“Do you know how the trains run?” I asked, getting up, a feeling of disgusted disappointment spreading over me.
“I think there is one around half-past nine or ten.”
“Damn!” I said, realizing what a dunce I had been. I had just forty-five minutes in which to pay my bill and make the train. Three hours more! I could have gone on the night before.
I hurried out, secured my bag, paid my bill and was off. On the way I had myself driven to the old “Juden-Gasse,” said to be full of picturesque medieval houses, for a look. I reached the depot in time to have a two-minute argument with my driver as to whether he was entitled to two marks or one—one being a fair reward—and then hurried into my train. In a half hour we were at Bingen-on-the-Rhine, and in three-quarters of an hour those lovely hills and ravines which make the Rhine so picturesque had begun, and they continued all the way to Coblenz and below that to Cologne.
CHAPTER XLIV
A MEDIEVAL TOWN
After Italy and Switzerland the scenery of the Rhine seemed very mild and unpretentious to me, yet it was very beautiful. The Hudson from Albany to New York is far more imposing. A score of American rivers such as the Penobscot, the New in West Virginia, the James above Lynchburg, the Rio Grande, and others would make the Rhine seem simple by comparison; yet it has an individuality so distinct that it is unforgetable. I always marvel over this thing—personality. Nothing under the sun explains it. So, often you can say “this is finer,” “that is more imposing,” “by comparison this is nothing,” but when you have said all this, the thing with personality rises up and triumphs. So it is with the Rhine. Like millions before me and millions yet to come, I watched its slopes, its castles, its islands, its pretty little German towns passing in review before the windows of this excellent train and decided that in its way nothing could be finer. It had personality. A snatch of old wall, with peach trees in blossom; a long thin side-wheel steamer, one smokestack fore and another aft, labeled “William Egan Gesellschaft”; a dismantled castle tower, with a flock of crows flying about it and hills laid out in ordered squares of vines gave it all the charm it needed.
When Coblenz was reached, I bustled out, ready to inspect Mayen at once. Another disappointment. Mayen was not at Coblenz but fifteen or eighteen miles away on a small branch road, the trains of which ran just four times a day, but I did not learn this until, as usual, I had done considerable investigating. According to my map Mayen appeared to be exactly at the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle, which was here, but when I asked a small boy dancing along a Coblenz street where the Moselle was, he informed me, “If you walk fast you will get there in half an hour!”
When I reached the actual juncture of the Rhine and the Moselle, however, I found I was mistaken; I was entertained at first by a fine view of the two rivers, darkly walled by hills and a very massive and, in a way, impressive equestrian statue of Emperor William I, armed in the most flamboyant and aggressive military manner and looking sternly down on the fast-traveling and uniting waters of the two rivers. Idling about the base of this monument, to catch sightseers, was a young picture-post-card seller with a box of views of the Rhine, Coblenz, Cologne and other cities, for sale. He was a very humble-looking youth,—a bit doleful,—who kept following me about until I bought some post-cards. “Where is Mayen?” I asked, as I began to select a few pictures of things I had and had not seen, for future reference.
“Mayence?” he asked doubtfully. “Mayence? Oh, that is a great way from here. Mayence is up the river near Frankfort.”