DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62134#0033
TALK BY THE WAY.
25
husband, because she would not give the wretch money to
redeem his master’s uniform which he had pawned; how
he cut off her head, then quietly took the money, went
and paid various debts which he had contracted in the city,
and decamped! And how the poor old father and her
husband were nearly brokenhearted when they discovered
the tragedy. And various equally lively histories did we
relate, till our conversation resembled a series of short
chapters out of the Neue Pitaval ; I relating, as my share,
the history of Casper Hauser, which Signor L. and Marie
had never heard, embellishing it with explanations out of
a certain prohibited book which I once had read on the
subject; and then, being in the midst of a horrible history
of a woman near Magdeburg, who has just been imprisoned
for having kept a little child of her own three years upon
bread and water, in a cask in a cellar, till the poor little
creature was crippled body and mind,—we found ourselves
upon one of the steep banks of the Isar; below us a
picturesque large white-washed house, its walls stained
with innumerable fading frescoes.
It was a large public-house, and its garden, filled with
benches and tables, was already sprinkled over with groups
of townspeople come out this lovely summer morning.
Peasants streamed along the road below us, which skirted
the river and wound round the inn-garden, bearing in
then1 hands little brooms of willow catkins, and mistletoe,
and holly. They were bringing them from some church,
where they had been blessed, as it was Palm Sunday, and
these catkins were, as by the children in England, called
palms ; but why holly and mistletoe should be bound up
with the palms I cannot tell: at Christmas here these
plants have no significance.
Having sat down on the warm dry grass of the very
steep bank, and admired the distant view of Munich, and
listened to the rush of the river and the singing of the
25
husband, because she would not give the wretch money to
redeem his master’s uniform which he had pawned; how
he cut off her head, then quietly took the money, went
and paid various debts which he had contracted in the city,
and decamped! And how the poor old father and her
husband were nearly brokenhearted when they discovered
the tragedy. And various equally lively histories did we
relate, till our conversation resembled a series of short
chapters out of the Neue Pitaval ; I relating, as my share,
the history of Casper Hauser, which Signor L. and Marie
had never heard, embellishing it with explanations out of
a certain prohibited book which I once had read on the
subject; and then, being in the midst of a horrible history
of a woman near Magdeburg, who has just been imprisoned
for having kept a little child of her own three years upon
bread and water, in a cask in a cellar, till the poor little
creature was crippled body and mind,—we found ourselves
upon one of the steep banks of the Isar; below us a
picturesque large white-washed house, its walls stained
with innumerable fading frescoes.
It was a large public-house, and its garden, filled with
benches and tables, was already sprinkled over with groups
of townspeople come out this lovely summer morning.
Peasants streamed along the road below us, which skirted
the river and wound round the inn-garden, bearing in
then1 hands little brooms of willow catkins, and mistletoe,
and holly. They were bringing them from some church,
where they had been blessed, as it was Palm Sunday, and
these catkins were, as by the children in England, called
palms ; but why holly and mistletoe should be bound up
with the palms I cannot tell: at Christmas here these
plants have no significance.
Having sat down on the warm dry grass of the very
steep bank, and admired the distant view of Munich, and
listened to the rush of the river and the singing of the