Close by his side an effeminate leather-dresser from Carlsruhe sits stroking his yellow goat’s beard. Instead of strapping his knapsack to his back like a stalwart youth, after the manly fashion of his forefathers when on the tramp, he trundles behind him as he goes, a little iron chaise loaded with his pack and worldly equipage.
There broods a sombre cordwainer from Bremen, gloating over his enormous pipe, in form and size like a small barrel, raising an atmosphere for himself of the fumes of coarse uncut knaster. He has doffed his white kittel (blouse), and has wriggled himself into a short-waisted, long-skirted, German frock-coat, which, having been badly packed in his knapsack, exhibits every crease and wrinkle it has acquired during a three weeks’ march. Know, friend, that the skilful folding of apparel, to be worn on his arrival in every important town, is one of the necessary acquirements of the German wanderer.
Add to these a rollicking saddler from Heldesheim, who figures in a full beard, a rich cluster of crisp, brown curls, his own especial pride, and the object of deep envy to his less hirsute companions; and who, far too fond of corn brandy-wine, goes about singing continually the song of the German tramp, “Ich Liebe das liederliche Leben!”—This vagabond life I delight in!—an earnest, quiet student, who, for reasons of economy, has made the Schuster-gasse his place of refuge; and a dishevelled button-maker, last from Hamburg, who has just received his geschenck, or trade-gift, amounting to fifteen silver groschens, about eighteenpence in English money; and who ponders drearily over it as it lies in the palm of his hand, wondering how far this slender sum will carry him on the road to Breslau, his native place, still some two hundred miles away.
We have among us the wily and the simple, the boisterous and the patient, the taciturn and the unruly; but though they will sing songs before they go to sleep, and swagger enormously among themselves, they become as still and meek as doves at the voice of the Herberges-Vater (the father of the Herberge), and quake like timid mice beneath the eye of the police.
CHAPTER X.
a street in berlin.
Berlin is a fine city, let the wise Germans of the East say what they will. It may be deficient in those monumental records of “the good old times,” the crumbling church, the thick-walled tower, the halls and dungeons of feudal barbarism, but it abounds with evidences of the vigour and life of modern taste and skill; and instead of daily sinking into rotten significance, like some of its elder brethren, is hourly growing in beauty and strength. It has all the attributes of a great city—spacious “places,” handsome edifices, broad and well-paved streets. Its monuments, while they are evidences of great cultivation in the arts, tell of times and events just old enough to be beyond the ken of our own experiences, yet possess all the truth and vividness of recent history. “Der Alter Fritz,” Blucher, Zieten, Seyditz, Winterfeldt, Keith, and “Der Alter Dessauer”—what names are these in Prussian story!
The entrance into Berlin, on the western side, from Spandau, by the Brandenburger Gate, is the finest that the capital of Prussia has to present. A thickly-planted wood skirts the road for a mile or two before you reach the city. The trees are dwarfed and twisted, for they cannot grow freely in the dense, eternal sands of this part of North Germany, but they form a rough fringing to the white road; while the noble gate itself, built of massive stone in the Doric order of architecture, and surmounted by an effective group of a four-horse chariot, within which stands the figure of Victory raising the Roman eagle above the almost winged steeds, might grace the entrance to the city of the Cæsars.
This Brandenburger Thor, as it is called, is a copy of the Propylæa of the Acropolis of Athens, but built on a much grander scale. The central gate is of iron, eighteen feet high; of the fourteen land gates of Berlin it is immeasurably the finest, and it acquires a still deeper interest when some enthusiastic Berliner, pointing to the prancing steeds upon the summit of the arch, tells you how Napoleon in his admiration had ordered this self-same group to be transported to
Paris in 1807, to ornament a French “arch de triomphe,” and how “We, the Prussians,” had torn the spoil from the eagle’s very nest in 1814, to replant it on its original site. A glow of military ardour flushes over your heart at the recital, and the echoes of a hundred battles thunder in your ears.