“‘What, in the name of all your saints in Zara, have your women to do with the refreshment we need?’
“‘Do! nothing in the world! that is precisely it! You will want three men each of you. For Dreimännerswein is three times as rough and ten times as sour as vinegar; and he who drinks it must be held fast by two men, while a third pours the liquid down his throat!’
“‘And what of the third of these Olympic beverages?’ said I.
“‘It is called Rachenputzer, and has peculiar qualities too. He who lies down to sleep with a flask of it in his body, must be aroused every half-hour, and turned over. Otherwise a pint of Rachenputzer would eat a hole right through his side!’
“The Gipsy laughed aloud as he uttered these words. We ourselves laughed in despite of our vexation; and, somewhat startlingly, a fourth voice took up the cachinnatory affection, and laughed even louder than the original three. As the new-comer stood in the light of the door-way, the landlord touched his cap, withdrew hastily into the passage, and slammed the door in our faces, leaving us in Cimmerian darkness, summer trousers, and a drizzling rain. The matter was no longer risible, and we were beginning to be seriously annoyed, when the mysterious stranger, whom we could but indistinctly see, invited us to accompany him we knew not whither, and hospitably to partake of we knew not what. We accepted the invitation most gratefully; and after a full half-hour’s walk, we found ourselves on the skirts of a wood. In less than half that time, we subsequently reached a neat little house within the wood itself; and I do not think ten minutes had elapsed, ere we had made such toilette as travellers may, and, with some doubts as to the reality of the circumstance, detected ourselves in the act of eating vermicelli soup, and wondering how it had reached us.
“Before our repast was entirely dispatched, our host, in whom we saw a young, well-made, and exceedingly amiable personage, informed us that he was on a botanizing expedition for the benefit of an establishment in Northern Germany; that he had been two months settled in the house in which we then were, and that he had already given temporary shelter to three plant-explorers, who had resorted, in their need, to the house of Djewitzki, the Gipsy, and who had found to their sorrow, that it had nothing of the quality of an inn about it, except the sign.
“We talked of flowers that night,” continued Knudtzen, “as though they were the foremost as well as the fairest things in all the world. But we were sciolists in the science, and, contrasted with us, our host was a sage. He knew that agrimony was under Jupiter, and angelica under the Sun in Leo; that milfoil was under the influence of Venus, and that garden basil was a herb of Mars. If every new idea be worth the knowing, why, we gained knowledge by the information, that all the dodders are under Saturn. We heard, for the first time, the virtues of the plant enchusa.”
“But,” interrupted Löwenskiold, “we were enabled to remind our host of what Dioscorides says about it,—that if any who have newly eaten of it do but spit in the mouth of a serpent, the reptile instantly dies.”
“True,” said Knudtzen, “we have not been at Upsal for nothing.”
“We may all aid each other by turns,” I remarked to my two friends, as we arrived, after descending from the cathedral, on the old bridge over the Moldau. A large herd of cattle was crossing it at the time; and some of the foremost black oxen of this herd had bunches of amara dulcis (or, “woody nightshade”) hung round their necks; a common custom in Germany, as I told the young travellers, and employed as a remedy against dizziness in the head.