A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives a brisk trade with summer tourists.  We descended into the gorge and had a supper which would have been very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.  The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything else if left to their own devices.  This is an argument of some value in support of the theory that they were the original colonists of the wild islands of the coast of Scotland.  A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked upon one of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle savages rendered the captain such willing assistance that he gave them as many oranges as they wanted.  Next day he asked them how they liked them.  They shook their heads and said: 

“Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t things for a hungry man to hanker after.”

We went down the glen after supper.  It is beautiful—­a mixture of sylvan loveliness and craggy wildness.  A limpid torrent goes whistling down the glen, and toward the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between lofty precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls.  After one passes the last of these he has a backward glimpse at the falls which is very pleasing—­they rise in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and glittering cascades, and make a picture which is as charming as it is unusual.

CHAPTER XXIII [Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]

We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out the next morning after breakfast determined to do it.  It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest summer weather for it.  So we set the pedometer and then stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing we might never have anything to do forever but walk to Oppenau and keep on doing it and then doing it over again.

Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.  The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.  It is no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the sympathetic ear.

And what motley variety of subjects a couple of people will casually rake over in the course of a day’s tramp!  There being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order, and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single topic until it grows tiresome.  We discussed everything we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes, that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free, boundless realm of the things we were not certain about.