"You see," she said apologetically, "Jake here and me are travelling around, and the only way we can get on is to ask for a ticket to a place, and never stop travelling till we get there. We speak German all right because my parents were Germans, and Jake was born in Germany; but he don't know much about it because he was only two years old when he left it eight-and-thirty years ago. We thought we'd like to see the Paris Exposition, but my! it ain't to be compared to the Chicago Exhibition, and as for Paris, it can't come up to Noo York, and these river steamers ain't a patch on the Hudson River boats, and I don't think much of Europe anyway."
Jake, a good-looking, gentle-mannered man, tried to soften the asperity of his wife's strictures without success. He evidently adored her.
"The way we travel," resumed Mrs. Jake, "is to think of a place we've heard of, and to ask for a ticket to it. Now, we'd heard of Paris and Cologne, and Heidelberg, and Baden, and Dresden, and Berlin, and Hamburg, but we don't know now how they come—see? So we hev' to go cavortin' around to find out which to take next. A gentleman way back at Cologne"—she pronounced it "Klon"—"told me Heidelberg came next. I quite thought Baden was near Hamburg, and that we should take it last; but they tell me it ain't, and that, you see, has upset all our calculations. Guess you're a Londoner, anyway; thought so by your accent!"
When we left the steamer at Bingen, the last I heard of Mrs. Jake was a plaintive moan:
"Guess I don't think much of Europe, anyway, and I wouldn't come again, not even to cut out Keren-Happuch!"
OF SOME FELLOW TRAVELLERS AND
THE CATHEDRAL OF MAINZ.
"Ja Wohl! Frau Rittergutsbesitzer. I have lived in the Herr Professor's house for five-and-thirty years. I have pickled his cabbage and preserved his fruit. I have minced with my own hand the pork for his sausages before they had mincing-machines in Schleswig-Holstein. I have seen personally to the smoking of his hams and fish. I make his Apfelkuchen and Nusskuchen myself, and do not buy them in the shop, like that lazy Hausfrau opposite us at No 2, who comes from that God-forgotten country England, where all the women are so badly brought up. I grant you that what I do is no more than the duty of every God-fearing German Haushälterin; none the less, I do not mean all my work to go for nothing, and I will not be ousted by a hussy! In the time of the vielbedauerten mother (Frau Regierungsrat Lenbach) I had no worries about his matrimonial affairs; she looked after those. But sieh mal, Frau Riedel, now the care of him is on my shoulders. He has no more idea of taking care of himself than a baby! He is exactly like that learned man—I think it was our great Neander—who was running out of his college one day and ran into a cow; so he pulled off his hat and said, 'Gnädige Frau, ich bitte um Verzeihung' ('Gracious lady, I beg your pardon'), and went on; and the week after he came tearing round the same corner, thinking, I suppose, of those heathen gods and goddesses whose pictures shame a modest woman to look at, and he ran up against a lady, so he cried out: 'Oh! du dumme Kuh! warum kommst du mir immer in den Weg?' ('Oh, you stupid cow, why will you always get in my way?') Yes, my Herr Professor is just like that—quite as stupid, though they call him so wise and clever; and what chance has a born innocent like he is against a designing spinster of forty-five who makes him presents of Weihnachtstollen at Christmas, Oster-Eier at Easter, and Geburtstagstorte on his birthday? I ask you what chance of escape a poor Junggeselle has?
"Told him she wanted to marry him! Not I. Why, liebe Frau, I have not lived sixty-five and a half years in this world for nothing! If I let him suppose she was in love with him, that would be the very way to make him like her. So as I laid the cloth for the Herr Professor's Abendtisch, I remarked casually that Fräulein Bettine Meyer was not at all a bad sort of woman really, and that she had some excellent qualities, if only she did not make herself so ridiculous. 'How ridiculous?' says he, sitting up. 'What does she do ridiculous, I should like to know?' 'Why, wears a false front and curls bought at Frau Kölsch's shop,' says I. 'Poor thing, she can't make herself look young and beautiful, whatever she does, and Frau Rittmeister Bernstorf was laughing at her the other day, and at the high heels and at the stuffing the Schneiderin round the corner puts into her gowns to cover the angular bones! She would look much more respectable,' said I, 'if she would brush her scanty grey locks back, and smooth them with pomatum as I do, and wear a black lace Mütze over them, instead of making herself the laughing-stock of Schleswig.' And away I walked. And the Professor ate no supper that night, and next day he left for his Ferienausflug, and never called to say good-bye to Fräulein Meyer; and so I put the extinguisher on that little candle just as its flame was beginning to burn up, and—why! here we are at Mainz."
And this is what I heard, and how I was entertained, in the "elektrische Bahn" on my little expedition from Wiesbaden to Mainz. I reflected, as I saw the Haushälterin get down heavily with all the deliberation of her sixty-five and a half years, that feline amenities are much the same in Germany as in England; and I felt sorry for poor Fräulein Meyer, who might have given up her small vanities and made pancakes and Apfelkuchen for the Professor quite as well in the end as the Haushälterin.