Baden-Baden sits in the lap of the hills, and the natural and artificial beauties of the surroundings are combined effectively and charmingly.  The level strip of ground which stretches through and beyond the town is laid out in handsome pleasure grounds, shaded by noble trees and adorned at intervals with lofty and sparkling fountain-jets.  Thrice a day a fine band makes music in the public promenade before the Conversation House, and in the afternoon and evening that locality is populous with fashionably dressed people of both sexes, who march back and forth past the great music-stand and look very much bored, though they make a show of feeling otherwise.  It seems like a rather aimless and stupid existence.  A good many of these people are there for a real purpose, however; they are racked with rheumatism, and they are there to stew it out in the hot baths.  These invalids looked melancholy enough, limping about on their canes and crutches, and apparently brooding over all sorts of cheerless things.  People say that Germany, with her damp stone houses, is the home of rheumatism.  If that is so, Providence must have foreseen that it would be so, and therefore filled the land with the healing baths.  Perhaps no other country is so generously supplied with medicinal springs as Germany.  Some of these baths are good for one ailment, some for another; and again, peculiar ailments are conquered by combining the individual virtues of several different baths.  For instance, for some forms of disease, the patient drinks the native hot water of Baden-Baden, with a spoonful of salt from the Carlsbad springs dissolved in it.  That is not a dose to be forgotten right away.

They don’t sell this hot water; no, you go into the great Trinkhalle, and stand around, first on one foot and then on the other, while two or three young girls sit pottering at some sort of ladylike sewing-work in your neighborhood and can’t seem to see you —­polite as three-dollar clerks in government offices.

By and by one of these rises painfully, and “stretches”—­stretches fists and body heavenward till she raises her heels from the floor, at the same time refreshing herself with a yawn of such comprehensiveness that the bulk of her face disappears behind her upper lip and one is able to see how she is constructed inside—­then she slowly closes her cavern, brings down her fists and her heels, comes languidly forward, contemplates you contemptuously, draws you a glass of hot water and sets it down where you can get it by reaching for it.  You take it and say: 

“How much?”—­and she returns you, with elaborate indifference, a beggar’s answer: 

“NACH BELIEBE” (what you please.)

This thing of using the common beggar’s trick and the common beggar’s shibboleth to put you on your liberality when you were expecting a simple straightforward commercial transaction, adds a little to your prospering sense of irritation.  You ignore her reply, and ask again: