Just For Fun: Mark Twain’s ‘At the Shrine of St. Wagner’

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Susan Brodie, Toi Toi Toi

By Susan Brodie: Toi Toi Toi!

Begin text here From a letter published in the Chicago Daily Tribune, December 6, 1891. Long, but worth it.

 

It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train–and it was the longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his own Mecca.”