One Year Abroad

by Blanche Willis Howard

“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.

[pg!232]

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 soupçon of orange.