s face was one of intense surprise,
as if laughter were the very last thing he had expected to be greeted
with. We thought this very funny: we said his earnest manner was half
the humor. The slightest hint on his part that he knew how funny he was
would have completely ruined it all. As we continued to laugh, his
surprise gave way to an air of annoyance and indignation, and he scowled
fiercely round upon us all (except the two young men, who, being behind
him, could not be seen). That sent us into convulsions. We told each
other it would be the death of us, this thing. The words alone, we said,
were enough to send us into fits, but added to his mock seriousness--oh,
it was too much!

In the last verse, he surpassed himself. He glowered round upon us with
a look of such concentrated ferocity that, but for our being forewarned
as to the German method of comic singing, we should have been nervous;
and he threw such a wailing note of agony into the weird music that, if
we had not known it was a funny song, we might have wept.

He finished amid a perfect shriek of laughter. We said it was the
funniest thing we had ever heard in all our lives. We said how strange
it was that, in the face of things like these, there should be a popular
notion that the Germans hadn't any sense of humor. And we asked the
Professor why he didn't translate the song into English, so that the
common people could understand it, and hear what a real comic song was
like.

Then Herr Slossenn Boschen got up, and went on awful. He swore at us in
German (which I should judge to be a singularly effective language for
that purpose), and he danced, and shook his fists, and called us all the
English he knew. He said he had never been so insulted in all his life.

It appeared that the song was not a comic song at all. It was about a
young girl who lived in the Harz Mountains, and who had given up her
life to save her lover's soul; and he died, and met her spirit in the
air; and then, in the last verse, he jilted her spirit, and went on with
another spirit--I'm not quite sure of the details, but it was something
very sad, I know. Herr Boschen said he had sung it once before the
German Emperor, and he (the German Emperor) had sobbed like a little
child. He (Herr Boschen) said it was generally acknowledged to be one of
the most tragic and pathetic songs in the German language.

It was a trying situation for us--very trying. There seemed to be no
answer. We lo