The Austrian Scientific Congress.
From Opçina we went to Sessana, a village about half an hour's drive in the interior, which is very good for the nerves, and from there back to Adelsberg, and thence to Laibach. There was a scientific Congress (like our British Association) at the Redouten Sala, and lectures on the Pfalbauten, tumuli, etc., a public dinner, a country excursion, and then a concert and supper, which exhausted me considerably, and these things went on for two or three days.
We visited the Pfalbauten, the excavated villages built upon piles in a peat country, and all the treasures excavated therefrom. Richard was received with great honour, surrounded by all the Austrian scientists. The Pfalbauten, or Pine villages, yielded excavations, which illustrated the whole age of Horn that preceded the age of Stone, and weapons made of Uchatius metal, which is wrongly called bronze-steel. It is compressed bronze and easily cuts metal. This settles the old dispute of how the Egyptians did such work with copper and bronze.
Richard then took me on to Graz, where we saw a good deal of Brugsch Bey. Then we went to Baden, near Vienna, where I had twenty-one days' bathing and drinking, which we varied with excursions to Vienna, sometimes to breakfast with Colonel Everard Primrose, to see people, and to hunt up swords in the Museum for Richard's "Sword" book. We went to Professor Benedict, nerve specialist, where Richard had his back electrified for lumbago. Mr. Egerton and Everard Primrose accompanied us to a place we were very fond of making an excursion to, Vöslau, and then back to Baden with us.
On the 31st of May I find in Richard's journal, "Poor Tommy Short dead, ninety years old;" he was his master at Oxford. After Richard's death I found one of the Rev. Thomas Short's cards kept amongst his treasures.
One day we had a delightful journey over the Semmering to Fröhnleiten. The Badhaus was on a terrace, with the running river under it in front, a plain and grand mountains all around. The night air was perfectly delightful, with a beautiful starlight. We had gone there to see the family of Mr. Brock, our dear old Vice-Consul. We then went to Römerbad. The Pension Sophien Schloss was beautifully situated, and we were well lodged. The baths there are like a gentle electric battery for nerves—the water turns a magnet a hundred and thirty-five degrees; the woods are lovely; the forestfull of squirrels come and play about you. We had delightful walks, and visits from several friends in the neighbourhood, Prince and Princess Wrede and others.
We had a most charming family of neighbours, who were some of our best friends in Trieste; they had a lovely property, an old castle called Weixelstein, near Steinbrück (Monsieur and Madame Gutmansthal de Benvenuti). He was a Trieste-Italian gentleman, and she was the daughter of a Russian, by an American wife, and is far away the most charming woman I know, and so clever. Their place is to be got at through a mountain gorge, and a river which you cross by ferry-boats. It is an old-fashioned-monastery-like-looking house in a gorge, with the river Save running through its park, and here we paid frequent visits. We had a pleasant excursion also to Mark Tüffer; a delightful moonlight drive back.
After we had been there about a fortnight, the avant courier of the Crown Princess of Germany, now Empress Frederick, came to engage rooms. Seeing that her Imperial Highness wished to be incog., that I was the only Englishwoman there, and had been presented to her, that I had got the only rooms in the place that were very nice, that I had the only bath, we thought it would be good taste to vanish, which we did next morning, and we went to our friends at Weixelstein. They received so perfectly, making us at home, like part of the family, and they let us do exactly what we liked without any effort at entertaining. Here Madame Gutmansthal, who is a first-rate artist amongst many other talents, began to paint Richard's picture, which was a great success, and which is now on view at the Grosvenor Gallery, in the little room to the left, with a pretty bronze medallion by Henry Page. Meantime he translated the Weixelstein ghost story from Old German to English, as he was very much taken with it. He writes—
