United States or France ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It gave me a great shock, this narrow escape, and I got on to my feet quickly, and burying the remains of my lunch under the gigantic molehill on which I had been sitting, asked myself nervously what I proposed to do next. Should I walk back to the village, go to the Gasthof, write a letter craving permission to call on my cousins, and wait there till an answer came?
The distance we had to go may have been about fifty English miles; but the roads were in such wretched condition, and the cattle, which we changed seven times, of such an abominable breed, that night had fallen upon the town of B before we entered it. I drove at once to the little gasthof, where, three days before, at the same hour, I had put up upon my arrival.
It was now getting on towards three o'clock, and as the weather, instead of improving, became every moment more boisterous, we determined to abandon our fishing. We accordingly adjourned to the gasthof, where a roasted fowl had been prepared for us, and made a hearty dinner, in the midst of the same crowd which had watched our mode of operations on the river.
She kept cruelly aloof from us during the whole of our sojourn, and made us pay at our departure just twice as much as, for similar fare, we were charged at any other gasthof in Bohemia.
The sun sank in a cloudless blaze behind a line of trenches on a gentle slope above the western shore when I entered the Gasthof Rabe, where I hoped to get a room for the night. I had no sooner crossed the threshold, however, than I was arrested and brought to the Etappen-Commandant in the Pregelstrasse.
It served the two-fold purpose of a mill and a gasthof; and whatever the comparative merits of the mill might be, the gasthof department was clearly not of the highest order.
I think if it had been a fine day I would have gone soberly to the Gasthof and written the conciliatory letter; but the temptation was too great, it was altogether irresistible, and in ten minutes I had found the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and was standing with a beating heart in the garden of my childhood.
With this view, passing through the town, I put up at a small but decent gasthof which stood upon a patch of rising ground close upon the margin of the stream; and having first seen to the comfort of my horse, which was well-nigh knocked up with the day's journey, and next attended to my own, I retired to rest at an early hour, without descending to the common room and joining in the beery orgies of the evening.
It would be a discreet and sober course to pursue; the next best thing to having written before leaving home. But the Gasthof of a north German village is a dreadful place, and the remembrance of one in which I had taken refuge once from a thunderstorm was still so vivid that nature itself cried out against this plan. The mist, if anything, was growing denser.
To the civility and kindness of that gentleman, we were much indebted both then and afterwards, and I am glad, though he may never be aware of the fact, thus publicly to acknowledge my obligations to him. We reached Starkenbach about six o'clock, after a pleasant walk through green fields, and made for what had been represented as the best inn, a gasthof in the market-place.
Word Of The Day