My head is getting slow in retaining things

I read long ago. So I went looking for a specific quote on Google and only got an approximation that was more vague than mine. It had to do with Mark Twain in his travel report titled 'A Tramp Abroad'.

I used to have it in my files on my old pc, Lazarus, but he finally gave up the ghost for good one fine day. (For those who don't know, I named it that because for the last three years of its 'life', it would die, then inexplicably come back to life a few days later, just when I was going to give him up entirely. And no, I certainly had nothing to do with it.)

It can be downloaded for free on the Gutenberg Project, and it is very funny.

At any rate, it was about his 'hiking' through Germany, Switzerand and Italy... and the joke was they never hiked, and always rode somehow.

Now I enjoy opera, most sorts at any rate. But have NEVER been able to STAND Wagner. I don't understand the music, it was and still remains cacophony to me. And while in Nürnberg, Twain attended a Wagner opera. That report went on for a few pages, and he exaggerated so wildly, yet was so on target, it delighted me. I can't remember the entire thing, but there was a delicious bit about a soprano and a tenor duelling it out vocally, and to paraphrase, 'Just when I thought we were about to have a respite, the entire chorus stormed onto the stage, and I suffered the agony I went through the night the orphanage burned down.'

Am sure it isn't word-perfect exact, but close, am sure.

He must have liked something about them... maybe they were just an easy target for him, but there were several other reports he did... all of them hilarious.

Tja. I found a nice report here from 1891. It made me smile.

Otherwise the news is sort of non-existant today, and the Sunday things I usually watch only have repeats.