by Mark Twain
"Going--going--"
"TEN thousand!" As Givenaught shouted this, his excitement was sogreat that he forgot himself and used his natural voice. His brotherrecognized it, and muttered, under cover of the storm of cheers--
"Aha, you are there, are you, besotted old fool? Take the books, I knowwhat you'll do with them!"
So saying, he slipped out of the place and the auction was at an end.Givenaught shouldered his way to Hildegarde, whispered a word inher ear, and then he also vanished. The old scholar and his daughterembraced, and the former said, "Truly the Holy Mother has done morethan she promised, child, for she has given you a splendid marriageportion--think of it, two thousand pieces of gold!"
"And more still," cried Hildegarde, "for she has given you back yourbooks; the stranger whispered me that he would none of them--'thehonored son of Germany must keep them,' so he said. I would I might haveasked his name and kissed his hand and begged his blessing; but he wasOur Lady's angel, and it is not meet that we of earth should venturespeech with them that dwell above."
APPENDIX F.
German Journals The daily journals of Hamburg, Frankfort, Baden, Munich,and Augsburg are all constructed on the same general plan. I speak ofthese because I am more familiar with them than with any other Germanpapers. They contain no "editorials" whatever; no "personals"--and thisis rather a merit than a demerit, perhaps; no funny-paragraph column;no police-court reports; no reports of proceedings of higher courts;no information about prize-fights or other dog-fights, horse-races,walking-machines, yachting-contents, rifle-matches, or other sportingmatters of any sort; no reports of banquet speeches; no department ofcurious odds and ends of floating fact and gossip; no "rumors" aboutanything or anybody; no prognostications or prophecies about anything oranybody; no lists of patents granted or sought, or any reference tosuch things; no abuse of public officials, big or little, or complaintsagainst them, or praises of them; no religious columns Saturdays, norehash of cold sermons Mondays; no "weather indications"; no "localitem" unveiling of what is happening in town--nothing of a local nature,indeed, is mentioned, beyond the movements of some prince, or theproposed meeting of some deliberative body.
After so formidable a list of what one can't find in a German daily,the question may well be asked, What CAN be found in it? It is easilyanswered: A child's handful of telegrams, mainly about European nationaland international political movements; letter-correspondence about thesame things; market reports. There you have it. That is what a Germandaily is made of. A German daily is the slowest and saddest anddreariest of the inventions of man. Our own dailies infuriate thereader, pretty often; the German daily only stupefies him. Once aweek the German daily of the highest class lightens up its heavycolumns--that is, it thinks it lightens them up--with a profound, anabysmal, book criticism; a criticism which carries you down, down, downinto the scientific bowels of the subject--for the German critic isnothing if not scientific--and when you come up at last and scent thefresh air and see the bonny daylight once more, you resolve without adissenting voice that a book criticism is a mistaken way to lighten upa German daily. Sometimes, in place of the criticism, the first-classdaily gives you what it thinks is a gay and chipper essay--about ancientGrecian funeral customs, or the ancient Egyptian method of tarring amummy, or the reasons for believing that some of the peoples who existedbefore the flood did not approve of cats. These are not unpleasantsubjects; they are not uninteresting subjects; they are even excitingsubjects--until one of these massive scientists gets hold of them. Hesoon convinces you that even these matters can be handled in such a wayas to make a person low-spirited.
As I have said, the average German daily is made up solely ofcorrespondences--a trifle of it by telegraph, the rest of it by mail.Every paragraph has the side-head, "London," "Vienna," or some othertown, and a date. And always, before the name of the town, is placeda letter or a sign, to indicate who the correspondent is, so that theauthorities can find him when they want to hang him. Stars, crosses,triangles, squares, half-moons, suns--such are some of the signs used bycorrespondents.
Some of the dailies move too fast, others too slowly. For instance, myHeidelberg daily was always twenty-four hours old when it arrived atthe hotel; but one of my Munich evening papers used to come a fulltwenty-four hours before it was due.
Some of the less important dailies give one a tablespoonful of acontinued story every day; it is strung across the bottom of the page,in the French fashion. By subscribing for the paper for five years Ijudge that a man might succeed in getting pretty much all of the story.
If you ask a citizen of Munich which is the best Munich daily journal,he will always tell you that there is only one good Munich daily, andthat it is published in Augsburg, forty or fifty miles away. It is likesaying that the best daily paper in New York is published out in NewJersey somewhere. Yes, the Augsburg ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG is "the bestMunich paper," and it is the one I had in my mind when I was describinga "first-class German daily" above. The entire paper, opened out, is notquite as large as a single page of the New York HERALD. It is printed onboth sides, of course; but in such large type that its entire contentscould be put, in HERALD type, upon a single page of the HERALD--andthere would still be room enough on the page for the ZEITUNG's"supplement" and some portion of the ZEITUNG's next day's contents.
Such is the first-class daily. The dailies actually printed in Munichare all called second-class by the public. If you ask which is the bestof these second-class papers they say there is no difference; one is asgood as another. I have preserved a copy of one of them; it iscalled the MUeNCHENER TAGES-ANZEIGER, and bears date January 25, 1879.Comparisons are odious, but they need not be malicious; and without anymalice I wish to compare this journal, published in a German city of170,000 inhabitants, with journals of other countries. I know of noother way to enable the reader to "size" the thing.
A column of an average daily paper in America contains from 1,800 to2,500 words; the reading-matter in a single issue consists of from25,000 to 50,000 words. The reading-matter in my copy of the Munichjournal consists of a total of 1,654 words --for I counted them. Thatwould be nearly a column of one of our dailies. A single issue of thebulkiest daily newspaper in the world--the London TIMES--often contains100,000 words of reading-matter. Considering that the DAILY ANZEIGERissues the usual twenty-six numbers per month, the reading matter in asingle number of the London TIMES would keep it in "copy" two months anda half.
The ANZEIGER is an eight-page paper; its page is one inch wider and oneinch longer than a foolscap page; that is to say, the dimensions of itspage are somewhere between those of a schoolboy's slate and a lady'spocket handkerchief. One-fourth of the first page is taken up with theheading of the journal; this gives it a rather top-heavy appearance;the rest of the first page is reading-matter; all of the second page isreading-matter; the other six pages are devoted to advertisements.
The reading-matter is compressed into two hundred and five small-picalines, and is lighted up with eight pica headlines. The bill of fareis as follows: First, under a pica headline, to enforce attention andrespect, is a four-line sermon urging mankind to remember that, althoughthey are pilgrims here below, they are yet heirs of heaven; and that"When they depart from earth they soar to heaven." Perhaps a four-linesermon in a Saturday paper is the sufficient German equivalent of theeight or ten columns of sermons which the New-Yorkers get in theirMonday morning papers. The latest news (two days old) follows thefour-line sermon, under the pica headline "Telegrams"--these are"telegraphed" with a pair of scissors out of the AUGSBURGER ZEITUNG ofthe day before. These telegrams consist of fourteen and two-thirds linesfrom Berlin, fifteen lines from Vienna, and two and five-eights linesfrom Calcutta. Thirty-three small-pica lines of telegraphic news in adaily journal in a King's Capital of one hundred and seventy thousandinhabitants is surely not an overdose. Next we have the pica heading,"News of the Day," under which the following facts are set forth: PrinceLeopold is going on a visit to Vienna, six lines; Prince Ar
nulph iscoming back from Russia, two lines; the Landtag will meet at ten o'clockin the morning and consider an election law, three lines and one wordover; a city government item, five and one-half lines; prices of ticketsto the proposed grand Charity Ball, twenty-three lines--for this oneitem occupies almost one-fourth of the entire first page; there is to bea wonderful Wagner concert in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, with an orchestraof one hundred and eight instruments, seven and one-half lines. Thatconcludes the first page. Eighty-five lines, altogether, on that page,including three headlines. About fifty of those lines, as one perceives,deal with local matters; so the reporters are not overworked.
Exactly one-half of the second page is occupied with an opera criticism,fifty-three lines (three of them being headlines), and "Death Notices,"ten lines.
The other half of the second page is made up of two paragraphs underthe head of "Miscellaneous News." One of these paragraphs tells about aquarrel between the Czar of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one anda half lines; and the other tells about the atrocious destruction of apeasant child by its parents, forty lines, or one-fifth of the total ofthe reading-matter contained in the paper.
Consider what a fifth part of the reading-matter of an American dailypaper issued in a city of one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitantsamounts to! Think what a mass it is. Would any one suppose I could sosnugly tuck away such a mass in a chapter of this book that it would bedifficult to find it again if the reader lost his place? Surely not.I will translate that child-murder word for word, to give the reader arealizing sense of what a fifth part of the reading-matter of a Munichdaily actually is when it comes under measurement of the eye:
"From Oberkreuzberg, January 21st, the DONAU ZEITUNG receives a longaccount of a crime, which we shortened as follows: In Rametuach,a village near Eppenschlag, lived a young married couple with twochildren, one of which, a boy aged five, was born three years before themarriage. For this reason, and also because a relative at Iggensbach hadbequeathed M400 ($100) to the boy, the heartless father considered himin the way; so the unnatural parents determined to sacrifice him in thecruelest possible manner. They proceeded to starve him slowly to death,meantime frightfully maltreating him--as the village people now makeknown, when it is too late. The boy was shut in a hole, and whenpeople passed by he cried, and implored them to give him bread. Hislong-continued tortures and deprivations destroyed him at last, on thethird of January. The sudden (sic) death of the child created suspicion,the more so as the body was immediately clothed and laid upon the bier.Therefore the coroner gave notice, and an inquest was held on the 6th.What a pitiful spectacle was disclosed then! The body was a completeskeleton. The stomach and intestines were utterly empty; they containednothing whatsoever. The flesh on the corpse was not as thick as the backof a knife, and incisions in it brought not one drop of blood. Therewas not a piece of sound skin the size of a dollar on the whole body;wounds, scars, bruises, discolored extravasated blood, everywhere--evenon the soles of the feet there were wounds. The cruel parents assertedthat the boy had been so bad that they had been obliged to use severepunishments, and that he finally fell over a bench and broke his neck.However, they were arrested two weeks after the inquest and put in theprison at Deggendorf."
Yes, they were arrested "two weeks after the inquest." What a home soundthat has. That kind of police briskness rather more reminds me of mynative land than German journalism does.
I think a German daily journal doesn't do any good to speak of, but atthe same time it doesn't do any harm. That is a very large merit, andshould not be lightly weighted nor lightly thought of.
The German humorous papers are beautifully printed upon fine paper, andthe illustrations are finely drawn, finely engraved, and are not vapidlyfunny, but deliciously so. So also, generally speaking, are the two orthree terse sentences which accompany the pictures. I remember one ofthese pictures: A most dilapidated tramp is ruefully contemplating somecoins which lie in his open palm. He says: "Well, begging is gettingplayed out. Only about five marks ($1.25) for the whole day; many anofficial makes more!" And I call to mind a picture of a commercialtraveler who is about to unroll his samples:
MERCHANT (pettishly).--NO, don't. I don't want to buy anything!
DRUMMER.--If you please, I was only going to show you--
MERCHANT.--But I don't wish to see them!
DRUMMER (after a pause, pleadingly).--But do you you mind letting MElook at them! I haven't seen them for three weeks!