Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/80

 to the forest and there set them free. Why should a human being kill little animals? Because a tiger may want to eat me—that's no reason why I should turn tiger, is it?"

He returned to the subject of the Margravine Wilhelmina.

"They thought I went to Bayreuth to hear Wagner," he said. "Nothing of the kind. I like his Wedding March hugely and very little else he has done. But, while Livy and the kids went to pieces over Tristan und Isolde and The Nibelungen, I visited the grave of the Margravine and looked at the temples and grottoes and houses she built, the statues and fountains she set up, the beauty she lavished on the landscape! Ah, Wilhelmina would have been the woman for me—for a week or two, I mean, even as I would like to have been the Great Frederick's dinner companion for a little while." 76