Hayda, though a small town, is a place of much importance in the glass trade. You hear the noise of wheels in every house. "None but glass-workers here," said the landlord of the inn where we dined. The repast over, I said good-bye to Röschen, vexed with myself for having occasioned her so long a walk, and taking the road which I had left at Markersdorf, stepped out for the Riesengebirge—distant a three days' tramp. The country between teems with manufactures and population—a cheerful country, hill and dale, grain, flax, and fruit-trees, and the people for the most part good-looking. Their faces are round, but not flat, and seemed to me to combine some of the best points of the German and Czech.
You see dye-works and hear looms at Zwickau—not the Saxon town we explored a fortnight ago, but a dull place, with a great dull square; the wooden houses dingy, the brick houses rough and ragged. Beyond, we pass strange-looking rocks and short ranges of cliffs, the castle and grounds owned by Count Clam Gallas, and so to Gabel, a town which bears a fork in its coat-of-arms; and is burdened with recollections of disasters from fire and sword. It has of course a great square, in the centre of which stands a tall column, surmounted by a figure of Christ looking towards the domed church. Its aspect is cheerful, notwithstanding that the old wooden houses with projecting gables are blackened by age.
Then the road becomes more hilly, and the distance appears mountainous. We pass a singular mass of boulders—huge compressed bladders turned to stone; and from time to time other strangely formed rocks, betokening extraordinary geological phenomena, as if to prepare us for what we shall see a few days hence at Adersbach.
By-and-by a deep glen, dark with firs above, green with birches below, into which you descend by long zigzags. Here among the trees sat a cuckoo, piping his name loud enough for all that passed to hear. It was the second time I had heard the gladsome note in Bohemia: the first was on the White Hill, while walking into Prague. Broad views, bounded always by hills, open as you emerge from the last slope, and there in a hollow lies the little village of Weisskirchen, where I tarried for the night. The innkeeper calls his house the Railway Inn, although there is no railway within half a day's walk, and in matter of diet all he could offer was smoked sausage—which is my abomination—and bread and butter.
On the way to Reichenberg next morning I saw a small, tasteful iron crucifix, with a lamp, set up on a stone pedestal by the wayside, at the cost, so runs the inscription, of Gottfried Hermann, Bauer in Rosenthal; and underneath the devout peasant adds a prayer for the solace of wayfarers:
An dem Abend wie am Morgen,
Unter Arbeit, unter Sorgen,
In der Freude, in dem Schmerz,