A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

but the last one departed after a fortnight’s bathing there,

and I have never had one since. I fully believe I left my

rheumatism in Baden-Baden. Baden-Baden is welcome to it.

It was little, but it was all I had to give. I would

have preferred to leave something that was catching,

but it was not in my power.

There are several hot springs there, and during two

thousand years they have poured forth a never-diminishing

abundance of the healing water. This water is conducted

in pipe to the numerous bath-houses, and is reduced to

an endurable temperature by the addition of cold water.

The new Friederichsbad is a very large and beautiful building,

and in it one may have any sort of bath that has ever

been invented, and with all the additions of herbs and

drugs that his ailment may need or that the physician

of the establishment may consider a useful thing to put

into the water. You go there, enter the great door,

get a bow graduated to your style and clothes from the

gorgeous portier, and a bath ticket and an insult from

the frowsy woman for a quarter; she strikes a bell and a

serving-man conducts you down a long hall and shuts you

into a commodious room which has a washstand, a mirror,

a bootjack, and a sofa in it, and there you undress

at your leisure.

The room is divided by a great curtain; you draw this

curtain aside, and find a large white marble bathtub,

with its rim sunk to the level of the floor,

and with three white marble steps leading down to it.

This tub is full of water which is as clear as crystal,

and is tempered to 28 degrees Re’aumur (about 95 degrees

Fahrenheit). Sunk into the floor, by the tub, is a covered

copper box which contains some warm towels and a sheet.

You look fully as white as an angel when you are stretched

out in that limpid bath. You remain in it ten minutes,

the first time, and afterward increase the duration from

day to day, till you reach twenty-five or thirty minutes.

There you stop. The appointments of the place are

so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate,

and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself

adoring the Friederichsbad and infesting it.

We had a plain, simple, unpretending, good hotel,

in Baden-Baden–the Ho^tel de France–and alongside my room

I had a giggling, cackling, chattering family who always

went to bed just two hours after me and always got up two

hours ahead of me. But this is common in German hotels;

the people generally go to bed long after eleven and get

up long before eight. The partitions convey sound

like a drum-head, and everybody knows it; but no matter,

a German family who are all kindness and consideration

in the daytime make apparently no effort to moderate

their noises for your benefit at night. They will sing,

laugh, and talk loudly, and bang furniture around in a most

pitiless way. If you knock on your wall appealingly,

they will quiet down and discuss the matter softly among

themselves for a moment–then, like the mice, they fall

to persecuting you again, and as vigorously as before.

They keep cruelly late and early hours, for such noisy folk.

Of course, when one begins to find fault with foreign

people’s ways, he is very likely to get a reminder to look

nearer home, before he gets far with it. I open my note-book

to see if I can find some more information of a valuable

nature about Baden-Baden, and the first thing I fall upon is

this:

“BADEN-BADEN (no date). Lot of vociferous Americans

at breakfast this morning. Talking AT everybody,

while pretending to talk among themselves. On their

first travels, manifestly. Showing off. The usual

signs–airy, easy-going references to grand distances

and foreign places. ‘Well GOOD-by, old fellow–

if I don’t run across you in Italy, you hunt me up in

London before you sail.'”

The next item which I find in my note-book is this one:

“The fact that a band of 6,000 Indians are now murdering

our frontiersmen at their impudent leisure, and that we