I was struck with the cleanliness of everything. The tables, chairs and floors, looked worn away with scrubbing. Breakfast was brought in immediately—eggs, rolls, and coffee, the latter in a glass bottle like a chemist’s retort, corked up tightly, and wrapped in a snowy napkin. It was an excellent breakfast, served with cleanliness and good humour, and cost about fourteen cents each. Even from this single meal, it seemed to me that I had entered a country of simple manners and kind feelings. The conductor gravely kissed the cheek of the girl who had waited on us, my companions lit their pipes afresh, and the postillion, in cocked hat and feather, blew a stave of a waltz on his horn, and fell into a steady trot, which he kept up with phlegmatic perseverance to the end of his post.
As we get away from the sea, the land grows richer, and the farm-houses more frequent. We are in the duchy of Carniola, forty or fifty miles from Trieste. How very unlike Italy and France, and how very like New England it is! There are no ruined castles, nor old cathedrals. Every village has its small white church, with a tapering spire, large manufactories cluster on the water-courses, the small rivers are rapid and deep, the horses large and strong, the barns immense, the crops heavy, the people grave and hard at work, and not a pauper by the post together. We are very far north, too, and the climate is like New England. The wind, though it is midsummer, is bracing, and there is no travelling as in Italy, with one’s hat off and breast open, dissolving at midnight in the luxury of the soft air. The houses, too, are ugly and comfortable, staring with paint and pierced in all directions with windows. The children are white-headed and serious. The hills are half-covered with woods, and clusters of elms are left here and there through the meadows, as if their owners could afford to let them grow for a shade to the mowers. I was perpetually exclaiming, “how like America!”
We dined at Laybach. My companions had found out by my passport that I was an American, and their curiosity was most amusing. The report of the arrival of the two frigates had reached the capital of Illyria, and with the assistance of the information of my friends, I found myself an object of universal attention. The crowd around the door of the hotel looked into the windows while we were eating, and followed me round the house as if I had been a savage. One of the passengers told me they connected the arrival of the ships with some political object, and thought I might be the envoy. The landlord asked me if we had potatoes in our country.
I took a walk through the city after dinner with my mincing friend the count. The low, two-story wooden houses, the sidewalks enclosed with trees, the matter-of-fact looking people, the shut windows, and neat white churches remind me again strongly of America. It was like the more retired streets of Portland or Portsmouth. The Illyrian language spoken here, seemed to me the most inarticulate succession of sounds I had ever heard. In crossing the bridge in the centre of the town, we met a party of German students travelling on foot with their knapsacks. My friend spoke to them to gratify my curiosity. I wished to know where they were going. They all spoke French and Italian, and seemed in high heart, bold, cheerful, and intelligent. They were bound for Egypt, determined to seek their fortunes in the service of the present reforming and liberal pacha. Their enthusiasm, when they were told I was an American, quite thrilled me. They closed about me and looked into my eyes, as if they expected to read the spirit of freedom in them. I was taken by the arms at last, and almost forced into a beer-shop. The large tankards were filled, each touched mine and the others, and “America” was drank with a grave earnestness of manner that moved my heart within me. They shook me by the hand on parting, and gave me a blessing in German, which as the old count translated it, was the first word I have learned of their language. We had met constantly parties of them on the road. They all dress alike, in long travelling frocks of brown stuff, and small green caps with straight visors; but, coarsely as they are clothed, and humbly as they seem to be faring, their faces bear always a mark that can never be mistaken. They look like scholars.
The roads, by the way, are crowded with pedestrians. It seems to be the favourite mode of travelling in this country. We have scarce met a carriage, and I have seen, I am sure, in one day, two hundred passengers on foot. Among them is a class of people peculiar to Germany. I was astonished occasionally at being asked for charity by stout, well-dressed young men, to all appearance as respectable as any travellers on the road. Expressing my surprise, my companion informed me that they were apprentices, and that the custom or law of the country compelled them, after completing their indentures, to travel in some distant province, and depend upon charity and their own exertions for two or three years before becoming masters at their trade. It is a singular custom, and I should think, a useful lesson in hardship and self-reliance. They held out their hats with a confident independence of look that quite satisfied me they felt no degradation in it.
We soon entered the province of Styria, and brighter rivers, greener woods, richer and more graceful uplands and meadows, do not exist in the world. I had thought the scenery of Stockbridge, in my own State, unequalled till now. I could believe myself there, were not the women alone working in the fields, and the roads lined for miles together with military wagons and cavalry upon march. The conscript law of Austria compels every peasant to serve fourteen years! and the labours of agriculture fall, of course, almost exclusively upon females. Soldiers swarm like locusts through the country, but they seem as inoffensive and as much at home as the cattle in the farm-yards. It is a curious contrast, to my eye, to see parks of artillery glistening in the midst of a wheat-field, and soldiers sitting about under the low thatches of these peaceful-looking cottages. I do not think, among the thousands that I have passed in three days’ travel, I have seen a gesture or heard a syllable. If sitting, they smoke and sit still, and if travelling, they economise motion to a degree that is wearisome to the eye.
Words are limited, and the description of scenery becomes tiresome. It is a fault that the sense of beauty, freshening constantly on the traveller, compels him who makes a note of impressions to mark every other line with the same ever-recurring exclamations of pleasure. I saw a hundred miles of unrivalled scenery in Styria, and how can I describe it? I were keeping silence on a world of enjoyment to pass it over. We come to a charming descent into a valley. The town beneath, the river, the embracing mountains, the swell to the ear of its bells ringing some holiday, affect my imagination powerfully. I take out my tablets. What shall I say? How convey to your minds who have not seen it, the charm of a scene I can only describe as I have described a thousand others?