CHAPTER III.

STUDENT LIFE AND WANDERINGS.

But I must get back to Heidelberg, where the sympathetic reader will not, I trust, have imagined that I went all this time without dinners because the search for one which should be the _ultima Thule_ of cheapness was embarrassing and adventurous. I found a place, at last, where a homely abundant midday meal was furnished me in a private family, for one gulden and twenty-six kreutzers per week,--a fraction over eight cents a day. My supper I took at a _Gasthaus_, in company with some theological students, at the cost of about four cents.

Many of my countrymen, who have spent large sums in endeavoring to live cheaply in the same city, will of course believe nothing of this. They have paid dearly for the privilege of being Americans. They date their experiences from hotels supplied with waiters who speak our language, and have dealt at shops on whose windows they have seen blazoned in golden letters, “ENGLISH SPOKEN.” They have, in reality, paid the teacher who taught these waiters and those shop-keepers to murder our own vernacular.

By matriculating at the great University of Heidelberg, I became endowed with all the time-honored privileges of students. I could not be arrested or taken through the streets, if I had been guilty of an ordinary crime; I could not be confined in a common prison or go to a common hospital, the University having those institutions for its own particular benefit.

And poverty seemed there to have lost its curse. The very fact of my being a student put me on a social scale above that of the wealthy merchant. This, however, may have been only in the estimation of the collegians themselves.

A fellow-student thought some of going to America, and propounded the following question: “But when I arrive, I shall not have any money, and I shall know nothing of the language of the country; what shall I do?”

“Go to work!” said I.

“What? manual labor! I am too aristocratic!”

That young man, let me add, was then living on an income of one hundred and ten dollars a year.

* * * * *

The German student must have his pipe, his beer, and a life of pleasure at whatever sacrifice. If he is rich, he pays some attention to his personal appearance. You will see him adorned with boots of immense length; _corps_ caps and ribbons; the number of his duels scored on his red face in ungainly sword-scars; and followed by a retinue of sinecurists, in the shape of great ugly worthless dogs. _His_ life is a continued sacrifice to the merry gods. He is rarely seen at lectures.

Indeed, there is one society or club at the University, the first article of whose constitution reads, “No member shall at any time, or on any pretence whatever, after matriculation, be seen in the University building.”

On the other hand, if the student is poor, he pays very slight attention to what he wears. He does not the less, however, devote a great portion of his time to beer, tobacco, and the pursuit of pleasure. You will see him at the most frequented beer-houses every night. If you go to the opera, you will observe him also stalking thither, shiveringly, through the wind, his tight pantaloons striking his crane-like legs about midships between his feet and knees, and his shoulders shrugged up in the vain attempt to get more warmth out of an extremely short coat. He looks more like the impersonation of Famine, striding about among men, than the good, honest-hearted fellow that he is.

For with all his faults, as our more Puritanical education may lead us to call them, the German student _is_ an honest, generous, noble-hearted fellow. He sees beyond the smoke of his own pipe, and has deeper thoughts than those inspired by beer. His heart swells beyond the bounds of his petty state. His sympathies are as broad as the old German Empire.

It is too true, perhaps, that when, in maturer manhood, he becomes _angestellt_ in some life-office in the gift of his little prince, his liberalism slumbers or dies out; but that does not affect the sincerity of his youthful sentiment. I am sure that I never spoke with one of them, on the subject, who had not some dream of a great united Germany.

There was no more interested watcher of our late civil strife than the German student. He felt that the battle then waging for the right of self-government had a connection with his hopes for the future of his own severed land. Germany’s wrongs and the sigh for universal liberty are the burden of his many songs. No higher and no more appropriate eulogy on the German student can be pronounced than to say that, in his university days at least, he is true to the spirit of one of his most beautiful and most popular melodies, “To the bold deed, the free word, the generous action, woman’s love, and the fatherland.”

* * * * *

By the laws of German universities, a matriculated student is not obliged to pay for more than the lectures of one professor during a semester,--that is, six months. I managed, therefore, to pay for the cheapest, and attended as many more as I liked; so about ten dollars a year were my collegiate expenses.

To confess the truth, my calendar and that of the University did not always agree. I often took vacations in session time, in the shape of long excursions on foot, and sometimes disappeared from Heidelberg for weeks together. My _Hausfrau_--she that received the princely income of eighty cents a month for my room--at first showed symptoms of anxiety about me; but she soon learned to be surprised at no wild freak of her aerial lodger.

By these tours on foot,--the only philosophical way of travelling,--and by the occasional aid of the cheap third-class cars of that country, I visited all parts of Germany, and learned more of the language, character, and habits of its odd, warm-souled people than I ever could have learned at the great hotels and in the first-class railway carriages. During the long vacations, and especially after leaving Heidelberg altogether, I extended my explorations into remoter parts,--into the Tyrol, Switzerland, Italy, and France.

I travelled in a way in which probably no American has ever travelled before or since, namely, disguised as a Handwerksbursche,--a wandering tradesman. Any one who has been in Europe will not ask why a stranger in that land should need to pass himself off as a poor native, if he wants to save money. On the Continent, as a general rule, a man in broadcloth, not personally known to the shop or hotel keeper, pays two prices; whereas a person speaking English, even if clad in fustian, pays three prices; and I should like to see him help himself. The English language has come to be mistaken for a gold-mine all through Europe.

These wandering tradesmen, these Handwerksburschen, let me say,--for they are unknown to nations under free, constitutional governments,--are a sort of fossil remains of feudalism. They are young fellows, half journeymen, half apprentices, who are obliged to wander for two or three years from city to city, working at their trades. They finally return to their homes, weary and poor; having learned little but the rough side of the world,--to make what is called their “masterpiece.” If this pass muster, they are entitled to style themselves masters of their trades.

They grow out of that old illiberal principle which compels the son to follow in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather. Yet, for all the narrow-minded enactments and regulations to crush their spirit and make them miserable, they always walk on the sunny side of nature. They are a jovial set of vagabonds, who have rarely the chance to be dishonest, if they had the inclination.

Disguised in the blouse of their class,--something like our Western “warmus,” except that it is of thin blue stuff,--I have spent many a happy hour, toiling along the same road with them, listening to their stories and merry songs. If I meet one of them on the highway, he stops, offers me his hand, and exchanges a kindly word. He takes out his pipe, asks me to fill mine from his tobacco-pouch, and tells me all he knows of the road passed over.

He never lodges in a city, unless he has work there. The village inn is his castle; here he obtains his bed at night and his breakfast in the morning for seven kreutzers,--not quite five cents; and trudges on, smoking and singing, through all Europe. This is the Handwerksbursche, poor, but merry; the knight-errant of the bundle and staff; the troubadour and minnesinger of the nineteenth century.

In Switzerland, for instance, where almost every one travels as a pedestrian, and where hundreds of our countrymen every year blister their inexperienced feet at the rates of from ten to thirty francs a day, I have journeyed sumptuously--thanks to my disguise--for thirty sous. When addressed in French, if my broken speech was noticed, it was supposed that I was from one of the German cantons; and, in the same manner, if my bad German was detected, I was set down as from one of the French cantons.

This gratuitous naturalization on one day and expatriation on the next had no bad effect whatever on my health, whereas it had the best possible result on my purse.

My blouse was a protection, not only to the respectable suit of clothes which I wore under it, but against all the impositions practised upon travellers. When I arrived at a large city or watering-place, I generally hired a little room for a week, found a cheap place to get my meals, and, after settling prices for everything in advance, divested myself of my disguise, and “did” the galleries and promenades, to the accompaniment of kid gloves and immaculate linen.

But the glory of pedestrianism is not in cities; it is in the broad highway, on the banks of mighty rivers, or in the narrow footpath winding over mountains. There is such pleasure and pride in the consciousness that one can go where and when one will, without waiting on coaches or trains. Thirty, forty, or fifty good miles left behind in one day, by the means of locomotion nature has given to every one, are not only a consolation to sleep upon at a village inn, but make the sleep sounder and sweeter. I defy any man not to be proud of his strength, when he finds--as almost every one will, after a little practice--that he can make thirty miles on foot, day after day, with perfect ease.

It is, however, just to state that village inns are not always paradises. The hostess sometimes has more lodgers in her beds than she receives money for; but a practised eye generally detects such places at a glance, and rarely exposes the body to their perils. Every village has at least one respectable inn. Before my personal history had taught me this wisdom by excruciating example, I had good reason to believe that the tortures of the Vehmgericht, the old secret tribunal of Germany, were not the things of the past which the world thought them. I had frequent occasion, too, for what might be called an equanimity of stomach.

I arrived one evening, for instance, at a small desolate village in the remote eastern part of Bavaria, near the Austrian border. I was weary and hungry, but before mine host of the inn would have anything to do with me, he sent me on a wild chase through innumerable narrow, crooked alleys, in search of the burgomaster to deliver my passport into his hands and obtain his gracious permission to remain over night in the place.

The entrance to the mansion of that dignitary was through a cattle-yard. He had probably never before in his life heard of the language of my passport, but that did not prevent his looking at it with an official air of infinite wisdom. I returned to the inn at last, fortified with the requisite credentials.

The hostess now appeared, and asked me what I would eat, addressing me familiarly in the second person singular. Her long lank frame was attired in the abominable costume of the Bavarian peasantry. I could compare her to nothing but a giant specimen of the Hungarian heron, which I need hardly say is not a pretty bird.

The same room served as parlor and kitchen. I sat patiently and watched her kindling the fire in the great earthen stove, indulging my mind as hungry people are wont to do, with rich visions of imaginary banquets. What was my horror to see her take the eggs, which I had ordered, break them one by one into her greasy leathern apron, and commence beating them vigorously with a pewter spoon!

As soon as I recovered my presence of mind, I considered the folly of remonstrating with her, and, with a great effort, I mildly remarked that she had misunderstood me; I wanted my eggs boiled. By this stratagem, I preserved my disguise and achieved a cleanly meal in defiance of the leathern apron.