when he awoke and became lively till about three, when he sank into sleep again. His days were like those of a far Northern winter, lit by the sun at the same hours.
The next morning a very gentlemanly young man knocked at my door, and entered and asked in perfect English for a Mr. Bell, who lived in the same house. I informed him that Mr. Bell was out, but asked him to enter my room and take a chair, which he did, conversing with me for half an hour, when he departed, leaving a card on a side-table. In a few minutes later, O., who was of the kind who notice everything, entered, took up the card, and read on it the name and address of the young Grand Duke of Baden, who was naturally by far the greatest man in the country, he being its hereditary ruler.
“Where the devil did you get this?” asked O., and all, in amazement.
“Oh,” I replied, “it’s only the Duke. He has just been in here making a call. If you fellows had come five minutes sooner you’d have seen him. Have some beer!”
The impression that I was a queer lot, due to my making my first call on Capelmann et cetera, was somewhat strengthened by this card, until I explained how I came by it. But as Dr. Johnson in other words remarked, there are people to whom such queer things happen daily, and others to whom they occur once a year. And there was never yet a living soul who entered into my daily life who did not observe that I belong to the former class. If I have a guardian angel, it must be Edgar A. Poe’s Angel of the Odd. But he generally comes to those who belong to him!
It was a long time before I profited much by my lectures, because it was fearful work for me to learn German. I engaged a tutor, and worked hard, and read a great deal, and talked it con amore; but few persons would believe how slowly I learned it, and with what incredible labour. How often have I cursed up hill and down dale, the Tower of Babel, which first brought the curse of languages upon the
world! And what did I ever have to do with that Tower? Had I lived in those days, I would never have laid hand to the work in merry, sunny, lazy Babylon, nor contributed a brick to it. By the way, it was a juvenile conjecture of mine that the Tower of Babel was destroyed for being a shot-tower, in which ammunition was prepared to be used by the heathen. Which theory might very well have been inspired by a verse from the old Puritanical rendering of the Psalms:—
“Ye race itt is not alwayes gott
By him who swiftest runns,
Nor ye Battell by ye Peo-pel
Who shoot with longest gunnes.”
Even before I had gone to Princeton I had read and learned a great deal relative to Justinus Kerner, the great German supernaturalist, mystic, and poet, firstly from a series of articles in the Dublin University Magazine, and later from a translation of “The Seeress of Prevorst,” and several of the good man’s own romances and lyrics. I suppose that, of all men on the face of the earth, I should have at that time preferred to meet him. Wherefore, as a matter of course, it occurred that one fine morning a pleasant gentlemanly German friend of mine, who spoke English perfectly, and whose name was Rücker, walked into my room, and proposed that we should take a two or three days’ walk up the Neckar with our knapsacks, and visit the famous old ruined castle of the Weibertreue. My mother had read me the ballad-legend of it in my boyhood, and I had learned it by heart. Indeed, I can still recall it after sixty years:—
“Who can tell me where Weinsberg lies?
As brave a town as any;
It must have sheltered in its time
Brave wives and maidens many:
If e’er I wooing have to do,
Good faith, in Weinsberg I will woo!”