“Therefore I have no desire for a name or money. Things are not sufficiently permanent to be desirable for an ambitious man.
“But speaking of the great cataclysm that is imminent, I did not hear any response to my application for a loan of a dollar to relieve my hunger. That is permanent, and will be till the universal smash-up.”
I gave the man a franc.
“It is little but it will do, it will assuage the pangs of hunger. A philosopher needs but little. Thank you. Farewell forever. In the smash that is to come, let us hope that our fragments may come together, and that we may sail through space in company.”
And he departed. He did not go to a restaurant, but he went, as straight as the bird flies, to the nearest brandy shop from which he emerged in a minute with his face illuminated. He did not live by bread alone.
Strasburg is rich in antiquity, rich in the quaintest old houses on the continent, houses that commence inland from the sidewalk, each story projecting above the one under it, the fronts filled full of carving of the quaintest and most curious description. These houses, some of them, count the years of their being by the hundreds, and Strasburg, sleepy old town that it is, either keeps them because she is too lazy to pull them down, or because she really treasures them because of their age.
An American looking at them feels that time has gone backward with him, and that he has awakened in the fourteenth century.
Here you see the genuine Alsatian costume. The women are, as a rule, fine-looking, some of them pretty, and the style of dress fits their peculiar style of beauty. They wear immense bows of wide black ribbon, which stands up at the back of the head, and flares out at the sides like the wings of a wind-mill. This admits of no hat or any other head-gear, and its effect, though odd at first sight, is rather pleasing. However, anything looks well on a pretty woman, and the women of Alsace are all comely. They wear their gowns short, that the effect of shapely ankles and trim feet may not be lost, and altogether they are good specimens of femininity.
The peculiarity of the old houses in Strasburg, already spoken of, is greatly intensified by the huge storks’ nests that crown the large awkward chimneys of many of the houses. All Summer long, the great white storks live in Strasburg, until the cold weather drives them further south. Their nests are built on the tops of chimneys, of rough sticks and straw, and are very clumsy-looking affairs. But when there is a white stork standing in them, solemn and grave, on one leg, the other drawn closely under him, the effect is extremely ludicrous.
The stork is a peculiarly Strasburgian institution. It is considered a bad omen if a stork leaves a house, in the chimney of which he has once built his nest, and misfortune is certain, so they believe, to follow any one who mistreats or offends a stork.