Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/233

 wine. He filled a glass from the first hogshead and tendered it and I drank the wine. He drew a glass full from the second hogshead and tendered it again. There were about thirty hogsheads in the cellar. Saying “danke sie” and “lebt wohl,” I withdrew. We are told in the Nibelungenlied that:

“Never were men so merry as these beside the Rhine.”

Then we came to Flomborn, perhaps fifteen miles across the Palatinate from Worms, a village of three or four hundred people, of whom about half bore the name of Pfannebecker. The bans of one of them, a girl about to be married, were nailed up against the church door. In the graveyard large flat stones covered the graves of those who were dead. The inn-keeper, who seemed a little surly when we took our horses into the yard to be fed, came running out after us on to the street, his face all smiles, to tell us that his wife was a Pfannebecker, and she, the good-hearted soul that she was, almost cried with joy to see a “Pfannebecker aus Amerika” as she tendered her cakes and wine. I was much impressed by seeing the children drive the flocks of geese up from the pastures, and I had them, together with everything else in the village photographed. Frederick P., the most important personage of the place, worth about $90,000, took us to his home to have us meet his wife, and son bearing the same name.

At Heidelberg, after looking over the University, which seemed to me dull and out of date, and the Tun, which was certainly large, and the Schloss, a most beautiful and impressive ruin, we climbed the mountain which rises from the Neckar in order that we might get a view of the Valley of the Rhine and the Neckar and the Taunus mountains. On the way up we overtook Catharine Grimm, a woman of about forty, who twice a week carried upon her head all of the supplies needed for the inn at the crest from the city below. She wanted us to take her home with us, poor woman, and little wonder. On the way down, after Rh