Lippincotts Magazine, October 1873 | Page 2

me--the highest tower in Europe, if we except
the hideous cast-iron abortion at Rouen. I recollected that in my
younger days I had been defrauded of my fair share of tower-climbing.
Hohenfels had a saying that most travelers are a sort of children, who
need to touch all they see, and who will climb to every broken tooth of
a castle they find on their way, getting a tiresome ascent and hot
sunshine for their pains. "I trust we are wiser," he would observe, so
unanswerably that I passed with him up the Rhine quite, as I may
express it, on the ground floor.
I marched to the cathedral, determined to ascend, and when I saw the
look of it changed my mind.
The sacristan, in fact, advised me not to go up after he had taken my fee
and obtained a view of my proportions over the tube of his key, which
he pretended to whistle into. We sat down together as I recovered my
breath, after which I wandered through the nave with my guide,
admiring the statue of the original architect, who stands looking at the
interior--a kind of Wren "circumspecting" his own monument. At high
noon the twelve apostles come out from the famous horologe and take
up their march, and chanticleer, on one of the summits of the
clock-case, opens his brazen throat and crows loud enough to fill the
farthest recesses of the church with his harsh alarum.
A portly citizen was talking to the sacristan. "I hear many objections to
that bird, sir," he remarked to me, "from fastidious tourists: one thinks

that a peacock, spreading its jewels by mechanism, would have a richer
effect. Another says that a swan, perpetually wrestling with its dying
song, would be more poetical. Others, in the light of late events, would
prefer a phoenix."
The dress of the stout citizen announced a sedentary man rather than a
cosmopolitan. He had a shirt-front much hardened with starch; a white
waistcoat, like an alabaster carving, which pushed his shirt away up
round his ears; and a superb bluebottle-colored coat, with metal buttons.
It was the costume of a stay-at-home, and I learned afterward that he
was a local professor of geography and political science--the first by
day, the last at night only in beer-gardens and places of resort.
[Illustration: THE HIGHEST SPIRE IN EUROPE.]
"Nay," I said, "the barnyard bird is of all others the fittest for a
timepiece: he chants the hours for the whole country-side, and an old
master of English song has called him Nature's 'crested clock.'"
"With all deference," said the bourgeois, "I would still have a substitute
provided for yonder cock. I would set up the Strasburg goose. Is he not
our emblem, and is not our commerce swollen by the inflation of the
_foie gras_? In one compartment I would show him fed with
sulphur-water to increase his biliary secretion; another might represent
his cage, so narrow that the pampered creature cannot even turn round
on his stomach for exercise; another division might be anatomical, and
present the martyr opening his breast, like some tortured saint, to
display his liver, enlarged to the weight of three pounds; while the apex
might be occupied by the glorified, gander in person, extending his
neck and commenting on the sins of the Strasburg pastry-cooks with a
cutting and sardonic hiss."
You have not forgotten, reader, the legend of the old clock?
Many years ago there lived here an aged and experienced mechanic.
Buried in his arts, he forgot the ways of the world, and promised his
daughter to his gallant young apprentice, instead of to the hideous old
magistrate who approached the maiden with offers of gold and dignity.
One day the youth and damsel found the unworldly artist weeping for
joy before his completed clock, the wonder of the earth. Everybody
came to see it, and the corporation bought it for the cathedral. The city
of Basel bespoke another just like it. This order aroused the jealousy of
the authorities, who tried to make the mechanic promise that he would

never repeat his masterpiece for another town. "Heaven gave me not
my talents to feed your vain ambition," said the man of craft: "the men
of Basel were quicker to recognize my skill than you were. I will make
no such promise." Upon that the rejected suitor, who was among the
magistrates, persuaded his colleagues to put out the artist's eyes. The
old man heard his fate with lofty fortitude, and only asked that he might
suffer the sentence in the presence of his darling work, to which he
wished to give a few final strokes. His request was granted, and he
gazed long at the splendid clock, setting its wonders in motion to count
off