The sojourner in Leipsic, while strolling through its quaint old streets and spacious market-place, will be attracted, among other peculiarities of national costume, by one which, while startling and showy, is still attractive and picturesque. The wearer is most probably a young man of small figure and of pallid appearance. He is dressed in a short jacket, which is black, and is enriched with black velvet. The nether garments are also black. His head is covered with a black brimless hat, and a small semicircular apron of dark cloth is tied, not before, but behind. This is one of the Berg-leute, mountain people; he comes from the Freiberg silver district, and is attired in the full dress of a miner.
Doubtless, these somewhat theatrically attired mountaineers hold a superior position to the diggers and blasters of the earth. The dress is, perhaps, more properly that worn in the mountains, than that of the miners themselves. Still, even their habiliments, as I afterwards learned, are but a working-day copy of this more costly model; and the semicircular apron tied on behind, is more especially an indispensable portion of the working dress of the labouring miner.
From Leipsic, the mines are distant about seventy English miles. We—who are a happy party of foot-wanderers bound for Vienna—spend three careless days upon the road. Look at this glorious old castle of Altenburg, gravely nodding from its towering rock upon the quaint town below. It is the first station we come to, and is the capital of the ancient dukedom of Saxon-Altenburg. Look at the people about us! Does it not strike you as original, that what is here called modest attire, would elsewhere be condemned as immoral and ridiculous? Each of the males, indeed, presents an old German portrait, with short plaited and wadded jacket, trunk breeches, and low hat, with a rolled brim. But the women! With petticoats no deeper than a Highlandman’s kilt, and their legs thus
guiltless of shoes or stockings, the bust and neck are hideously covered by a wooden breastplate, which, springing from the waist, rises at an angle of forty-five degrees as high as the chin; and on the edge of it is fastened a handkerchief, tied tightly round the neck. A greater disfigurement of the female form could scarcely have been devised. Yet, to these good people, it is doubtless beauty and propriety itself; for it is old, and national.
Through pretty woods and cultivated lands; beside rugged, roadside dells, we trudge along. We halt in quiet villages, snug and neat even in their poverty; or wend our way, in the midst of sunshine, through endless vistas of fruit-laden woods, the public road being one rich orchard of red-dotted cherry-trees: purchasable for a mere fraction, but not to be feloniously abstracted. Through Altenburg, Zwickau, Oederon, and Chemnitz; up steep hill paths, and by the side of unpronounceable villages, until, on the morning of the fourth day, we straggle into Freiberg.
Freiberg is the walled capital of the Saxon ore mountains, the Erzgebirge; the centre of the Saxon mining administration. One of its most spacious buildings is the Mining Academy, which dates from 1767. Here are rich collections of the wonderful produce of these mountains; models of mining machines, of philosophical and chemical apparatus; class and lecture rooms, and books out of number. Here Werner, the father of geology, and Humboldt, the systematiser of physical geography, were pupils. The former has bequeathed an extensive museum of mineralogy to the Academy, which has been gratefully named after its founder, the Wernerian Museum.
Freiberg holds up its head very high. The Mining Academy stands one thousand two hundred and thirty-one feet above the sea, although this is by no means the greatest altitude in the long range of mountains, which form a huge boundary line between the kingdoms of Saxony and Bohemia. The general name for the whole district is the Erzgebirg-Kreis—the circle of ore mountains—and truly they form one vast store of silver, tin, lead, iron, coal, copper, and cobalt ores; besides a host of chemical compounds and other riches. The indefatigable Saxons have worked and burrowed in them for more than seven hundred years.
We proceed to the Royal Saxon Mining Office, and request permission to descend into the “bowels of the land.” This is accorded us without difficulty, and we receive a beautiful specimen of
German text, in the shape of a lithographed Fahrschein, or permission to descend into Abraham’s Shaft and Himmelfahrt, and to inspect all the works and appliances thereunto belonging. This Fahrschein especially informs us, that no person, unless of the Minerstand (fraternity of miners), can be permitted to descend into the Zechen or pits, who is not eighteen years old; nor can more than two persons be intrusted to the care of one guide. We cheerfully pay on demand the sum of ten silver groschens each (about one shilling), for the purpose—as we are informed in a note at the bottom of the Fahrschein—of meeting the exigencies of the Miners’ Pension and Relief Fund.
The mine we are about to inspect, which bears the general title of Himmelsfurst—Prince of Heaven—is situated near to the village of Brand. How fond these old miners were of Biblical designations! and what an earnest spirit of religion glowed within them! There is another mine in the vicinity, at Voightberg, called the Old Hope of God; but we must recollect that Freiberg was one of the strongholds of early Protestantism, and that the first and sternest of the reformers clustered about its mountains. They have a cold, desolate look; and we think of the gardens we have left at their bases, and of the forests of fir-trees which wave upon some of the loftier pinnacles of these same Erzgebirge. Nor are the few men we meet of more promising appearance: not dwarfed nor stunted, but naturally diminutive, with sallow skins and oppressed demeanour. How different are the firm, lithe, sun-tanned mountaineers, who breathe the free air on the summits of their hills!