Wall, Heidelberg Castle is a sight, a sight to see. All the picters we see of it in chromos and almanacks and sech don’t give you any idee of how grand, how vast it is.
Why, imagine a buildin’ all covered with carvin’s, and towers, and pinnakles, and with moats, and drawbridges, and dungeons, and courtyards, and banquet-halls, and decorations of all kinds, as big as from our house over to Deacon Henzy’s, and back round by Solomon Bobbettses, and acrost to Seth Shelmadine’s, and so on around the two cross-roads and back to our house.
Wall, reader, whether you believe it or not, it covers as much ground as that, and you well know how much ground that covers. Good land! it is enough to make anybody’s back ache to think of the days’ work it took to build it. But, then, it wuzn’t all done all in one job—it wuz begun a good many hundred years ago. They didn’t shirk their work, them old carpenters didn’t; the makers of summer hotels could take lessons of ’em in the matter of walls. It would make one of them paper wall makers swoon away to think of buildin’ a wall twenty feet thick.
I wish I had one of them rooms to take round with me summers on my towers. It would be impossible for the sound of snorers to penetrate into the apartment where one wuz vainly tryin’ to woo the Goddess of Sleep. And midnight snickerers would be futile to kill that Goddess with their giggle-pinted arrers.
Of course, a big part of this immense buildin’ is in ruins.
A handsome old stone platform or piazza that them old builders made half way up the castle walls I did want to see. It had everything it needed in the way of sculpters, vases, carved seats, etc. And the view, oh! my poor head-dress, it almost rises now as the paneramy sweeps through my foretop, it gives sech elevatin’ thoughts and emotions.
How fur off, how fur off you could see—towns, country, the blue Rhine, the mountains—oh, my soul! wuz it not a fair seen, a fair seen!
But the barrel, or, ruther, hogsit, to hold wine in, it jest madded me to see it. Would you believe it that the very worst old drunkard you ever see or hearn on would make a hogsit as big as the Jonesville tarvern to hold his liquor in?
A hogsit as big as the Jonesville tarvern.