We said how strange it was that, in the face of things like these, there should be a popular notion that the Germans hadn't any sense of humour.

And we asked the Professor why he didn't translate the song into English, so that the common people could understand it, and hear what a real comic song was like.
Then Herr Slossenn Boschen got up, and went on awful.

He swore at us in German (which I should judge to be a singularly effective language for that purpose), and he danced, and shook his fists, and called us all the English he knew.

He said he had never been so insulted in all his life.
It appeared that the song was not a comic song at all.

It was about a young girl who lived in the Hartz Mountains, and who had given up her life to save her lover's soul; and he died, and met her spirit in the air; and then, in the last verse, he jilted her spirit, and went on with another spirit--I'm not quite sure of the details, but it was something very sad, I know.