An examination into the character and behaviour of the German student—The German Mensur—Uses and abuses of use—Views of an impressionist—The humour of the thing—Recipe for making —The Jungfrau: her taste in laces—The Kneipe—How to rub a Salamander—Advice to the stranger—A story that might have ended sadly—Of two men and two wives—Together with a bachelor.  
On our way home we included a German University town, being wishful to obtain an insight into the ways of student life, a curiosity that the courtesy of German friends enabled us to gratify.
 
The English boy plays till he is fifteen, and works thence till twenty.  In Germany it is the child that works; the young man that plays.  The German boy goes to school at seven o’clock in the summer, at eight in the winter, and at school he studies.  The result is that at sixteen he has a thorough knowledge of the classics and mathematics, knows as much history as any man compelled to belong to a political party is wise in knowing, together with a thorough grounding in modern languages.  Therefore his eight College Semesters, extending over four years, are, except for the young man aiming at a professorship, unnecessarily ample.  He is not a sportsman, which is a pity, for he should make good one.  He plays football a little, bicycles still less; plays French in cafés more.  But generally speaking he, or the majority of him, lays out his time bummeling, beer drinking, and fighting.  If he be the son of a wealthy father he joins a Korps—to belong to a crack Korps costs about four hundred pounds a year.  If he be a middle-class young man, he himself in a Burschenschaft, or a Landsmannschaft, which is a little cheaper.  These companies are again broken up into smaller circles, in which attempt is made to keep to nationality.  There are the Swabians, from Swabia; the Frankonians, descendants of the Franks; the Thuringians, and so .  In practice, of course, this results as all such attempts do result—I believe half our Gordon Highlanders are Cockneys—but the object is obtained of dividing each University into some dozen or so separate companies of students, each one with its cap and colours, and, quite as important, its own particular beer hall, into which no other student wearing his colours may come.
 
The chief work of these student companies is to fight among themselves, or with some rival Korps or Schaft, the German Mensur.
 
The Mensur has been described so often and so that I do not intend to bore my readers with any account of it.  I merely come forward as an impressionist, and I write purposely the impression of my first Mensur, because I believe that first impressions are more true and useful than opinions blunted by , or shaped by influence.
 
A Frenchman or a Spaniard will seek to persuade you that the bull-ring is an institution got up chiefly for the benefit of the bull.  The horse which you imagined to be screaming with pain was only laughing at the comical appearance presented by its own inside.  Your French or Spanish friend contrasts its glorious and exciting death in the ring with the cold-blooded of the knacker’s yard.  If you do not keep a tight hold of your head, you come away with the desire to start an for the of the bull-ring in England as an aid to .  No doubt Torquemada was convinced of the humanity of the Inquisition.  To a gentleman, suffering, perhaps, from or , an hour or so on the rack was really a physical benefit.  He would rise feeling more free in his joints—more , as one might say, than he had felt for years.  English huntsmen regard the fox as an animal to be envied.  A day’s excellent sport is provided for him free of charge, during which he is the centre of attraction.
 
Use blinds one to everything one does not wish to see.  Every third German gentleman you meet in the street still bears, and will bear to his grave, marks of the twenty to a hundred he has fought in his student days.  The German children play at the Mensur in the nursery, rehearse it in the gymnasium.  The Germans have come to persuade themselves there is no brutality in it—nothing offensive, nothing degrading.  Their argument is that it schools the German youth to coolness and courage.  If this could be proved, the argument, particularly in a country where every man is a soldier, would be one-sided.  But is the of the prize-fighter the virtue of the soldier?  One doubts it.  Nerve and dash are surely of more service in the field than a of unreasoning as to what is happening to one.  As a matter of fact, the German student would have to be of much more courage not to fight.  He fights not to please himself, but to satisfy a public opinion that is two hundred years behind the times.
 
All the Mensur does is to brutalise him.  There may be skill displayed—I am told there is,—but it is not apparent.  The fighting is like nothing so much as a broadsword combat at a Richardson’s show; the display as a whole a successful attempt to combine the ludicrous with the unpleasant.  In aristocratic Bonn, where style is considered, and in Heidelberg, where visitors from other nations are more common, the affair is perhaps more formal.  I am told that there the contests take place in handsome rooms; that grey-haired doctors wait upon the wounded, and liveried servants upon the hungry, and that the affair is conducted throughout with a certain amount of picturesque ceremony.  In the more German Universities, where strangers are rare and not much encouraged, the simple essentials are the only things kept in view, and these are not of an nature.
 
Indeed, so distinctly uninviting are they, that I strongly advise the sensitive reader to avoid even this description of them.  The subject cannot be made pretty, and I do not intend to try.
 
The room is bare and ; its walls splashed with mixed stains of beer, blood, and candle-grease; its ceiling, smoky; its floor, sawdust covered.  A crowd of students, laughing, smoking, talking, some sitting on the floor, others perched upon chairs and benches form the framework.
 
In the centre, facing one another, stand the combatants, resembling Japanese , as made familiar to us by the Japanese tea-tray.  and , with their goggle-covered eyes, their necks tied up in comforters, their bodies in what looks like dirty bed quilts, their padded arms stretched straight above their heads, they might be a pair of ungainly clockwork figures.  The seconds, also more or less padded—their heads and faces protected by huge leather-peaked caps,—drag them out into their proper position.  One almost listens to hear the sound of the castors.  The umpire takes his place, the word is given, and immediately there follow five rapid clashes of the long straight swords.  There is no interest in watching the fight: there is no movement, no skill, no grace (I am speaking of my own impressions.)  The strongest man wins; the man who, with his heavily-padded arm, always in an position, can hold his huge clumsy sword longest without growing too weak to be able either to guard or to strike.
 
The whole interest is centred in watching the wounds.  They come always in one of two places—on the top of the head or the left side of the face.  Sometimes a portion of hairy scalp or section of cheek flies up into the air, to be carefully preserved in an envelope by its proud possessor, or, speaking, its proud former possessor, and shown round on evenings; and from every wound, of course, flows a stream of blood.  It splashes doctors, seconds, and spectators; it sprinkles ceiling and walls; it the fighters, and makes pools for itself in the sawdust.  At the end of each round the doctors rush up, and with hands already dripping with blood press together the wounds, them with little balls of wet cotton wool, which an attendant carries ready on a plate.  Naturally, the moment the men stand up again and commence work, the blood out again, half blinding them, and the ground beneath them slippery.  Now and then you see a man’s teeth laid bare almost to the ear, so that for the rest of the he appears to be grinning at one half of the spectators, his other side, remaining serious; and sometimes a man’s nose gets , which gives to him as he fights a singularly air.
 
As the object of each student is to go away from the University bearing as many scars as possible, I doubt if any particular pains are taken to guard, even to the small extent such method of fighting can allow.  The real victor is he who comes out with the greatest number of wounds; he who then, stitched and patched almost to unrecognition as a human being, can for the next month, the envy of the German youth, the of the German .  He who obtains only a few unimportant wounds retires sulky and disappointed.
 
But the actual fighting is only the beginning of the fun.  The second act of the spectacle takes place in the -room.  The doctors are generally mere medical students—young fellows who, having taken their degree, are anxious for practice.  Truth compels me to say that those with whom I came in contact were coarse-looking men who seemed rather to their work.  Perhaps they are not to be blamed for this.  It is part of the system that as much further punishment as possible must be by the doctor, and the ideal medical man might hardly care for such job.  How the student bears the dressing of his wounds is as important as how he receives them.  Every operation has to be performed as as may be, and his companions carefully watch him during the process to see that he goes through it with an appearance of peace and .  A clean-cut wound that wide is most desired by all parties.  On purpose it is sewn up clumsily, with the hope that by this means the scar will last a lifetime.  Such a wound, mauled and with during the week afterwards, can generally be reckoned on to secure its fortunate possessor a wife with a dowry of five figures at the least.
 
These are the general bi-weekly Mensurs, of which the average student fights some dozen a year.  There are others to which visitors are not admitted.  When a student is considered to have disgraced himself by some slight involuntary movement of the head or body while fighting, then he can only his position by up to the best swordsman in his Korps.  He demands and is accorded, not a contest, but a punishment.  His opponent then proceeds to as many and as wounds as can be taken.  The object of the victim is to show his comrades that he can stand still while his head is half sliced from his .
 
Whether anything can properly be said in favour of the German Mensur I am doubtful; but if so it concerns only the two combatants.  Upon the spectators it can and does, I am convinced, exercise nothing but evil.  I know myself sufficiently well to be sure I am not of an unusually bloodthirsty .  The effect it had upon me can only be the usual effect.  At first, before the actual work commenced, my sensation was curiosity with anxiety as to how the sight would trouble me, though some slight acquaintance with dissecting-rooms and operating tables left me less doubt on that point than I might otherwise have felt.  As the blood began to flow, and nerves and muscles to be laid bare, I experienced a of disgust and pity.  But with the second duel, I must confess, my finer feelings began to disappear; and by the time the third was well upon its way, and the room heavy with the curious hot odour of blood, I began, as the American expression is, to see things red.
 
I wanted more.  I looked from face to face surrounding me, and in most of them I found reflected my own sensations.  If it be a good thing to excite this blood thirst in the modern man, then the Mensur is a useful institution.  But is it a good thing?  We about our and humanity, but those of us who do not carry to the length of self-deception know that our shirts there the , with all his savage instincts untouched.  Occasionally he may be wanted, but we never need fear his dying out.  On the other hand, it seems unwise to over-nourish him.
 
In favour of the duel, seriously considered, there are many points to be urged.  But the Mensur serves no good purpose whatever.  It is childishness, and the fact of its being a cruel and game makes it none the less childish.  Wounds have no intrinsic value of their own; it is the cause that them, not their size.  William Tell is rightly one of the heroes of the world; but what should we think of the members of a club of fathers, formed with the object of meeting twice a week to shoot apples from their sons’ heads with cross-bows?  These young German gentlemen could obtain all the results of which they are so proud by teasing a wild cat!  To join a society for the mere purpose of getting yourself about reduces a man to the intellectual level of a dancing Dervish.  Travellers tell us of savages in Central Africa who express their feelings on occasions by jumping about and themselves.  But there is no need for Europe to imitate them.  The Mensur is, in fact, the reductio ad absurdum of the duel; and if the Germans themselves cannot see that it is funny, one can only regret their lack of humour.
 
But though one may be unable to agree with the public opinion that supports and commands the Mensur, it at least is possible to understand.  The University code that, if it does not encourage it, at least drunkenness, is more difficult to treat argumentatively.  All German students do not get drunk; in fact, the majority are sober, if not .  But the minority, whose claim to be representative is freely admitted, are only saved from perpetual by ability, acquired at some cost, to half the day and all the night, while retaining to some extent their five senses.  It does not affect all alike, but it is common in any University town to see a young man not yet twenty with the figure of a Falstaff and the of a Rubens Bacchus.  That the German maiden can be fascinated with a face, cut and till it suggests having been made out of odd materials that never could have fitted, is a proved fact.  But surely there can be no attraction about a blotched and bloated skin and a &............