since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty,
history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could
excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom
in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in,
when you can get a better quality, outside, any day,
free of expense. What could this cask have been
built for? The more one studies over that, the more
uncertain and unhappy he becomes. Some historians say
that thirty couples, some say thirty thousand couples,
can dance on the head of this cask at the same time.
Even this does not seem to me to account for the building
of it. It does not even throw light on it. A profound
and scholarly Englishman–a specialist–who had made
the great Heidelberg Tun his sole study for fifteen years,
told me he had at last satisfied himself that the ancients
built it to make German cream in. He said that the average
German cow yielded from one to two and half teaspoons of milk,
when she was not worked in the plow or the hay-wagon
more than eighteen or nineteen hours a day. This milk
was very sweet and good, and a beautiful transparent
bluish tint; but in order to get cream from it in the
most economical way, a peculiar process was necessary.
Now he believed that the habit of the ancients was to collect
several milkings in a teacup, pour it into the Great Tun,
fill up with water, and then skim off the cream from
time to time as the needs of the German Empire demanded.
This began to look reasonable. It certainly began
to account for the German cream which I had encountered
and marveled over in so many hotels and restaurants.
But a thought struck me–
“Why did not each ancient dairyman take his own teacup
of milk and his own cask of water, and mix them,
without making a government matter of it?’
“Where could he get a cask large enough to contain
the right proportion of water?”
Very true. It was plain that the Englishman had studied
the matter from all sides. Still I thought I might catch
him on one point; so I asked him why the modern empire
did not make the nation’s cream in the Heidelberg Tun,
instead of leaving it to rot away unused. But he answered
as one prepared–
“A patient and diligent examination of the modern German cream
had satisfied me that they do not use the Great Tun now,
because they have got a BIGGER one hid away somewhere.
Either that is the case or they empty the spring milkings
into the mountain torrents and then skim the Rhine
all summer.”
There is a museum of antiquities in the Castle, and among
its most treasured relics are ancient manuscripts connected
with German history. There are hundreds of these,
and their dates stretch back through many centuries.
One of them is a decree signed and sealed by the hand
of a successor of Charlemagne, in the year 896.
A signature made by a hand which vanished out of this life
near a thousand years ago, is a more impressive thing than
even a ruined castle. Luther’s wedding-ring was shown me;
also a fork belonging to a time anterior to our era,
and an early bookjack. And there was a plaster cast
of the head of a man who was assassinated about sixty
years ago. The stab-wounds in the face were duplicated
with unpleasant fidelity. One or two real hairs
still remained sticking in the eyebrows of the cast.
That trifle seemed to almost change the counterfeit into
a corpse.
There are many aged portraits–some valuable, some worthless;
some of great interest, some of none at all. I bought a
couple–one a gorgeous duke of the olden time, and the other
a comely blue-eyed damsel, a princess, maybe. I bought
them to start a portrait-gallery of my ancestors with.
I paid a dollar and a half for the duke and a half
for the princess. One can lay in ancestors at even
cheaper rates than these, in Europe, if he will mouse
among old picture shops and look out for chances.