ABSTRACT
Michael Angelo Titmarsh's objections to German Tafelmusik apply doubly to modern restaurants that plague their customers with music blared through loudspeakers—a plague the Victorians were happily spared. The composite landscape, embodying features of Saxony and the Rhineland as Anne Thackeray Ritchie had experienced them, makes a deceptively idyllic opening for a tale of dark deeds and cruel revenges set in the Germany of the Thirty Years War. It is mysteriously titled 'The —'s Wife' and tells how Max von Waldberg avenges the death of his brother by tricking the femme fatale responsible for that death into marrying 'the greatest swordsman in Europe'—who turns out to be the public executioner. The IrishSketch Book goes on to reflect on the different kinds of conversation in which European fellow-travellers engage strangers they meet on a journey.
