A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

Wiesbaden, the most charming of German watering-places, is a clean and handsome city, with broad and well paved streets, many attractive shops and pleasant residences, excellent hotels, extensive and lovely parks, a sumptuous opera house, a less costly but very spacious music hall (where, by the way, we had the pleasure of hearing Frau Shuman-Heink sing), and a few large and costly churches, but with no adequate arrangements, so far as I could see, for the churching of its large population. The place owes its importance primarily to the Boiling Salt Springs, which here gush from the earth, and which have made this the great resort for rheumatics and the victims of various other ailments. It is also the home of one of the most celebrated oculists in Europe, whose patients come to him from every part of the world. The chief attraction for those who are fond of outdoor life is the glorious forests which stretch from Wiesbaden back through the valleys and over the Taunus Mountains. One of our young people has just been writing to the folks at home about an eighteen-mile walk through these woods, guided only by the blazed trees, and speaks with pardonable enthusiasm of "the blue-gray trunks outlined against the terra cotta carpet of fallen leaves, the sunlight glancing through the trees, and the gently waving branches against the azure sky. There is no undergrowth as in our forests at home, but there are here and there gray rocks, large and small, covered with fresh green moss, or with gray, pink and yellow lichen. There were rustic benches all along, but the forest was quite deserted except for an occasional woodman with a fire and piles of neatly chopped wood, or some little boys drawing carts filled with bundles of sticks for winter use."

November 20, 1902.

Worms, Heidelberg and Strasburg.

We spent three weeks at wholesome Wiesbaden, counting a day that we gave to Mayence, on the other side of the Rhine, for the purpose of seeing the memorials of Gutenberg, the inventor of printing. Then we took the train for Worms. The chief "lion" here is, of course, the magnificent Luther monument, a thing which no visitor to this part of the world should fail to see. Recrossing the Rhine, we ran up to Heidelberg, and devoted a day to the fine old castle and the famous university—a stinging cold day it was, too. Nor did winter relax his grip at Strasburg, for there we had snow. One of the youngsters celebrated his birthday there by watching the noon performances of the world-renowned clock in the old Cathedral, our whole party going with him, the adults watching the wonderful mechanism with scarcely less interest than the children. The striking of that clock and the movements of its various figures and fixtures at twelve o'clock every day invariably draws a large crowd of people. We saw the storks' nests on the chimneys, too, but of course the storks themselves were down in the warm sunshine of Africa at that season.

November 23, 1902.

Switzerland in Winter-time.

Switzerland caps the climax of scenic interest in Europe—lakes, waterfalls, mountains, glaciers—language and pictures are alike unavailing to convey an adequate impression of this sublime scenery. My first views of it were in midsummer. On the 31st of July, 1896, at the top of the Wengern Alp, seven thousand feet above the sea, reached by rail all the way, my travelling companions and I had coasted on sleds over the snow like boys, wearing our heavy overcoats the while. Above us rose the Jungfrau, six thousand feet higher, piercing the clouds. As we watched, the clouds parted, and the white Jungfrau, wearing the dazzling Silberhorn on her bosom, burst upon our view. Never shall we see anything more beautiful till our eyes rest upon the pinnacles of the celestial city. We were standing at the time on the Eiger Glacier, an immense mass of pale green ice covered with a snowy crust. Longfellow somewhere (in "Hyperion," I think) likens the shape of one of the glaciers to a glove, lying with the palm downwards. "It is a gauntlet of ice, which centuries ago Winter, the king of these mountains, threw down in defiance to the Sun, and year by year the Sun strives in vain to lift it from the ground on the point of his glittering spear." Aye, in vain. Winter is king. But the Sun now and then wrenches somewhat from his grasp. And even while we gazed speechless at the unearthly splendor of the Jungfrau and the Silberhorn we heard an avalanche fall with a crash like the end of the world. That night we sat before a roaring fire and wrote home about it.

THE LION OF LUCERNE.