Such rooms and beds and embroidered linen are as frequent in German village inns as they are rare in ours.  Our villages are superior to German villages in more merits, excellences, conveniences, and privileges than I can enumerate, but the hotels do not belong in the list.

“The Naturalist Tavern” was not a meaningless name; for all the halls and all the rooms were lined with large glass cases which were filled with all sorts of birds and animals, glass-eyed, ably stuffed, and set up in the most natural eloquent and dramatic attitudes.  The moment we were abed, the rain cleared away and the moon came out.  I dozed off to sleep while contemplating a great white stuffed owl which was looking intently down on me from a high perch with the air of a person who thought he had met me before, but could not make out for certain.

But young Z did not get off so easily.  He said that as he was sinking deliciously to sleep, the moon lifted away the shadows and developed a huge cat, on a bracket, dead and stuffed, but crouching, with every muscle tense, for a spring, and with its glittering glass eyes aimed straight at him.  It made Z uncomfortable.  He tried closing his own eyes, but that did not answer, for a natural instinct kept making him open them again to see if the cat was still getting ready to launch at him—­which she always was.  He tried turning his back, but that was a failure; he knew the sinister eyes were on him still.  So at last he had to get up, after an hour or two of worry and experiment, and set the cat out in the hall.  So he won, that time.

CHAPTER XVIII [The Kindly Courtesy of Germans]

In the morning we took breakfast in the garden, under the trees, in the delightful German summer fashion.  The air was filled with the fragrance of flowers and wild animals; the living portion of the menagerie of the “Naturalist Tavern” was all about us.  There were great cages populous with fluttering and chattering foreign birds, and other great cages and greater wire pens, populous with quadrupeds, both native and foreign.  There were some free creatures, too, and quite sociable ones they were.  White rabbits went loping about the place, and occasionally came and sniffed at our shoes and shins; a fawn, with a red ribbon on its neck, walked up and examined us fearlessly; rare breeds of chickens and doves begged for crumbs, and a poor old tailless raven hopped about with a humble, shamefaced mein which said, “Please do not notice my exposure—­think how you would feel in my circumstances, and be charitable.”  If he was observed too much, he would retire behind something and stay there until he judged the party’s interest had found another object.  I never have seen another dumb creature that was so morbidly sensitive.  Bayard Taylor, who could interpret the dim reasonings of animals, and understood their moral natures better than most men, would have found some way to make this poor old chap forget his troubles for a while, but we have not his kindly art, and so had to leave the raven to his griefs.