“There, that is Prince Ludwig and his wife, walking along there.”

Everybody was bowing to them—­cabmen, little children, and everybody else—­and they were returning all the bows and overlooking nobody, when a young lady met them and made a deep courtesy.

“That is probably one of the ladies of the court,” said my German friend.

I said: 

“She is an honor to it, then.  I know her.  I don’t know her name, but I know her.  I have known her at Allerheiligen and Baden-Baden.  She ought to be an Empress, but she may be only a Duchess; it is the way things go in this way.”

If one asks a German a civil question, he will be quite sure to get a civil answer.  If you stop a German in the street and ask him to direct you to a certain place, he shows no sign of feeling offended.  If the place be difficult to find, ten to one the man will drop his own matters and go with you and show you.

In London, too, many a time, strangers have walked several blocks with me to show me my way.

There is something very real about this sort of politeness.  Quite often, in Germany, shopkeepers who could not furnish me the article I wanted have sent one of their employees with me to show me a place where it could be had.

CHAPTER XIX [The Deadly Jest of Dilsberg]

However, I wander from the raft.  We made the port of Necharsteinach in good season, and went to the hotel and ordered a trout dinner, the same to be ready against our return from a two-hour pedestrian excursion to the village and castle of Dilsberg, a mile distant, on the other side of the river.  I do not mean that we proposed to be two hours making two miles—­no, we meant to employ most of the time in inspecting Dilsberg.

For Dilsberg is a quaint place.  It is most quaintly and picturesquely situated, too.  Imagine the beautiful river before you; then a few rods of brilliant green sward on its opposite shore; then a sudden hill—­no preparatory gently rising slopes, but a sort of instantaneous hill —­a hill two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet high, as round as a bowl, with the same taper upward that an inverted bowl has, and with about the same relation of height to diameter that distinguishes a bowl of good honest depth—­a hill which is thickly clothed with green bushes—­a comely, shapely hill, rising abruptly out of the dead level of the surrounding green plains, visible from a great distance down the bends of the river, and with just exactly room on the top of its head for its steepled and turreted and roof-clustered cap of architecture, which same is tightly jammed and compacted within the perfectly round hoop of the ancient village wall.