What was my surprise, on Christmas evening, to see her head the American party to our house, with this picture and a speech to the Consul.
The treasured gift hangs in my Iowa home, but the kind words of that Christmas evening are stored away in the depths of our hearts. It was the sign, not the gift itself, that gratified us most.
Most of us mortals are so constituted that to have the esteem of our fellow beings gives us a most comfortable feeling here, anyway, whatever it may do for us hereafter.
December 7.--Last night Prof. Kinkel invited me to attend a Students’ Commers or festival. There must have been a thousand students present in the big skating rink. They sat at long tables; the corps students in high boots, and wearing their corps caps, badges and ribbons. In front of every one stood a mighty schooner of beer. All smoked, and the narcotic cloud was so dense I could scarcely see to the stage. There were decorations everywhere, and a band of music in the gallery. There were sentinels outside at the door, and whenever a particularly popular professor was about to enter, signals were waved along the tables and to the band. Then, as he walked blushing through the aisles to the stage, pandemonium itself was let loose in the way of clanging glasses, band playing, pounding tables, hurrahing and singing, until the conquering hero was seated on the platform. It was a great time for the professors. Lunge, the chemist; Kinkel, the poet; Hermann, the physiologist; Scherr, the historian; Meyer, the chemist; Klebs, the bacteriologist, and other men with names that sound all over Europe, were literally carried to the stage on the wings of noise, smoke, music and lager beer.
These great Zurich professors are the men whom Hepworth Dixon calls the “Dukes of the Republic.” They are the only people in Switzerland appointed to their places for life.
Students near me got away with a dozen and more schooners of Munich’s best. I don’t know where it went to, but they have been known to drink twenty glasses at a sitting. For myself, to keep up appearances I did away with three glasses and a half, and absorbed smoke enough, without touching a cigar, to give me the headache for a week.
Here, as at the German Universities, the corps students fought duels. The most self-important young man in the city is the one with the little red corps cap, the big top boots, the ribbon across his breast, and the fresh patch of muslin on his nose, showing a recent engagement.
If the duelist has attended still other universities, he will probably have a half a dozen welts and scars across his face. He may not know much about text-books, but these unseemly welts on the face are signs of great honor; and as the man of danger struts down the street with a big-mouthed bull-dog in tow, he is a spectacle to behold. His greatest happiness in life is to have some passer-by turn and gaze on him.
And this was what Bismarck was doing at twenty; this, and shooting off pistols in his bedroom!
These University warriors are not so dangerous as their slit-up noses indicate. I have known of fifty duels in the past few years and not a soul, save one, was badly hurt. He did get really killed.