Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There was a flat with the reddest of new carpets, tasselled portières and six steins with pewter lids arranged on a ledge above the wainscoting of the dining-room. The wonder of it was yet upon them.
Vance had draped a Neapolitan scarf; an upright piano, upon which Emmanuel Day, or, as he was known to the cross-roads of Broadway and Forty-second street, "Mannie" Day, provoked the most marvelous rag-time, an enlarged photograph in crayon, of Professor Vance, in a frock coat and lawn tie, a china bull dog, coquettishly decorated with a blue bow, and, on the mantel piece, two tall beer steins and a hand telephone.
In the beer garden, where they used to dine almost every night an imitation medieval saloon, with paneled beams made by machinery, plaster walls imitating oak, and neo-Gothic crystals the proprietor used to exhibit as a great curiosity a jar of grotesque little figures among the porcelain steins that adorned the brackets of the pedestals.
The narrow and tortuous avenue they threaded was gloomy in the extreme, affording scarcely any glimpse of the sky, and opening out no vistas between the serried ranks of steins, each clothed in a covering of velvet moss, and all looped together by the parasitical vines, whose boles were often as thick as cables.
Men and girls lounged and danced, or spun the wheels of fortune or sat at tables drinking from massive steins, a highly flavoured variety of rather ineffectual synthetic beer. Older women served and waited on the men and girls, and for every man was at least one girl and sometimes as many as could crowd about him. And so they sang, and banged their mugs and sloshed their frothy beverage.
Between acts at the theater he excuses himself and goes out and prepares his stomach for supper, which will follow at eleven, by drinking two or three steins of thick Munich beer, and nibbling on such small tidbits as a rosary of German sausage or the upper half of a raw Westphalia ham.
"What could he wish or look for that he would not have obtained through my friendship?" demanded Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity. "But no, he has preferred to surround himself with my enemies, and with whom? With Steins, Armfeldts, Bennigsens, and Wintzingerodes! They are neither fit for war nor peace!
"Why, I have any amount of them. I'll drink half a litre to your health." She filled one of the old blue earthen steins. "I haven't seen your roses in the gardens, but I'll drink to those in your cheeks," said I, and I drew back the pewter lid. "How long does Herr intend to stay?" asked Gretchen. "To the day is the evil thereof." "Ah, one must be happy with nothing to do."
I fancied grandma would be pleased with all I had accomplished, and laughed to myself as I saw the three coming home leaning close to each other in earnest conversation. To my surprise, the Steins went directly to their own room; and grandma did not speak, but closed her eyes as she passed me. That was her way, and I knew that it would be useless to ask what had offended her.
Now she had learnt that contrition was a sorrow for sin; and the simple sort of catechism which her mother was accustomed to teach her spoke also of the heart being full of sin, and how tears of penitence were necessary to wash it from its corrupt steins.
Word Of The Day