A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

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.

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 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

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 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, ith no company but an undigested dinner.

My mind got a start by and by, and began to consider the