It is said that the vast majority of the Heidelberg students are hard workers, and make the most of their opportunities; that they have no surplus means to spend in dissipation, and no time to spare for frolicking.  One lecture follows right on the heels of another, with very little time for the student to get out of one hall and into the next; but the industrious ones manage it by going on a trot.  The professors assist them in the saving of their time by being promptly in their little boxed-up pulpits when the hours strike, and as promptly out again when the hour finishes.  I entered an empty lecture-room one day just before the clock struck.  The place had simple, unpainted pine desks and benches for about two hundred persons.

About a minute before the clock struck, a hundred and fifty students swarmed in, rushed to their seats, immediately spread open their notebooks and dipped their pens in ink.  When the clock began to strike, a burly professor entered, was received with a round of applause, moved swiftly down the center aisle, said “Gentlemen,” and began to talk as he climbed his pulpit steps; and by the time he had arrived in his box and faced his audience, his lecture was well under way and all the pens were going.  He had no notes, he talked with prodigious rapidity and energy for an hour—­then the students began to remind him in certain well-understood ways that his time was up; he seized his hat, still talking, proceeded swiftly down his pulpit steps, got out the last word of his discourse as he struck the floor; everybody rose respectfully, and he swept rapidly down the aisle and disappeared.  An instant rush for some other lecture-room followed, and in a minute I was alone with the empty benches once more.

Yes, without doubt, idle students are not the rule.  Out of eight hundred in the town, I knew the faces of only about fifty; but these I saw everywhere, and daily.  They walked about the streets and the wooded hills, they drove in cabs, they boated on the river, they sipped beer and coffee, afternoons, in the Schloss gardens.  A good many of them wore colored caps of the corps.  They were finely and fashionably dressed, their manners were quite superb, and they led an easy, careless, comfortable life.  If a dozen of them sat together and a lady or a gentleman passed whom one of them knew and saluted, they all rose to their feet and took off their caps.  The members of a corps always received a fellow-member in this way, too; but they paid no attention to members of other corps; they did not seem to see them.  This was not a discourtesy; it was only a part of the elaborate and rigid corps etiquette.