The German Classics (Volume 17); Masterpieces of German Literature Translated Into English

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: NOBLE BLOOD By Ernst Von Wildenbruoh TRANSLATED RY MURIEL ALMON, BE there people, I wonder, who are entirely free from curiosity? ? People who, when they see someone looking attentively and interestedly at an unknown object, are able to pass by without feeling in the least an itching desire to stop, to follow the direction of the other's gaze and find out what mysterious thing it is he sees ? If anyone should ask me whether I, personally, belong to that strong sort of men, I do not know whether I could honestly say yes, and certain it is that there was one moment in my life when I not only felt such an itching desire but actually yielded to it and did what any curious person does. The place where that happened was a wine-tavern in the old town where I was practising at the court as a young, unpaid barrister; the time was a summer afternoon. The wine-tavern, on the ground floor, at the side of a large square of which its windows commanded a view in all directions, was almost empty at that hour. To my mind ? for I always have been a lover of solitude ? it was only the pleasanter on that account. There were three of us: the fat tapster who poured golden yellow muscatel into my glass from a bottle gray with dust, then I myself, sitting in a corner of the many- angled, cosy room, sipping the fragrant wine, and finally another guest who had seated himself at one of the two open windows, a goblet of red wine before him on the window-sill, a long, well-colored meerschaum cigar-holder in his mouth, from which he spread clouds of smoke about him. This man, whose reddish face, tinged with a bluish hue in spots, was surrounded by a long gray beard, was an old pensioned colonel known to everyone in town; he belonged to the colony of retired officers who had settled in t...