d hailed with demonstrative
hospitality any stray cousin who chanced that way. In one of the last
of these improvised _Trinkhallen_ we came upon a young man and maiden
who had the place quite to themselves. Her brown parasol kept the
sun off them both, and it was of no sort of consequence that they had
nothing more interesting than the back of a shed to look at. Future
prospects were the only ones they cared for: the present had no need
of anything but a faint beeriness, conducive to day-dreaming.

As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must see the
new statue. Accordingly, we drive through the town and halt before it
in the square. It is very fine, glowing like gold from the mint.
The king sits his charger well, and gazes majestically at nothing in
particular: still, one must be a little critical, and we imagine the
horse's tail is not quite right. But then is not the whisk of a tail
in bronze almost impossible to conceive of? If the artist suffers no
severer censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy
man. The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, "From his
grateful people." High and low have contributed to it, and gladly.
"That was a man!" says our driver. He was a soldier under him, and
knows. And in fact the old king seems to have been always doing
something for the country, so that the gratitude is not without a
cause. The inhabitants of Cannstatt have special reason to remember
him kindly: he himself was grateful to them and showed it. In the
troublous times of 1848 he was sadly in need of money: Ludwigsburg
(another satellite of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came
up to the mark handsomely. The royal creditor never forgot that. He
instituted the _Volksfest_ as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is
proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the dead.
So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened between us it
flows without intermission. His head is over his shoulder all the way
as we roll back to the city under the beautiful trees of the palace
grounds. "If the old king had been living, Wuertemberg would never have
joined in the last war: he would have told Prussia to fight it out by
herself." Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck.
He evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the
generally accepted sense of that expression. He states as a fact that
there _are_ limits, leaving it to us to understand that the