Beyond Rheinfelden the road, which so far has skirted the Rhine rather closely, leaves it again for a few miles until it touches it for the last time at the small town of Stein.
From Stein we saw an imposing-looking church on the other side of the river at Sekingen. It has a great western front with two bulbous-topped steeples, and is of very considerable length. The division between choir and nave is marked by a delicate turret, and the whole church, as far as one can judge by a distant view, looks as though it would well repay a visit. There are six bays in the nave, five and an apse in the choir. The former has very simple windows, whilst in the latter they are rather elaborate. There is no aisle to the choir and no transept.
The rain continued incessantly until we reached the long straggling village of Frick, a quaint and antique-looking place, where our voiturier stopped for an hour to bait his horses, who, however, at Rheinfelden had enjoyed a treat in the shape of a loaf of very brown bread, a kind of food second only, in the estimation of foreign steeds, to the precious morceaux of lump sugar with which Swiss voituriers are so fond of encouraging and petting them.
We were nothing loth to stretch our legs; and finding that the church was worthless—one of those unhappy bulbous-spired and bulbous-roofed erections so common in some parts of the Continent, and the roof of even the eastern apse of which was twisted into a most ingenious and ugly compound curve—we took up our quarters in the respectable hostelry and “Bierbrauerei” of the Angel, and devoted ourselves to the consumption of coffee and beer of no bad quality. Our host wished sadly to see us located under his roof for the night, but we were resolute in our determination to reach Baden that night, and so persisted in going, though to our subsequent regret.
It was soon dark, and the new moon, which shone cheerfully upon us, gave us just a glimpse occasionally of the scenery, which about Brugg, where we crossed the Aar, and again at Königsfelden, seemed to be remarkably good.
At last, at about half-past ten o’clock, we reached what we fondly hoped was to be our resting-place. But Baden chose not to take us in, and to our horror, as we drove up to the chief and only available inn, we were met with the dismal announcement from the mouth of the civil landlord, that all the rooms were full.
However, we dismounted, and found that there was no other inn in Baden proper, but that at the Baths there were several; at them our landlord assured us that he knew we should find no room, and so we thought it useless to return and try. Our only course seemed to be to feed our horses again and then go on to Zurich; and as Swiss drivers and Swiss horses never seem to tire of trotting on slowly and drowsily along the road, there was no difficulty in at once coming to an arrangement with our coachman.
Accordingly, at midnight we started again, hoping at some early hour in the morning to reach Zurich. It was sufficiently provoking to be toiling on slowly and sleepily for nearly four hours almost alongside of a railroad which would have taken us early the next morning in three-quarters of an hour; but there was no help for it, and so we did the best we could, by sleeping whenever we were able, to pass the weary hours away.