We got down at the Gasthaus zum Hirsch, but I had already sold the ruins of my chronometer, and was twenty-five francs the richer for the transaction.

I cannot call Baden-Baden a city:  it is a stage.  It is a perpetually set-scene for light opera.  Everything seems dressed up and artificial, and meant to be viewed, as it were, in the glare of the foot-lights.  But instead of the shepherds in white satin who ought to be the performers in this ingenious theatre, it is the unaccustomed stranger who is forced into the position of actor.  As he toils up the steep and slovenly streets, faced with shabby buildings that crack and blacken behind their ill-adjusted fronts of stucco and distemper, he cheapens rapidly in his own view:  he feels painfully like the hapless supernumerary whom he has seen mounting an obvious step-ladder behind a screen of rock-work on his way to a wedding in the chapel or a coronation in the Capitol.  The difference is, that here the permission to play his role is paid for by the performer.

But I, as I sat hugging my knee in the hotel bed-room, was possessed by loftier feelings.  If there is one faculty which I can fairly extol in myself, it is that of displaying true sentiment in false situations.  My thoughts, with incredible agility, went back to Francine.  A knock came at the door, and my emotions received a chill:  my visitor could be none but Berkley, in whose face I should see a reminder that I owed him for my car-fare.

In place of frigid politeness, however, the diplomatist wore all that he knew of good-fellowship and Bohemianism.  He was now clad in tourists’ plaid, and stood upon soles half an inch thick—­a true Englishman on his travels.

“Come, old boy!”—­old boy, indeed!—­“you must taste the pleasures of Baden-Baden:  it is but four o’clock, and we can see the Trinkhalle, the Conversations-Haus, and plenty besides before dinner.  Is there any place in particular where you would like to go?”

[Illustration:  THE WOOD-PATH.]

I looked solemnly at him.  “I would fain visit the Alt-Schloss,” I said.

“With all my heart!” replied Sylvester, tapping his legs and admiring his boots.  This unpromising comrade was wearing better than I expected.

[Illustration:  SCENE OF MATTHISSON’S POEM IMITATING GRAY’S “ELEGY.”]

“Shall we have a carriage?” he pursued.  At this question my face contracted as by the effect of a nervous attack.  I thought of the few pence I possessed.  I assumed the determined pedestrian.

“For shame!” I cried:  “it is but three miles.  Where are your tourist muscles?  I should like to walk.”

“Nothing simpler,” said the man of facile views:  “we shall do it within the hour.”

[Illustration:  “WINE OR BEER!”]

I breathed again.  We set off.  We had before us cliffs and hills, with small Gothic towers printed on the blue of the sky; but the mountain-path beneath our steps was sanded, graveled, packed, rolled, weeded, and provided with coquettish sofas at every hundred steps.  I, who happened that afternoon to feel the emotions of Manfred, would gladly have exchanged these detestable conveniences for precipices, storms and eagles.