A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

but they don’t like to.”

The captain probably imagined all this, as modern science

denies that the intermarrying of relatives deteriorates

the stock.

Arrived within the wall, we found the usual village

sights and life. We moved along a narrow, crooked lane

which had been paved in the Middle Ages. A strapping,

ruddy girl was beating flax or some such stuff in a little

bit of a good-box of a barn, and she swung her flail

with a will–if it was a flail; I was not farmer enough

to know what she was at; a frowsy, barelegged girl was

herding half a dozen geese with a stick–driving them

along the lane and keeping them out of the dwellings;

a cooper was at work in a shop which I know he did not make

so large a thing as a hogshead in, for there was not room.

In the front rooms of dwellings girls and women were

cooking or spinning, and ducks and chickens were waddling

in and out, over the threshold, picking up chance crumbs

and holding pleasant converse; a very old and wrinkled man

sat asleep before his door, with his chin upon his breast

and his extinguished pipe in his lap; soiled children

were playing in the dirt everywhere along the lane,

unmindful of the sun.

Except the sleeping old man, everybody was at work,

but the place was very still and peaceful, nevertheless;

so still that the distant cackle of the successful hen smote

upon the ear but little dulled by intervening sounds.

That commonest of village sights was lacking here–the

public pump, with its great stone tank or trough of

limpid water, and its group of gossiping pitcher-bearers;

for there is no well or fountain or spring on this tall hill;

cisterns of rain-water are used.

Our alpenstocks and muslin tails compelled attention,

and as we moved through the village we gathered a considerable

procession of little boys and girls, and so went in some

state to the castle. It proved to be an extensive pile of

crumbling walls, arches, and towers, massive, properly grouped

for picturesque effect, weedy, grass-grown, and satisfactory.

The children acted as guides; they walked us along the top

of the highest walls, then took us up into a high tower

and showed us a wide and beautiful landscape, made up

of wavy distances of woody hills, and a nearer prospect

of undulating expanses of green lowlands, on the one hand,

and castle-graced crags and ridges on the other,

with the shining curves of the Neckar flowing between.

But the principal show, the chief pride of the children,

was the ancient and empty well in the grass-grown court

of the castle. Its massive stone curb stands up three

or four feet above-ground, and is whole and uninjured.

The children said that in the Middle Ages this well was

four hundred feet deep, and furnished all the village

with an abundant supply of water, in war and peace.

They said that in the old day its bottom was below the level

of the Neckar, hence the water-supply was inexhaustible.

But there were some who believed it had never been a well

at all, and was never deeper than it is now–eighty feet;

that at that depth a subterranean passage branched from it

and descended gradually to a remote place in the valley,

where it opened into somebody’s cellar or other hidden recess,

and that the secret of this locality is now lost.

Those who hold this belief say that herein lies the

explanation that Dilsberg, besieged by Tilly and many

a soldier before him, was never taken: after the longest

and closest sieges the besiegers were astonished to

perceive that the besieged were as fat and hearty as ever,

and were well furnished with munitions of war–therefore

it must be that the Dilsbergers had been bringing these

things in through the subterranean passage all the time.

The children said that there was in truth a subterranean

outlet down there, and they would prove it. So they set

a great truss of straw on fire and threw it down the well,

while we leaned on the curb and watched the glowing

mass descend. It struck bottom and gradually burned out.