The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,672 pages of information about The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner.

The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,672 pages of information about The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner.

On other days there was horse-trotting, music production, and for several days prize-shooting.  The latter was admirably conducted:  the targets were placed at the foot of the bank; and opposite, I should think not more than two hundred yards off, were shooting-houses, each with a room for the register of the shots, and on each side of him closets where the shooters stand.  Signal-wires run from these houses to the targets, where there are attendants who telegraph the effect of every shot.  Each competitor has a little book; and he shoots at any booth he pleases, or at all, and has his shots registered.  There was a continual fusillade for a couple of days; but what it all came to, I cannot tell.  I can only say, that, if they shoot as steadily as they drink beer, there is no other corps of shooters that can stand before them.

INDIAN SUMMER

We are all quiet along the Isar since the October Fest; since the young king has come back from his summer castle on the Starnberg See to live in his dingy palace; since the opera has got into good working order, and the regular indoor concerts at the cafes have begun.  There is no lack of amusements, with balls, theaters, and the cheap concerts, vocal and instrumental.  I stepped into the West Ende Halle the other night, having first surrendered twelve kreuzers to the money-changer at the entrance,—­double the usual fee, by the way.  It was large and well lighted, with a gallery all round it and an orchestral platform at one end.  The floor and gallery were filled with people of the most respectable class, who sat about little round tables, and drank beer.  Every man was smoking a cigar; and the atmosphere was of that degree of haziness that we associate with Indian summer at home; so that through it the people in the gallery appeared like glorified objects in a heathen Pantheon, and the orchestra like men playing in a dream.  Yet nobody seemed to mind it; and there was, indeed, a general air of social enjoyment and good feeling.  Whether this good feeling was in process of being produced by the twelve or twenty glasses of beer which it is not unusual for a German to drink of an evening, I do not know.  “I do not drink much beer now,” said a German acquaintance,—­“not more than four or five glasses in an evening.”  This is indeed moderation, when we remember that sixteen glasses of beer is only two gallons.  The orchestra playing that night was Gungl’s; and it performed, among other things, the whole of the celebrated Third (or Scotch) Symphony of Mendelssohn in a manner that would be greatly to the credit of orchestras that play without the aid of either smoke or beer.  Concerts of this sort, generally with more popular music and a considerable dash of Wagner, in whom the Munichers believe, take place every night in several cafes; while comic singing, some of it exceedingly well done, can be heard in others.  Such amusements—­and nothing can be more harmless —­are very cheap.

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