Hither and Thither in Germany Author:William Dean Howells Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill CARLSBAD THE long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound down the hillside like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay s... more »tuccoed houses of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of dark-green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that surrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, the hill- fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world. Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines, with tight, corkscrew curls on their temples under their black-velvet derbies; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in Astrakhan caps accented the more homogeneous masses of western Europeans, in which it would have been hard so say which were English, French, or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have passed unknown in the perfection of theirdress, gave their nationality away in the flat, wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet. The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and coming between the rows of pollarded locust-trees on one side and the bright walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables served by pretty, bareheaded girls ...« less