eople
come to the Red Inn for their wedding feast from thirty miles round. You
shall have a princely meal, a Rhine fish! More, I need not say."

After confiding their weary steeds to the care of the landlord, who
vainly called to his hostler, the two young men entered the public room
of the inn. Thick white clouds exhaled by a numerous company of smokers
prevented them from at first recognizing the persons with whom they
were thrown; but after sitting awhile near the table, with the patience
practised by philosophical travellers who know the inutility of making
a fuss, they distinguished through the vapors of tobacco the inevitable
accessories of a German inn: the stove, the clock, the pots of beer, the
long pipes, and here and there the eccentric physiognomies of Jews,
or Germans, and the weather-beaten faces of mariners. The epaulets of
several French officers were glittering through the mist, and the clank
of spurs and sabres echoed incessantly from the brick floor. Some were
playing cards, others argued, or held their tongues and ate, drank, or
walked about. One stout little woman, wearing a black velvet cap, blue
and silver stomacher, pincushion, bunch of keys, silver buckles, braided
hair,--all distinctive signs of the mistress of a German inn (a costume
which has been so often depicted in colored prints that it is too
common to describe here),--well, this wife of the innkeeper kept the two
friends alternately patient and impatient with remarkable ability.

Little by little the noise decreased, the various travellers retired to
their rooms, the clouds of smoke dispersed. When places were set for
the two young men, and the classic carp of the Rhine appeared upon the
table, eleven o'clock was striking and the room was empty. The silence
of night enabled the young surgeons to hear vaguely the noise their
horses made in eating their provender, and the murmur of the waters of
the Rhine, together with those indefinable sounds which always enliven
an inn when filled with persons preparing to go to bed. Doors and
windows are opened and shut, voices murmur vague words, and a few
interpellations echo along the passages.

At this moment of silence and tumult the two Frenchmen and their
landlord, who was boasting of Andernach, his inn, his cookery, the Rhine
wines, the Republican army, and his wife, were all three listening
with a sort of interest to the hoarse cries of sailors in a boat which
appeared to be coming to the w