It was weary hours after the middle of the day before the spires of Wittenberg disappeared below a sand-hill. The afternoon was far spent, and I began to cast longing glances ahead in search of an eligible tavern, for I thoroughly agree with Dr. Johnson that “there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”
I had come up with a thumping lout of a young peasant, who strode along with his “clouted shoon,” measuring about a yard and a quarter at a stride, whose voice blubbered and gurgled up out of his stomach in such a manner that the fierce wind whisked it away, and left me nothing but an occasional horse-laugh (whereupon I would also laugh, though I had not the remotest notion of the matters whereof he was discoursing); and by his advice I passed several inns, though I found afterwards, to my sorrow, he was looking only for the cheapest. At last we came to one which was meaner than all the others, but I was too weary to go a step farther. It bore the pretentious name of the inn of the Green Linden. It was a mere hovel, built of cobbles and mud-stuccoed, tawny-yellow within, greenish-yellowish without, with an earthen floor and benches around the walls. Above the door were twined some sprigs of Whitsuntide birch, which I had seen during the day on the peasants’ hats, wagons, and everywhere.
Around a pine table were eight or ten men and hobbledehoys, each with a Schoppen of terribly stiff beer before him, and most of them smoking the long goosenecked porcelain pipe, while four of them were intent on cards. The men were hard, gristly-faced, sour-blooded fellows, who only muttered now and then a monosyllable, which I could seldom understand; while the youths looked on with the most vacuous, loamy countenances imaginable. So intent were they on the miserable game that they gave no heed to our arrival, and when I endeavored to ascertain who was the landlord, I received only a blank stare or a gesture of impatience. I sat down and waited, and I confess for a few minutes my enthusiasm for the Prussian people fell absolutely to the freezing-point.
After about half an hour the landlord seemed to be disturbed in his mind by a suspicion that I was a foreigner, drew near and ascertained that fact, whereupon he brought me some vile black coffee and some good wheaten Semmel, and then returned to his occupation. The players continued at their game far into the night, and though the stakes were of the most trifling nature, often only a half-penny, they displayed a fierce and obstinate eagerness which was surprising. They would rise up on their feet, lean far across the table and smite it with appalling violence. When they at last desisted, and were preparing to disperse, they collected about me, and, finding I was an American, listened to me awhile with a kind of drowsy, immovable passiveness, while the smoke lazily swirled above their heads. Unlike the lively Swabians and the joyous drinkers of the sunny wine of Freiburg, they scarcely asked any questions or expressed any interest beyond grunting their assent or wonder.
At last the host and myself were left alone, and then he proceeded to prepare the only couch he could offer by shaking down on the floor a bundle of rye straw. He tucked me all up, as if I were one of his young Buben, shook the hand which I reached out from the straw, and left me with a cheerful Schlafen Sie wohl. In the adjoining room a lusty fellow stretched himself on a bench, pillowed his head on a portentous loaf of rye bread, not having even inserted that useful article of diet into a pillow-case, and there he snored—stertitque supinus—the livelong night in a tone so audible that I was greatly tempted to rise and introduce a wisp of rye straw judiciously into his windpipe.
When I sat up on my couch next morning, pulling the straw out of my hair, I said to myself, like Richard, “Oh, I have passed a miserable night!” I had not had any “fearful dreams,” nor, for that matter, any sleep, that I was aware of; neither had I any “ugly sights,” because it was too dark to see them, but I felt them. They appeared to be greatly rejoiced to be permitted, once in their lives, to extract blood out of a man’s veins instead of beer.
The next day I passed through spectacles of the most wonderfully minute and unceasing toil. In an artificial pine-forest, where the trees were become too large to be ploughed, there were men on their knees plucking the weeds between the rows; others in long sheep-skin cloaks were weeding fields of flax; a woman was culling in a royal forest the merest sprigs and leaf-stems for fuel; others along the roadside snipped off the close, short fleece of grass, and carried it in mighty bundles on their backs for the stalled cattle. Here a stalwart yeoman lazily leans his chin on his crook, guarding three sheep as they nimbly nibble! Peasant-women, going to the village to hawk their little produce, shuffled along with their wooden shoes, making a prodigious dust, chatting cheerfully with their stolid lords, though they were bowed down nearly to the earth beneath the intolerable weight of vegetables. And the infamous brutal tyrants trudged along beside the poor women, never even offering to touch the burdens with so much as one of their fingers!
I think the Prussians will certainly never “witch the world with noble horsemanship.” The horses are splendid creatures for farm-animals, strong and glossy and round, superb as the finest Clydesdales; but the owners seem to have no confidence upon their backs, and little skill in guiding them in vehicles. The Prussians are by no means a chivalric race, in the etymologic sense. In all my travels in Prussia I have yet to see a civilian on horseback outside of a city, and even there it is usually only officers who prance through the streets. The immense superiority of the Hungarian cavalry over the Prussian was abundantly demonstrated in the Bohemian campaign until the magnificent infantry battalions turned the scale; and the dreaded “three Uhlans” of Edmond About were far oftener Poles than Prussians.