it.

'A Tramp Abroad' had an "Introduction" in the manuscript, a pleasant word
to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was omitted.
Fortunately the appendix remained. Beyond question it contains some of
the very best things in the book. The descriptions of the German Portier
and the German newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the awful
German language is one of Mark Twain's supreme bits of humor. It is Mark
Twain at his best; Mark Twain in a field where he had no rival, the field
of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest absurdities
of some national custom or institution which the nation itself could
enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound. The present Emperor of
Germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national speech when
all other amusements fail. It is delicious beyond words to express; it
is unique.

In the body of the book there are also many delights. The description of
the ant might rank next to the German language almost in its humor, and
the meeting with the unrecognized girl at Lucerne has a lively charm.

Of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their
beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the Jungfrau from
Interlaken:

There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and
solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the
indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial
and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the
contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding
contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a
spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a
million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a
million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and
unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have
become a vacant desolation

While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,
toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in
the Alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless
influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves
always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing
which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which
will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met
dozen