SHIVER, a yawn, and a stretch, ther a series of shivers; a shiver as I emerge from between two feather beds whose stuffing was plucked from German geese, a very severe shiver as I dutifully scrub my neck with c-o-o-l-d water, a long shiver during which I button myself, with much fum bling, into an old suit of clothes, and all by the half-light of a cheerless tallow candle, that sleepily blinks remonstrance against keeping open its single-eye at the unholy hour of four in the chill, dull morning. Lest this account be too harrowing for the "gentle reader," I hasten to explain that this is the beginning of a trip to Cologne over twenty miles or so of German roads, and that, choosing the lesser evil, I arose before dawn with chattering teeth only to avoid being caught by the sun of mid-afternoon and parched on the pitiless highway. With the candlestick in one hand and my boots in the other, I descended, burglar-like, a pair of stairs that did their best to arouse the household, a habit stairs have when one uses them during sleeping hours. But I am proud to record that I reached the kitchen without dropping a thing. Here awaited me black bread that is hard and filling, sausage of a dozen varieties, and such like Teuton dishes, that are healthful and satisfying, not to mention the cheese, which indeed should be unmentionable in polite society, and which is best eaten in such perfect seclusion as one Lnds in the weird hours of the "morning-gray." Then I pulled on my boots, which made a last desperate effort to wake the family, blew out the candle, to its great relief, and wander-staff in hand passed out into the cold light that comes before the sun. The way to Cologne leads first of all through the narrow streets of the little town, with tall, angular houses on either side, stiff and formal even in sleep and looking very uncomfortable and stuffy behind their drawn blinds to one out in the fresh morning, bound for strange sights in a new world. And onward the streets lead, past stores barred so tightly that even a dollar could not enter, past the railway station, seemingly oppressively silent now that the life and bustle of train time has left it; past the working-men's cottages in the outskirts, all sound asleep except the last, where by the open door a woman with uncombed hair is preparing breakfast for her slumbering spouse, and then, leaving behind me feather beds, unaired chambers, and shuttered windows, I plunge into the forest-misty, mysterious, fragrant with the fresh fragrance of dew on the damp earth. Here, too, it is still, but with a sacred quiet as in a holy edifice; to speak were out of place, to laugh aloud a profanation. Once in a while the morning breeze stirs the heavy branches and they sigh contentedly, a drowsy bird chirps and dozes again; far in the hazy depths of the woods a brook croons and babbles in its dreaming; all else is silence. Then the breeze freshens, the mist vanishes even as I look, and the stems of the hemlock and beech reveal themselves where before was gray obscurity; above the tree tops the sky is hardly tinged with coming day when jubilees the morning chorus of birds, the forest opens, and I am on a road, broad and smooth as any city boulevard, the highway to Cologne. The highway leads past fields unfenced and cultivated clear to the edge, not a foot being wasted in a growth of roadside weeds. Overhanging apple trees give shade and an occasional windfall to the passer-by, but woe to him who appropriates more than his share. As the law was explained to me by journeyman bakers, butchers, and shoemakers, the tree is sacred, and he who breaks fruit therefrom is punished by a heavy fine; such fruit as falls within the field boundaries is sacred; he who eats thereof is punished by a fine; likewise he who greedily fills his pockets with fruit fallen on the road is punished by a fine of three marks (seventy-five cents), but he who picks up an apple from the road and munches it as he goes along is not amenable to law. Such are the intricacies of rural German jurisprudence. The fields are not divided by hedges or fences, but a stone at each corner marks the boundary for the owner, and as the little plots are sown at different times and with various grains and vegetables, a gay patchwork is the result, for the emerald green of the young wheat, the bright yellow of the ripened grains, the dusky red of the cabbage fields, the violet shades where the earth is newly plowed-all these precise little squares and oblongs lying over hill and valley could be compared to nothing but an old-fashioned quilt spread over the landscape. All this time no farmhouse is to be seen till a turn of the road brings me before the village where live the owners and tillers of these fields. Whether it is because the Germans are very sociable, or that the farms are smaller and the distances less than with us, the peasants here live in crowded hamlets or towns, from whence they go to their fields every morning and return at night. Perhaps the custom is handed down from medieval times, when it was necessary to huddle together for mutual protection. However it may have come to pass, it is through this that we who love the picturesque find all sorts of artistic bits in the way of narrow streets with unexpected windings and abrupt corners, buildings whose projecting stories make them lean over the streets like infirm gossips, gravely nodIding and whispering with heads together, houses whose mortared sides are criss-crossed at all angles and curves with the framework of beams that supports them; houses that have settled till the right angles in their original construction are long since lost, so that for centuries they have appeared on the point of collapse, as doubtless they will continue to stand in apparent decrepitude for centuries to come. Then details such as little windows barred with antique iron work, worm-eaten doors of heavy oak that swing open on curiously-wrought hinges to reveal-obscurity; a dusky hall in which one makes out the erratic breakneck staircase, climbing upward through the gloom-all these, the sketchable tidbits with which artist folk fill their little books, are found at their best in such out-of-the way places, where there is nothing of the modern times to jangle a false note into the harmony of the old. There is the old church, too. Usually simple in outline, with little ornament, this very simplicity is in its beauty and its strength, like a rare violin. It has grown mellow with years of use, and the chords that have sounded within its walls for centuries, all the harmonies and discords that unite in the great symphony of human life, have given it a voice that speaks as from soul to soul. For whatever was exalted above the sordid and commonplace in the lives that were lived around it found expression here; in childhood the choral chanted from its tower told that Christmastide had come with its mysteries and delights; then to those of a few more years came confirmation, that day fraught with great things, when the old life was ended and the child was no more; then betrothal with its solemn joy; marriage; birth; ali these were celebrated here with rites that removed them from the less sacred events of life. |