Peck's bad boy abroad : $b Being a humorous description of the bad boy and his dad in their journeys through foreign lands: 1904Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's bad boy abroad : $b Being a humorous description of the bad boy and his dad in their journeys through foreign lands: 1904
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
American wit and humor; Boys -- Fiction; Practical jokes -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
Berlin, Germany.--My Dear Old Pummer-nickel: Now we have got pretty near
home, and you would enjoy it to be with us, because you couldn't tell
the town from Milwaukee, except for the military precision with which
everything is conducted, where you never take a glass of beer without
cracking your heels together like a soldier, and giving a military
salute to the bartender, who is the commander-in-chief of all who happen
to patronize his bar. Everybody here acts like he was at a picnic in the
woods, with a large barrel of beer, with perspiration oozing down the
outside, and a spigot of the largest size, which fills a schooner at one
turn of the wrist, and every man either smiles or laughs out loud, and
you feel as though there was happiness everywhere, and that heaven was
right here in this greatest German city.
[Illustration: There is laughter everywhere 353]
There is laughter everywhere, except when the Emperor drives by,
escorted by his bodyguard, on the finest horses in the world; then
every citizen on the street stops smiling and laughing; all stand
at attention, and every face takes on a solemn, patriotic, almost a
fighting look, as though each man would consider it his happiest duty
and pleasure to walk right up to the mouth of cannon and die in his
tracks for his pale-faced, haggard and loved Emperor. And the Emperor
never smiles on his subjects as he passes, but looks into every eye on
both sides of the beautiful street, with an expression of agony on his
face, but a proud light in his eye, as though he would say, “Ach, Gott,
but they are daisies, and they would fight for the Fatherland with the
last breath in their bodies.”
The pride of the people in that moustached young man, with the look of
suffering, is only equalled by the pride of the Emperor in every German
in Germany, or anywhere on the face of the globe. There is none of the
“Hello, Bill!” such as we have in America, when the President drives
through his people, many of whom yell, “Hello, Teddy!” while he shows
his teeth, and laughs, and stands up in his carriage, and says, “Hello,
Mike,” as he recognizes an acquaintance. But these same “Hello, Bill,”
Americans are probably just as loyal to their chief, whoever he may be,
and would fight as hard as the loving Germans would for their hereditary
Emperor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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