We stopped at the very same inn which the famous old robber-knight and rough fighter Goetz von Berlichingen, abode in after he got out of captivity in the Square Tower of Heilbronn between three hundred and fifty and four hundred years ago.  Harris and I occupied the same room which he had occupied and the same paper had not quite peeled off the walls yet.  The furniture was quaint old carved stuff, full four hundred years old, and some of the smells were over a thousand.  There was a hook in the wall, which the landlord said the terrific old Goetz used to hang his iron hand on when he took it off to go to bed.  This room was very large—­it might be called immense —­and it was on the first floor; which means it was in the second story, for in Europe the houses are so high that they do not count the first story, else they would get tired climbing before they got to the top.  The wallpaper was a fiery red, with huge gold figures in it, well smirched by time, and it covered all the doors.  These doors fitted so snugly and continued the figures of the paper so unbrokenly, that when they were closed one had to go feeling and searching along the wall to find them.  There was a stove in the corner—­one of those tall, square, stately white porcelain things that looks like a monument and keeps you thinking of death when you ought to be enjoying your travels.  The windows looked out on a little alley, and over that into a stable and some poultry and pig yards in the rear of some tenement-houses.  There were the customary two beds in the room, one in one end, the other in the other, about an old-fashioned brass-mounted, single-barreled pistol-shot apart.  They were fully as narrow as the usual German bed, too, and had the German bed’s ineradicable habit of spilling the blankets on the floor every time you forgot yourself and went to sleep.

A round table as large as King Arthur’s stood in the center of the room; while the waiters were getting ready to serve our dinner on it we all went out to see the renowned clock on the front of the municipal buildings.

CHAPTER XII [What the Wives Saved]

The RATHHAUS, or municipal building, is of the quaintest and most picturesque Middle-Age architecture.  It has a massive portico and steps, before it, heavily balustraded, and adorned with life-sized rusty iron knights in complete armor.  The clock-face on the front of the building is very large and of curious pattern.  Ordinarily, a gilded angel strikes the hour on a big bell with a hammer; as the striking ceases, a life-sized figure of Time raises its hour-glass and turns it; two golden rams advance and butt each other; a gilded cock lifts its wings; but the main features are two great angels, who stand on each side of the dial with long horns at their lips; it was said that they blew melodious blasts on these horns every hour—­but they did not do it for us.  We were told, later, than they blew only at night, when the town was still.