for a couple of weeks. Then I sallied forth with a pocket-dictionary, and captured some worthless young fellow without friends or employment. To this luckless person I cleaved without mercy. I followed him--if I could not make him follow me--everywhere, and talked at him and made him talk. I argued with him over his three sous’ worth of chocolate, if we were in France, or over his boiled beans and olive-oil, if we were in Italy.

I asked him questions about everything, if we walked together in the streets; and, by the way, is it not truly wonderful how much one has to say when he has a difficulty in saying it? You may have noticed that a man who stutters, or has a hair-lip, is always talking. He who learns a new language is invariably troubled with the same fruitful suggestiveness, and often, too, with a more distressful execution.

If, therefore, the patience of my friendless tutor would sometimes flag, I would attempt to make him understand my glowing accounts of the comparative wealth of such vagrants as he was in my own prosperous, poor man’s country, advising him to immigrate. This occasionally would have the effect of restoring him to a feeble interest in life.

But if he would still persist in his low spirits, and find himself on the verge of asking me why I did not myself go back to my Eldorado of good-for-nothings, where he, no doubt, heartily wished me, then, at that last critical stage of his gloom, I would soothe and cheer him with a penny cigar. Generally speaking, this will not fail thoroughly to overcome your Old World vagabond. He will talk, and even listen, after that. The only difficulty is to know just when to administer to him the cigar: he must not be pampered or spoiled by undue indulgence and luxury.

At first, when I commenced my experiments on these unfortunate beings, and I could see them wince under my laceration of their helpless mother-tongue, I had slight qualms of conscience. Learning to quiet these at last, however, I fastened myself on the most intelligent vagrant at hand, with an almost faultless pre-calculation of my man, and subjected him to my tortures with a triumphant sense of virtue in the act, far transcending, I fancy, that experienced by your enthusiastic _savant_ when substantiating some pet theory on a living criminal.

Nothing, I am sure, ever before impressed me so highly with the modest merit that may lie concealed in vagrancy. It would be positively surprising to any one who has not enjoyed the advantage of this desperate method of mastering the colloquial speech of a country, if I should tell how soon I was enabled by it to drop my humble tutor, and, moving out of his neighborhood to some other city in the same state, to utilize and practise upon more pretending persons, in a higher grade of society.