November xxx.
His Excellency from hence designed the straight road, by the way of Framstein, Friburg (where are silver mines, and the tombs of the electors of Saxony) Waltheim, Coldick, Walcowitz, and so to Leipsick. In the mean time he permitted me to quit his retinue, in order to see Dresden. With this intent I take a post waggon from Deplitz to Peterswaldt, the distance of two miles, in which I pass the hill of Kaiasberg. From Peterswaldt I take a new post, and soon after I have left the town pass the boundary of Bohemia and Saxony; and at two miles end changing post at a little village not far from Pirn, by this third post I come under its walls, and presently am upon the banks of the Elbe, along which I ride about half an hour, and then quitting the river arrive about five a clock at Dresden, being in all six miles from Deplitz. It being now dark, I repair immediately to my lodgings at the house of one Leonard Serert, betwixt the two market places, a civil host, who spoke both French and Italian. The way from Peterswaldt to Dresden is very agreable, being interspersed with woods of fir. The villages are better built, and more populous, than those of Bohemia; where indeed neither towns nor villages are thin, but the people very few, and those dejected with a sense of poverty and slavery, occasioned partly by the tyranny of the church, and partly by the constitution of the government, which makes the peasants slaves to their Lords, as in Moravia.