A GERMAN watering-place, with its nauseous springs, its inviting groves and garden and shady walks and rustic seats and bowers, its conversation house, and sweet, clean beds and airy rooms and quiet halls, was in our way, and a Sabbath was just ahead of us. So we would rest there according to the commandment.
I have been left alone, or with my little party only, in a wayside inn, among the Swiss valleys, and have seen troops of travellers, some of them with white cravats and straight coat collars, go on their way of a bright, glad, summer Sabbath morning, when it seemed to me the mountains looked down with a divine benediction and invited us to sit all day under their shadows and worship toward the holy hill of Zion. And a Sabbath in a wilderness, alone, is well spent, if the soul is at peace, and the wearied limbs of a pilgrim are suffered also to have rest.
If a land impregnated with salt is cursed, this region ought to be barren; but it is not. It is a rich, picturesque, rolling country, and a beautiful river flows through its waving harvest-fields, just now white for the sickle. Sometimes a bold cliff stands majestically on the river-side, and an old feudal castle hangs on the summit, where once the lord of the domain held high revel and strong rule, a robber on land and a pirate on the river he would be called now, since his race has run out, and kings who do the same things that he did are reckoned as the lawful plunderers as well as rulers of the people. So the robber told Alexander, and the king couldn’t see it, but it was true nevertheless.
They make salt curiously in these parts. The water is pumped up from springs or wells into troughs, which are raised on scaffolding thirty or more feet high; and below these troughs a solid mass of brush is piled, a wall some ten feet thick, standing on a reservoir; this brush wall reaches hundreds and thousands of feet along, according to the extent of the works employed. The pumps are moved by water-power, and slowly and steadily, ceaselessly, day and night, they raise the water into the troughs above, through which it trickles upon this brush and drops down, down, down into the basins below; this exposes the water to the action of the air and rapidly evaporates it; so that what runs through the heap and finally reaches the reservoir below is exceedingly strong, and by completing the process with boiling is readily converted into salt.
The vicinity of these works is a healthful resort for invalids, who find the atmosphere more highly charged with saline particles than the shores of the sea itself. In the neighborhood of the mighty wall of wood are boarding-houses, as at the sea-shore, and in the pleasant, shady side the ladies sit with their needle-work or books in hand, inhaling the invigorating air, and enjoying the quietest, coolest, and most bracing climate in hot weather, and on the outskirts of the fashionable world. On the bank of the river we found a place to stay, and from it made excursions into the regions beyond. A rock, rising one thousand feet perpendicularly from the water, held on its giddy summit the tottering remnants of the fortress of one of the petty tyrants of the olden time, and a circuit of five or six miles, in a broiling day, brought us by a path that no wheels can traverse to the height. Tradition tells of the last of the barons who held his court in these walls; how his daughter was loved and wooed by his rival chieftain, whose castle still stands erect across the river a few miles below and in full view of this; how the “cruel father” refused to give his daughter to his foe, and the lover lured her by the arts of love to aid him in his daring scheme to capture her father’s castle and compel him to surrender her in exchange for his liberty and his home; how the stratagem succeeded, and the circumvented parent threw himself headlong from the rampart into the frightful abyss, and the lovers, after destroying the stronghold, removed to their castle below, and became the ancestors of a distinguished family of an unpronounceable German name. All this tradition tells, and to write it all out would be perhaps worth the while of some one who has nothing better to do.
Our next stopping-place was Homburg, one of the more modern, but the most brilliant of the watering-places in Europe. Like some of our own cities, it has rapidly rushed into notoriety; that is just the word for the reputation it has made for itself, and by which it has made its fortunes and ruined the fortunes of thousands who have sought its hospitalities.
A very few years ago a wide waste of marshy meadows, swamps we would call them, lay around and over the spot that now gathers and holds for the season the fashion and style and rank of the gayest European capitals,—the largest and most distinguished circle of “the upper classes” to be found at any fashionable resort in the world. It is a city of hotels, and these on a scale of elegance that is not surpassed. But between these hotels and the waters of health that first drew the crowds hither, are these original meadows, now covered with young woods, and intersected by numberless walks and drives, in which a stranger might easily be lost, and left to wander hours and hours without finding his way out. Beyond these shaded groves we come to the springs, several, with various properties, very kindly arranged to meet the many maladies of man, and all of them sufficiently disagreeable to be medicinal. Neatness, order, elegance reign everywhere. Around the springs, through the avenues overhung with venerable trees, along the rows of beautiful lodging-houses and residences of those who permanently pass the summer here, the quietness of private life rests with a grace and charm quite rare in a great watering-place. This gives to Homburg such an attraction that thousands of the quietest class of people in the world love to come here for refreshment and repose. They need not go into the Kursaal, though that word means cure-hall or cure-house. I would call it Kursaal, or curse-all, because it is the curse of all who are drawn into its vortex.
It is a palace. In its extent, its proportions, and appointments, it is fit for a royal residence, all the arts of ornamentation being exhausted to make it a splendid temple of pleasure, instead of a hospital or asylum for the sick and suffering. This palace, with its broad piazzas looking upon beautiful gardens, where elegant women are sitting under the shade, with their books or fancy needle-work, while a German band fills the soft and fragrant atmosphere with delicious waves of music; this palace, with its concert-rooms and ball-rooms and reading-rooms, filled with all the choicest periodicals of all nations, which studious old men are diligently pondering; this palace, so still, so beautiful, so gorgeous in its decorations, and so well fitted to bear the inscription which Ptolemy Soter put upon his library at Alexandria, “The Medicine of the Soul,”—this palace was also the great gambling-house in Europe.
A grand saloon that stretches across the house holds two long tables, around which are seated thirty or forty men and women, intent, silent, more statue than life-like. With your eyes closed you would scarcely be conscious that any one was in the room. The clicking of gold and silver on the table, the few words of the manager as he decides a point, an occasional deep-drawn sigh as pent-up emotion finds escape, with now and then an involuntary exclamation, evidently out of order and quite disagreeable to all concerned,—these are the only interruptions to the solemn, painful stillness of the Homburg gaming-table. I have heard that something more startling than an oath or a groan sometimes has interrupted the current of the play, and that a gambler, in a paroxysm of rage and despair, has blown out his brains at the table. But such incidents are not of every-day occurrence. Besides, people who play here have not many brains to blow out. They are not insane. But as a class, they are below the average of the human family in intellectual force, because they stake their money with the knowledge that the chances are not even, are always against them, and in favor of the bank, or managers of the table. In playing roulette, or rouge et noir, the two games which are constantly going on, a bystander sees that the taker draws in more than he shoves out, and that the tendency of things is steadily in favor of the bank, while chance favors the victims just often enough to keep up the hope that they will make a grand hit by and by and make up all their losses. Yet the game is so transparently in the hands of the managers, that one wonders any one can be so big a fool as to lose all his money in such hopeless ventures. The bank sets up a certain amount of money every day, as the capital for that day, and stories are told of some heavy gambler now and then breaking the bank, but that means only that by a fortunate run he has cleaned out what was set up for the time, and to-morrow it is all right again with the same or a larger capital. But these stories are mostly fictitious, set afloat by the bank itself, which, by pretending to be broken, encourages the idea that it is just as apt to lose money as those who are playing against it.
Some of these people are historic characters. One of them here now is the brother of the Viceroy of Egypt, and he plays heavily, but stops when he has had excitement enough. A fatalist by profession, he takes his chances as decrees, and consoles himself with other pleasures when these go against him. A German princess, who is the model of all the virtues at home, gratifies a darling passion during the summer months by wasting half her income in this gambling-house. American travellers are the most cautious of all the company; but now and then a dissipated youngster takes a plunge into swifter ruin in the waters of this terrible stream. Most pitiable it is to see fair women, and sometimes women that are known to be exemplary in society beyond the sea, trying it just once, tempting luck; and if they lose they usually stop after the first loss, but if they win they try again, and so on, until they lose all they have about them and can borrow of their friends.