daughters; French feuilletonistes living at
the rate of two thousand a-year, and trying to
believe that they have it; English
barristers persuading others that the fatigue
of the practice (which they never had) has
rendered the baths of Saxe-Roulettenburg
essential to their health; dissenting dowagers
finding the chances of the rouge and the
noir superior in excitement to the sermons
of the inspired Habakkuk Goosecall of
Tiglath-Pilesar chapel—these are the sights
and people you see at the Gross-Herzog.
You sit opposite to them at the table-d'hôte
and their contemplation is more nourishing
than the five-and-twenty courses. What a
delightful, wicked masquerade it is. What is
the Grand Opera with its débardeurs,
hussars, titis, vivandières, cossacks, Robinson
Crusoes, Incroyables and Pierrots, in
comparison with this travestie?

One word before leaving the naughty
little place. Is the Gross-Herzog comfortable?
On my word, I think very few people
have ever taken the trouble to ask even
themselves that question. There is such a
continuous round of amusing folly, gaiety,
and excitement; you lose and win so much
money; you fall in love (or out of it) so
often, that you have really no time to inquire
whether the doors and windows are properly
fastened; whether the chimneys smoke, or
the sheets are well aired. For the same
reason, although Herren Brauwer and nephew
stick it on very heavily in the bill, no one
cares to dispute the items. What does it
matter to Captain Flash, who has just won
eighteen hundred Napoleons, whether he has
been charged two florins for a bottle of
Cognac or six? Especially, how does it concern
the captain, should he be charged even ten
florins for the same, when, after an unlucky
night at rouge, in which he has lost all, he has
been obliged to borrow Captain Raff's passport
and run away to Frankfort, without paying
his bill at all? No definite judgment can
be passed on the degree of comfort attainable
at the Gross-Herzog; for nobody
stops there in winter-time. It is believed
that Brauwer and nephew go to Paris,
where they dine at the Café de Paris, and
pass themselves off as Moldo-Wallachian
Waywodes. The Kursaal is deserted, the
natives break in upon the table-d'hôte, and
in revenge for the French cookery of the
season, hold Saturnalia of cabbage-soup and
suet-puddings; the croupiers practice the
flute, and the waiters play at roulette for
silbergroschen and button-moulds. My friend
Niggerlegge, formerly of the Buffs, who has
lived over the tobacconist's shop in the
Boodelstrasse at Saxe-Roulettenburg for ten
years, and makes three pounds a-week the
year round at rouge (the only income, in
fact, that the worthy man has to live on),
Niggerlegge tells me that, if a chance
traveller alights at the Gross-Herzog in the
winter-time, the waiters fall upon and
embrace him, the Life-Guardsmen at the
palace present arms to him as he passes;
the band serenade him; and the
oberkellner lets him have for a florin a-day the
gorgeous suite of apartments occupied during
the autumn by her Serene Highness the
Dowager Duchess Betsy-Jane of Bavaria. It
is something to sleep in a Grand Duchess's
bed; but then it costs you some six florins
a-day in fuel to keep the enormous rooms at
anything like a comfortable temperature.

The second class of German hotels are
found in the towns, not the watering
places. The hotel of Der König von
Cockaign may be in the ancient German
town of Lieberschweinsgarten. It is on the
Dom-Platz—that ancient, gloomy, jagged-
paved expanse, hemmed in by tall, frowning,
many casemented houses, and dominated by
the old cathedral—like a tall carved cabinet in
stone, which was built, as the legends tell, by
Frederick the Wicked, assisted of course by
the devil, and will never be finished till the
Lust-Berg—that lofty mound outside the
town, cast there one night by Satan in a
frolicsome mood—tumbles bodily into the
river Schnappsundwasser. The König von
Cockaign—who is depicted on a swinging sign
in the costume of a landsknecht in complete
armour, with a tremendously rubicund nose,
and mounted on a white charger like a
rampant beer-barrel—is, goodness knows, how
many centuries old. Walter Biber, the
landlord's father, kept it in the time of the French
invasion, when it was sacked by a disorderly
squad of republican grenadiers. It looks
as if it could stand a stout siege now.
Walter Biber's grandfather entertained the
Elector of Hanover there, on his way to
England, to assume the crown. There, it is
said, the great Guelph ate the last bad oyster
which was to pass his royal lips in Vaterland.
Walter Biber's great grandfather may have
lodged Wallenstein in his rambling old inn,
and have been threatened by Max Piccolomini
with the loss of his ears for bringing
him an extortionate bill. Walter Biber keeps
the König himself now. He is a villain. He
is a fat, scowling, shock-headed old man with
a face covered with warts, a cap with a green
shade, and a wash-leather waistcoat. He is a
widower, and childless. He had a nephew
once (all German hotel-keepers have nephews)
young Fritz Mängelwurzel, his sister's son.
This youth offending him, on a disputed question
of over-cheating a traveller, he formally
renounced and disinherited him, to the
extent of refusing him bread, salt, a featherbed,
beer and tobacco, which are the
sacramental elements of German hospitality; and,
after deprivation of which, nothing can be
done. More than this, he complained of him
to the senate of the town; and Fritz, being
very unpopular with the burghers, and too
popular with the burghers' wives, the
conscript fathers of Lieberschweinsgarten
forthwith picked a German quarrel with him