The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon
the golden simplicity of a purer age. It had a small church, with a
burying-ground adjoining. At the heads of the graves were placed crosses
of wood or iron. On some were affixed miniatures, rudely executed, but
evidently attempts at likenesses of the deceased. On the crosses
were hung chaplets of flowers, some withering others fresh, as if
occasionally renewed. I paused with interest at this scene: I felt
that I was at the source of poetical description, for these were the
beautiful but unaffected offerings of the heart which poets are fain to
record. In a gayer and more populous place I should have suspected them
to have been suggested by factitious sentiment derived from books; but
the good people of Gersau knew little of books; there was not a novel
nor a love-poem in the village, and I question whether any peasant of
the place dreamt, while he was twining a fresh chaplet for the grave of
his mistress, that he was fulfilling one of the most fanciful rites of
poetical devotion, and that he was practically a poet.
THE INN KITCHEN.
Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?
FALSTAFF.
DURING a journey that I once made through the Netherlands, I had arrived
one evening at the Pomme d’Or, the principal inn of a small Flemish
village. It was after the hour of the table d’hote, so that I was
obliged to make a solitary supper from the relics of its ampler board.
The weather was chilly; I was seated alone in one end of a great gloomy
dining-room, and, my repast being over, I had the prospect before me
of a long dull evening, without any visible means of enlivening it. I
summoned mine host and requested something to read; he brought me the
whole literary stock of his household, a Dutch family Bible, an almanac
in the same language, and a number of old Paris newspapers. As I sat
dozing over one of the latter, reading old news and stale criticisms,
my ear was now and then struck with bursts of laughter which seemed to
proceed from the kitchen. Every one that has travelled on the Continent
must know how favorite a resort the kitchen of a country inn is to the
middle and inferior order of travellers, particularly in that equivocal
kind of weather when a fire becomes agreeable toward evening. I threw
aside the newspaper and explored my way to the kitchen, to take a peep
at the group that appeared to be so merry. It was composed partly of
travellers who had arrived some hours before in a diligence, and partly
of the usual attendants and hangers-on of inns. They were seated round
a great burnished stove, that might have been mistaken for an altar at
which they were worshipping. It was covered with various kitchen vessels
of resplendent brightness, among which steamed and hissed a huge copper
tea-kettle. A large lamp threw a strong mass of light upon the group,
bringing out many odd features in strong relief. Its yellow rays
partially illumined the spacious kitchen, dying duskily away into remote
corners, except where they settled in mellow radiance on the broad side
of a flitch of bacon or were reflected back from well-scoured utensils
that gleamed from the midst of obscurity. A strapping Flemish lass,
with long golden pendants in her ears and a necklace with a golden heart
suspended to it, was the presiding priestess of the temple.
Many of the company were furnished with pipes, and most of them with
some kind of evening potation. I found their mirth was occasioned by
anecdotes which a little swarthy Frenchman, with a dry weazen face and
large whiskers, was giving of his love-adventures; at the end of each of
which there was one of those bursts of honest unceremonious laughter in
which a man indulges in that temple of true liberty, an inn.
As I had no better mode of getting through a tedious blustering evening,
I took my seat near the stove, and listened to a variety of travellers’
tales, some very extravagant and most very dull. All of them, however,
have faded from my treacherous memory except one, which I will endeavor
to relate. I fear, however, it derived its chief zest from the manner in
which it was told, and the peculiar air and appearance of the narrator.
He was a corpulent old Swiss, who had the look of a veteran traveller.
He was dressed in a tarnished green travelling-jacket, with a broad belt
round his waist, and a pair of overalls with buttons from the hips to
the ankles. He was of a full rubicund countenance, with a double chin,
aquiline nose, and a pleasant twinkling eye. His hair was light, and
curled from under an old green velvet travelling-cap stuck on one side
of his head. He was interrupted more than once by the arrival of guests
or the remarks of his auditors, and paused now and then to replenish his
pipe; at which times he had generally a roguish leer and a sly joke for
the buxom kitchen-maid.
I wish my readers could imagine the old fellow lolling in a huge
arm-chair, one arm a-kimbo, the other holding a curiously twisted
tobacco-pipe formed of genuine ecume de mer, decorated with silver chain
and silken tassel, his head cocked on one side, and a whimsical cut of
the eye occasionally as he related the following story.
THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM.
A TRAVELLER’S TALE.*
He that supper for is dight,
He lyes full cold, I trow, this night!
Yestreen to chamber I him led,
This night Gray-steel has made his bed!
SIR EGER, SIR GRAHAME, and SIR GRAY-STEEL.
ON the summit of one of the heights of the Odenwald, a wild and romantic
tract of Upper Germany that lies not far from the confluence of the
Main and the Rhine, there stood many, many years since the castle of the
Baron Von Landshort. It is now quite fallen to decay, and almost
buried among beech trees and dark firs; above which, however, its old
watch-tower may still be seen struggling, like the former possessor I
have mentioned, to carry a high head and look down upon the neighboring
country.
The baron was a dry branch of the great family of Katzenellenbogen,+
and inherited the relics of the property and all the pride, of his
ancestors. Though the warlike disposition of his predecessors had much
impaired the family possessions, yet the baron still endeavored to keep
up some show of former state. The times were peaceable, and the German
nobles in general had abandoned their inconvenient old castles, perched
like eagles’ nests among the mountains, and had built more convenient
residences in the valleys; still, the baron remained proudly drawn up in
his little fortress, cherishing with hereditary inveteracy all the
old family feuds, so that he was on ill terms with some of his nearest
neighbors, on account of disputes that had happened between their
great-great-grandfathers.
* The erudite reader, well versed in good-for-nothing lore,
will perceive that the above Tale must have been suggested
to the old Swiss by a little French anecdote, a circumstance
said to have taken place in Paris.
+ I.e., CAT’S ELBOW--the name of a family of those parts,
and very powerful in former times. The appellation, we are
told, was given in compliment to a peerless dame of the
family, celebrated for a fine arm.
The baron had but one child, a daughter, but Nature, when she grants but
one child, always compensates by making it a prodigy; and so it was with
the daughter of the baron. All the nurses, gossips, and country cousins
assured her father that she had not her equal for beauty in all Germany;
and who should know better than they? She had, moreover, been brought up
with great care under the superintendence of two maiden aunts, who had
spent some years of their early life at one of the little German courts,
and were skilled in all branches of knowledge necessary to the education
of a fine lady. Under their instructions she became a miracle of
accomplishments. By the time she was eighteen she could embroider to
admiration, and had worked whole histories of the saints in tapestry
with such strength of expression in their countenances that they
looked like so many souls in purgatory. She could read without great
difficulty, and had spelled her way through several Church legends and
almost all the chivalric wonders of the Heldenbuch. She had even made
considerable proficiency in writing; could sign her own name without
missing a letter, and so legibly that her aunts could read it without
spectacles. She excelled in making little elegant good-for-nothing,
lady-like knicknacks of all kinds, was versed in the most abstruse
dancing of the day, played a number of airs on the harp and guitar, and
knew all the tender ballads of the Minnelieders by heart.
Her aunts, too, having been great flirts and coquettes in their younger
days, were admirably calculated to be vigilant guardians and strict
censors of the conduct of their niece; for there is no duenna so rigidly
prudent and inexorably decorous as a superannuated coquette. She was
rarely suffered out of their sight; never went beyond the domains of
the castle unless well attended, or rather well watched; had continual
lectures read to her about strict decorum and implicit obedience; and,
as to the men--pah!--she was taught to hold them at such a distance and
in such absolute distrust that, unless properly authorized, she would
not have cast a glance upon the handsomest cavalier in the world--no,
not if he were even dying at her feet.
The good effects of this system were wonderfully apparent. The young
lady was a pattern of docility and correctness. While others were
wasting their sweetness in the glare of the world, and liable to be
plucked and thrown aside by every hand, she was coyly blooming into
fresh and lovely womanhood under the protection of those immaculate
spinsters, like a rosebud blushing forth among guardian thorns. Her
aunts looked upon her with pride and exultation, and vaunted that,
though all the other young ladies in the world might go astray, yet
thank Heaven, nothing of the kind could happen to the heiress of
Katzenellenbogen.
But, however scantily the Baron Von Landshort might be provided with
children, his household was by no means a small one; for Providence
had enriched him with abundance of poor relations. They, one and all,
possessed the affectionate disposition common to humble relatives--were
wonderfully attached to the baron, and took every possible occasion
to come in swarms and enliven the castle. All family festivals were
commemorated by these good people at the baron’s expense; and when they
were filled with good cheer they would declare that there was nothing
on earth so delightful as these family meetings, these jubilees of the
heart.
The baron, though a small man, had a large soul, and it swelled with
satisfaction at the consciousness of being the greatest man in the
little world about him. He loved to tell long stories about the stark
old warriors whose portraits looked grimly down from the walls around,
and he found no listeners equal to those who fed at his expense. He
was much given to the marvellous and a firm believer in all those
supernatural tales with which every mountain and valley in Germany
abounds. The faith of his guests exceeded even his own: they listened
to every tale of wonder with open eyes and mouth, and never failed to be
astonished, even though repeated for the hundredth time. Thus lived the
Baron Von Landshort, the oracle of his table, the absolute monarch of
his little territory, and happy, above all things, in the persuasion
that he was the wisest man of the age.
At the time of which my story treats there was a great family gathering
at the castle on an affair of the utmost importance: it was to receive
the destined bridegroom of the baron’s daughter. A negotiation had been