Three men on the bummelJerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
General
Three men on the bummel
Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
Bicycle touring -- Fiction; Black Forest (Germany) -- Fiction; British -- Germany -- Fiction; Humorous stories
Another excellent piece of material for obtaining excitement in Germany
is the simple domestic perambulator. What you may do with a
"kinder-wagen," as it is called, and what you may not, covers pages of
German law; after the reading of which, you conclude that the man who can
push a perambulator through a German town without breaking the law was
meant for a diplomatist. You must not loiter with a perambulator, and
you must not go too fast. You must not get in anybody's way with a
perambulator, and if anybody gets in your way you must get out of their
way. If you want to stop with a perambulator, you must go to a place
specially appointed where perambulators may stop; and when you get there
you _must_ stop. You must not cross the road with a perambulator; if you
and the baby happen to live on the other side, that is your fault. You
must not leave your perambulator anywhere, and only in certain places can
you take it with you. I should say that in Germany you could go out with
a perambulator and get into enough trouble in half an hour to last you
for a month. Any young Englishman anxious for a row with the police
could not do better than come over to Germany and bring his perambulator
with him.
In Germany you must not leave your front door unlocked after ten o'clock
at night, and you must not play the piano in your own house after eleven.
In England I have never felt I wanted to play the piano myself, or to
hear anyone else play it, after eleven o'clock at night; but that is a
very different thing to being told that you must not play it. Here, in
Germany, I never feel that I really care for the piano until eleven
o'clock, then I could sit and listen to the "Maiden's Prayer," or the
Overture to "Zampa," with pleasure. To the law-loving German, on the
other hand, music after eleven o'clock at night ceases to be music; it
becomes sin, and as such gives him no satisfaction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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