A July Holiday in Saxony, Bohemia, and Silesia

by Walter White

He had heard that the English were fond of music, and thought there must be plenty of good singing among the working-people; and it surprised him not a little to be told that the Islanders' love for sweet sounds went far—far beyond their power of producing them. "Ah!" interrupted Röschen, "my brother writes that there is no music in his English workmates' singing."

The engraver thought it a great privation, and could not well comprehend how the evenings could pass agreeably without a little music at home. "And when you are away from home," he went on, "it seems still better. Like all the young men here, I have been a soldier, have marched to Bucharest, to Pesth, to Trent, and Innsbruck, and what should we do on those long marches, and in dull quarters, if we could not sing?"

Concerning the military service, he thought it a hardship to be obliged to serve, whether or no, but compensated by advantages. It added to a young man's knowledge and experience to march to distant lands, to see strange scenes, and strange people. You could always tell the difference between one who had travelled, even as a soldier, and a stay-at-home; the one had something to talk about, the other had nothing. Then, the pleasure of coming home again—a pleasure so sweet, that the thought of marching forth once more could hardly embitter it. For his part, he had been at home eighteen months, glad to resume his craft, and for the present saw no prospect of a call to arms. But there remained yet one year of his term unexpired, and he was liable at any moment to get an order requiring him to leave everything, and march. "Who can tell," he said, "how hard it is to go away so suddenly, to leave the little home, and all friends? Right glad shall I be when the year is over."

Röschen looked as if she would be glad too, and, to make me aware of all the young man's cleverness, she took down the frame of trees from the wall and put it in my hands. I then saw that what looked like a coloured drawing was a picture made of insects. The engraver had a taste for natural history, and with a collection of beetles of all sizes, black, brown, green, gold, and sapphire, had constructed the group of trees which, when looked at from the middle of the room, showed as a highly-finished drawing. You saw here and there a withered branch shooting from the foliage—it was nothing but the horns and legs ingeniously placed, and those deep hollows in the trunks, places where owls may haunt, are produced by an artful arrangement of wings.

Then Röschen would have him fetch down his trays of moths and portfolio of drawings. The moths had all been collected in walks about the neighbourhood, and were carefully preserved and labelled. The drawings showed the hand of an artist. The engraver had begun to learn to draw in school at the age of eleven, and had practised ever since, for without good drawing one could not engrave glass. He spoke of Röschen's youngest sister as a real genius, who would one day outstrip all the engravers in Ulrichsthal.

Bohemia was the first to rival, and soon to excel, Venice in the art of glass-making. In her vast forests she found exhaustless stores of fuel and potash, and quartz and lime in her rocks, and produced a white glass which won universal admiration until about the beginning of last century, when English manufacturers discovered the process for making flint-glass with oxyde of lead as an ingredient. There was nothing superior to this glass, so it has been said, but the diamond, and the Bohemians, finding their craft in danger, introduced coloured glass, frosted glass, and pleasing styles of ornament. This practice they have since kept up. Their works are mostly situate in the great forests on the Bavarian frontier, where fuel and labour are alike cheap: the managers are well taught, and have a good knowledge of chemistry, and by striving always after something new, reproducing at times long-forgotten Venice patterns, they have achieved a reputation due more to the taste and elegance displayed in the forms of their manufactures than to their quality. From the rude forest villages the articles are sent all across the kingdom to the northern districts, where, as we have seen, the finishing touches that are to fit them for stately halls and drawing-rooms, are applied by the hands of humble cottagers.

We were about to leave, when the engraver asked if I would not like to try my hand at the lathe, and, without waiting for an answer, he brought out a small, plain beaker of thick glass, and begged me to cut a forget-me-not upon it as a memorial of my visit. The process looked so easy, that I thought there would be no great risk in an attempt, so I sat down, spread out my elbows to rest upon the cushions, put my foot to the treadle, and the glass to the wheel. Whiz—skirr-r-r-r, and there was a fine white blur which, by a stretch of fancy, might have been taken for a cloud. Karl—as Röschen called him—took the beaker, and, leaning across me as I sat, speedily converted the blur into a rose, and bade me try again. I presented the opposite side, and this time with better effect, for the result was a very passable forget-me-not. I have seen many a worse on A Trifle from Margate.

Röschen then said something about meeting in the evening, and we made haste home, for it was dinner-time. Immediately on arrival she proceeded to roll out a small piece of dry brown dough into a thin sheet, which she cut into strips, and these strips, laid three or four together, and shredded down very thin, produced an imitation of vermicelli, which was thrown into the soup.

Now all was ready, and a proud woman was the mother as the soup was followed by two kinds of meat, stewed and roast—salad, potatoes, and a cool, slightly acid preserve, made from forest berries. And for drink there was pale beer from the Wirthshaus. She did not fail to remind me of my promise to "eat a plenty."

Nor, after we had sipped our coffee, did Röschen fail to remind me of my morning's surrender, and pointing to the high hill-top, about two miles off, she said, "I mean to take you up there." So, as my docility remained unimpaired, we braved the hot sun, and had a very pretty walk over broken ground, and down into a bosky valley, watered by a noisy brook, before we reached the hill-foot. Then flowery meads, and presently the shadow of a forest, where we regaled ourselves with a second dessert of juicy bilberries and wild strawberries, both growing in profusion. From a little clearing, not far from the top, we saw heaving darkly against the blue, the hills of the Saxon Switzerland. The last bit was steep and pathless; but at length we came out upon a little hollow platform, the summit of a precipice, from which, the trees diverging and sinking on either hand, there was a grand view over the vale we had left, and far away, over field and hamlet, meadow and coppice, to a wavy line of hills, gray, purple, green, and brown, blended on the horizon. We sat for an hour; and after scanning the principal features Röschen pointed out the details, naming every house and field within a great sweep. Each man's little property lay distinctly mapped out, and we could see the neighbours and her sisters working in the sunshine.