Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/21

Rh True, they have been buffeted about by political waves, between Germany and Austria, for many years; but the people in these Bohemian hills are happy, industrious, and enterprising to a remarkable degree.

On the morning of the tenth of May, when we went down to the Brunn to drink, a thousand people were standing in line.

"Reminds me of the days when we used to line up at the post-office in Thompsonville," said Jim, his mind going back to the big days of Colorado, when he was mayor and silver was a dollar ten.

It is a great show: men and women from everywhere, with every disease that can possibly be charged to the liver, stomach, or gall. Even nervous people come here for the baths; and get well, or think they do, which is the same thing. There are men whose skin and eyes are yellow; and others green as olives; German dandies who walk like pacing grey-hounds; fat young Germans who seem to be walking on eggs; and old, gouty Germans who do not walk at all, but shuffle. There are big, bony Britons in knickerbockers, and elderly Englishmen whose love of plaids is largely responsible for the daily rains that come to this otherwise delightful region. There are modest Americans, with their pretty wives and daughters; and other Americans, who talk loud in the lobbies and cafes; Tyrolese, in green hats trimmed in feathers; and Polish Jews, with little corkscrew curls hanging down by their ears, such as we see in Jerusalem. Then there are a few stray Frenchmen, walking alone; and once—but not more than once—in a while a Parisian lady, and you know her by the charming cut of her skirt and the way she holds it up and the beautiful dream of a petticoat the act discloses. There are Austrian soldiers in long coats, and officers in pale-blue uniforms, spurred and cinched like the corset-wearers of France.

In a solid mass the crowd of cupbearers move up and down in the great colonnade, keeping time with their feet or hands or heads to the strains of the band, which begins to play at 6.45 in the morning.

By nine o'clock the springs are deserted, and the multitude has distributed itself among the many restaurants and cafés in the cañon. An hour later, having breakfasted lightly on toast and coffee—on such toast and such coffee as can be had only in Karlsbad—the great army of healthy-looking invalids lose themselves in the hills.

Here comes an old, old woman, bearing a load that would bend the back of a Turkish hamal, followed by a landau, wherein loll the fairest dames of Saxony; then a sausage-man, whose garlic-flavored viands freight the whole gulch with their fumes; and just behind him a wagon laden with flowers and shrubs for the new gardens of the Grand Hotel Pupp, and their opening leaves fling such a fragrance out upon the still air that it follows and trails far behind, as the smoke of a locomotive follows a freight train. Women with baskets on their backs, filled with