Then the village also shook hands, having
evidently understood what Christian said, notwithstanding the fact
that it was intelligible German, and I returned to Thun and Berne.
No. 53 was still the only bed disengaged, for it was very late when I
reached Berne; but on my vehement protestations against that unquiet
chamber, the landlord most obligingly converted a sofa in his own
sitting-room into a temporary bed, and made it over to me. This room was
separated by a door of ground-glass from another sitting-room
brilliantly lighted, in which a number of German young gentlemen were
feting the return of a comrade after the national manner. The landlord
said he thought it must soon be over, for he doubted whether they could
last much longer; but their powers of endurance were greater than he had
supposed. It will readily be imagined that German songs with a good
chorus, the solo parts being very short, and received with the utmost
impatience by the chorus, were even less soporific in their effect than
the flirtations--though boisterous beyond all conventional propriety--of
German housemaids and waiters.
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