urned into German
wine, according to desire, the head waiter went blandly about his other
duties, as if the working of this sort of miracle was a common and easy
thing to him.

Mr. X said he had not known, before, that there were people honest
enough to do this miracle in public, but he was aware that thousands
upon thousands of labels were imported into America from Europe every
year, to enable dealers to furnish to their customers in a quiet and
inexpensive way all the different kinds of foreign wines they might
require.

We took a turn around the town, after dinner, and found it fully as
interesting in the moonlight as it had been in the daytime. The streets
were narrow and roughly paved, and there was not a sidewalk or a
street-lamp anywhere. The dwellings were centuries old, and vast enough
for hotels. They widened all the way up; the stories projected further
and further forward and aside as they ascended, and the long rows
of lighted windows, filled with little bits of panes, curtained with
figured white muslin and adorned outside with boxes of flowers, made a
pretty effect.

The moon was bright, and the light and shadow very strong; and nothing
could be more picturesque than those curving streets, with their rows
of huge high gables leaning far over toward each other in a friendly
gossiping way, and the crowds below drifting through the alternating
blots of gloom and mellow bars of moonlight. Nearly everybody was
abroad, chatting, singing, romping, or massed in lazy comfortable
attitudes in the doorways.

In one place there was a public building which was fenced about with a
thick, rusty chain, which sagged from post to post in a succession of
low swings. The pavement, here, was made of heavy blocks of stone. In
the glare of the moon a party of barefooted children were swinging on
those chains and having a noisy good time. They were not the first ones
who have done that; even their great-great-grandfathers had not been the
first to do it when they were children. The strokes of the bare feet
had worn grooves inches deep in the stone flags; it had taken many
generations of swinging children to accomplish that.

Everywhere in the town were the mold and decay that go with antiquity,
and evidence of it; but I do not know that anything else gave us so
vivid a sense of the old age of Heilbronn as those footworn grooves in
the paving-stones.

CHAPTER XIII

[My Long Crawl in the Dark]

When we got