Fly-Fishing in the Bavarian Highlands. 69 



denly occurred to him that Thannheim possessed 

 an attraction for us strangers of which it would 

 be wrong to deprive us, so " the American " 

 was quickly brought on the scene. This man 

 was a villager who had emigrated, made a little 

 money, and returned to his native village; a 

 person of considerable shrewdness, but who 

 had lost the simple courtesy of the mountaineer, 

 and caught the free-and-easy style of the Yan- 

 kee. The chief thing he seemed to have gained 

 by his stay in the States was an impression 

 that the whole art of conversation is to mix it 

 with as many oaths as possible. In fact he 

 adopted the principle of the well-known whist 

 maxim, and when in doubt of a word, invari- 

 ably substituted the most horrible oath his 

 vocabulary possessed. So the last state of the 

 dinner was even worse than the first, for neither 

 of these excellent villagers dispensed with a 

 pipe, and we had finally to bid them good- 

 night in rather a peremptory manner. They 

 subsequently, however, never forgot to appear 

 at meal-times, and it was necessary to cut their 

 interviews shorter than they probably con- 

 sidered courteous. 



The Post Inn of the village of Thannheim 



