A Tramp Abroad - The Original Classic Edition. Twain MarkЧитать онлайн книгу.

       Very well, presently the gates swung open and out filed those women

       carrying their HUSBANDS on their shoulders. The besiegers, furious at the trick, rushed forward to slaughter the men, but the Duke stepped between and said:

       "No, put up your swords--a prince's word is inviolable."

       When we got back to the hotel, King Arthur's Round Table was ready for us in its white drapery, and the head waiter and his first assistant, in swallow-tails and white cravats, brought in the soup and the hot plates

       at once.

       Mr. X had ordered the dinner, and when the wine came on, he picked up a bottle, glanced at the label, and then turned to the grave, the melancholy, the sepulchral head waiter and said it was not the sort of wine he had asked for. The head waiter picked up the bottle, cast his undertaker-eye on it and said:

       "It is true; I beg pardon." Then he turned on his subordinate and calmly said, "Bring another label."

       At the same time he slid the present label off with his hand and laid it aside; it had been newly put on, its paste was still wet. When the new

       label came, he put it on; our French wine being now turned into German wine, according to desire, the head waiter went blandly about his other duties, as if the working of this sort of miracle was a common and easy

       thing to him.

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       Mr. X said he had not known, before, that there were people honest enough to do this miracle in public, but he was aware that thousands

       upon thousands of labels were imported into America from Europe every year, to enable dealers to furnish to their customers in a quiet and inexpensive way all the different kinds of foreign wines they might

       require.

       We took a turn around the town, after dinner, and found it fully as interesting in the moonlight as it had been in the daytime. The streets were narrow and roughly paved, and there was not a sidewalk or a

       street-lamp anywhere. The dwellings were centuries old, and vast enough for hotels. They widened all the way up; the stories projected further

       and further forward and aside as they ascended, and the long rows

       of lighted windows, filled with little bits of panes, curtained with

       figured white muslin and adorned outside with boxes of flowers, made a

       pretty effect.

       The moon was bright, and the light and shadow very strong; and nothing could be more picturesque than those curving streets, with their rows

       of huge high gables leaning far over toward each other in a friendly gossiping way, and the crowds below drifting through the alternating blots of gloom and mellow bars of moonlight. Nearly everybody was abroad, chatting, singing, romping, or massed in lazy comfortable attitudes in the doorways.

       In one place there was a public building which was fenced about with a thick, rusty chain, which sagged from post to post in a succession of

       low swings. The pavement, here, was made of heavy blocks of stone. In

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       the glare of the moon a party of barefooted children were swinging on those chains and having a noisy good time. They were not the first ones who have done that; even their great-great-grandfathers had not been the

       first to do it when they were children. The strokes of the bare feet

       had worn grooves inches deep in the stone flags; it had taken many

       generations of swinging children to accomplish that.

       Everywhere in the town were the mold and decay that go with antiquity, and evidence of it; but I do not know that anything else gave us so

       vivid a sense of the old age of Heilbronn as those footworn grooves in the paving-stones.

       CHAPTER XIII

       [My Long Crawl in the Dark]

       When we got back to the hotel I wound and set the pedometer and put it in my pocket, for I was to carry it next day and keep record of the

       miles we made. The work which we had given the instrument to do during the day which had just closed had not fatigued it perceptibly.

       We were in bed by ten, for we wanted to be up and away on our tramp homeward with the dawn. I hung fire, but Harris went to sleep at once. I hate a man who goes to sleep at once; there is a sort of indefinable

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       something about it which is not exactly an insult, and yet is an insolence; and one which is hard to bear, too. I lay there fretting over this injury, and trying to go to sleep; but the harder I tried, the wider awake I grew. I got to feeling very lonely in the dark, with no

       company but an undigested dinner. My mind got a start by and by, and began to consider the beginning of every subject which has ever been thought of; but it never went further than the beginning; it was touch

       and go; it fled from topic to topic with a frantic speed. At the end of

       an hour my head was in a perfect whirl and I was dead tired, fagged out.

       The fatigue was so great that it presently began to make some head against the nervous excitement; while imagining myself wide awake, I

       would really doze into momentary unconsciousness, and come suddenly out of it with a physical jerk which nearly wrenched my joints apart--the delusion of the instant being that I was tumbling backward over a

       precipice. After I had fallen over eight or nine precipices and thus

       found out that one half of my brain had been asleep eight or nine times without the wide-awake, hard-working other half suspecting it, the periodical unconsciousnesses began to extend their spell gradually over more of my brain-territory, and at last I sank into a drowse which grew deeper and deeper and was doubtless just on the very point of being a solid, blessed dreamless stupor, when--what was that?

       My dulled faculties dragged themselves partly back to life and took a receptive attitude. Now out of an immense, a limitless distance, came

       a something which grew and grew, and approached, and presently was recognizable as a sound--it had rather seemed to be a feeling, before.

       This sound was a mile away, now--perhaps it was the murmur of a storm;

       and now it was nearer--not a quarter of a mile away; was it the muffled

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       rasping and grinding of distant machinery? No, it came still nearer; was it the measured tramp of a marching troop? But it came nearer still,

       and still nearer--and at last it was right in the room: it was merely

       a mouse gnawing the woodwork. So I had held my breath all that time for

       such a trifle.

       Well, what was done could not be helped; I would go to sleep at once and make up the lost time. That was a thoughtless thought. Without intending it--hardly knowing it--I fell to listening intently to that sound, and

       even unconsciously counting the strokes of the mouse's nutmeg-grater. Presently I was deriving exquisite suffering from this employment, yet maybe I could have endured it if the mouse had attended steadily to

       his work; but he did not do that; he stopped every now and then, and I

       suffered more while waiting and listening for him to begin again than I did while he was gnawing. Along at first I was mentally offering a reward of five--six--seven--ten--dollars for that mouse; but toward

       the last I was offering rewards which were entirely beyond my means. I

       close-reefed my ears--that is to say, I bent the flaps of them down and furled them into five or six folds, and pressed them against the hearing-orifice--but it did no good: the faculty was so sharpened

       by nervous excitement that it was become a microphone and could hear through the overlays without trouble.

       My