A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

its own bulk into the air, and supported it there,

like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools,

with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose.

But what good would it do?

All our afternoon’s progress had been uphill. About five

or half past we reached the summit, and all of a sudden

the dense curtain of the forest parted and we looked

down into a deep and beautiful gorge and out over a

wide panorama of wooded mountains with their summits

shining in the sun and their glade-furrowed sides dimmed

with purple shade. The gorge under our feet–called

Allerheiligen–afforded room in the grassy level at its

head for a cozy and delightful human nest, shut away

from the world and its botherations, and consequently

the monks of the old times had not failed to spy it out;

and here were the brown and comely ruins of their church

and convent to prove that priests had as fine an instinct

seven hundred years ago in ferreting out the choicest

nooks and corners in a land as priests have today.

A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives

a brisk trade with summer tourists. We descended

into the gorge and had a supper which would have been

very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.

The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything

else if left to their own devices. This is an argument

of some value in support of the theory that they were

the original colonists of the wild islands of the coast

of Scotland. A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked

upon one of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle

savages rendered the captain such willing assistance

that he gave them as many oranges as they wanted.

Next day he asked them how they liked them. They shook

their heads and said:

“Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t

things for a hungry man to hanker after.”

We went down the glen after supper. It is beautiful–a

mixture of sylvan loveliness and craggy wildness.

A limpid torrent goes whistling down the glen, and toward

the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between lofty

precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls.

After one passes the last of these he has a backward

glimpse at the falls which is very pleasing–they rise

in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and glittering cascades,

and make a picture which is as charming as it is unusual.

CHAPTER XXIII

[Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]

We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in

one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out

the next morning after breakfast determined to do it.

It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest

summer weather for it. So we set the pedometer and then

stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through

the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath

of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing

we might never have anything to do forever but walk

to Oppenau and keep on doing it and then doing it over again.

Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie

in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.

The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by,

and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active;

the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon

a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace

to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes

from the talk. It is no matter whether one talks wisdom

or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment

lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping

of the sympathetic ear.

And what motley variety of subjects a couple of people will

casually rake over in the course of a day’s tramp! There

being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order,

and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single

topic until it grows tiresome. We discussed everything

we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes,