Perkeo was not so sentimental as the Trumpeter of Sakkingen, and the Trumpeter of Sakkingen was not so sentimental as the Heidelberg University student.  The Heidelberg University student was as a rule very round and very young, and he seemed to give up the whole of his spare time to imitating the passion which I hope has not been permitted to enter too largely into this book of travels.

Dicky and I agreed that it was a mere imitation; that is, Dicky said it was and I agreed.  It could not possibly amount to anything more, for it consisted wholly in walking up and down in front of the house in which its object lived.  We saw it being done, and it looked so uninteresting that we failed to realise what it meant until we inquired.  Mrs. Portheris’s nephew, Mr. Jarvis Portheris, who was acquiring German in Heidelberg, told us about it.  Mrs. Portheris’s nephew was just fourteen and small of his age, but he, too, had selected the lady of his admiration, and was taking regular daily pedestrian exercise in front of her residence.  He pointed out the residence, and observed with an enormous frown that “another man” had usurped the pavement in his absence, and was doing it in quick step doubtless to show his ardour.  “He’s a beastly German too,” said Mrs. Portheris’s nephew, “so I can’t challenge him, but I’ll jolly well punch his head.”

“Come on,” said Dicky, “you’d better steady your nerves,” and treated him liberally to ginger-beer and currant buns; but we were not allowed to see the encounter, which Mr. Jarvis Portheris, gratefully satiate, assured us must be conducted on strict lines of etiquette, with formal preliminaries.  He was so very young, and obviously knew so little about what he was doing, that we questioned him with some delicacy, but we discovered that the practice had no parallel, as Dicky put it, for lack of incident.  It was accompanied in some cases by the writing of poetry, “German poetry, of course,” said Mrs. Portheris’s nephew ineffably, but even that was more likely to be exhibited as evidence of the writer’s fervid state of mind than to be sent to its object, who plaited her hair and attended to her domestic duties as if nobody were in the street but the fishmonger.  In Mr. Jarvis Portheris’s case he did not know the colour of her eyes, or the number of her years; he had selected her, it seemed, at a venture, in church, from a rear view, sitting; and had never seen her since.  Dicky, whose predilections of this sort have always been very active, asked him seriously why he adhered to such a hollow mockery, and he said regretfully that a fellow more or less had to; it was one of the beastly nuisances of being educated abroad.  But from what we saw of the German temperament generally we were convinced that as a native demonstration it was sincere, and that its idiocy arose only, as Dicky expressed it, from the remarkable lack in foreigners of business capacity.