All Baden went there in the afternoon, to listen to that band.  It was a very good band.  Baden-Baden was a very good place.  There was no better hotel in Baden-Baden than the Darmstaedterhof; there were no such baths in the other hotels, these came straight from the spring, at their natural temperature.  They were matchless for rheumatism, especially in the legs.  The old Empress, Augusta, when in Baden, used to patronise this very hotel and no other.  They could show me the actual bath, and I myself could have pension (baths excluded) for eight marks and fifty a day.  If I would be so kind as to step into the lift, I should see the room for myself, and then with my permission they would bring in my luggage and pay the cab.

All this by degrees, from a pale youth in frock-coat and forage-cap, and a more prosperous personage with pince-nez and a paunch (yet another concierge and my latest landlord respectively), while I stood making up my mind.  The closing proposition was of some assistance to me.  I had no luggage on the cab, of which the cabman’s hat alone was visible, at the bottom of a flight of steps, at the far end of the flagged approach.  I had left my luggage at the station, but I only recollected the fact upon being recalled from a mental forecast of the interview before me to these exceedingly petty preliminaries.

There and then I paid off the cab and found my own way to this Conversationshaus.  I liked the look of the trim, fresh town in its perfect amphitheatre of pine-clad hills, covered in by a rich blue sky from which the last clouds were exhaling like breath from a mirror.  The well-drained streets were drying clean as in a black frost; checkered with sharp shadows, twinkling with shop windows, and strikingly free from the more cumbrous forms of traffic.  If this was Germany, I could dispense with certain discreditable prejudices.  I had to inquire my way of a policeman in a flaming helm; because I could not understand his copious directions, he led me to a tiny bridge within earshot of the band, and there refused my proferred coin with the dignity of a Hohenzollern.  Under the tiny bridge there ran the shallowest and clearest of little rivers.  Up the white walls of the houses clambered a deal of Virginia creeper, brought on by the rain, and now almost scarlet in the strong sunlight.  Presently at some gates there was a mark to pay, or it may have been two; immediate admittance to an avenue of fascinating shops, with an inner avenue of trees, little tables under them, and the crash of the band growing louder at every yard.  Eventual access to a fine, broad terrace, a fine, long facade, a bandstand, and people listening and walking up and down, people listening and drinking beer or coffee at more little tables, people listening and reading on rows of chairs, people standing to listen with all their ears; but not for a long time the person I sought.

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