Tales of the Caravan, Inn, and PalaceHauff, Wilhelm
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Tales of the Caravan, Inn, and Palace
Hauff, Wilhelm
Short stories, German -- Translations into English
Then, when the mayor and doctor, to conceal the anger they did not dare
express, sat down to a game of chess, the nephew would come up, look
over the mayor's shoulders with his great goggles, and find fault with
this and that move, and tell the doctor he must move thus and so, until
both men were secretly burning with anger. If then the mayor challenged
him to play a game, with the design of mating him speedily--as he held
himself to be a second Philidor--the old gentleman would grasp his
nephew by the cravat, whereupon the young man at once became quiet and
polite, and gave mate to the mayor.
They had been accustomed to play cards of an evening at Gruenwiesel, at
half a kreuzer a game for each player; this the nephew thought was a
miserable stake, and laid down crown-thalers and ducats himself,
asserting that not one of them could play as well as he, but generally
consoled the insulted gentlemen by losing large sums of money to them.
They suffered no twinges of conscience in this taking of his money. "He
is an Englishman, and inherits his wealth," said they, as they shoved
the ducats into their pockets.
Thus did the nephew of the strange gentleman establish his
respectability in the town in a very short time. The oldest inhabitants
could not remember having ever seen a young man of this style in
Gruenwiesel, and he created the greatest sensation that had ever been
known there. It could not be said that the nephew had learned any thing
more than the art of dancing; Latin and Greek were to him, as we were
wont to express it, "Bohemian villages." In a game at the mayor's house
he was called upon to write something, and it was discovered that he
could not even write his own name. In geography, he made the most
egregious blunders--as he would place a German city in France, or a
Danish town in Poland; he had not read any thing, had not studied any
thing, and the minister often shook his head seriously over the utter
ignorance of the young man. Yet, in spite of all these defects, every
thing he said or did was considered excellent; for he was so impudent
as to claim that he was always right, and the close of every one of his
speeches was, "I know better than you!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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