The Sun.
London, England, 1865-08-30 00:00:00

HOLIDAY-MAKEXit

(Prom the Times Correspondent.)
FRANKFORT, Aug. 28.
The poor wight who, on reaching the border at
Gretna, chanced to meet there an ill-favoured and
redhaired girl, had to submit to no end of obloquy
for the conclusion he forthwith came to, that " all
Scotchwomen were ugly, and wore crops of carrots
on their heads." If I tell you that every German
you meet is sure to have a pocket-comb in his
pocket, and to make use of it every third or fourth
minute, I suppose there will be an outcry against
my propensity to overhasty generalization. Truly,
however, that pocket-comb is my abomination. I
embarked at Blackwall on board one of the Antwerp
steamers many years ago. I was new to the world
then, and impressions worked deep on my mind.
We sat down to breakfast in sight of the Nore,
and I happened to be seated near a Professor,
whose long hair left no room for doubt as to his
nationality. He bowed down his head on his
cup and plate, and my heart yearned to him, as I
honoured the piety and disregard of the world that
prompted him to stick to his habits of " grace before
meat" under any circumstances. Grace ! no, the
graceless, shaggy old brute only whipped out his
horrid pocket-comb, and—took away such appetite
as sea-sickness would have spared me. Since that
time my ideas of Germany are inseparably associated
with the use and abuse of that most objectionable of
all pocket instruments. I dread it more than the
olive-leaf bladed ivory-handled knife of the Italian
brigand.
Well, then, I think that if at any time, God and
Bismark permitting, old Teutonia succeeded ix
achieving her unity, the pocket-comb ought to be
quartered somewhere in the Imperial escutcheon, as
an emblem of national niceness. Of all countries in
the world, England and Holland not excepted, Ger-
many—Protestant Germany I should say—may be
safely pronounced to be the cleanest. Here I am,
seated at my writing table, in one of the third floor
rooms of my hotel, and the white beechen floor, the
moveable carpet, the white china stove, only opening
out in the passage, the bedding, the curtains and
counterpane, are a nest of unspotted tidiness, so long
as only a Christian has enjoyment of its luxuries.
Say nothing of a private dwelling for the upper or
middle classes, where the Haus-Frau, on the second
day after her honeymoon, is transformed into a mop
and a water-brush, and knows no other worship
than rubbing and scrubbing, dusting and scouring.
In all the domestic establishment, however, the only
unclean article of furniture is the human animal.
For him the pocket-comb epitomises all the rites
and mysteries of the toilet. I had picked up an
acquaintance at one of the stations on the Bavarian
line the other day, and as we went to the ticket-
office he asked me, with a view to be my fellow-
traveller, " Whether I would go first or second
class ?" " First class in .Germany," he observed,
"is only fit for Princes and Queen's massengers.
The soft deep cushions of the first-class carriages
are stifling in this hot weather; and, besides, your
chance is that you will have no company from one
end to the other of .your route." " The chances are
that' you will have too much company in the second-
class,".l said ; " but, for my own part, Irani no way
particular, so here goes for the second class."
My companion, gentle reader, was a gentleman,
if I at all know -what ought to be understood by that
appellation. The perfect lines-of his profile, the thin
though not emaciated face, the rich but smooth
brown hair, the shaven chin, the bushy whiskers,
the small ear, the long white taper fingers, the
almond nails—all about him spoke of that blood
which gives in England a much surer patent of
high descent than any golden page in that sacred
volume which the good-natured cynic, Thackeray,
rather profanely calls "theßritishßible." Something
in my friend's garb proclaimed him a scholar; if not
actually a " clerk ;" a fellow of one of the Oxford
colleges, if not a priest in orders. The word " nice"
seemed to have been coined for his benefit, and he
was evidently a man whose keen senses are given to
him rather for excruciating pain than for exquisite
pleasure.
Well, with such nerves as God had endowed him
with, acoustic as well as olfactory, my friend courted
a contact with the lower German world, and so we
sat down together, vis-a-vis, in one of the second
class carriages. It was a nicht-rauchende coupe, and
we had no one with us besides a mother and nurse
with a kicking "Joy and a squalling babe. My friend
drew up the skirts of his cutaway coat, rubbed his
ear, and took out a pamphlet. We passed one sta-
tion, another ; an odd passenger or two got in and
got out, and we had no lack of breathing room ; but
presently, at Lohr, behold ! the guard looks in
hurriedly.. " 4 Noch vier platzen hier!" he cried, and
here, pell-mell, with armful of bags, hampers, cotton
umbrellas, and other impediments of every descrip-
tion, four big countrymentumbled in. Look out for

toes and shins; squeeze yourself up, shrink away into
nothing, or here you have German contact with a
vengeance. Our four countrymen did not look much
above the class of pig-drovers. They had evidently
travelled day and night—heaven alone knows how
many days and nights ; such linen 1 such neck-
cloths ! such velveteen coats ! They dared not
smoke in that forbidden compartment, that was
clear ; but even their smoke would have been a re-
lief against the stale odours of their unlit pipes.
They were merry withal, noisy and friendly, and as
they took a love-at-first-sight fancy to my dainty
Oxonian, they poured into his ears such volleys of
their Franconian jargon as even 011endorff would
not have enabled him to make out in a hundred
years' study. As he stared at them and was dumb-
stricken, they conceived that he was afflicted with
what Sir Bulwer Lytton calls the "aristocratic com-
plaint" of being hard of hearing, and so they re-
doubled their shouts, and with them the peals of
their good-humoured but roaring laughter. They
soon perceived the futility of their efforts, however.
They detected, perhaps, some ineffable disdain in
his thin distended nostrils, and were, on the whole,
too welibred to give voluntarily offence, so they
turned their attention to their neighbours on the
other side, and we soon had a screeching concert
from the obstreperous boy, the stormy baby; "the
hushing, soothing woman. There was an end of
that also, however, and our new fellow-passengers.
were reminded, of the fact that they had tasted
nothing that morning, and open flew their parcels
with their thick sandwiches. By a natural associa-
tion of the ideas of breakfast with those of a
morning toilet, out also from the same receptacles'
came their pocket-combs—pocket-comb, I should
say, for as one of them had been at the trouble of

producing one, that one passed from hand to hand
and from head to head, till the hats which did
duty as tables and plates for the occasion had been
laid back on their rearranged-cheveltires. The day
was baking hot even at that early hour, but

those dear fellows who sat with their faces to the
engine complained of the draught, the dust, and
cinders ; and the sash on the Side where the women
sat was pulled up without ceremony as far as it
would go. The same greasy sleeve that had per-
formed that feat brushed also past the aquiline nose
of my college friend to do as much on our side. I
only wished you had seen the daggers he looked as
he stopped the sacrilegious hand. There might have
been a divergence of opinion and a " difficulty"
about our right. of breathing ; but, luckily, at that
moment, there was a whistle of the engine, a slack-
ening of the train, and we came to one of the hun-

dred and one stations with which we had to make

our acquaintance in our weary progress.

" Let us

pay the difference, and take first-class tickets," says
our friend, picking up his goods and chattels, and
there we were, meet company for Queen's Messen-

gers and Princes, safe from pocket combs and reek-
ing pipes, except when the company, short of second

and third class carriages, are driven to the necessity
of pouring in a whole mob upon you, and meet your

complaints with a protest that " you have only paid
for onoplace, and they have a right to do as they

ike with their own."

With all the drawbacks that may rise against•
:ravelling in this country, owing to the habits of a

. _
great part of the people, and the inconceivable
length to which a few miles' Journey may be drawn
by the invincible slowness of the national tempera-
ment, there is no doubt that the country affords
endless enjoyment to any man that visits it on his
holiday tour. Yesterday was my fourth day, and
lily third Sunday on this same Franconian-line from

1 Bamberg to Frankfort, and the shady hills, the
broad Main, the towns, castles, and churches on
my route, seemed to acquire new charms in my
eyes in proportion as they became more familiar.
Life is short, and the world is large, and I suppose
I shall never stop and see anything of Bamberg,
Wurtzburg, Schwienfurt, Gemunden, and other
old places of the kind, beyond what I may catch
at a glance as the train rolls past them. lam
not sure, however, that they are not seen at the
greatest advantage from afar. There they sit
on their hills with their many spired min-
sters, their turreted palaces, their wildernesses
of gables, their grey ruins, their sunny slopes, and
their leafy promenades. It is as much as one can
do now-a-days if he stays for a few hours at the
living capitals ; the still life of those decaying towns
must be taken as a matter of course. People them
with as much of the romance of the past as you
please, conjure up the phantoms of entombed empe-
rors, and crumbling prince-bishops. Only, if you
are wise, avoid the dull hours of their long summer
days, the cramping beds, the smothering bolsters,
and the savoury sauer-kraut of their thorough Ger-
man hotels.

Or, if you are curious about a place where the old
and the new join hands, where the Middle Ages are
blending their lingering memorials with the realities
of the bustling 19th century, stop for a day or two
here at the Imperial Frankfort. Take a stroll in
the cool of the evening along the Zeil, hold your
nose, and just peep in at the Suden-gasse. See the
Kaisers at the Riirner, and the market girls at the
Messe, Goethe's house, and the Rothschilds'. Many
are the times I have been at Frankfort; I have lived
here for 12 months at a time. The more I see of it,
however, the less I tire of it. I find all Germany
here, genuine Germany, with its bewigged, besotted
droning Diet, with its greedy, unsympathising, piti-
lessly screwing Geld-Sacke. There is no transcen-
dant beauty in the country immediately round
Frankfort. The bare bald plains from here to May-
ence, and from here to Hanau, are only suggestive
of point-blank cannon balls and unimpeded cavalry
charges. But if Frankfort is not the rose, she has
the fragrance of the rose within reach. Soden and
Homburg are at minutes' distances ; so is all Nas-
sau ; not much further Heidelberg and all Baden.
Here at hand you have the Forest and the Forst-
haus, the beer-flasks at the Main-gardens, cold
bathing in the Main waters, the sweet, broad river
itself, placid and easy-flowing as all German life,
famous shops for ,mian glass and Black Forest
trinkets ; considerai .e dirt, too, and every variety
of smells, incurable, ineradicable, for Frankfort is
the money-market of Germany, and if " money is
dirt," morally, in all countries, it is especially so
here, morally and physically, whether you have it
in paper or in that dingy metal which is called Ger-
man silver.