“Land aboard the starboard transom!”

“Saved!” cried the captain.  “Jump ashore and take a turn around a tree and pass the bight aboard!”

The next moment we were all on shore weeping and embracing for joy, while the rain poured down in torrents.  The captain said he had been a mariner for forty years on the Neckar, and in that time had seen storms to make a man’s cheek blanch and his pulses stop, but he had never, never seen a storm that even approached this one.  How familiar that sounded!  For I have been at sea a good deal and have heard that remark from captains with a frequency accordingly.

We framed in our minds the usual resolution of thanks and admiration and gratitude, and took the first opportunity to vote it, and put it in writing and present it to the captain, with the customary speech.  We tramped through the darkness and the drenching summer rain full three miles, and reached “The Naturalist Tavern” in the village of Hirschhorn just an hour before midnight, almost exhausted from hardship, fatigue, and terror.  I can never forget that night.

The landlord was rich, and therefore could afford to be crusty and disobliging; he did not at all like being turned out of his warm bed to open his house for us.  But no matter, his household got up and cooked a quick supper for us, and we brewed a hot punch for ourselves, to keep off consumption.  After supper and punch we had an hour’s soothing smoke while we fought the naval battle over again and voted the resolutions; then we retired to exceedingly neat and pretty chambers upstairs that had clean, comfortable beds in them with heirloom pillowcases most elaborately and tastefully embroidered by hand.

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.