A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

largely in pain that its scattered delights are prodigiously

augmented by the contrasts. A pretty air in an opera is

prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose,

just as an honest man in politics shines more than he

would elsewhere.

I have since found out that there is nothing the Germans

like so much as an opera. They like it, not in a mild

and moderate way, but with their whole hearts.

This is a legitimate result of habit and education.

Our nation will like the opera, too, by and by, no doubt.

One in fifty of those who attend our operas likes

it already, perhaps, but I think a good many of the other

forty-nine go in order to learn to like it, and the

rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it.

The latter usually hum the airs while they are being sung,

so that their neighbors may perceive that they have been

to operas before. The funerals of these do not occur

often enough.

A gentle, old-maidish person and a sweet young girl

of seventeen sat right in front of us that night at the

Mannheim opera. These people talked, between the acts,

and I understood them, though I understood nothing

that was uttered on the distant stage. At first they

were guarded in their talk, but after they had heard

my agent and me conversing in English they dropped their

reserve and I picked up many of their little confidences;

no, I mean many of HER little confidences–meaning

the elder party–for the young girl only listened,

and gave assenting nods, but never said a word. How pretty

she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she would speak.

But evidently she was absorbed in her own thoughts,

her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleasure

in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams–no,

she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still

a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was

of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round

young figure like a fish’s skin, and it was rippled

over with the gracefulest little fringy films of lace;

she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes;

and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such

a dear little rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dovelike,

so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and so bewitching.

For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak.

And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaps her

thought–and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm,

too: “Auntie, I just KNOW I’ve got five hundred fleas

on me!”

That was probably over the average. Yes, it must have been

very much over the average. The average at that time

in the Grand Duchy of Baden was forty-five to a young

person (when alone), according to the official estimate

of the home secretary for that year; the average for older

people was shifty and indeterminable, for whenever a

wholesome young girl came into the presence of her elders

she immediately lowered their average and raised her own.

She became a sort of contribution-box. This dear young

thing in the theater had been sitting there unconsciously

taking up a collection. Many a skinny old being in our

neighborhood was the happier and the restfuler for her coming.

In that large audience, that night, there were eight very

conspicuous people. These were ladies who had their hats

or bonnets on. What a blessed thing it would be if a lady

could make herself conspicuous in our theaters by wearing

her hat. It is not usual in Europe to allow ladies

and gentlemen to take bonnets, hats, overcoats, canes,

or umbrellas into the auditorium, but in Mannheim this

rule was not enforced because the audiences were largely

made up of people from a distance, and among these were

always a few timid ladies who were afraid that if they had

to go into an anteroom to get their things when the play

was over, they would miss their train. But the great mass

of those who came from a distance always ran the risk