On reaching Innsbruck, I lighted on an umbrella-maker’s shop under one of the arcades near the Golden Roof of Frederick with the Empty Pockets. I saw suspended before the vault in which the man dwelt or did business, umbrellas the exact reproductions of what I had seen at Würzburg--red, green, brown, blue, even white--lined with pink, like mushrooms: and for the sum of about fifteen shillings I became the happy possessor of one of these articles, which I proceed to describe. The covering was of a brilliant red, and imprinted round it was a wreath of flowers and foliage, white, yellow, blue, and green; around the ferule also was a smaller wreath similar in colour and character. This cover was stretched on canes, such canes as are well known in schools; and the canes were distended by twisted brass strainers, rising out of a sliding tube of elaborately hammered brass, through which passed the stick of the umbrella. The whole, when expanded, measured nearly five feet, and was not extraordinarily heavy, nothing like the weight of a gig-umbrella. Walking under it was like walking about in a tent, taking the tent with one; and walking under it in the rain filled one with sanguine hopes that the day was about to mend, so surrounded was one with a warm and cheerful glow. On a hot climb over a pass, when I spread this shelter above my head against the sun, I felt that I must appear to the shepherds on the high pastures like a migratory Alpine rose. I met with no inconvenience whatever from my umbrella till I reached Heidelberg on my way home, and innocently walked with it under my arm in the Castle gardens on Sunday afternoon. Then I found that it provoked attention and excited astonishment. Such an umbrella had its social level, and that level was the market-place, not the Castle gardens; it was sufferable as spread over an old woman vending _sauerkraut_, but not as carried furled in the hand of a respectably dressed gentleman. So much comment did my umbrella occasion that it annoyed me, spoiled the pleasure of my walk, and I accepted the offer of a friend to relieve me of it. He took my umbrella and thrust it up his back under his coat, and with crossed arms to the rear, hugged it to his spine. But even so it was not to escape observation, for the black handle, crooked, appeared below his coat, a fact to which I was aroused as I dropped behind my friend, by the exclamations of a nursemaid: “_Ach Tausend!_ the Herr has a curly tail!” and then of a Professor, who, beckoning some students to him, said: “Let us catch him--the Missing Link, _homo caudatus_.”