A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

tour of Europe.

He told us all about the Heidelberg road, and which

were the best places to avoid and which the best ones

to tarry at; he charged me less than cost for the things

I broke in the night; he put up a fine luncheon for us

and added to it a quantity of great light-green plums,

the pleasantest fruit in Germany; he was so anxious to do us

honor that he would not allow us to walk out of Heilbronn,

but called up Go”tz von Berlichingen’s horse and cab

and made us ride.

I made a sketch of the turnout. It is not a Work, it is only

what artists call a “study”–a thing to make a finished

picture from. This sketch has several blemishes in it;

for instance, the wagon is not traveling as fast as the

horse is. This is wrong. Again, the person trying to get

out of the way is too small; he is out of perspective,

as we say. The two upper lines are not the horse’s back,

they are the reigns; there seems to be a wheel missing–

this would be corrected in a finished Work, of course.

This thing flying out behind is not a flag, it is a curtain.

That other thing up there is the sun, but I didn’t get

enough distance on it. I do not remember, now, what that

thing is that is in front of the man who is running,

but I think it is a haystack or a woman. This study

was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1879, but did not

take any medal; they do not give medals for studies.

[Figure 3]

We discharged the carriage at the bridge. The river was

full of logs–long, slender, barkless pine logs–and we

leaned on the rails of the bridge, and watched the men put

them together into rafts. These rafts were of a shape

and construction to suit the crookedness and extreme

narrowness of the Neckar. They were from fifty to one

hundred yards long, and they gradually tapered from a

nine-log breadth at their sterns, to a three-log breadth

at their bow-ends. The main part of the steering is done

at the bow, with a pole; the three-log breadth there

furnishes room for only the steersman, for these little logs

are not larger around than an average young lady’s waist.

The connections of the several sections of the raft are

slack and pliant, so that the raft may be readily bent

into any sort of curve required by the shape of the river.

The Neckar is in many places so narrow that a person

can throw a dog across it, if he has one; when it is

also sharply curved in such places, the raftsman has

to do some pretty nice snug piloting to make the turns.

The river is not always allowed to spread over its whole

bed–which is as much as thirty, and sometimes forty yards

wide–but is split into three equal bodies of water,

by stone dikes which throw the main volume, depth, and current

into the central one. In low water these neat narrow-edged

dikes project four or five inches above the surface,

like the comb of a submerged roof, but in high water

they are overflowed. A hatful of rain makes high water

in the Neckar, and a basketful produces an overflow.

There are dikes abreast the Schloss Hotel, and the current

is violently swift at that point. I used to sit for hours

in my glass cage, watching the long, narrow rafts slip

along through the central channel, grazing the right-bank

dike and aiming carefully for the middle arch of the stone

bridge below; I watched them in this way, and lost all this

time hoping to see one of them hit the bridge-pier and wreck

itself sometime or other, but was always disappointed.

One was smashed there one morning, but I had just stepped

into my room a moment to light a pipe, so I lost it.

While I was looking down upon the rafts that morning

in Heilbronn, the daredevil spirit of adventure came

suddenly upon me, and I said to my comrades:

“_I_ am going to Heidelberg on a raft. Will you venture