"Certainly. I should like to see how these things are managed in Heidelberg. You are a Baron, and I am a stranger. It is of no consequence what you and I do, as the king's fool Angeli said to the poet Bautru, urging him to put on his hat at the royal dinner-table."
William Lilly, the Astrologer, says, in his Autobiography, that, when he was committed to the guard-room in White Hall, he thought himself in hell; for "some were sleeping, others swearing, others smoking tobacco; and in the chimney of the room there were two bushels of broken tobacco-pipes, and almost half a load of ashes." What he would have thought if he had peeped into this Heidelberg Studenten-Kneipe, I know not. He certainly would not have thought himself in heaven; unless it were a Scandinavian heaven. The windows were open; and yet so dense was the atmosphere with the smoke of tobacco, and the fumes of beer, that the tallow candles burnt but dimly. A crowd of students were sitting at three long tables, in the large hall; a medley of fellows, known at German Universities under the cant names of Old-Ones, Mossy-Heads, Princes of Twilight, and Pomatum-Stallions. They were smoking, drinking, singing, screaming, and discussing the great Laws of the Broad-Stone and the Gutter. They had a great deal to say, likewise, about Besens, and Zobels, and Poussades; and, if they had been charged for the noise they made, as travellers used to be, in the old Dutch taverns, they would have had a longer bill to pay for that, than for their beer.
In a large arm-chair, upon the middle table, sat one of those distinguished individuals, known among German students as a Senior, or Leader of a Landsmannschaft. He was booted and spurred, and wore a very small crimson cap, and a very tight blue jacket, and very long hair, and a very dirty shirt. He was President of the night; and, as Flemming entered the hall with the Baron and his friend, striking upon the table with a mighty broadsword, he cried in a loud voice;
"Silentium!"
At the same moment a door at the end of the hall was thrown open, and a procession of newcomers, or Nasty-Foxes, as they are called in the college dialect, entered two by two, looking wild, and green, and foolish. As they came forward, they were obliged to pass under a pair of naked swords, held cross-wise by two Old-Ones, who, with pieces of burnt cork, made an enormous pair of mustaches, on the smooth, rosy cheeks of each, as he passed beneath this arch of triumph. While the procession was entering the hall, the President lifted up his voice again, and began to sing the well-known Fox-song, in the chorus of which all present joined lustily.
What comes there from the hill?
What comes there from the hill?
What comes there from the leathery hill?
Ha! Ha!
Leathery hill!