This etext was prepared by David Widger

The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Volume 2

CONTENTS:

SAUNTERINGS

MISAPPREHENSIONS CORRECTED

I should not like to ask an indulgent and idle public to saunter about with me under a misapprehension. It would be more agreeable to invite it to go nowhere than somewhere; for almost every one has been somewhere, and has written about it. The only compromise I can suggest is, that we shall go somewhere, and not learn anything about it. The instinct of the public against any thing like information in a volume of this kind is perfectly justifiable; and the reader will perhaps discover that this is illy adapted for a text-book in schools, or for the use of competitive candidates in the civil-service examinations.

Years ago, people used to saunter over the Atlantic, and spend weeks in filling journals with their monotonous emotions. That is all changed now, and there is a misapprehension that the Atlantic has been practically subdued; but no one ever gets beyond the rolling forties" without having this impression corrected.

I confess to have been deceived about this Atlantic, the roughest and windiest of oceans. If you look at it on the map, it does n't appear to be much, and, indeed, it is spoken of as a ferry. What with the eight and nine days' passages over it, and the laying of the cable, which annihilates distance, I had the impression that its tedious three thousand and odd miles had been, somehow, partly done away with; but they are all there. When one has sailed a thousand miles due east and finds that he is then nowhere in particular, but is still out, pitching about on an uneasy sea, under an inconstant sky, and that a thousand miles more will not make any perceptible change, he begins to have some conception of the unconquerable ocean. Columbus rises in my estimation.

I was feeling uncomfortable that nothing had been done for the memory of Christopher Columbus, when I heard some months ago that thirty- seven guns had been fired off for him in Boston. It is to be hoped that they were some satisfaction to him. They were discharged by countrymen of his, who are justly proud that he should have been able, after a search of only a few weeks, to find a land where the hand-organ had never been heard. The Italians, as a people, have not profited much by this discovery; not so much, indeed, as the Spaniards, who got a reputation by it which even now gilds their decay. That Columbus was born in Genoa entitles the Italians to celebrate the great achievement of his life; though why they should discharge exactly thirty-seven guns I do not know. Columbus did not discover the United States: that we partly found ourselves, and partly bought, and gouged the Mexicans out of. He did not even appear to know that there was a continent here. He discovered the West Indies, which he thought were the East; and ten guns would be enough for them. It is probable that he did open the way to the discovery of the New World. If he had waited, however, somebody else would have discovered it,—perhaps some Englishman; and then we might have been spared all the old French and Spanish wars. Columbus let the Spaniards into the New World; and their civilization has uniformly been a curse to it. If he had brought Italians, who neither at that time showed, nor since have shown, much inclination to come, we should have had the opera, and made it a paying institution by this time. Columbus was evidently a person who liked to sail about, and did n't care much for consequences.

Perhaps it is not an open question whether Columbus did a good thing in first coming over here, one that we ought to celebrate with salutes and dinners. The Indians never thanked him, for one party. The Africans had small ground to be gratified for the market he opened for them. Here are two continents that had no use for him. He led Spain into a dance of great expectations, which ended in her gorgeous ruin. He introduced tobacco into Europe, and laid the foundation for more tracts and nervous diseases than the Romans had in a thousand years. He introduced the potato into Ireland indirectly; and that caused such a rapid increase of population, that the great famine was the result, and an enormous emigration to New York—hence Tweed and the constituency of the Ring. Columbus is really responsible for New York. He is responsible for our whole tremendous experiment of democracy, open to all comers, the best three in five to win. We cannot yet tell how it is coming out, what with the foreigners and the communists and the women. On our great stage we are playing a piece of mingled tragedy and comedy, with what denouement we cannot yet say. If it comes out well, we ought to erect a monument to Christopher as high as the one at Washington expects to be; and we presume it is well to fire a salute occasionally to keep the ancient mariner in mind while we are trying our great experiment. And this reminds me that he ought to have had a naval salute.

There is something almost heroic in the idea of firing off guns for a man who has been stone-dead for about four centuries. It must have had a lively and festive sound in Boston, when the meaning of the salute was explained. No one could hear those great guns without a quicker beating of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who had made Boston possible. We are trying to "realize" to ourselves the importance of the 12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence. If any one wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him start out among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise money for powder to be exploded in his honor. And yet Columbus was a well-meaning man; and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he found the only one that was left.

Columbus made voyaging on the Atlantic popular, and is responsible for much of the delusion concerning it. Its great practical use in this fast age is to give one an idea of distance and of monotony.

I have listened in my time with more or less pleasure to very rollicking songs about the sea, the flashing brine, the spray and the tempest's roar, the wet sheet and the flowing sea, a life on the ocean wave, and all the rest of it. To paraphrase a land proverb, let me write the songs of the sea, and I care not who goes to sea and sings 'em. A square yard of solid ground is worth miles of the pitching, turbulent stuff. Its inability to stand still for one second is the plague of it. To lie on deck when the sun shines, and swing up and down, while the waves run hither and thither and toss their white caps, is all well enough to lie in your narrow berth and roll from side to side all night long; to walk uphill to your state-room door, and, when you get there, find you have got to the bottom of the hill, and opening the door is like lifting up a trap-door in the floor; to deliberately start for some object, and, before you know it, to be flung against it like a bag of sand; to attempt to sit down on your sofa, and find you are sitting up; to slip and slide and grasp at everything within reach, and to meet everybody leaning and walking on a slant, as if a heavy wind were blowing, and the laws of gravitation were reversed; to lie in your berth, and hear all the dishes on the cabin-table go sousing off against the wall in a general smash; to sit at table holding your soup-plate with one hand, and watching for a chance to put your spoon in when it comes high tide on your side of the dish; to vigilantly watch, the lurch of the heavy dishes while holding your glass and your plate and your knife and fork, and not to notice it when Brown, who sits next you, gets the whole swash of the gravy from the roast-beef dish on his light-colored pantaloons, and see the look of dismay that only Brown can assume on such an occasion; to see Mrs. Brown advance to the table, suddenly stop and hesitate, two waiters rush at her, with whom she struggles wildly, only to go down in a heap with them in the opposite corner; to see her partially recover, but only to shoot back again through her state-room door, and be seen no more;—all this is quite pleasant and refreshing if you are tired of land, but you get quite enough of it in a couple of weeks. You become, in time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes about wishing "he vas a veek older;" and the eccentric man, who looks at no one, and streaks about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose, and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the deck occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin door, washes himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his state-room, saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed,—as if the hard narrow, uneasy shelf of a berth was anything like a bed!—and you have heard at last pretty nearly all about the officers, and their twenty and thirty years of sea-life, and every ocean and port on the habitable globe where they have been. There comes a day when you are quite ready for land, and the scream of the "gull" is a welcome sound.

Even the sailors lose the vivacity of the first of the voyage. The first two or three days we had their quaint and half-doleful singing in chorus as they pulled at the ropes: now they are satisfied with short ha-ho's, and uncadenced grunts. It used to be that the leader sang, in ever-varying lines of nonsense, and the chorus struck in with fine effect, like this:

"I wish I was in Liverpool town.
Handy-pan, handy O!

O captain! where 'd you ship your crew
Handy-pan, handy O!

Oh! pull away, my bully crew,
Handy-pan, handy O!"

There are verses enough of this sort to reach across the Atlantic; and they are not the worst thing about it either, or the most tedious. One learns to respect this ocean, but not to love it; and he leaves it with mingled feelings about Columbus.

And now, having crossed it,—a fact that cannot be concealed,—let us not be under the misapprehension that we are set to any task other than that of sauntering where it pleases us.

PARIS AND LONDON

SURFACE CONTRASTS OF PARIS AND LONDON

I wonder if it is the Channel? Almost everything is laid to the Channel: it has no friends. The sailors call it the nastiest bit of water in the world. All travelers anathematize it. I have now crossed it three times in different places, by long routes and short ones, and have always found it as comfortable as any sailing anywhere, sailing being one of the most tedious and disagreeable inventions of a fallen race. But such is not the usual experience: most people would make great sacrifices to avoid the hour and three quarters in one of those loathsome little Channel boats,—they always call them loathsome, though I did n't see but they are as good as any boats. I have never found any boat that hasn't a detestable habit of bobbing round. The Channel is hated: and no one who has much to do with it is surprised at the projects for bridging it and for boring a hole under it; though I have scarcely ever met an Englishman who wants either done,—he does not desire any more facile communication with the French than now exists. The traditional hatred may not be so strong as it was, but it is hard to say on which side is the most ignorance and contempt of the other.

It must be the Channel: that is enough to produce a physical disagreement even between the two coasts; and there cannot be a greater contrast in the cultivated world than between the two lands lying so close to each other; and the contrast of their capitals is even more decided,—I was about to say rival capitals, but they have not enough in common to make them rivals. I have lately been over to London for a week, going by the Dieppe and New Haven route at night, and returning by another; and the contrasts I speak of were impressed upon me anew. Everything here in and about Paris was in the green and bloom of spring, and seemed to me very lovely; but my first glance at an English landscape made it all seem pale and flat. We went up from New Haven to London in the morning, and feasted our eyes all the way. The French foliage is thin, spindling, sparse; the grass is thin and light in color—in contrast. The English trees are massive, solid in substance and color; the grass is thick, and green as emerald; the turf is like the heaviest Wilton carpet. The whole effect is that of vegetable luxuriance and solidity, as it were a tropical luxuriance, condensed and hardened by northern influences. If my eyes remember well, the French landscapes are more like our own, in spring tone, at least; but the English are a revelation to us strangers of what green really is, and what grass and trees can be. I had been told that we did well to see England before going to the Continent, for it would seem small and only pretty afterwards. Well, leaving out Switzerland, I have seen nothing in that beauty which satisfies the eye and wins the heart to compare with England in spring. When we annex it to our sprawling country which lies out-doors in so many climates, it will make a charming little retreat for us in May and June, a sort of garden of delight, whence we shall draw our May butter and our June roses. It will only be necessary to put it under glass to make it pleasant the year round.

When we passed within the hanging smoke of London town, threading our way amid numberless railway tracks, sometimes over a road and sometimes under one, now burrowing into the ground, and now running along among the chimney-pots,—when we came into the pale light and the thickening industry of a London day, we could but at once contrast Paris. Unpleasant weather usually reduces places to an equality of disagreeableness. But Paris, with its wide streets, light, handsome houses, gay windows and smiling little parks and fountains, keeps up a tolerably pleasant aspect, let the weather do its worst. But London, with its low, dark, smutty brick houses and insignificant streets, settles down hopelessly into the dumps when the weather is bad. Even with the sun doing its best on the eternal cloud of smoke, it is dingy and gloomy enough, and so dirty, after spick-span, shining Paris. And there is a contrast in the matter of order and system; the lack of both in London is apparent. You detect it in public places, in crowds, in the streets. The "social evil" is bad enough in its demonstrations in Paris: it is twice as offensive in London. I have never seen a drunken woman in Paris: I saw many of them in the daytime in London. I saw men and women fight in the streets,—a man kick and pound a woman; and nobody interfered. There is a brutal streak in the Anglo-Saxon, I fear,—a downright animal coarseness, that does not exhibit itself the other side of the Channel. It is a proverb, that the London policemen are never at hand. The stout fellows with their clubs look as if they might do service; but what a contrast they are to the Paris sergents de ville! The latter, with his dress-coat, cocked hat, long rapier, white gloves, neat, polite, attentive, alert,—always with the manner of a jesuit turned soldier,—you learn to trust very much, if not respect; and you feel perfectly secure that he will protect you, and give you your rights in any corner of Paris. It does look as if he might slip that slender rapier through your body in a second, and pull it out and wipe it, and not move a muscle; but I don't think he would do it unless he were directly ordered to. He would not be likely to knock you down and drag you out, in mistake for the rowdy who was assaulting you.

A great contrast between the habits of the people of London and Paris is shown by their eating and drinking. Paris is brilliant with cafes: all the world frequents them to sip coffee (and too often absinthe), read the papers, and gossip over the news; take them away, as all travelers know, and Paris would not know itself. There is not a cafe in London: instead of cafes, there are gin-mills; instead of light wine, there is heavy beer. The restaurants and restaurant life are as different as can be. You can get anything you wish in Paris: you can live very cheaply or very dearly, as you like. The range is more limited in London. I do not fancy the usual run of Paris restaurants. You get a great deal for your money, in variety and quantity; but you don't exactly know what it is: and in time you tire of odds and ends, which destroy your hunger without exactly satisfying you. For myself, after a pretty good run of French cookery (and it beats the world for making the most out of little), when I sat down again to what the eminently respectable waiter in white and black calls "a dinner off the Joint, sir," with what belongs to it, and ended up with an attack on a section of a cheese as big as a bass-drum, not to forget a pewter mug of amber liquid, I felt as if I had touched bottom again,—got something substantial, had what you call a square meal. The English give you the substantials, and better, I believe, than any other people. Thackeray used to come over to Paris to get a good dinner now and then. I have tried his favorite restaurant here, the cuisine of which is famous far beyond the banks of the Seine; but I think if he, hearty trencher-man that he was, had lived in Paris, he would have gone to London for a dinner oftener than he came here.

And as for a lunch,—this eating is a fascinating theme,—commend me to a quiet inn of England. We happened to be out at Kew Gardens the other afternoon. You ought to go to Kew, even if the Duchess of Cambridge is not at home. There is not such a park out of England, considering how beautiful the Thames is there. What splendid trees it has! the horse-chestnut, now a mass of pink-and-white blossoms, from its broad base, which rests on the ground, to its high rounded dome; the hawthorns, white and red, in full flower; the sweeps and glades of living green,—turf on which you walk with a grateful sense of drawing life directly from the yielding, bountiful earth,—a green set out and heightened by flowers in masses of color (a great variety of rhododendrons, for one thing), to say nothing of magnificent greenhouses and outlying flower-gardens. Just beyond are Richmond Hill and Hampton Court, and five or six centuries of tradition and history and romance. Before you enter the garden, you pass the green. On one side of it are cottages, and on the other the old village church and its quiet churchyard. Some boys were playing cricket on the sward, and children were getting as intimate with the turf and the sweet earth as their nurses would let them. We turned into a little cottage, which gave notice of hospitality for a consideration; and were shown, by a pretty maid in calico, into an upper room,—a neat, cheerful, common room, with bright flowers in the open windows, and white muslin curtains for contrast. We looked out on the green and over to the beautiful churchyard, where one of England's greatest painters, Gainsborough, lies in rural repose. It is nothing to you, who always dine off the best at home, and never encounter dirty restaurants and snuffy inns, or run the gauntlet of Continental hotels, every meal being an experiment of great interest, if not of danger, to say that this brisk little waitress spread a snowy cloth, and set thereon meat and bread and butter and a salad: that conveys no idea to your mind. Because you cannot see that the loaf of wheaten bread was white and delicate, and full of the goodness of the grain; or that the butter, yellow as a guinea, tasted of grass and cows, and all the rich juices of the verdant year, and was not mere flavorless grease; or that the cuts of roast beef, fat and lean, had qualities that indicate to me some moral elevation in the cattle,—high-toned, rich meat; or that the salad was crisp and delicious, and rather seemed to enjoy being eaten, at least, did n't disconsolately wilt down at the prospect, as most salad does. I do not wonder that Walter Scott dwells so much on eating, or lets his heroes pull at the pewter mugs so often. Perhaps one might find a better lunch in Paris, but he surely couldn't find this one.

PARIS IN MAY—FRENCH GIRLS—THE EMPEROR AT LONGCHAMPS

It was the first of May when we came up from Italy. The spring grew on us as we advanced north; vegetation seemed further along than it was south of the Alps. Paris was bathed in sunshine, wrapped in delicious weather, adorned with all the delicate colors of blushing spring. Now the horse-chestnuts are all in bloom) and so is the hawthorn; and in parks and gardens there are rows and alleys of trees, with blossoms of pink and of white; patches of flowers set in the light green grass; solid masses of gorgeous color, which fill all the air with perfume; fountains that dance in the sunlight as if just released from prison; and everywhere the soft suffusion of May. Young maidens who make their first communion go into the churches in processions of hundreds, all in white, from the flowing veil to the satin slipper; and I see them everywhere for a week after the ceremony, in their robes of innocence, often with bouquets of flowers, and attended by their friends; all concerned making it a joyful holiday, as it ought to be. I hear, of course, with what false ideas of life these girls are educated; how they are watched before marriage; how the marriage is only one of arrangement, and what liberty they eagerly seek afterwards. I met a charming Paris lady last winter in Italy, recently married, who said she had never been in the Louvre in her life; never had seen any of the magnificent pictures or world-famous statuary there, because girls were not allowed to go there, lest they should see something that they ought not to see. I suppose they look with wonder at the young American girls who march up to anything that ever was created, with undismayed front.

Another Frenchwoman, a lady of talent and the best breeding, recently said to a friend, in entire unconsciousness that she was saying anything remarkable, that, when she was seventeen, her great desire was to marry one of her uncles (a thing not very unusual with the papal dispensation), in order to keep all the money in the family! That was the ambition of a girl of seventeen.

I like, on these sunny days, to look into the Luxembourg Garden: nowhere else is the eye more delighted with life and color. In the afternoon, especially, it is a baby-show worth going far to see. The avenues are full of children, whose animated play, light laughter, and happy chatter, and pretty, picturesque dress, make a sort of fairy grove of the garden; and all the nurses of that quarter bring their charges there, and sit in the shade, sewing, gossiping, and comparing the merits of the little dears. One baby differs from another in glory, I suppose; but I think on such days that they are all lovely, taken in the mass, and all in sweet harmony with the delicious atmosphere, the tender green, and the other flowers of spring. A baby can't do better than to spend its spring days in the Luxembourg Garden.

There are several ways of seeing Paris besides roaming up and down before the blazing shop-windows, and lounging by daylight or gaslight along the crowded and gay boulevards; and one of the best is to go to the Bois de Boulogne on a fete-day, or when the races are in progress. This famous wood is very disappointing at first to one who has seen the English parks, or who remembers the noble trees and glades and avenues of that at Munich. To be sure, there is a lovely little lake and a pretty artificial cascade, and the roads and walks are good; but the trees are all saplings, and nearly all the "wood" is a thicket of small stuff. Yet there is green grass that one can roll on, and there is a grove of small pines that one can sit under. It is a pleasant place to drive toward evening; but its great attraction is the crowd there. All the principal avenues are lined with chairs, and there people sit to watch the streams of carriages.

I went out to the Bois the other day, when there were races going on; not that I went to the races, for I know nothing about them, per se, and care less. All running races are pretty much alike. You see a lean horse, neck and tail, flash by you, with a jockey in colors on his back; and that is the whole of it. Unless you have some money on it, in the pool or otherwise, it is impossible to raise any excitement. The day I went out, the Champs Elysees, on both sides, its whole length, was crowded with people, rows and ranks of them sitting in chairs and on benches. The Avenue de l'Imperatrice, from the Arc de l'Etoile to the entrance of the Bois, was full of promenaders; and the main avenues of the Bois, from the chief entrance to the race-course, were lined with people, who stood or sat, simply to see the passing show. There could not have been less than ten miles of spectators, in double or triple rows, who had taken places that afternoon to watch the turnouts of fashion and rank. These great avenues were at all times, from three till seven, filled with vehicles; and at certain points, and late in the day, there was, or would have been anywhere else except in Paris, a jam. I saw a great many splendid horses, but not so many fine liveries as one will see on a swell-day in London. There was one that I liked. A handsome carriage, with one seat, was drawn by four large and elegant black horses, the two near horses ridden by postilions in blue and silver,—blue roundabouts, white breeches and topboots, a round- topped silver cap, and the hair, or wig, powdered, and showing just a little behind. A footman mounted behind, seated, wore the same colors; and the whole establishment was exceedingly tonnish.

The race-track (Longchamps, as it is called), broad and beautiful springy turf, is not different from some others, except that the inclosed oblong space is not flat, but undulating just enough for beauty, and so framed in by graceful woods, and looked on by chateaux and upland forests, that I thought I had never seen a sweeter bit of greensward. St. Cloud overlooks it, and villas also regard it from other heights. The day I saw it, the horse-chestnuts were in bloom; and there was, on the edges, a cloud of pink and white blossoms, that gave a soft and charming appearance to the entire landscape. The crowd in the grounds, in front of the stands for judges, royalty, and people who are privileged or will pay for places, was, I suppose, much as usual,—an excited throng of young and jockey-looking men, with a few women-gamblers in their midst, making up the pool; a pack of carriages along the circuit of the track, with all sorts of people, except the very good; and conspicuous the elegantly habited daughters of sin and satin, with servants in livery, as if they had been born to it; gentlemen and ladies strolling about, or reclining on the sward, and a refreshment-stand in lively operation.

When the bell rang, we all cleared out from the track, and I happened to get a position by the railing. I was looking over to the Pavilion, where I supposed the Emperor to be, when the man next to me cried, "Voila!" and, looking up, two horses brushed right by my face, of which I saw about two tails and one neck, and they were gone. Pretty soon they came round again, and one was ahead, as is apt to be the case; and somebody cried, "Bully for Therise!" or French to that effect, and it was all over. Then we rushed across to the Emperor's Pavilion, except that I walked with all the dignitV consistent with rapidity, and there, in the midst of his suite, sat the Man of December, a stout, broad, and heavy-faced man as you know, but a man who impresses one with a sense of force and purpose,—sat, as I say, and looked at us through his narrow, half-shut eyes, till he was satisfied that I had got his features through my glass, when he deliberately arose and went in.

All Paris was out that day,—it is always out, by the way, when the sun shines, and in whatever part of the city you happen to be; and it seemed to me there was a special throng clear down to the gate of the Tuileries, to see the Emperor and the rest of us come home. He went round by the Rue Rivoli, but I walked through the gardens. The soldiers from Africa sat by the gilded portals, as usual,—aliens, and yet always with the port of conquerors here in Paris. Their nonchalant indifference and soldierly bearing always remind me of the sort of force the Emperor has at hand to secure his throne. I think the blouses must look askance at these satraps of the desert. The single jet fountain in the basin was springing its highest,—a quivering pillar of water to match the stone shaft of Egypt which stands close by. The sun illuminated it, and threw a rainbow from it a hundred feet long, upon the white and green dome of chestnut-trees near. When I was farther down the avenue, I had the dancing column of water, the obelisk, and the Arch of Triumph all in line, and the rosy sunset beyond.

AN IMPERIAL REVIEW

The Prince and Princess of Wales came up to Paris in the beginning of May, from Italy, Egypt, and alongshore, stayed at a hotel on the Place Vendome, where they can get beef that is not horse, and is rare, and beer brewed in the royal dominions, and have been entertained with cordiality by the Emperor. Among the spectacles which he has shown them is one calculated to give them an idea of his peaceful intentions,-a grand review of cavalry and artillery at the Bois de Boulogne. It always seems to me a curious comment upon the state of our modern civilization,

when one prince visits another here in Europe, the first thing that the visited does, by way of hospitality is to get out his troops, and show his rival how easily he could "lick" him, if it came to that. It is a little puerile. At any rate, it is an advance upon the old fashion of getting up a joust at arms, and inviting the guest to come out and have his head cracked in a friendly way.

The review, which had been a good deal talked about, came off in the afternoon; and all the world went to it. The avenues of the Bois were crowded with carriages, and the walks with footpads. Such a constellation of royal personages met on one field must be seen; for, besides the imperial family and Albert Edward and his Danish beauty, there was to be the Archduke of Austria) and no end of titled personages besides. At three o'clock the royal company, in the Emperor's carriages, drove upon the training-ground of the Bois, where the troops awaited them. All the party, except the Princess of Wales, then mounted horses, and rode along the lines, and afterwards retired to a wood-covered knoll at one end to witness the evolutions. The training-ground is a noble, slightly undulating piece of greensward, perhaps three quarters of a mile long and half that in breadth, hedged about with graceful trees, and bounded on one side by the Seine. Its borders were rimmed that day with thousands of people on foot and in carriages,—a gay sight, in itself, of color and fashion. A more brilliant spectacle than the field presented cannot well be imagined. Attention was divided between the gentle eminence where the imperial party stood,—a throng of noble persons backed by the gay and glittering Guard of the Emperor, as brave a show as chivalry ever made,—and the field of green, with its long lines in martial array; every variety of splendid uniforms, the colors and combinations that most dazzle and attract, with shining brass and gleaming steel, and magnificent horses of war, regiments of black, gray, and bay.

The evolutions were such as to stir the blood of the most sluggish. A regiment, full front, would charge down upon a dead run from the far field, men shouting, sabers flashing, horses thundering along, so that the ground shook, towards the imperial party, and, when near, stop suddenly, wheel to right and left, and gallop back. Others would succeed them rapidly, coming up the center while their predecessors filed down the sides; so that the whole field was a moving mass of splendid color and glancing steel. Now and then a rider was unhorsed in the furious rush, and went scrambling out of harm, while the steed galloped off with free rein. This display was followed by that of the flying artillery, battalion after battalion, which came clattering and roaring along, in double lines stretching half across the field, stopped and rapidly discharged its pieces, waking up all the region with echoes, filling the plain with the smoke of gunpowder, and starting into rearing activity all the carriage-horses in the Bois. How long this continued I do not know, nor how many men participated in the review, but they seemed to pour up from the far end in unending columns. I think the regiments must have charged over and over again. It gave some people the impression that there were a hundred thousand troops on the ground. I set it at fifteen to twenty thousand. Gallignani next morning said there were only six thousand! After the charging was over, the reviewing party rode to the center of the field, and the troops galloped round them; and the Emperor distributed decorations. We could recognize the Emperor and Empress; Prince Albert in huzzar uniform, with a green plume in his cap; and the Prince Imperial, in cap and the uniform of a lieutenant, on horseback in front; while the Princess occupied a carriage behind them.

There was a crush of people at the entrance to see the royals make their exit. Gendarmes were busy, and mounted guards went smashing through the crowd to clear a space. Everybody was on the tiptoe of expectation. There is a portion of the Emperor's guard; there is an officer of the household; there is an emblazoned carriage; and, quick, there! with a rush they come, driving as if there was no crowd, with imperial haste, postilions and outriders and the imperial carriage. There is a sensation, a cordial and not loud greeting, but no Yankee-like cheers. That heavy gentleman in citizen's dress, who looks neither to right nor left, is Napoleon III.; that handsome woman, grown full in the face of late, but yet with the bloom of beauty and the sweet grace of command, in hat and dark riding-habit, bowing constantly to right and left, and smiling, is the Empress Eugenie. And they are gone. As we look for something more, there is a rout in the side avenue; something is coming, unexpected, from another quarter: dragoons dash through the dense mass, shouting and gesticulating, and a dozen horses go by, turning the corner like a small whirlwind, urged on by whip and spur, a handsome boy riding in the midst,—a boy in cap and simple uniform, riding gracefully and easily and jauntily, and out of sight in a minute. It is the boy Prince Imperial and his guard. It was like him to dash in unexpectedly, as he has broken into the line of European princes. He rides gallantly, and Fortune smiles on him to-day; but he rides into a troubled future. There was one more show,—a carriage of the Emperor, with officers, in English colors and side-whiskers, riding in advance and behind: in it the future King of England, the heavy, selfish-faced young man, and beside him his princess, popular wherever she shows her winning face,—a fair, sweet woman, in light and flowing silken stuffs of spring, a vision of lovely youth and rank, also gone in a minute.

These English visitors are enjoying the pleasures of the French capital. On Sunday, as I passed the Hotel Bristol, a crowd, principally English, was waiting in front of it to see the Prince and Princess come out, and enter one of the Emperor's carriages in waiting. I heard an Englishwoman, who was looking on with admiration "sticking out" all over, remark to a friend in a very loud whisper, "I tell you, the Prince lives every day of his life." The princely pair came out at length, and drove away, going to visit Versailles. I don't know what the Queen would think of this way of spending Sunday; but if Albert Edward never does anything worse, he does n't need half the praying for that he gets every Sunday in all the English churches and chapels.

THE LOW COUNTRIES AND RHINELAND

AMIENS AND QUAINT OLD BRUGES

They have not yet found out the secret in France of banishing dust from railway-carriages. Paris, late in June, was hot, but not dusty: the country was both. There is an uninteresting glare and hardness in a French landscape on a sunny day. The soil is thin, the trees are slender, and one sees not much luxury or comfort. Still, one does not usually see much of either on a flying train. We spent a night at Amiens, and had several hours for the old cathedral, the sunset light on its noble front and towers and spire and flying buttresses, and the morning rays bathing its rich stone. As one stands near it in front, it seems to tower away into heaven, a mass of carving and sculpture,—figures of saints and martyrs who have stood in the sun and storm for ages, as they stood in their lifetime, with a patient waiting. It was like a great company, a Christian host, in attitudes of praise and worship. There they were, ranks on ranks, silent in stone, when the last of the long twilight illumined them; and there in the same impressive patience they waited the golden day. It required little fancy to feel that they had lived, and now in long procession came down the ages. The central portal is lofty, wide, and crowded with figures. The side is only less rich than the front. Here the old Gothic builders let their fancy riot in grotesque gargoyles,—figures of animals, and imps of sin, which stretch out their long necks for waterspouts above. From the ground to the top of the unfinished towers is one mass of rich stone-work, the creation of genius that hundreds of years ago knew no other way to write its poems than with the chisel. The interior is very magnificent also, and has some splendid stained glass. At eight o'clock, the priests were chanting vespers to a larger congregation than many churches have on Sunday: their voices were rich and musical, and, joined with the organ notes, floated sweetly and impressively through the dim and vast interior. We sat near the great portal, and, looking down the long, arched nave and choir to the cluster of candles burning on the high altar, before which the priests chanted, one could not but remember how many centuries the same act of worship had been almost uninterrupted within, while the apostles and martyrs stood without, keeping watch of the unchanging heavens.

When I stepped in, early in the morning, the first mass was in progress. The church was nearly empty. Looking within the choir, I saw two stout young priests lustily singing the prayers in deep, rich voices. One of them leaned back in his seat, and sang away, as if he had taken a contract to do it, using, from time to time, an enormous red handkerchief, with which and his nose he produced a trumpet obligato. As I stood there, a poor dwarf bobbled in and knelt on the bare stones, and was the only worshiper, until, at length, a half-dozen priests swept in from the sacristy, and two processions of young school-girls entered from either side. They have the skull of John the Baptist in this cathedral. I did not see it, although I suppose I could have done so for a franc to the beadle: but I saw a very good stone imitation of it; and his image and story fill the church. It is something to have seen the place that contains his skull.

The country becomes more interesting as one gets into Belgium. Windmills are frequent: in and near Lille are some six hundred of them; and they are a great help to a landscape that wants fine trees. At Courtrai, we looked into Notre Dame, a thirteenth century cathedral, which has a Vandyke ("The Raising of the Cross"), and the chapel of the Counts of Flanders, where workmen were uncovering some frescoes that were whitewashed over in the war-times. The town hall has two fine old chimney-pieces carved in wood, with quaint figures,- -work that one must go to the Netherlands to see. Toward evening we came into the ancient town of Bruges. The country all day has been mostly flat, but thoroughly cultivated. Windmills appear to do all the labor of the people,—raising the water, grinding the grain, sawing the lumber; and they everywhere lift their long arms up to the sky. Things look more and more what we call "foreign." Harvest is going on, of hay and grain; and men and women work together in the fields. The gentle sex has its rights here. We saw several women acting as switch-tenders. Perhaps the use of the switch comes natural to them. Justice, however, is still in the hands of the men. We saw a Dutch court in session in a little room in the town hall at Courtrai. The justice wore a little red cap, and sat informally behind a cheap table. I noticed that the witnesses were treated with unusual consideration, being allowed to sit down at the table opposite the little justice, who interrogated them in a loud voice. At the stations to-day we see more friars in coarse, woolen dresses, and sandals, and the peasants with wooden sabots.

As the sun goes to the horizon, we have an effect sometimes produced by the best Dutch artists,—a wonderful transparent light, in which the landscape looks like a picture, with its church-spires of stone, its windmills, its slender trees, and red-roofed houses. It is a good light and a good hour in which to enter Bruges, that city of the past. Once the city was greater than Antwerp; and up the Rege came the commerce of the East, merchants from the Levant, traders in jewels and silks. Now the tall houses wait for tenants, and the streets have a deserted air. After nightfall, as we walked in the middle of the roughly paved streets, meeting few people, and hearing only the echoing clatter of the wooden sabots of the few who were abroad, the old spirit of the place came over us. We sat on a bench in the market-place, a treeless square, hemmed in by quaint, gabled houses, late in the evening, to listen to the chimes from the belfry. The tower is less than four hundred feet high, and not so high by some seventy feet as the one on Notre Dame near by; but it is very picturesque, in spite of the fact that it springs out of a rummagy- looking edifice, one half of which is devoted to soldiers' barracks, and the other to markets. The chimes are called the finest in Europe. It is well to hear the finest at once, and so have done with the tedious things. The Belgians are as fond of chimes as the Dutch are of stagnant water. We heard them everywhere in Belgium; and in some towns they are incessant, jangling every seven and a half minutes. The chimes at Bruges ring every quarter hour for a minute, and at the full hour attempt a tune. The revolving machinery grinds out the tune, which is changed at least once a year; and on Sundays a musician, chosen by the town, plays the chimes. In so many bells (there are forty-eight), the least of which weighs twelve pounds, and the largest over eleven thousand, there must be soft notes and sonorous tones; so sweet jangled sounds were showered down: but we liked better than the confused chiming the solemn notes of the great bell striking the hour. There is something very poetical about this chime of bells high in the air, flinging down upon the hum and traffic of the city its oft-repeated benediction of peace; but anybody but a Lowlander would get very weary of it. These chimes, to be sure, are better than those in London, which became a nuisance; but there is in all of them a tinkling attempt at a tune, which always fails, that is very annoying.

Bruges has altogether an odd flavor. Piles of wooden sabots are for sale in front of the shops; and this ugly shoe, which is mysteriously kept on the foot, is worn by all the common sort. We see long, slender carts in the street, with one horse hitched far ahead with rope traces, and no thills or pole.

The women-nearly every one we saw-wear long cloaks of black cloth with a silk hood thrown back. Bruges is famous of old for its beautiful women, who are enticingly described as always walking the streets with covered faces, and peeping out from their mantles. They are not so handsome now they show their faces, I can testify. Indeed, if there is in Bruges another besides the beautiful girl who showed us the old council-chamber in the Palace of justice, she must have had her hood pulled over her face.

Next morning was market-day. The square was lively with carts, donkeys, and country people, and that and all the streets leading to it were filled with the women in black cloaks, who flitted about as numerous as the rooks at Oxford, and very much like them, moving in a winged way, their cloaks outspread as they walked, and distended with the market-basket underneath. Though the streets were full, the town did not seem any less deserted; and the early marketers had only come to life for a day, revisiting the places that once they thronged. In the shade of the tall houses in the narrow streets sat red-cheeked girls and women making lace, the bobbins jumping under their nimble fingers. At the church doors hideous beggars crouched and whined,— specimens of the fifteen thousand paupers of Bruges. In the fishmarket we saw odd old women, with Rembrandt colors in faces and costume; and while we strayed about in the strange city, all the time from the lofty tower the chimes fell down. What history crowds upon us! Here in the old cathedral, with its monstrous tower of brick, a portion of it as old as the tenth century, Philip the Good established, in 1429, the Order of the Golden Fleece, the last chapter of which was held by Philip the Bad in 1559, in the rich old Cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent. Here, on the square, is the site of the house where the Emperor Maximilian was imprisoned by his rebellious Flemings; and next it, with a carved lion, that in which Charles II. of England lived after the martyrdom of that patient and virtuous ruler, whom the English Prayerbook calls that "blessed martyr, Charles the First." In Notre Dame are the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary his daughter.

We begin here to enter the portals of Dutch painting. Here died Jan van Eyck, the father of oil painting; and here, in the hospital of St. John, are the most celebrated pictures of Hans Memling. The most exquisite in color and finish is the series painted on the casket made to contain the arm of St. Ursula, and representing the story of her martyrdom. You know she went on a pilgrimage to Rome, with her lover, Conan, and eleven thousand virgins; and, on their return to Cologne, they were all massacred by the Huns. One would scarcely believe the story, if he did not see all their bones at Cologne.

GHENT AND ANTWERP

What can one do in this Belgium but write down names, and let memory recall the past? We came to Ghent, still a hand some city, though one thinks of the days when it was the capital of Flanders, and its merchants were princes. On the shabby old belfry-tower is the gilt dragon which Philip van Artevelde captured, and brought in triumph from Bruges. It was originally fetched from a Greek church in Constantinople by some Bruges Crusader; and it is a link to recall to us how, at that time, the merchants of Venice and the far East traded up the Scheldt, and brought to its wharves the rich stuffs of India and Persia. The old bell Roland, that was used to call the burghers together on the approach of an enemy, hung in this tower. What fierce broils and bloody fights did these streets witness centuries ago! There in the Marche au Vendredi, a large square of old-fashioned houses, with a statue of Jacques van Artevelde, fifteen hundred corpses were strewn in a quarrel between the hostile guilds of fullers and brewers; and here, later, Alva set blazing the fires of the Inquisition. Near the square is the old cannon, Mad Margery, used in 1382 at the siege of Oudenarde,—a hammered-iron hooped affair, eighteen feet long. But why mention this, or the magnificent town hall, or St. Bavon, rich in pictures and statuary; or try to put you back three hundred years to the wild days when the iconoclasts sacked this and every other church in the Low Countries?

Up to Antwerp toward evening. All the country flat as the flattest part of Jersey, rich in grass and grain, cut up by canals, picturesque with windmills and red-tiled roofs, framed with trees in rows. It has been all day hot and dusty. The country everywhere seems to need rain; and dark clouds are gathering in the south for a storm, as we drive up the broad Place de Meir to our hotel, and take rooms that look out to the lace-like spire of the cathedral, which is sharply defined against the red western sky.

Antwerp takes hold of you, both by its present and its past, very strongly. It is still the home of wealth. It has stately buildings, splendid galleries of pictures, and a spire of stone which charms more than a picture, and fascinates the eye as music does the ear. It still keeps its strong fortifications drawn around it, to which the broad and deep Scheldt is like a string to a bow, mindful of the unstable state of Europe. While Berlin is only a vast camp of soldiers, every less city must daily beat its drums, and call its muster-roll. From the tower here one looks upon the cockpit of Europe. And yet Antwerp ought to have rest: she has had tumult enough in her time. Prosperity seems returning to her; but her old, comparative splendor can never come back. In the sixteenth century there was no richer city in Europe.

We walked one evening past the cathedral spire, which begins in the richest and most solid Gothic work, and grows up into the sky into an exquisite lightness and grace, down a broad street to the Scheldt. What traffic have not these high old houses looked on, when two thousand and five hundred vessels lay in the river at one time, and the commerce of Europe found here its best mart. Along the stream now is a not very clean promenade for the populace; and it is lined with beer-houses, shabby theaters, and places of the most childish amusements. There is an odd liking for the simple among these people. In front of the booths, drums were beaten and instruments played in bewildering discord. Actors in paint and tights stood without to attract the crowd within. On one low balcony, a copper-colored man, with a huge feather cap and the traditional dress of the American savage, was beating two drums; a burnt-cork black man stood beside him; while on the steps was a woman, in hat and shawl, making an earnest speech to the crowd. In another place, where a crazy band made furious music, was an enormous "go-round" of wooden ponies, like those in the Paris gardens, only here, instead of children, grown men and women rode the hobby-horses, and seemed delighted with the sport. In the general Babel, everybody was good-natured and jolly. Little things suffice to amuse the lower classes, who do not have to bother their heads with elections and mass meetings.

In front of the cathedral is the well, and the fine canopy of iron-work, by Quentin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, some of whose pictures we saw in the Museum, where one sees, also some of the finest pictures of the Dutch school,—the "Crucifixion" of Rubens, the "Christ on the Cross" of Vandyke; paintings also by Teniers, Otto Vennius, Albert Cuyp, and others, and Rembrandt's portrait of his wife,—a picture whose sweet strength and wealth of color draws one to it with almost a passion of admiration. We had already seen "The Descent from the Cross" and "The Raising of the Cross" by Rubens, in the cathedral. With all his power and rioting luxuriance of color, I cannot come to love him as I do Rembrandt. Doubtless he painted what he saw; and we still find the types of his female figures in the broad-hipped, ruddy-colored women of Antwerp. We walked down to his house, which remains much as it was two hundred and twenty-five years ago. From the interior court, an entrance in the Italian style leads into a pleasant little garden full of old trees and flowers, with a summer-house embellished with plaster casts, and having the very stone table upon which Rubens painted. It is a quiet place, and fit for an artist; but Rubens had other houses in the city, and lived the life of a man who took a strong hold of the world.

AMSTERDAM

The rail from Antwerp north was through a land flat and sterile. After a little, it becomes a little richer; but a forlorner land to live in I never saw. One wonders at the perseverance of the Flemings and Dutchmen to keep all this vast tract above water when there is so much good solid earth elsewhere unoccupied. At Moerdjik we changed from the cars to a little steamer on the Maas, which flows between high banks. The water is higher than the adjoining land, and from the deck we look down upon houses and farms. At Dort, the Rhine comes in with little promise of the noble stream it is in the highlands. Everywhere canals and ditches dividing the small fields instead of fences; trees planted in straight lines, and occasionally trained on a trellis in front of the houses, with the trunk painted white or green; so that every likeness of nature shall be taken away. >From Rotterdam, by cars, it is still the same. The Dutchman spends half his life, apparently, in fighting the water. He has to watch the huge dikes which keep the ocean from overwhelming him, and the river-banks, which may break, and let the floods of the Rhine swallow him up. The danger from within is not less than from without. Yet so fond is he of his one enemy, that, when he can afford it, he builds him a fantastic summer-house over a stagnant pool or a slimy canal, in one corner of his garden, and there sits to enjoy the aquatic beauties of nature; that is, nature as he has made it. The river-banks are woven with osiers to keep them from washing; and at intervals on the banks are piles of the long withes to be used in emergencies when the swollen streams threaten to break through.

And so we come to Amsterdam, the oddest city of all,—a city wholly built on piles, with as many canals as streets, and an architecture so quaint as to even impress one who has come from Belgium. The whole town has a wharf-y look; and it is difficult to say why the tall brick houses, their gables running by steps to a peak, and each one leaning forward or backward or sideways, and none perpendicular, and no two on a line, are so interesting. But certainly it is a most entertaining place to the stranger, whether he explores the crowded Jews' quarter, with its swarms of dirty people, its narrow streets, and high houses hung with clothes, as if every day were washing-day; or strolls through the equally narrow streets of rich shops; or lounges upon the bridges, and looks at the queer boats with clumsy rounded bows, great helms' painted in gay colors, with flowers in the cabin windows,—boats where families live; or walks down the Plantage, with the zoological gardens on the one hand and rows of beer-gardens on the other; or round the great docks; or saunters at sunset by the banks of the Y, and looks upon flat North Holland and the Zuyder Zee.

The palace on the Dam (square) is a square, stately edifice, and the only building that the stranger will care to see. Its interior is richer and more fit to live in than any palace we have seen. There is nothing usually so dreary as your fine Palace. There are some good frescoes, rooms richly decorated in marble, and a magnificent hall, or ball-room, one hundred feet in height, without pillars. Back of it is, of course, a canal, which does not smell fragrantly in the summer; and I do not wonder that William III. and his queen prefer to stop away. From the top is a splendid view of Amsterdam and all the flat region. I speak of it with entire impartiality, for I did not go up to see it. But better than palaces are the picture-galleries, three of which are open to the sightseer. Here the ancient and modern Dutch painters are seen at their best, and I know of no richer feast of this sort. Here Rembrandt is to be seen in his glory; here Van der Helst, Jan Steen, Gerard Douw, Teniers the younger, Hondekoeter, Weenix, Ostade, Cuyp, and other names as familiar. These men also painted what they saw, the people, the landscapes, with which they were familiar. It was a strange pleasure to meet again and again in the streets of the town the faces, or types of them, that we had just seen on canvas so old.

In the Low Countries, the porters have the grand title of commissionaires. They carry trunks and bundles, black boots, and act as valets de place. As guides, they are quite as intolerable in Amsterdam as their brethren in other cities. Many of them are Jews; and they have a keen eye for a stranger. The moment he sallies from his hotel, there is a guide. Let him hesitate for an instant in his walk, either to look at something or to consult his map, or let him ask the way, and he will have a half dozen of the persistent guild upon him; and they cannot easily be shaken off. The afternoon we arrived, we had barely got into our rooms at Brack's Oude Doelan, when a gray-headed commissionaire knocked at our door, and offered his services to show us the city. We deferred the pleasure of his valuable society. Shortly, when we came down to the street, a smartly dressed Israelite took off his hat to us, and offered to show us the city. We declined with impressive politeness, and walked on. The Jew accompanied us, and attempted conversation, in which we did not join. He would show us everything for a guilder an hour,—for half a guilder. Having plainly told the Jew that we did not desire his attendance, he crossed to the other side of the street, and kept us in sight, biding his opportunity. At the end of the street, we hesitated a moment whether to cross the bridge or turn up by the broad canal. The Jew was at our side in a moment, having divined that we were on the way to the Dam and the palace. He obligingly pointed the way, and began to walk with us, entering into conversation. We told him pointedly, that we did not desire his services, and requested him to leave us. He still walked in our direction, with the air of one much injured, but forgiving, and was more than once beside us with a piece of information. When we finally turned upon him with great fierceness, and told him to begone, he regarded us with a mournful and pitying expression; and as the last act of one who returned good for evil, before he turned away, pointed out to us the next turn we were to make. I saw him several times afterward; and I once had occasion to say to him, that I had already told him I would not employ him; and he always lifted his hat, and looked at me with a forgiving smile. I felt that I had deeply wronged him. As we stood by the statue, looking up at the eastern pediment of the palace, another of the tribe (they all speak a little English) asked me if I wished to see the palace. I told him I was looking at it, and could see it quite distinctly. Half a dozen more crowded round, and proffered their aid. Would I like to go into the palace ? They knew, and I knew, that they could do nothing more than go to the open door, through which they would not be admitted, and that I could walk across the open square to that, and enter alone. I asked the first speaker if he wished to go into the palace. Oh, yes! he would like to go. I told him he had better go at once,- -they had all better go in together and see the palace,—it was an excellent opportunity. They seemed to see the point, and slunk away to the other side to wait for another stranger.

I find that this plan works very well with guides: when I see one approaching, I at once offer to guide him. It is an idea from which he does not rally in time to annoy us. The other day I offered to show a persistent fellow through an old ruin for fifty kreuzers: as his price for showing me was forty-eight, we did not come to terms. One of the most remarkable guides, by the way, we encountered at Stratford-on-Avon. As we walked down from the Red Horse Inn to the church, a full-grown boy came bearing down upon us in the most wonderful fashion. Early rickets, I think, had been succeeded by the St. Vitus' dance. He came down upon us sideways, his legs all in a tangle, and his right arm, bent and twisted, going round and round, as if in vain efforts to get into his pocket, his fingers spread out in impotent desire to clutch something. There was great danger that he would run into us, as he was like a steamer with only one side-wheel and no rudder. He came up puffing and blowing, and offered to show us Shakespeare's tomb. Shade of the past, to be accompanied to thy resting-place by such an object! But he fastened himself on us, and jerked and hitched along in his side-wheel fashion. We declined his help. He paddled on, twisting himself into knots, and grinning in the most friendly manner. We told him to begone. "I am," said he, wrenching himself into a new contortion, "I am what showed Artemus Ward round Stratford." This information he repeated again and again, as if we could not resist him after we had comprehended that. We shook him off; but when we returned at sundown across the fields, from a visit to Anne Hathaway's cottage, we met the sidewheeler cheerfully towing along a large party, upon whom he had fastened.

The people of Amsterdam are only less queer than their houses. The men dress in a solid, old-fashioned way. Every one wears the straight, high-crowned silk hat that went out with us years ago, and the cut of clothing of even the most buckish young fellows is behind the times. I stepped into the Exchange, an immense interior, that will hold five thousand people, where the stock-gamblers meet twice a day. It was very different from the terrible excitement and noise of the Paris Bourse. There were three or four thousand brokers there, yet there was very little noise and no confusion. No stocks were called, and there was no central ring for bidding, as at the Bourse and the New York Gold Room; but they quietly bought and sold. Some of the leading firms had desks or tables at the side, and there awaited orders. Everything was phlegmatically and decorously done.

In the streets one still sees peasant women in native costume. There was a group to-day that I saw by the river, evidently just crossed over from North Holland. They wore short dresses, with the upper skirt looped up, and had broad hips and big waists. On the head was a cap with a fall of lace behind; across the back of the head a broad band of silver (or tin) three inches broad, which terminated in front and just above the ears in bright pieces of metal about two inches square, like a horse's blinders, Only flaring more from the head; across the forehead and just above the eyes a gilt band, embossed; on the temples two plaits of hair in circular coils; and on top of all a straw hat, like an old-fashioned bonnet) stuck on hindside before. Spiral coils of brass wire, coming to a point in front, are also worn on each side of the head by many. Whether they are for ornament or defense, I could not determine.

Water is brought into the city now from Haarlem, and introduced into the best houses; but it is still sold in the streets by old men and women, who sit at the faucets. I saw one dried-up old grandmother, who sat in her little caboose, fighting away the crowd of dirty children who tried to steal a drink when her back was turned, keeping count of the pails of water carried away with a piece of chalk on the iron pipe, and trying to darn her stocking at the same time. Odd things strike you at every turn. There is a sledge drawn by one poor horse, and on the front of it is a cask of water pierced with holes, so that the water squirts out and wets the stones, making it easier sliding for the runners. It is an ingenious people!

After all, we drove out five miles to Broek, the clean village; across the Y, up the canal, over flatness flattened. Broek is a humbug, as almost all show places are. A wooden little village on a stagnant canal, into which carriages do not drive, and where the front doors of the houses are never open; a dead, uninteresting place, neat but not specially pretty, where you are shown into one house got up for the purpose, which looks inside like a crockery shop, and has a stiff little garden with box trained in shapes of animals and furniture. A roomy-breeched young Dutchman, whose trousers went up to his neck, and his hat to a peak, walked before us in slow and cow-like fashion, and showed us the place; especially some horrid pleasure-grounds, with an image of an old man reading in a summer-house, and an old couple in a cottage who sat at a table and worked, or ate, I forget which, by clock-work; while a dog barked by the same means. In a pond was a wooden swan sitting on a stick, the water having receded, and left it high and dry. Yet the trip is worth while for the view of the country and the people on the way: men and women towing boats on the canals; the red-tiled houses painted green, and in the distance the villages, with their spires and pleasing mixture of brown, green, and red tints, are very picturesque. The best thing that I saw, however, was a traditional Dutchman walking on the high bank of a canal, with soft hat, short pipe, and breeches that came to the armpits above, and a little below the knees, and were broad enough about the seat and thighs to carry his no doubt numerous family. He made a fine figure against the sky.

COLOGNE AND ST. URSULA

It is a relief to get out of Holland and into a country nearer to hills. The people also seem more obliging. In Cologne, a brown-cheeked girl pointed us out the way without waiting for a kreuzer. Perhaps the women have more to busy themselves about in the cities, and are not so curious about passers-by. We rarely see a reflector to exhibit us to the occupants of the second-story windows. In all the cities of Belgium and Holland the ladies have small mirrors, with reflectors, fastened to their windows; so that they can see everybody who passes, without putting their heads out. I trust we are not inverted or thrown out of shape when we are thus caught up and cast into my lady's chamber. Cologne has a cheerful look, for the Rhine here is wide and promising; and as for the "smells," they are certainly not so many nor so vile as those at Mainz.

Our windows at the hotel looked out on the finest front of the cathedral. If the Devil really built it, he is to be credited with one good thing, and it is now likely to be finished, in spite of him. Large as it is, it is on the exterior not so impressive as that at Amiens; but within it has a magnificence born of a vast design and the most harmonious proportions, and the grand effect is not broken by any subdivision but that of the choir. Behind the altar and in front of the chapel, where lie the remains of the Wise Men of the East who came to worship the Child, or, as thev are called, the Three Kings of Cologne, we walked over a stone in the pavement under which is the heart of Mary de Medicis: the remainder of her body is in St. Denis near Paris. The beadle in red clothes, who stalks about the cathedral like a converted flamingo, offered to open for us the chapel; but we declined a sight of the very bones of the Wise Men. It was difficult enough to believe they were there, without seeing them. One ought not to subject his faith to too great a strain at first in Europe. The bones of the Three Kings, by the way, made the fortune of the cathedral. They were the greatest religious card of the Middle Ages, and their fortunate possession brought a flood of wealth to this old Domkirche. The old feudal lords would swear by the Almighty Father, or the Son, or Holy Ghost, or by everything sacred on earth, and break their oaths as they would break a wisp of straw: but if you could get one of them to swear by the Three Kings of Cologne, he was fast; for that oath he dare not disregard.

The prosperity of the cathedral on these valuable bones set all the other churches in the neighborhood on the same track; and one can study right here in this city the growth of relic worship. But the most successful achievement was the collection of the bones of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, and their preservation in the church on the very spot where they suffered martyrdom. There is probably not so large a collection of the bones of virgins elsewhere in the world; and I am sorry to read that Professor Owen has thought proper to see and say that many of them are the bones of lower orders of animals. They are built into the walls of the church, arranged about the choir, interred in stone coffins, laid under the pavements; and their skulls grin at you everywhere. In the chapel the bones are tastefully built into the wall and overhead, like rustic wood-work; and the skulls stand in rows, some with silver masks, like the jars on the shelves of an apothecary's shop. It is a cheerful place. On the little altar is the very skull of the saint herself, and that of Conan, her ]over, who made the holy pilgrimage to Rome with her and her virgins, and also was slain by the Huns at Cologne. There is a picture of the eleven thousand disembarking from one boat on the Rhine, which is as wonderful as the trooping of hundreds of spirits out of a conjurer's bottle. The right arm of St. Ursula is preserved here: the left is at Bruges. I am gradually getting the hang of this excellent but somewhat scattered woman, and bringing her together in my mind. Her body, I believe, lies behind the altar in this same church. She must have been a lovely character, if Hans Memling's portrait of her is a faithful one. I was glad to see here one of the jars from the marriage-supper in Cana. We can identify it by a piece which is broken out; and the piece is in Notre Dame in Paris. It has been in this church five hundred years. The sacristan, a very intelligent person, with a shaven crown and his hair cut straight across his forehead, who showed us the church, gave us much useful information about bones, teeth, and the remains of the garments that the virgins wore; and I could not tell from his face how much he expected us to believe. I asked the little fussy old guide of an English party who had joined us, how much he believed of the story. He was a Protestant, and replied, still anxious to keep up the credit of his city, "Tousands is too many; some hundreds maybe; tousands is too many."

A GLIMPSE OF THE RHINE

You have seen the Rhine in pictures; you have read its legends. You know, in imagination at least, how it winds among craggy hills of splendid form, turning so abruptly as to leave you often shut in with no visible outlet from the wall of rock and forest; how the castles, some in ruins so as to be as unsightly as any old pile of rubbish, others with feudal towers and battlements, still perfect, hang on the crags, or stand sharp against the sky, or nestle by the stream or on some lonely island. You know that the Rhine has been to Germans what the Nile was to the Egyptians,—a delight, and the theme of song and story. Here the Roman eagles were planted; here were the camps of Drusus; here Caesar bridged and crossed the Rhine; here, at every turn, a feudal baron, from his high castle, levied toll on the passers; and here the French found a momentary halt to their invasion of Germany at different times. You can imagine how, in a misty morning, as you leave Bonn, the Seven Mountains rise up in their veiled might, and how the Drachenfels stands in new and changing beauty as you pass it and sail away. You have been told that the Hudson is like the Rhine. Believe me, there is no resemblance; nor would there be if the Hudson were lined with castles, and Julius Caesar had crossed it every half mile. The Rhine satisfies you, and you do not recall any other river. It only disappoints you as to its "vine-clad hills." You miss trees and a covering vegetation, and are not enamoured of the patches of green vines on wall-supported terraces, looking from the river like hills of beans or potatoes. And, if you try the Rhine wine on the steamers, you will wholly lose your faith in the vintage. We decided that the wine on our boat was manufactured in the boiler.

There is a mercenary atmosphere about hotels and steamers on the Rhine, a watering-place, show sort of feeling, that detracts very much from one's enjoyment. The old habit of the robber barons of levying toll on all who sail up and down has not been lost. It is not that one actually pays so much for sightseeing, but the charm of anything vanishes when it is made merchandise. One is almost as reluctant to buy his "views" as he is to sell his opinions. But one ought to be weeks on the Rhine before attempting to say anything about it.

One morning, at Bingen,—I assure you it was not six o'clock,—we took a big little rowboat, and dropped down the stream, past the Mouse Tower, where the cruel Bishop Hatto was eaten up by rats, under the shattered Castle of Ehrenfels, round the bend to the little village of Assmannshausen, on the hills back of which is grown the famous red wine of that name. On the bank walked in line a dozen peasants, men and women, in picturesque dress, towing, by a line passed from shoulder to shoulder, a boat filled with marketing for Rudesheim. We were bound up the Niederwald, the mountain opposite Bingen, whose noble crown of forest attracted us. At the landing, donkeys awaited us; and we began the ascent, a stout, good-natured German girl acting as guide and driver. Behind us, on the opposite shore, set round about with a wealth of foliage, was the Castle of Rheinstein, a fortress more pleasing in its proportions and situation than any other. Our way was through the little town which is jammed into the gorge; and as we clattered up the pavement, past the church, its heavy bell began to ring loudly for matins, the sound reverberating in the narrow way, and following us with its benediction when we were far up the hill, breathing the fresh, inspiring morning air. The top of the Niederwald is a splendid forest of trees, which no impious Frenchman has been allowed to trim, and cut into allees of arches, taking one in thought across the water to the free Adirondacks. We walked for a long time under the welcome shade, approaching the brow of the hill now and then, where some tower or hermitage is erected, for a view of the Rhine and the Nahe, the villages below, and the hills around; and then crossed the mountain, down through cherry orchards, and vine yards, walled up, with images of Christ on the cross on the angles of the walls, down through a hot road where wild flowers grew in great variety, to the quaint village of Rudesheim, with its queer streets and ancient ruins. Is it possible that we can have too many ruins? "Oh dear!" exclaimed the jung-frau as we sailed along the last day, "if there is n't another castle!"

HEIDELBERG

If you come to Heidelberg, you will never want to go away. To arrive here is to come into a peaceful state of rest and content. The great hills out of which the Neckar flows, infold the town in a sweet security; and yet there is no sense of imprisonment, for the view is always wide open to the great plains where the Neckar goes to join the Rhine, and where the Rhine runs for many a league through a rich and smiling land. One could settle down here to study, without a desire to go farther, nor any wish to change the dingy, shabby old buildings of the university for anything newer and smarter. What the students can find to fight their little duels about I cannot see; but fight they do, as many a scarred cheek attests. The students give life to the town. They go about in little caps of red, green, and blue, many of them embroidered in gold, and stuck so far on the forehead that they require an elastic, like that worn by ladies, under the back hair, to keep them on; and they are also distinguished by colored ribbons across the breast. The majority of them are well-behaved young gentlemen, who carry switch-canes, and try to keep near the fashions, like students at home. Some like to swagger about in their little skull-caps, and now and then one is attended by a bull-dog.

I write in a room which opens out upon a balcony. Below it is a garden, below that foliage, and farther down the town with its old speckled roofs, spires, and queer little squares. Beyond is the Neckar, with the bridge, and white statues on it, and an old city gate at this end, with pointed towers. Beyond that is a white road with a wall on one side, along which I see peasant women walking with large baskets balanced on their heads. The road runs down the river to Neuenheim. Above it on the steep hillside are vineyards; and a winding path goes up to the Philosopher's Walk, which runs along for a mile or more, giving delightful views of the castle and the glorious woods and hills back of it. Above it is the mountain of Heiligenberg, from the other side of which one looks off toward Darmstadt and the famous road, the Bergstrasse. If I look down the stream, I see the narrow town, and the Neckar flowing out of it into the vast level plain, rich with grain and trees and grass, with many spires and villages; Mannheim to the northward, shining when the sun is low; the Rhine gleaming here and there near the horizon; and the Vosges Mountains, purple in the last distance: on my right, and so near that I could throw a stone into them, the ruined tower and battlements of the northwest corner of the castle, half hidden in foliage, with statues framed in ivy, and the garden terrace, built for Elizabeth Stuart when she came here the bride of the Elector Frederick, where giant trees grow. Under the walls a steep path goes down into the town, along which little houses cling to the hillside. High above the castle rises the noble Konigstuhl, whence the whole of this part of Germany is visible, and, in a clear day, Strasburg Minster, ninety miles away.

I have only to go a few steps up a narrow, steep street, lined with the queerest houses, where is an ever-running pipe of good water, to which all the neighborhood resorts, and I am within the grounds of the castle. I scarcely know where to take you; for I never know where to go myself, and seldom do go where I intend when I set forth. We have been here several days; and I have not yet seen the Great Tun, nor the inside of the show-rooms, nor scarcely anything that is set down as a "sight." I do not know whether to wander on through the extensive grounds, with splendid trees, bits of old ruin, overgrown, cozy nooks, and seats where, through the foliage, distant prospects open into quiet retreats that lead to winding walks up the terraced hill, round to the open terrace overlooking the Neckar, and giving the best general view of the great mass of ruins. If we do, we shall be likely to sit in some delicious place, listening to the band playing in the "Restauration," and to the nightingales, till the moon comes up. Or shall we turn into the garden through the lovely Arch of the Princess Elizabeth, with its stone columns cut to resemble tree-trunks twined with ivy? Or go rather through the great archway, and under the teeth of the portcullis, into the irregular quadrangle, whose buildings mark the changing style and fortune of successive centuries, from 1300 down to the seventeenth century? There is probably no richer quadrangle in Europe: there is certainly no other ruin so vast, so impressive, so ornamented with carving, except the Alhambra. And from here we pass out upon the broad terrace of masonry, with a splendid flanking octagon tower, its base hidden in trees, a rich facade for a background, and below the town the river, and beyond,the plain and floods of golden sunlight. What shall we do? Sit and dream in the Rent Tower under the lindens that grow in its top? The day passes while one is deciding how to spend it, and the sun over Heiligenberg goes down on his purpose.

ALPINE NOTES

ENTERING SWITZERLAND BERNE ITS BEAUTIES AND BEARS

If you come to Bale, you should take rooms on the river, or stand on the bridge at evening, and have a sunset of gold and crimson streaming down upon the wide and strong Rhine, where it rushes between the houses built plumb up to it, or you will not care much for the city. And yet it is pleasant on the high ground, where are some stately buildings, and where new gardens are laid out, and where the American consul on the Fourth of July flies our flag over the balcony of a little cottage smothered in vines and gay with flowers. I had the honor of saluting it that day, though I did not know at the time that gold had risen two or three per cent. under its blessed folds at home. Not being a shipwrecked sailor, or a versatile and accomplished but impoverished naturalized citizen, desirous of quick transit to the land of the free, I did not call upon the consul, but left him under the no doubt correct impression that he was doing a good thing by unfolding the flag on the Fourth.

You have not journeyed far from Bale before you are aware that you are in Switzerland. It was showery the day we went down; but the ride filled us with the most exciting expectations. The country recalled New England, or what New England might be, if it were cultivated and adorned, and had good roads and no fences. Here at last, after the dusty German valleys, we entered among real hills, round which and through which, by enormous tunnels, our train slowly went: rocks looking out of foliage; sweet little valleys, green as in early spring; the dark evergreens in contrast; snug cottages nestled in the hillsides, showing little else than enormous brown roofs that come nearly to the ground, giving the cottages the appearance of huge toadstools; fine harvests of grain; thrifty apple-trees, and cherry- trees purple with luscious fruit. And this shifting panorama continues until, towards evening, behold, on a hill, Berne, shining through showers, the old feudal round tower and buildings overhanging the Aar, and the tower of the cathedral over all. From the balcony of our rooms at the Bellevue, the long range of the Bernese Oberland shows its white summits for a moment in the slant sunshine, and then the clouds shut down, not to lift again for two days. Yet it looks warmer on the snow-peaks than in Berne, for summer sets in in Switzerland with a New England chill and rigor.

The traveler finds no city with more flavor of the picturesque and quaint than Berne; and I think it must have preserved the Swiss characteristics better than any other of the large towns in Helvetia. It stands upon a peninsula, round which the Aar, a hundred feet below, rapidly flows; and one has on nearly every side very pretty views of the green basin of hills which rise beyond the river. It is a most comfortable town on a rainy day; for all the principal streets have their houses built on arcades, and one walks under the low arches, with the shops on one side and the huge stone pillars on the other. These pillars so stand out toward the street as to give the house-fronts a curved look. Above are balconies, in which, upon red cushions, sit the daughters of Berne, reading and sewing, and watching their neighbors; and in nearly every window are quantities of flowers of the most brilliant colors. The gray stone of the houses, which are piled up from the streets, harmonizes well with the colors in the windows and balconies, and the scene is quite Oriental as one looks down, especially if it be upon a market morning, when the streets are as thronged as the Strand. Several terraces, with great trees, overlook the river, and command prospects of the Alps. These are public places; for the city government has a queer notion that trees are not hideous, and that a part of the use of living is the enjoyment of the beautiful. I saw an elegant bank building, with carved figures on the front, and at each side of the entrance door a large stand of flowers,—oleanders, geraniums, and fuchsias; while the windows and balconies above bloomed with a like warmth of floral color. Would you put an American bank president in the Retreat who should so decorate his banking-house? We all admire the tasteful display of flowers in foreign towns: we go home, and carry nothing with us but a recollection. But Berne has also fountains everywhere; some of them grotesque, like the ogre that devours his own children, but all a refreshment and delight. And it has also its clock-tower, with one of those ingenious pieces of mechanism, in which the sober people of this region take pleasure. At the hour, a procession of little bears goes round, a jolly figure strikes the time, a cock flaps his wings and crows, and a solemn Turk opens his mouth to announce the flight of the hours. It is more grotesque, but less elaborate, than the equally childish toy in the cathedral at Strasburg.

We went Sunday morning to the cathedral; and the excellent woman who guards the portal—where in ancient stone the Last Judgment is enacted, and the cheerful and conceited wise virgins stand over against the foolish virgins, one of whom has been in the penitential attitude of having a stone finger in her eye now for over three hundred years—refused at first to admit us to the German Lutheran service, which was just beginning. It seems that doors are locked, and no one is allowed to issue forth until after service. There seems to be an impression that strangers go only to hear the organ, which is a sort of rival of that at Freiburg, and do not care much for the well-prepared and protracted discourse in Swiss-German. We agreed to the terms of admission; but it did not speak well for former travelers that the woman should think it necessary to say, "You must sit still, and not talk." It is a barn-like interior. The women all sit on hard, high-backed benches in the center of the church, and the men on hard, higher-backed benches about the sides, inclosing and facing the women, who are more directly under the droppings of the little pulpit, hung on one of the pillars,—a very solemn and devout congregation, who sang very well, and paid strict attention to the sermon.

I noticed that the names of the owners, and sometimes their coats-of- arms, were carved or painted on the backs of the seats, as if the pews were not put up at yearly auction. One would not call it a dressy congregation, though the homely women looked neat in black waists and white puffed sleeves and broadbrimmed hats.

The only concession I have anywhere seen to women in Switzerland, as the more delicate sex, was in this church: they sat during most of the service, but the men stood all the time, except during the delivery of the sermon. The service began at nine o'clock, as it ought to with us in summer. The costume of the peasant women in and about Berne comes nearer to being picturesque than in most other parts of Switzerland, where it is simply ugly. You know the sort of thing in pictures,—the broad hat, short skirt) black, pointed stomacher, with white puffed sleeves, and from each breast a large silver chain hanging, which passes under the arm and fastens on the shoulder behind,—a very favorite ornament. This costume would not be unbecoming to a pretty face and figure: whether there are any such native to Switzerland, I trust I may not be put upon the witness- stand to declare. Some of the peasant young men went without coats, and with the shirt sleeves fluted; and others wore butternut-colored suits, the coats of which I can recommend to those who like the swallow-tailed variety. I suppose one would take a man into the opera in London, where he cannot go in anything but that sort. The buttons on the backs of these came high up between the shoulders, and the tails did not reach below the waistband. There is a kind of rooster of similar appearance. I saw some of these young men from the country, with their sweethearts, leaning over the stone parapet, and looking into the pit of the bear-garden, where the city bears walk round, or sit on their hind legs for bits of bread thrown to them, or douse themselves in the tanks, or climb the dead trees set up for their gambols. Years ago they ate up a British officer who fell in; and they walk round now ceaselessly, as if looking for another. But one cannot expect good taste in a bear.

If you would see how charming a farming country can be, drive out on the highway towards Thun. For miles it is well shaded with giant trees of enormous trunks, and a clean sidewalk runs by the fine road. On either side, at little distances from the road, are picturesque cottages and rambling old farmhouses peeping from the trees and vines and flowers. Everywhere flowers, before the house, in the windows, at the railway stations. But one cannot stay forever even in delightful Berne, with its fountains and terraces, and girls on red cushions in the windows, and noble trees and flowers, and its stately federal Capitol, and its bears carved everywhere in stone and wood, and its sunrises, when all the Bernese Alps lie like molten silver in the early light, and the clouds drift over them, now hiding, now disclosing, the enchanting heights.

HEARING THE FREIBURG ORGAN—FIRST SIGHT OF LAKE LEMAN

Freiburg, with its aerial suspension-bridges, is also on a peninsula, formed by the Sarine; with its old walls, old watch-towers, its piled-up old houses, and streets that go upstairs, and its delicious cherries, which you can eat while you sit in the square by the famous linden-tree, and wait for the time when the organ will be played in the cathedral. For all the world stops at Freiburg to hear and enjoy the great organ,—all except the self-satisfied English clergyman, who says he does n't care much for it, and would rather go about town and see the old walls; and the young and boorish French couple, whose refined amusement in the railway-carriage consisted in the young man's catching his wife's foot in the window-strap, and hauling it up to the level of the window, and who cross themselves and go out after the first tune; and the two bread-and-butter English young ladies, one of whom asks the other in the midst of the performance, if she has thought yet to count the pipes,—a thoughtful verification of Murray, which is very commendable in a young woman traveling for the improvement of her little mind.

One has heard so much of this organ, that he expects impossibilities, and is at first almost disappointed, although it is not long in discovering its vast compass, and its wonderful imitations, now of a full orchestra, and again of a single instrument. One has not to wait long before he is mastered by its spell. The vox humana stop did not strike me as so perfect as that of the organ in the Rev. Mr. Hale's church in Boston, though the imitation of choir-voices responding to the organ was very effective. But it is not in tricks of imitation that this organ is so wonderful: it is its power of revealing, by all its compass, the inmost part of any musical composition.

The last piece we heard was something like this: the sound of a bell, tolling at regular intervals, like the throbbing of a life begun; about it an accompaniment of hopes, inducements, fears, the flute, the violin, the violoncello, promising, urging, entreating, inspiring; the life beset with trials, lured with pleasures, hesitating, doubting, questioning; its purpose at length grows more certain and fixed, the bell tolling becomes a prolonged undertone, the flow of a definite life; the music goes on, twining round it, now one sweet instrument and now many, in strife or accord, all the influences of earth and heaven and the base underworld meeting and warring over the aspiring soul; the struggle becomes more earnest, the undertone is louder and clearer; the accompaniment indicates striving, contesting passion, an agony of endeavor and resistance, until at length the steep and rocky way is passed, the world and self are conquered, and, in a burst of triumph from a full orchestra, the soul attains the serene summit. But the rest is only for a moment. Even in the highest places are temptations. The sunshine fails, clouds roll up, growling of low, pedal thunder is heard, while sharp lightning-flashes soon break in clashing peals about the peaks. This is the last Alpine storm and trial. After it the sun bursts out again, the wide, sunny valleys are disclosed, and a sweet evening hymn floats through all the peaceful air. We go out from the cool church into the busy streets of the white, gray town awed and comforted.

And such a ride afterwards! It was as if the organ music still continued. All the world knows the exquisite views southward from Freiburg; but such an atmosphere as we had does not overhang them many times in a season. First the Moleross, and a range of mountains bathed in misty blue light,—rugged peaks, scarred sides, white and tawny at once, rising into the clouds which hung large and soft in the blue; soon Mont Blanc, dim and aerial, in the south; the lovely valley of the River Sense; peasants walking with burdens on the white highway; the quiet and soft-tinted mountains beyond; towns perched on hills, with old castles and towers; the land rich with grass, grain, fruit, flowers; at Palezieux a magnificent view of the silver, purple, and blue mountains, with their chalky seams and gashed sides, near at hand; and at length, coming through a long tunnel, as if we had been shot out into the air above a country more surprising than any in dreams, the most wonderful sight burst upon us,—the low-lying, deep-blue Lake Leman, and the gigantic mountains rising from its shores, and a sort of mist, translucent, suffused with sunlight, like the liquid of the golden wine the Steinberger poured into the vast basin. We came upon it out of total darkness, without warning; and we seemed, from our great height, to be about to leap into the splendid gulf of tremulous light and color.

This Lake of Geneva is said to combine the robust mountain grandeur of Luzerne with all the softness of atmosphere of Lake Maggiore. Surely, nothing could exceed the loveliness as we wound down the hillside, through the vineyards, to Lausanne, and farther on, near the foot of the lake, to Montreux, backed by precipitous but tree-clad hills, fronted by the lovely water, and the great mountains which run away south into Savoy, where Velan lifts up its snows. Below us, round the curving bay, lies white Chillon; and at sunset we row down to it over the bewitched water, and wait under its grim walls till the failing light brings back the romance of castle and prisoner. Our garcon had never heard of the prisoner; but he knew about the gendarmes who now occupy the castle.

OUR ENGLISH FRIENDS

Not the least of the traveler's pleasure in Switzerland is derived from the English people who overrun it: they seem to regard it as a kind of private park or preserve belonging to England; and they establish themselves at hotels, or on steamboats and diligences, with a certain air of ownership that is very pleasant. I am not very fresh in my geology; but it is my impression that Switzerland was created especially for the English, about the year of the Magna Charta, or a little later. The Germans who come here, and who don't care very much what they eat, or how they sleep, provided they do not have any fresh air in diningroom or bedroom, and provided, also, that the bread is a little sour, growl a good deal about the English, and declare that they have spoiled Switzerland. The natives, too, who live off the English, seem to thoroughly hate them; so that one is often compelled, in self-defense, to proclaim his nationality, which is like running from Scylla upon Charybdis; for, while the American is more popular, it is believed that there is no bottom to his pocket.

There was a sprig of the Church of England on the steamboat on Lake Leman, who spread himself upon a center bench, and discoursed very instructively to his friends,—a stout, fat-faced young man in a white cravat, whose voice was at once loud and melodious, and whom our manly Oxford student set down as a man who had just rubbed through the university, and got into a scanty living.

"I met an American on the boat yesterday," the oracle was saying to his friends, "who was really quite a pleasant fellow. He—ah really was, you know, quite a sensible man. I asked him if they had anything like this in America; and he was obliged to say that they had n't anything like it in his country; they really had n't. He was really quite a sensible fellow; said he was over here to do the European tour, as he called it."

Small, sympathetic laugh from the attentive, wiry, red-faced woman on the oracle's left, and also a chuckle, at the expense of the American, from the thin Englishman on his right, who wore a large white waistcoat, a blue veil on his hat, and a face as red as a live coal.

"Quite an admission, was n't it, from an American? But I think they have changed since the wah, you know."

At the next landing, the smooth and beaming churchman was left by his friends; and he soon retired to the cabin, where I saw him self-sacrificingly denying himself the views on deck, and consoling himself with a substantial lunch and a bottle of English ale.

There is one thing to be said about the English abroad: the variety is almost infinite. The best acquaintances one makes will be English,—people with no nonsense and strong individuality; and one gets no end of entertainment from the other sort. Very different from the clergyman on the boat was the old lady at table-d'hote in one of the hotels on the lake. One would not like to call her a delightfully wicked old woman, like the Baroness Bernstein; but she had her own witty and satirical way of regarding the world. She had lived twenty-five years at Geneva, where people, years ago, coming over the dusty and hot roads of France, used to faint away when they first caught sight of the Alps. Believe they don't do it now. She never did; was past the susceptible age when she first came; was tired of the people. Honest? Why, yes, honest, but very fond of money. Fine Swiss wood-carving? Yes. You'll get very sick of it. It's very nice, but I 'm tired of it. Years ago, I sent some of it home to the folks in England. They thought everything of it; and it was not very nice, either,—a cheap sort. Moral ideas? I don't care for moral ideas: people make such a fuss about them lately (this in reply to her next neighbor, an eccentric, thin man, with bushy hair, shaggy eyebrows, and a high, falsetto voice, who rallied the witty old lady all dinner-time about her lack of moral ideas, and accurately described the thin wine on the table as "water- bewitched"). Why did n't the baroness go back to England, if she was so tired of Switzerland? Well, she was too infirm now; and, besides, she did n't like to trust herself on the railroads. And there were so many new inventions nowadays, of which she read. What was this nitroglycerine, that exploded so dreadfully? No: she thought she should stay where she was.

There is little risk of mistaking the Englishman, with or without his family, who has set out to do Switzerland. He wears a brandy-flask, a field-glass, and a haversack. Whether he has a silk or soft hat, he is certain to wear a veil tied round it. This precaution is adopted when he makes up his mind to come to Switzerland, I think, because he has read that a veil is necessary to protect the eyes from the snow-glare. There is probably not one traveler in a hundred who gets among the ice and snow-fields where he needs a veil or green glasses: but it is well to have it on the hat; it looks adventurous. The veil and the spiked alpenstock are the signs of peril. Everybody—almost everybody—has an alpenstock. It is usually a round pine stick, with an iron spike in one end. That, also, is a sign of peril. We saw a noble young Briton on the steamer the other day, who was got up in the best Alpine manner. He wore a short sack,—in fact, an entire suit of light gray flannel, which closely fitted his lithe form. His shoes were of undressed leather, with large spikes in the soles; and on his white hat he wore a large quantity of gauze, which fell in folds down his neck. I am sorry to say that he had a red face, a shaven chin, and long side-whiskers. He carried a formidable alpenstock; and at the little landing where we first saw him, and afterward on the boat, he leaned on it in a series of the most graceful and daring attitudes that I ever saw the human form assume. Our Oxford student knew the variety, and guessed rightly that he was an army man. He had his face burned at Malta. Had he been over the Gemmi? Or up this or that mountain? asked another English officer. "No, I have not." And it turned out that he had n't been anywhere, and did n't seem likely to do anything but show himself at the frequented valley places. And yet I never saw one whose gallant bearing I so much admired. We saw him afterward at Interlaken, enduring all the hardships of that fashionable place. There was also there another of the same country, got up for the most dangerous Alpine climbing, conspicuous in red woolen stockings that came above his knees. I could not learn that he ever went up anything higher than the top of a diligence.

THE DILIGENCE TO CHAMOUNY

The greatest diligence we have seen, one of the few of the old-fashioned sort, is the one from Geneva to Chamouny. It leaves early in the morning; and there is always a crowd about it to see the mount and start. The great ark stands before the diligence-office, and, for half an hour before the hour of starting, the porters are busy stowing away the baggage, and getting the passengers on board. On top, in the banquette, are seats for eight, besides the postilion and guard; in the coup6, under the postilion's seat and looking upon the horses, seats for three; in the interior, for three; and on top, behind, for six or eight. The baggage is stowed in the capacious bowels of the vehicle. At seven, the six horses are brought out and hitched on, three abreast. We climb up a ladder to the banquette: there is an irascible Frenchman, who gets into the wrong seat; and before he gets right there is a terrible war of words between him and the guard and the porters and the hostlers, everybody joining in with great vivacity; in front of us are three quiet Americans, and a slim Frenchman with a tall hat and one eye-glass. The postilion gets up to his place. Crack, crack, crack, goes the whip; and, amid "sensation" from the crowd, we are off at a rattling pace, the whip cracking all the time like Chinese fireworks. The great passion of the drivers is noise; and they keep the whip going all day. No sooner does a fresh one mount the box than he gives a half-dozen preliminary snaps; to which the horses pay no heed, as they know it is only for the driver's amusement. We go at a good gait, changing horses every six miles, till we reach the Baths of St. Gervais, where we dine, from near which we get our first glimpse of Mont Blanc through clouds,—a section of a dazzlingly white glacier, a very exciting thing to the imagination. Thence we go on in small carriages, over a still excellent but more hilly road, and begin to enter the real mountain wonders; until, at length, real glaciers pouring down out of the clouds nearly to the road meet us, and we enter the narrow Valley of Chamouny, through which we drive to the village in a rain.

Everybody goes to Chamouny, and up the Flegere, and to Montanvert, and over the Mer de Glace; and nearly everybody down the Mauvais Pas to the Chapeau, and so back to the village. It is all easy to do; and yet we saw some French people at the Chapeau who seemed to think they had accomplished the most hazardous thing in the world in coming down the rocks of the Mauvais Pas. There is, as might be expected, a great deal of humbug about the difficulty of getting about in the Alps, and the necessity of guides. Most of the dangers vanish on near approach. The Mer de Glace is inferior to many other glaciers, and is not nearly so fine as the Glacier des Bossons: but it has a reputation, and is easy of access; so people are content to walk over the dirty ice. One sees it to better effect from below, or he must ascend it to the Jardin to know that it has deep crevasses, and is as treacherous as it is grand. And yet no one will be disappointed at the view from Montanvert, of the upper glacier, and the needles of rock and snow which rise beyond.

We met at the Chapeau two jolly young fellows from Charleston, S. C. who had been in the war, on the wrong side. They knew no language but American, and were unable to order a cutlet and an omelet for breakfast. They said they believed they were going over the Tete Noire. They supposed they had four mules waiting for them somewhere, and a guide; but they couldn't understand a word he said, and he couldn't understand them. The day before, they had nearly perished of thirst, because they could n't make their guide comprehend that they wanted water. One of them had slung over his shoulder an Alpine horn, which he blew occasionally, and seemed much to enjoy. All this while we sit on a rock at the foot of the Mauvais Pas, looking out upon the green glacier, which here piles itself up finely, and above to the Aiguilles de Charmoz and the innumerable ice-pinnacles that run up to the clouds, while our muleteer is getting his breakfast. This is his third breakfast this morning.

The day after we reached Chamouny, Monseigneur the bishop arrived there on one of his rare pilgrimages into these wild valleys. Nearly all the way down from Geneva, we had seen signs of his coming, in preparations as for the celebration of a great victory. I did not know at first but the Atlantic cable had been laid; or rather that the decorations were on account of the news of it reaching this region. It was a holiday for all classes; and everybody lent a hand to the preparations. First, the little church where the confirmations were to take place was trimmed within and without; and an arch of green spanned the gateway. At Les Pres, the women were sweeping the road, and the men were setting small evergreen-trees on each side. The peasants were in their best clothes; and in front of their wretched hovels were tables set out with flowers. So cheerful and eager were they about the bishop, that they forgot to beg as we passed: the whole valley was in a fever of expectation. At one hamlet on the mulepath over the Tete Noire, where the bishop was that day expected, and the women were sweeping away all dust and litter from the road, I removed my hat, and gravely thanked them for their thoughtful preparation for our coming. But they only stared a little, as if we were not worthy to be even forerunners of Monseigneur.

I do not care to write here how serious a drawback to the pleasures of this region are its inhabitants. You get the impression that half of them are beggars. The other half are watching for a chance to prey upon you in other ways. I heard of a woman in the Zermatt Valley who refused pay for a glass of milk; but I did not have time to verify the report. Besides the beggars, who may or may not be horrid-looking creatures, there are the grinning Cretins, the old women with skins of parchment and the goitre, and even young children with the loathsome appendage, the most wretched and filthy hovels, and the dirtiest, ugliest people in them. The poor women are the beasts of burden. They often lead, mowing in the hayfield; they carry heavy baskets on their backs; they balance on their heads and carry large washtubs full of water. The more appropriate load of one was a cradle with a baby in it, which seemed not at all to fear falling. When one sees how the women are treated, he does not wonder that there are so many deformed, hideous children. I think the pretty girl has yet to be born in Switzerland.

This is not much about the Alps? Ah, well, the Alps are there. Go read your guide-book, and find out what your emotions are. As I said, everybody goes to Chamouny. Is it not enough to sit at your window, and watch the clouds when they lift from the Mont Blanc range, disclosing splendor after splendor, from the Aiguille de Goute to the Aiguille Verte,—white needles which pierce the air for twelve thousand feet, until, jubilate! the round summit of the monarch himself is visible, and the vast expanse of white snow-fields, the whiteness of which is rather of heaven than of earth, dazzles the eyes, even at so great a distance? Everybody who is patient and waits in the cold and inhospitable-looking valley of the Chamouny long enough, sees Mont Blanc; but every one does not see a sunset of the royal order. The clouds breaking up and clearing, after days of bad weather, showed us height after height, and peak after peak, now wreathing the summits, now settling below or hanging in patches on the sides, and again soaring above, until we had the whole range lying, far and brilliant, in the evening light. The clouds took on gorgeous colors, at length, and soon the snow caught the hue, and whole fields were rosy pink, while uplifted peaks glowed red, as with internal fire. Only Mont Blanc, afar off, remained purely white, in a kind of regal inaccessibility. And, afterward, one star came out over it, and a bright light shone from the hut on the Grand Mulets, a rock in the waste of snow, where a Frenchman was passing the night on his way to the summit.

Shall I describe the passage of the Tete Noire? My friend, it is twenty-four miles, a road somewhat hilly, with splendid views of Mont Blanc in the morning, and of the Bernese Oberland range in the afternoon, when you descend into Martigny,—a hot place in the dusty Rhone Valley, which has a comfortable hotel, with a pleasant garden, in which you sit after dinner and let the mosquitoes eat you.

THE MAN WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH

It was eleven o'clock at night when we reached Sion, a dirty little town at the end of the Rhone Valley Railway, and got into the omnibus for the hotel; and it was also dark and rainy. They speak German in this part of Switzerland, or what is called German. There were two very pleasant Americans, who spoke American, going on in the diligence at half-past five in the morning, on their way over the Simplex. One of them was accustomed to speak good, broad English very distinctly to all races; and he seemed to expect that he must be understood if he repeated his observations in a louder tone, as he always did. I think he would force all this country to speak English in two months. We all desired to secure places in the diligence, which was likely to be full, as is usually the case when a railway discharges itself into a postroad.

We were scarcely in the omnibus, when the gentleman said to the conductor:

"I want two places in the coupe of the diligence in the morning. Can
I have them? "

"Yah" replied the good-natured German, who did n't understand a word.

"Two places, diligence, coupe, morning. Is it full?"

"Yah," replied the accommodating fellow. "Hotel man spik English."

I suggested the banquette as desirable, if it could be obtained, and the German was equally willing to give it to us. Descending from the omnibus at the hotel, in a drizzling rain, and amidst a crowd of porters and postilions and runners, the "man who spoke English" immediately presented himself; and upon him the American pounced with a torrent of questions. He was a willing, lively little waiter, with his moony face on the top of his head; and he jumped round in the rain like a parching pea, rolling his head about in the funniest manner.

The American steadied the little man by the collar, and began, "I want to secure two seats in the coupe of the diligence in the. morning."

"Yaas," jumping round, and looking from one to another. "Diligence, coupe, morning."

"I—want—two seats—in—coupe. If I can't get them, two—in— banquette."

"Yaas banquette, coupe,—yaas, diligence."

"Do you understand? Two seats, diligence, Simplon, morning. Will you get them?"

"Oh, yaas! morning, diligence. Yaas, sirr."

"Hang the fellow! Where is the office? "And the gentleman left the spry little waiter bobbing about in the middle of the street, speaking English, but probably comprehending nothing that was said to him. I inquired the way to the office of the conductor: it was closed, but would soon be open, and I waited; and at length the official, a stout Frenchman, appeared, and I secured places in the interior, the only ones to be had to Visp. I had seen a diligence at the door with three places in the coupe, and one perched behind; no banquette. The office is brightly lighted; people are waiting to secure places; there is the usual crowd of loafers, men and women, and the Frenchman sits at his desk. Enter the American.

"I want two places in coupe, in the morning. Or banquette. Two places, diligence." The official waves him off, and says something.

"What does he say?"

"He tells you to sit down on that bench till he is ready."

Soon the Frenchman has run over his big waybills, and turns to us.

"I want two places in the diligence, coupe," etc, etc, says the
American.

This remark being lost on the official, I explain to him as well as I can what is wanted, at first,—two places in the coupe.

"One is taken," is his reply.

"The gentleman will take two," I said, having in mind the diligence in the yard, with three places in the coupe.

"One is taken," he repeats.

"Then the gentleman will take the other two."

"One is taken! "he cries, jumping up and smiting the table,—" one is taken, I tell you!"

"How many are there in the coupe?"

"TWO."

"Oh! then the gentleman will take the one remaining in the coupe and the one on top."

So it is arranged. When I come back to the hotel, the Americans are explaining to the lively waiter "who speaks English" that they are to go in the diligence at half-past five, and that they are to be called at half-past four and have breakfast. He knows all about it,— "Diligence, half-past four breakfast, Oh, yaas!" While I have been at the diligence-office, my companions have secured room and gone to them; and I ask the waiter to show m to my room. First, however, I tell him that we three two ladies and myself, who came together, are going in the diligence at half-past five, and want to be called and have breakfaSt. Did he comprehend?

"Yaas," rolling his face about on the top of his head violently.
"You three gentleman want breakfast. What you have?"

I had told him before what we would I have, an now I gave up all hope of keeping our parties separate in his mind; so I said, "Five persons want breakfast at five o'clock. Five persons, five hours. Call all of them at half-past four." And I repeated it, and made him repeat it in English and French. He then insisted on putting me into the room of one of the American gentlemen and then he knocked at the door of a lady, who cried out in indignation at being disturbed; and, finally, I found my room. At the door I reiterated the instructions for the morning; and he cheerfully bade me good-night. But he almost immediately came back, and poked in his head with,—

"Is you go by de diligence?"

"Yes, you stupid."

In the morning one of our party was called at halfpast three, and saved the rest of us from a like fate; and we were not aroused at all, but woke early enough to get down and find the diligence nearly ready, and no breakfast, but "the man who spoke English " as lively as ever. And we had a breakfast brought out, so filthy in all respects that nobody could eat it. Fortunately, there was not time to seriously try; but we paid for it, and departed. The two American gentlemen sat in front of the house, waiting. The lively waiter had called them at half-past three, for the railway train, instead of the diligence; and they had their wretched breakfast early. They will remember the funny adventure with "the man who speaks English," and, no doubt, unite with us in warmly commending the Hotel Lion d'Or at Sion as the nastiest inn in Switzerland.

A WALK TO THE GORNER GRAT

When one leaves the dusty Rhone Valley, and turns southward from Visp, he plunges into the wildest and most savage part of Switzerland, and penetrates the heart of the Alps. The valley is scarcely more than a narrow gorge, with high precipices on either side, through which the turbid and rapid Visp tears along at a furious rate, boiling and leaping in foam over its rocky bed, and nearly as large as the Rhone at the junction. From Visp to St. Nicolaus, twelve miles, there is only a mule-path, but a very good one, winding along on the slope, sometimes high up, and again descending to cross the stream, at first by vineyards and high stone walls, and then on the edges of precipices, but always romantic and wild. It is noon when we set out from Visp, in true pilgrim fashion, and the sun is at first hot; but as we slowly rise up the easy ascent, we get a breeze, and forget the heat in the varied charms of the walk.

Everything for the use of the upper valley and Zermatt, now a place of considerable resort, must be carried by porters, or on horseback; and we pass or meet men and women, sometimes a dozen of them together, laboring along under the long, heavy baskets, broad at the top and coming nearly to a point below, which are universally used here for carrying everything. The tubs for transporting water are of the same sort. There is no level ground, but every foot is cultivated. High up on the sides of the precipices, where it seems impossible for a goat to climb, are vineyards and houses, and even villages, hung on slopes, nearly up to the clouds, and with no visible way of communication with the rest of the world.

In two hours' time we are at Stalden, a village perched upon a rocky promontory, at the junction of the valleys of the Saas and the Visp, with a church and white tower conspicuous from afar. We climb up to the terrace in front of it, on our way into the town. A seedy- looking priest is pacing up and down, taking the fresh breeze, his broad-brimmed, shabby hat held down upon the wall by a big stone. His clothes are worn threadbare; and he looks as thin and poor as a Methodist minister in a stony town at home, on three hundred a year. He politely returns our salutation, and we walk on. Nearly all the priests in this region look wretchedly poor,—as poor as the people. Through crooked, narrow streets, with houses overhanging and thrusting out corners and gables, houses with stables below, and quaint carvings and odd little windows above, the panes of glass hexagons, so that the windows looked like sections of honey-comb,—we found our way to the inn, a many-storied chalet, with stairs on the outside, stone floors in the upper passages, and no end of queer rooms; built right in the midst of other houses as odd, decorated with German-text carving, from the windows of which the occupants could look in upon us, if they had cared to do so; but they did not. They seem little interested in anything; and no wonder, with their hard fight with Nature. Below is a wine-shop, with a little side booth, in which some German travelers sit drinking their wine, and sputtering away in harsh gutturals. The inn is very neat inside, and we are well served. Stalden is high; but away above it on the opposite side is a village on the steep slope, with a slender white spire that rivals some of the snowy needles. Stalden is high, but the hill on which it stands is rich in grass. The secret of the fertile meadows is the most thorough irrigation. Water is carried along the banks from the river, and distributed by numerous sluiceways below; and above, the little mountain streams are brought where they are needed by artificial channels. Old men and women in the fields were constantly changing the direction of the currents. All the inhabitants appeared to be porters: women were transporting on their backs baskets full of soil; hay was being backed to the stables; burden-bearers were coming and going upon the road: we were told that there are only three horses in the place. There is a pleasant girl who brings us luncheon at the inn; but the inhabitants for the most part are as hideous as those we see all day: some have hardly the shape of human beings, and they all live in the most filthy manner in the dirtiest habitations. A chalet is a sweet thing when you buy a little model of it at home.

After we leave Stalden, the walk becomes more picturesque, the precipices are higher, the gorges deeper. It required some engineering to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the ravines. Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,—a very considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the gorge of the Visp. Switzerland may not have so much population to the square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of her square miles that would astonish some parts of the earth's surface elsewhere. Farther on we saw a faint, zigzag footpath, that we conjectured led to Emd; but it might lead up to heaven. All day we had been solicited for charity by squalid little children, who kiss their nasty little paws at us, and ask for centimes. The children of Emd, however, did not trouble us. It must be a serious affair if they ever roll out of bed.

Late in the afternoon thunder began to tumble about the hills, and clouds snatched away from our sight the snow-peaks at the end of the valley; and at length the rain fell on those who had just arrived and on the unjust. We took refuge from the hardest of it in a lonely chalet high up on the hillside, where a roughly dressed, frowzy Swiss, who spoke bad German, and said he was a schoolmaster, gave us a bench in the shed of his schoolroom. He had only two pupils in attendance, and I did not get a very favorable impression of this high school. Its master quite overcame us with thanks when we gave him a few centimes on leaving. It still rained, and we arrived in St. Nicolaus quite damp.

There is a decent road from St. Nicolaus to Zermatt, over which go wagons without springs. The scenery is constantly grander as we ascend. The day is not wholly clear; but high on our right are the vast snow-fields of the Weishorn, and out of the very clouds near it seems to pour the Bies Glacier. In front are the splendid Briethorn, with its white, round summit; the black Riffelhorn; the sharp peak of the little Matterhorn; and at last the giant Matterhorn itself rising before us, the most finished and impressive single mountain in Switzerland. Not so high as Mont Blanc by a thousand feet, it appears immense in its isolated position and its slender aspiration. It is a huge pillar of rock, with sharply cut edges, rising to a defined point, dusted with snow, so that the rock is only here and there revealed. To ascend it seems as impossible as to go up the Column of Luxor; and one can believe that the gentlemen who first attempted it in 1864, and lost their lives, did fall four thousand feet before their bodies rested on the glacier below.

We did not stay at Zermatt, but pushed on for the hotel on the top of the Riffelberg,—a very stiff and tiresome climb of about three hours, an unending pull up a stony footpath. Within an hour of the top, and when the white hotel is in sight above the zigzag on the breast of the precipice, we reach a green and widespread Alp where hundreds of cows are feeding, watched by two forlorn women,—the "milkmaids all forlorn " of poetry. At the rude chalets we stop, and get draughts of rich, sweet cream. As we wind up the slope, the tinkling of multitudinous bells from the herd comes to us, which is also in the domain of poetry. All the way up,we have found wild flowers in the greatest profusion; and the higher we ascend, the more exquisite is their color and the more perfect their form. There are pansies; gentians of a deeper blue than flower ever was before; forget-me-nots, a pink variety among them; violets, the Alpine rose and the Alpine violet; delicate pink flowers of moss; harebells; and quantities for which we know no names, more exquisite in shape and color than the choicest products of the greenhouse. Large slopes are covered with them,—a brilliant show to the eye, and most pleasantly beguiling the way of its tediousness. As high as I ascended, I still found some of these delicate flowers, the pink moss growing in profusion amongst the rocks of the GornerGrat, and close to the snowdrifts.

The inn on the Riffelberg is nearly eight thousand feet high, almost two thousand feet above the hut on Mount Washington; yet it is not so cold and desolate as the latter. Grass grows and flowers bloom on its smooth upland, and behind it and in front of it are the snow-peaks. That evening we essayed the Gorner-Grat, a rocky ledge nearly ten thousand feet above the level of the sea; but after a climb of an hour and a half, and a good view of Monte Rosa and the glaciers and peaks of that range, we were prevented from reaching the summit, and driven back by a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next morning I started for the GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk sharply against the sky, except where fleecy clouds lightly draped it and fantastically blew about it. As I ascended, and turned to look at it, its beautifully cut peak had caught the first ray of the sun, and burned with a rosy glow. Some great clouds drifted high in the air: the summits of the Breithorn, the Lyscamm, and their companions, lay cold and white; but the snow down their sides had a tinge of pink. When I stood upon the summit of the Gorner-Grat, the two prominent silver peaks of Monte Rosa were just touched with the sun, and its great snow-fields were visible to the glacier at its base. The Gorner-Grat is a rounded ridge of rock, entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The panorama from it is unexcelled in Switzerland.

Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great waste of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left sleeping at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp. Lured on by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the ridge, she had climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and come to meet me. She also had seen the great peaks lift themselves out of the gray dawn, and Monte Rosa catch the first rays. We stood awhile together to see how jocund day ran hither and thither along the mountain-tops, until the light was all abroad, and then silently turned downward, as one goes from a mount of devotion

THE BATHS OF LEUK

In order to make the pass of the Gemmi, it is necessary to go through the Baths of Leuk. The ascent from the Rhone bridge at Susten is full of interest, affording fine views of the valley, which is better to look at than to travel through, and bringing you almost immediately to the old town of Leuk, a queer, old, towered place, perched on a precipice, with the oddest inn, and a notice posted up to the effect, that any one who drives through its steep streets faster than a walk will be fined five francs. I paid nothing extra for a fast walk. The road, which is one of the best in the country, is a wonderful piece of engineering, spanning streams, cut in rock, rounding precipices, following the wild valley of the Dala by many a winding and zigzag.

The Baths of Leuk, or Loeche-les-Bains, or Leukerbad, is a little village at the very head of the valley, over four thousand feet above the sea, and overhung by the perpendicular walls of the Gemmi, which rise on all sides, except the south, on an average of two thousand feet above it. There is a nest of brown houses, clustered together like bee-hives, into which the few inhabitants creep to hibernate in the long winters, and several shops, grand hotels, and bathing-houses open for the season. Innumerable springs issue out of this green, sloping meadow among the mountains, some of them icy cold, but over twenty of them hot, and seasoned with a great many disagreeable sulphates, carbonates, and oxides, and varying in temperature from ninety-five to one hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Italians, French, and Swiss resort here in great numbers to take the baths, which are supposed to be very efficacious for rheumatism and cutaneous affections. Doubtless many of them do up their bathing for the year while here; and they may need no more after scalding and soaking in this water for a couple of months.

Before we reached the hotel, we turned aside into one of the bath-houses. We stood inhaling a sickly steam in a large, close hall, which was wholly occupied by a huge vat, across which low partitions, with bridges, ran, dividing it into four compartments. When we entered, we were assailed with yells in many languages, and howls in the common tongue, as if all the fiends of the pit had broken loose. We took off our hats in obedience to the demand; but the clamor did not wholly subside, and was mingled with singing and horrible laughter. Floating about in each vat, we at first saw twenty or thirty human heads. The women could be distinguished from the men by the manner of dressing the hair. Each wore a loose woolen gown. Each had a little table floating before him or her, which he or she pushed about at pleasure. One wore a hideous mask; another kept diving in the opaque pool and coming up to blow, like the hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens; some were taking a lunch from their tables, others playing chess; some sitting on the benches round the edges, with only heads out of water, as doleful as owls, while others roamed about, engaged in the game of spattering with their comrades, and sang and shouted at the top of their voices. The people in this bath were said to be second class; but they looked as well and behaved better than those of the first class, whom we saw in the establishment at our hotel afterward.

It may be a valuable scientific fact, that the water in these vats, in which people of all sexes, all diseases, and all nations spend so many hours of the twenty-four, is changed once a day. The temperature at which the bath is given is ninety-eight. The water is let in at night, and allowed to cool. At five in the morning, the bathers enter it, and remain until ten o'clock,—five hours, having breakfast served to them on the floating tables, "as they sail, as they sail." They then have a respite till two, and go in till five. Eight hours in hot water! Nothing can be more disgusting than the sight of these baths. Gustave Dore must have learned here how to make those ghostly pictures of the lost floating about in the Stygian pools, in his illustrations of the Inferno; and the rocks and cavernous precipices may have enabled him to complete the picture. On what principle cures are effected in these filthy vats, I could not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many diseases meet and mingle in one swashing fluid, they neutralize each other. It may be that the action is that happily explained by one of the Hibernian bathmen in an American water-cure establishment. "You see, sir," said he, "that the shock of the water unites with the electricity of the system, and explodes the disease." I should think that the shock to one's feeling of decency and cleanliness, at these baths, would explode any disease in Europe. But, whatever the result may be, I am not sorry to see so many French and Italians soak themselves once a year.

Out of the bath these people seem to enjoy life. There is a long promenade, shaded and picturesque, which they take at evening, sometimes as far as the Ladders, eight of which are fastened, in a shackling manner, to the perpendicular rocks,—a high and somewhat dangerous ascent to the village of Albinen, but undertaken constantly by peasants with baskets on their backs. It is in winter the only mode Leukerbad has of communicating with the world; and in summer it is the only way of reaching Albinen, except by a long journey down the Dala and up another valley and height. The bathers were certainly very lively and social at table-d'hote, where we had the pleasure of meeting some hundred of them, dressed. It was presumed that the baths were the subject of the entertaining conversation; for I read in a charming little work which sets forth the delights of Leuk, that La poussee forms the staple of most of the talk. La poussee, or, as this book poetically calls it, "that daughter of the waters of Loeche," "that eruption of which we have already spoken, and which proves the action of the baths upon the skin,"—becomes the object, and often the end, of all conversation. And it gives specimens of this pleasant converse, as:

"Comment va votre poussee?"

"Avez-vous la poussee?"

"Je suis en pleine poussee"

"Ma poussee s'est fort bien passee!"

Indeed says this entertaining tract, sans poussee, one would not be able to hold, at table or in the salon, with a neighbor of either sex, the least conversation. Further, it is by grace a la poussee that one arrives at those intimacies which are the characteristics of the baths. Blessed, then, be La poussee, which renders possible such a high society and such select and entertaining conversation! Long may the bathers of Leuk live to soak and converse! In the morning, when we departed for the ascent of the Gemmi, we passed one of the bathing-houses. I fancied that a hot steam issued out of the crevices; from within came a discord of singing and caterwauling; and, as a door swung open, I saw that the heads floating about on the turbid tide were eating breakfast from the swimming tables.

OVER THE GEMMI

I spent some time, the evening before, studying the face of the cliff we were to ascend, to discover the path; but I could only trace its zigzag beginning. When we came to the base of the rock, we found a way cut, a narrow path, most of the distance hewn out of the rock, winding upward along the face of the precipice. The view, as one rises, is of the break-neck description. The way is really safe enough, even on mule-back, ascending; but one would be foolhardy to ride down. We met a lady on the summit who was about to be carried down on a chair; and she seemed quite to like the mode of conveyance: she had harnessed her husband in temporarily for one of the bearers, which made it still more jolly for her. When we started, a cloud of mist hung over the edge of the rocks. As we rose, it descended to meet us, and sunk below, hiding the valley and its houses, which had looked like Swiss toys from our height. When we reached the summit, the mist came boiling up after us, rising like a thick wall to the sky, and hiding all that great mountain range, the Vallais Alps, from which we had come, and which we hoped to see from this point. Fortunately, there were no clouds on the other side, and we looked down into a magnificent rocky basin, encircled by broken and overtopping crags and snow-fields, at the bottom of which was a green lake. It is one of the wildest of scenes.

An hour from the summit, we came to a green Alp, where a herd of cows were feeding; and in the midst of it were three or four dirty chalets, where pigs, chickens, cattle, and animals constructed very much like human beings, lived; yet I have nothing to say against these chalets, for we had excellent cream there. We had, on the way down, fine views of the snowy Altels, the Rinderhorn, the Finster- Aarhorn, a deep valley which enormous precipices guard, but which avalanches nevertheless invade, and, farther on, of the Blumlisalp, with its summit of crystalline whiteness. The descent to Kandersteg is very rapid, and in a rain slippery. This village is a resort for artists for its splendid views of the range we had crossed: it stands at the gate of the mountains. From there to the Lake of Thun is a delightful drive,—a rich country, with handsome cottages and a charming landscape, even if the pyramidal Niesen did not lift up its seven thousand feet on the edge of the lake. So, through a smiling land, and in the sunshine after the rain, we come to Spiez, and find ourselves at a little hotel on the slope, overlooking town and lake and mountains.

Spiez is not large: indeed, its few houses are nearly all picturesquely grouped upon a narrow rib of land which is thrust into the lake on purpose to make the loveliest picture in the world. There is the old castle, with its many slim spires and its square- peaked roofed tower; the slender-steepled church; a fringe of old houses below on the lake, one overhanging towards the point; and the promontory, finished by a willo drooping to the water. Beyond, in hazy light, over the lucid green of the lake, are mountains whose masses of rock seem soft and sculptured. To the right, at the foot of the lake, tower the great snowy mountains, the cone of the Schreckhorn, the square top of the Eiger, the Jungfrau, just showing over the hills, and the Blumlisalp rising into heaven clear and silvery.

What can one do in such a spot, but swim in the lake, lie on the shore, and watch the passing steamers and the changing light on the mountains? Down at the wharf, when the small boats put off for the steamer, one can well entertain himself. The small boat is an enormous thing, after all, and propelled by two long, heavy sweeps, one of which is pulled, and the other pushed. The laboring oar is, of course, pulled by a woman; while her husband stands up in the stern of the boat, and gently dips the other in a gallant fashion. There is a boy there, whom I cannot make out,—a short, square boy, with tasseled skull-cap, and a face that never changes its expression, and never has any expression to change; he may be older than these hills; he looks old enough to be his own father: and there is a girl, his counterpart, who might be, judging her age by her face, the mother of both of them. These solemn old-young people are quite busy doing nothing about the wharf, and appear to be afflicted with an undue sense of the responsibility of life. There is a beer-garden here, where several sober couples sit seriously drinking their beer. There are some horrid old women, with the parchment skin and the disagreeable necks. Alone, in a window of the castle, sits a lady at her work, who might be the countess; only, I am sorry, there is no countess, nothing but a frau, in that old feudal dwelling. And there is a foreigner, thinking how queer it all is. And while he sits there, the melodious bell in the church-tower rings its evening song.

BAVARIA.

AMERICAN IMPATIENCE

We left Switzerland, as we entered it, in a rain,—a kind of double baptism that may have been necessary, and was certainly not too heavy a price to pay for the privileges of the wonderful country. The wind blew freshly, and swept a shower over the deck of the little steamboat, on board of which we stepped from the shabby little pier and town of Romanshorn. After the other Swiss lakes, Constance is tame, except at the southern end, beyond which rise the Appenzell range and the wooded peaks of the Bavarian hills. Through the dash of rain, and under the promise of a magnificent rainbow,—rainbows don't mean anything in Switzerland, and have no office as weather-prophets, except to assure you, that, as it rains to-day, so it will rain tomorrow,—we skirted the lower bend of the lake,—and at twilight sailed into the little harbor of Lindau, through the narrow entrance between the piers, on one of which is a small lighthouse, and on the other sits upright a gigantic stone lion,—a fine enough figure of a Bavarian lion, but with a comical, wide-awake, and expectant expression of countenance, as if he might bark right out at any minute, and become a dog. Yet in the moonlight, shortly afterward, the lion looked very grand and stately, as he sat regarding the softly plashing waves, and the high, drifting clouds, and the old Roman tower by the bridge which connects the Island of Lindau with the mainland, and thinking perhaps, if stone lions ever do think, of the time when Roman galleys sailed on Lake Constance, and when Lindau was an imperial town with a thriving trade.

On board the little steamer was an American, accompanied by two ladies, and traveling, I thought, for their gratification, who was very anxious to get on faster than he was able to do,—though why any one should desire to go fast in Europe I do not know. One easily falls into the habit of the country, to take things easily, to go when the slow German fates will, and not to worry one's self beforehand about times and connections. But the American was in a fever of impatience, desirous, if possible, to get on that night. I knew he was from the Land of the Free by a phrase I heard him use in the cars: he said, "I'll bet a dollar." Yet I must flatter myself that Americans do not always thus betray themselves. I happened, on the Isle of Wight, to hear a bland landlord "blow up" his glib- tongued son because the latter had not driven a stiffer bargain with us for the hire of a carriage round the island.

"Didn't you know they were Americans?" asks the irate father. "I knew it at once."

"No," replies young hopeful: "they didn't say GUESS once."

And straightway the fawning-innkeeper returns to us, professing, with his butter-lips, the greatest admiration of all Americans, and the intensest anxiety to serve them, and all for pure good-will. The English are even more bloodthirsty at sight of a travelere than the Swiss, and twice as obsequious. But to return to our American. He had all the railway timetables that he could procure; and he was busily studying them, with the design of "getting on." I heard him say to his companions, as he ransacked his pockets, that he was a mass of hotel-bills and timetables. He confided to me afterward, that his wife and her friend had got it into their heads that they must go both to Vienna and Berlin. Was Berlin much out of the way in going from Vienna to Paris? He said they told him it was n't. At any rate, he must get round at such a date: he had no time to spare. Then, besides the slowness of getting on, there were the trunks. He lost a trunk in Switzerland, and consumed a whole day in looking it up. While the steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout porters came on board, and shouldered his baggage to take it ashore. To his remonstrances in English they paid no heed; and it was some time before they could be made to understand that the trunks were to go on to Lindau. "There," said he, "I should have lost my trunks. Nobody understands what I tell them: I can't get any information." Especially was he unable to get any information as to how to "get on." I confess that the restless American almost put me into a fidget, and revived the American desire to "get on," to take the fast trains, make all the connections,—in short, in the handsome language of the great West, to "put her through." When I last saw our traveler, he was getting his luggage through the custom-house, still undecided whether to push on that night at eleven o'clock. But I forgot all about him and his hurry when, shortly after, we sat at the table-d'hote at the hotel, and the sedate Germans lit their cigars, some of them before they had finished eating, and sat smoking as if there were plenty of leisure for everything in this world,

A CITY OF COLOR

After a slow ride, of nearly eight hours, in what, in Germany, is called an express train, through a rain and clouds that hid from our view the Tyrol and the Swabian mountains, over a rolling, pleasant country, past pretty little railway station-houses, covered with vines, gay with flowers in the windows, and surrounded with beds of flowers, past switchmen in flaming scarlet jackets, who stand at the switches and raise the hand to the temple, and keep it there, in a military salute, as we go by, we come into old Augsburg, whose Confession is not so fresh in our minds as it ought to be. Portions of the ancient wall remain, and many of the towers; and there are archways, picturesquely opening from street to street, under several of which we drive on our way to the Three Moors, a stately hostelry and one of the oldest in Germany.

It stood here in the year 1500; and the room is still shown, unchanged since then, in which the rich Count Fugger entertained Charles V. The chambers are nearly all immense. That in which we are lodged is large enough for Queen Victoria; indeed, I am glad to say that her sleeping-room at St. Cloud was not half so spacious. One feels either like a count, or very lonesome, to sit down in a lofty chamber, say thirty-five feet square, with little furniture, and historical and tragical life-size figures staring at one from the wall-paper. One fears that they may come down in the deep night, and stand at the bedside,—those narrow, canopied beds there in the distance, like the marble couches in the cathedral. It must be a fearful thing to be a royal person, and dwell in a palace, with resounding rooms and naked, waxed, inlaid floors. At the Three Moors one sees a visitors' book, begun in 18oo, which contains the names of many noble and great people, as well as poets and doctors and titled ladies, and much sentimental writing in French. It is my impression, from an inspection of the book, that we are the first untitled visitors.

The traveler cannot but like Augsburg at once, for its quaint houses, colored so diversely and yet harmoniously. Remains of its former brilliancy yet exist in the frescoes on the outside of the buildings, some of which are still bright in color, though partially defaced. Those on the House of Fugger have been restored, and are very brave pictures. These frescoes give great animation and life to the appearance of a street, and I am glad to see a taste for them reviving. Augsburg must have been very gay with them two and three hundred years ago, when, also, it was the home of beautiful women of the middle class, who married princes. We went to see the house in which lived the beautiful Agnes Bernauer, daughter of a barber, who married Duke Albert III. of Bavaria. The house was nought, as old Samuel Pepys would say, only a high stone building, in a block of such; but it is enough to make a house attractive for centuries if a pretty woman once looks out of its latticed windows, as I have no doubt Agnes often did when the duke and his retinue rode by in clanking armor.

But there is no lack of reminders of old times. The cathedral, which was begun before the Christian era could express its age with four figures, has two fine portals, with quaint carving, and bronze doors of very old work, whereon the story of Eve and the serpent is literally given,—a representation of great theological, if of small artistic value. And there is the old clock and watch tower, which for eight hundred years has enabled the Augsburgers to keep the time of day and to look out over the plain for the approach of an enemy. The city is full of fine bronze fountains some of them of very elaborate design, and adding a convenience and a beauty to the town which American cities wholly want. In one quarter of the town is the Fuggerei, a little city by itself, surrounded by its own wall, the gates of which are shut at night, with narrow streets and neat little houses. It was built by Hans Jacob Fugger the Rich, as long ago as 1519, and is still inhabited by indigent Roman-Catholic families, according to the intention of its founder. In the windows were lovely flowers. I saw in the street several of those mysterious, short, old women,—so old and yet so little, all body and hardly any legs, who appear to have grown down into the ground with advancing years.

It happened to be a rainy day, and cold, on the 30th of July, when we left Augsburg; and the flat fields through which we passed were uninviting under the gray light. Large flocks of geese were feeding on the windy plains, tended by boys and women, who are the living fences of this country. I no longer wonder at the number of feather-beds at the inns, under which we are apparently expected to sleep even in the warmest nights. Shepherds with the regulation crooks also were watching herds of sheep. Here and there a cluster of red-roofed houses were huddled together into a village, and in all directions rose tapering spires. Especially we marked the steeple of Blenheim, where Jack Churchill won the name for his magnificent country-seat, early in the eighteenth century. All this plain where the silly geese feed has been marched over and fought over by armies time and again. We effect the passage of, the Danube without difficulty, and on to Harburg, a little town of little red houses, inhabited principally by Jews, huddled under a rocky ridge, upon the summit of which is a picturesque medieval castle, with many towers and turrets, in as perfect preservation as when feudal flags floated over it. And so on, slowly, with long stops at many stations, to give opportunity, I suppose, for the honest passengers to take in supplies of beer and sausages, to Nuremberg.

A CITY LIVING ON THE PAST

Nuremberg, or Nurnberg, was built, I believe, about the beginning of time. At least, in an old black-letter history of the city which I have seen, illustrated with powerful wood-cuts, the first representation is that of the creation of the world, which is immediately followed by another of Nuremberg. No one who visits it is likely to dispute its antiquity. " Nobody ever goes to Nuremberg but Americans," said a cynical British officer at Chamouny; "but they always go there. I never saw an American who had n't been or was not going to Nuremberg." Well, I suppose they wish to see the oldest-looking, and, next to a true Briton on his travels, the oddest thing on the Continent. The city lives in the past still, and on its memories, keeping its old walls and moat entire, and nearly fourscore wall-towers, in stern array. But grass grows in the moat, fruit trees thrive there, and vines clamber on the walls. One wanders about in the queer streets with the feeling of being transported back to the Middle Ages; but it is difficult to reproduce the impression on paper. Who can describe the narrow and intricate ways; the odd houses with many little gables; great roofs breaking out from eaves to ridgepole, with dozens of dormer-windows; hanging balconies of stone, carved and figure-beset, ornamented and frescoed fronts; the archways, leading into queer courts and alleys, and out again into broad streets; the towers and fantastic steeples; and the many old bridges, with obelisks and memorials of triumphal entries of conquerors and princes?

The city, as I said, lives upon the memory of what it has been, and trades upon relics of its former fame. What it would have been without Albrecht Durer, and Adam Kraft the stone-mason, and Peter Vischer the bronze-worker, and Viet Stoss who carved in wood, and Hans Sachs the shoemaker and poet-minstrel, it is difficult to say. Their statues are set up in the streets; their works still live in the churches and city buildings,—pictures, and groups in stone and wood; and their statues, in all sorts of carving, are reproduced, big and little, in all the shop-windows, for sale. So, literally, the city is full of the memory of them; and the business of the city, aside from its manufactory of endless, curious toys, seems to consist in reproducing them and their immortal works to sell to strangers.

Other cities project new things, and grow with a modern impetus: Nuremberg lives in the past, and traffics on its ancient reputation. Of course, we went to see the houses where these old worthies lived, and the works of art they have left behind them,—things seen and described by everybody. The stone carving about the church portals and on side buttresses is inexpressibly quaint and naive. The subjects are sacred; and with the sacred is mingled the comic, here as at Augsburg, where over one portal of the cathedral, with saints and angels, monkeys climb and gibber. A favorite subject is that of our Lord praying in the Garden, while the apostles, who could not watch one hour, are sleeping in various attitudes of stony comicality. All the stone-cutters seem to have tried their chisels on this group, and there are dozens of them. The wise and foolish virgins also stand at the church doors in time-stained stone,—the one with a perked-up air of conscious virtue, and the other with a penitent dejection that seems to merit better treatment. Over the great portal of St. Lawrence—a magnificent structure, with lofty twin spires and glorious rosewindow is carved "The Last Judgment." Underneath, the dead are climbing out of their stone coffins; above sits the Judge, with the attending angels. On the right hand go away the stiff, prim saints, in flowing robes, and with palms and harps, up steps into heaven, through a narrow door which St. Peter opens for them; while on the left depart the wicked, with wry faces and distorted forms, down into the stone flames, towards which the Devil is dragging them by their stony hair.

The interior of the Church of St. Lawrence is richer than any other I remember, with its magnificent pillars of dark red stone, rising and foliating out to form the roof; its splendid windows of stained glass, glowing with sacred story; a high gallery of stone entirely round the choir, and beautiful statuary on every column. Here, too, is the famous Sacrament House of honest old Adam Kraft, the most exquisite thing I ever saw in stone. The color is light gray; and it rises beside one of the dark, massive pillars, sixty-four feet, growing to a point, which then strikes the arch of the roof, and there curls up like a vine to avoid it. The base is supported by the kneeling figures of Adam Kraft and two fellow-workmen, who labored on it for four years. Above is the Last Supper, Christ blessing little children, and other beautiful tableaux in stone. The Gothic spire grows up and around these, now and then throwing out graceful tendrils, like a vine, and seeming to be rather a living plant than inanimate stone. The faithful artist evidently had this feeling for it; for, as it grew under his hands, he found that it would strike the roof, or he must sacrifice something of its graceful proportion. So his loving and daring genius suggested the happy design of letting it grow to its curving, graceful completeness.

He who travels by a German railway needs patience and a full haversack. Time is of no value. The rate of speed of the trains is so slow, that one sometimes has a desire to get out and walk, and the stoppages at the stations seem eternal; but then we must remember that it is a long distance to the bottom of a great mug of beer. We left Lindau on one of the usual trains at half-past five in the morning, and reached Augsburg at one o'clock in the afternoon: the distance cannot be more than a hundred miles. That is quicker than by diligence, and one has leisure to see the country as he jogs along. There is nothing more sedate than a German train in motion; nothing can stand so dead still as a German train at a station. But there are express trains.

We were on one from Augsburg to Nuremberg, and I think must have run twenty miles an hour. The fare on the express trains is one fifth higher than on the others. The cars are all comfortable; and the officials, who wear a good deal of uniform, are much more civil and obliging than officials in a country where they do not wear uniforms. So, not swiftly, but safely and in good-humor, we rode to the capital of Bavaria.

OUTSIDE ASPECTS OF MUNICH

I saw yesterday, on the 31st of August, in the English Garden, dead leaves whirling down to the ground, a too evident sign that the summer weather is going. Indeed, it has been sour, chilly weather for a week now, raining a little every day, and with a very autumn feeling in the air. The nightly concerts in the beer-gardens must have shivering listeners, if the bands do not, as many of them do, play within doors. The line of droschke drivers, in front of the post-office colonnade, hide the red facings of their coats under long overcoats, and stand in cold expectancy beside their blanketed horses, which must need twice the quantity of black-bread in this chilly air; for the horses here eat bread, like people. I see the drivers every day slicing up the black loaves, and feeding them, taking now and then a mouthful themselves, wetting it down with a pull from the mug of beer that stands within reach. And lastly (I am still speaking of the weather), the gay military officers come abroad in long cloaks, to some extent concealing their manly forms and smart uniforms, which I am sure they would not do, except under the pressure of necessity.

Yet I think this raw weather is not to continue. It is only a rough visit from the Tyrol, which will give place to kinder influences. We came up here from hot Switzerland at the end of July, expecting to find Munich a furnace. It will be dreadful in Munich everybody said. So we left Luzerne, where it was warm, not daring to stay till the expected rival sun, Victoria of England, should make the heat overpowering. But the first week of August in Munich it was delicious weather,—clear, sparkling, bracing air, with no chill in it and no languor in it, just as you would say it ought to be on a high, gravelly plain, seventeen hundred feet above the sea. Then came a week of what the Muncheners call hot weather, with the thermometer up to eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and the white wide streets and gray buildings in a glare of light; since then, weather of the most uncertain sort.

Munich needs the sunlight. Not that it cannot better spare it than grimy London; for its prevailing color is light gray, and its many-tinted and frescoed fronts go far to relieve the most cheerless day. Yet Munich attempts to be an architectural reproduction of classic times; and, in order to achieve any success in this direction, it is necessary to have the blue heavens and golden sunshine of Greece. The old portion of the city has some remains of the Gothic, and abounds in archways and rambling alleys, that suddenly become broad streets and then again contract to the width of an alderman, and portions of the old wall and city gates; old feudal towers stand in the market-place, and faded frescoes on old clock-faces and over archways speak of other days of splendor.

But the Munich of to-day is as if built to order,—raised in a day by the command of one man. It was the old King Ludwig I., whose flower-wreathed bust stands in these days in the vestibule of the Glyptothek, in token of his recent death, who gave the impulse for all this, though some of the best buildings and streets in the city have been completed by his successors. The new city is laid out on a magnificent scale of distances, with wide streets, fine, open squares, plenty of room for gardens, both public and private; and the art buildings and art monuments are well distributed; in fact, many a stately building stands in such isolation that it seems to ask every passer what it was put there for. Then, again, some of the new adornments lack fitness of location or purpose. At the end of the broad, monotonous Ludwig Strasse, and yet not at the end, for the road runs straight on into the flat country between rows of slender trees, stands the Siegesthor, or Gate of Victory, an imitation of the Constantine arch at Rome. It is surmounted by a splendid group in bronze, by Schwanthaler, Bavaria in her war-chariot, drawn by four lions; and it is in itself, both in its proportions and its numerous sculptural figures and bas-reliefs, a fine recognition of the valor "of the Bavarian army," to whom it is erected. Yet it is so dwarfed by its situation, that it seems to have been placed in the middle of the street as an obstruction. A walk runs on each side of it. The Propylaeum, another magnificent gateway, thrown across the handsome Brienner Strasse, beyond the Glyptothek, is an imitation of that on the Acropolis at Athens. It has fine Doric columns on the outside, and Ionic within, and the pediment groups are bas-reliefs, by Schwanthaler, representing scenes in modern Greek history. The passageways for carriages are through the side arches; and thus the "sidewalk" runs into the center of the street, and foot-passers must twice cross the carriage-drive in going through the gate. Such things as these give one the feeling that art has been forced beyond use in Munich; and it is increased when one wanders through the new churches, palaces, galleries, and finds frescoes so prodigally crowded out of the way, and only occasionally opened rooms so overloaded with them, and not always of the best, as to sacrifice all effect, and leave one with the sense that some demon of unrest has driven painters and sculptors and plasterers, night and day, to adorn the city at a stroke; at least, to cover it with paint and bedeck it with marbles, and to do it at once, leaving nothing for the sweet growth and blossoming of time.

You see, it is easy to grumble, and especially in a cheerful, open, light, and smiling city, crammed with works Of art, ancient and modern, its architecture a study of all styles, and its foaming beer, said by antiquarians to be a good deal better than the mead drunk in Odin's halls, only seven and a half kreuzers the quart. Munich has so much, that it, of course, contains much that can be criticised. The long, wide Ludwig Strasse is a street of palaces,—a street built up by the old king, and regarded by him with great pride. But all the buildings are in the Romanesque style,—a repetition of one another to a monotonous degree: only at the lower end are there any shops or shop-windows, and a more dreary promenade need not be imagined. It has neither shade nor fountains; and on a hot day you can see how the sun would pour into it, and blind the passers. But few ever walk there at any time. A street that leads nowhere, and has no gay windows, does not attract. Toward the lower end, in the Odeon Platz, is the equestrian statue of Ludwig, a royally commanding figure, with a page on either side. The street is closed (so that it flows off on either side into streets of handsome shops) by the Feldherrnhalle, Hall of the Generals, an imitation of the beautiful Loggia dei Lanzi, at Florence, that as yet contains only two statues, which seem lost in it. Here at noon, with parade of infantry, comes a military band to play for half an hour; and there are always plenty of idlers to listen to them. In the high arcade a colony of doves is domesticated; and I like to watch them circling about and wheeling round the spires of the over-decorated Theatine church opposite, and perching on the heads of the statues on the facade.

The royal palace, near by, is a huddle of buildings and courts, that I think nobody can describe or understand, built at different times and in imitation of many styles. The front, toward the Hof Garden, a grassless square of small trees, with open arcades on two sides for shops, and partially decorated with frescoes of landscapes and historical subjects, is "a building of festive halls," a facade eight hundred feet long, in the revived Italian style, and with a fine Ionic porch. The color is the royal, dirty yellow.

On the Max Joseph Platz, which has a bronze statue of King Max, a seated figure, and some elaborate bas-reliefs, is another front of the palace, the Konigsbau, an imitation, not fully carried out, of the Pitti Palace, at Florence. Between these is the old Residenz, adorned with fountain groups and statues in bronze. On another side are the church and theater of the Residenz. The interior of this court chapel is dazzling in appearance: the pillars are, I think, imitation of variegated marble; the sides are imitation of the same; the vaulting is covered with rich frescoes on gold ground. The whole effect is rich, but it is not at all sacred. Indeed, there is no church in Munich, except the old cathedral, the Frauenkirche, with its high Gothic arches, stained windows, and dusty old carvings, that gives one at all the sort of feeling that it is supposed a church should give. The court chapel interior is boastingly said to resemble St. Mark's, in Venice.

You see how far imitation of the classic and Italian is carried here in Munich; so, as I said, the buildings need the southern sunlight. Fortunately, they get the right quality much of the time. The Glyptothek, a Grecian structure of one story, erected to hold the treasures of classic sculpture that King Ludwig collected, has a beautiful Ionic porch and pediment. On the outside are niches filled with statues. In the pure sunshine and under a deep blue sky, its white marble glows with an almost ethereal beauty. Opposite stands another successful imitation of the Grecian style of architecture,—a building with a Corinthian porch, also of white marble. These, with the Propylaeum, before mentioned, come out wonderfully against a blue sky. A few squares distant is the Pinakothek, with its treasures of old pictures, and beyond it the New Pinakothek, containing works of modern artists. Its exterior is decorated with frescoes, from designs by Kaulbach: these certainly appear best in a sparkling light; though I am bound to say that no light can make very much of them.

Yet Munich is not all imitation. Its finest street, the Maximilian, built by the late king of that name, is of a novel and wholly modern style of architecture, not an imitation, though it may remind some of the new portions of Paris. It runs for three quarters of a mile, beginning with the postoffice and its colonnades, with frescoes on one side, and the Hof Theater, with its pediment frescoes, the largest opera-house in Germany, I believe; with stately buildings adorned with statues, and elegant shops, down to the swift-flowing Isar, which is spanned by a handsome bridge; or rather by two bridges, for the Isar is partly turned from its bed above, and made to turn wheels, and drive machinery. At the lower end the street expands into a handsome platz, with young shade trees, plats of grass, and gay beds of flowers. I look out on it as I write; and I see across the Isar the college building begun by Maximilian for the education of government officers; and I see that it is still unfinished, indeed, a staring mass of brick, with unsightly scaffolding and gaping windows. Money was left to complete it; but the young king, who does not care for architecture, keeps only a mason or two on the brick-work, and an artist on the exterior frescoes. At this rate, the Cologne Cathedral will be finished and decay before this is built. On either side of it, on the elevated bank of the river, stretch beautiful grounds, with green lawns, fine trees, and well-kept walks.

Not to mention the English Garden, in speaking of the outside aspects of the city, would be a great oversight. It was laid out originally by the munificent American, Count Rumford, and is called English, I suppose, because it is not in the artificial Continental style. Paris has nothing to compare with it for natural beauty,—Paris, which cannot let a tree grow, but must clip it down to suit French taste. It is a noble park four miles in length, and perhaps a quarter of that in width,—a park of splendid old trees, grand, sweeping avenues, open glades of free-growing grass, with delicious, shady walks, charming drives and rivers of water. For the Isar is trained to flow through it in two rapid streams, under bridges and over rapids, and by willow-hung banks. There is not wanting even a lake; and there is, I am sorry to say, a temple on a mound, quite in the classic style, from which one can see the sun set behind the many spires of Munich. At the Chinese Tower two military bands play every Saturday evening in the summer; and thither the carriages drive, and the promenaders assemble there, between five and six o'clock; and while the bands play, the Germans drink beer, and smoke cigars, and the fashionably attired young men walk round and round the, circle, and the smart young soldiers exhibit their handsome uniforms, and stride about with clanking swords.

We felicitated ourselves that we should have no lack of music when we came to Munich. I think we have not; though the opera has only just begun, and it is the vacation of the Conservatoire. There are first the military bands: there is continually a parade somewhere, and the streets are full of military music, and finely executed too. Then of beer-gardens there is literally no end, and there are nightly concerts in them. There are two brothers Hunn, each with his band, who, like the ancient Huns, have taken the city; and its gardens are given over to their unending waltzes, polkas, and opera medleys. Then there is the church music on Sundays and holidays, which is largely of a military character; at least, has the aid of drums and trumpets, and the whole band of brass. For the first few days of our stay here we had rooms near the Maximilian Platz and the Karl's Thor. I think there was some sort of a yearly fair in progress, for the great platz was filled with temporary booths: a circus had set itself up there, and there were innumerable side-shows and lottery-stands; and I believe that each little shanty and puppet-show had its band or fraction of a band, for there was never heard such a tooting and blowing and scraping, such a pounding and dinning and slang-whanging, since the day of stopping work on the Tower of Babel. The circus band confined itself mostly to one tune; and as it went all day long, and late into the night, we got to know it quite well; at least, the bass notes of it, for the lighter tones came to us indistinctly. You know that blurt, blurt, thump, thump, dissolute sort of caravan tune. That was it.

The English Caf‚ was not far off, and there the Hunns and others also made night melodious. The whole air was one throb and thrump. The only refuge from it was to go into one of the gardens, and give yourself over to one band. And so it was possible to have delightful music, and see the honest Germans drink beer, and gossip in friendly fellowship and with occasional hilarity. But music we had, early and late. We expected quiet in our present quarters. The first morning, at six o'clock, we were startled by the resonant notes of a military band, that set the echoes flying between the houses, and a regiment of cavalry went clanking down the street. But that is a not unwelcome morning serenade and reveille. Not so agreeable is the young man next door, who gives hilarious concerts to his friends, and sings and bangs his piano all day Sunday; nor the screaming young woman opposite. Yet it is something to be in an atmosphere of music.

THE MILITARY LIFE OF MUNICH

This morning I was awakened early by the strains of a military band. It was a clear, sparkling morning, the air full of life, and yet the sun showing its warm, southern side. As the mounted musicians went by, the square was quite filled with the clang of drum and trumpet, which became fainter and fainter, and at length was lost on the ear beyond the Isar, but preserved the perfection of time and the precision of execution for which the military bands of the city are remarkable. After the band came a brave array of officers in bright uniform, upon horses that pranced and curveted in the sunshine; and the regiment of cavalry followed, rank on rank of splendidly mounted men, who ride as if born to the saddle. The clatter of hoofs on the pavement, the jangle of bit and saber, the occasional word of command, the onward sweep of the well-trained cavalcade, continued for a long time, as if the lovely morning had brought all the cavalry in the city out of barracks. But this is an almost daily sight in Munich. One regiment after another goes over the river to the drill-ground. In the hot mornings I used quite to pity the troopers who rode away in the glare in scorching brazen helmets and breastplates. But only a portion of the regiments dress in that absurd manner. The most wear a simple uniform, and look very soldierly. The horses are almost invariably fine animals, and I have not seen such riders in Europe. Indeed, everybody in Munich who rides at all rides well. Either most of the horsemen have served in the cavalry, or horsemanship, that noble art "to witch the world," is in high repute here.

Speaking of soldiers, Munich is full of them. There are huge caserns in every part of the city, crowded with troops. This little kingdom of Bavaria has a hundred and twenty thousand troops of the line. Every man is obliged to serve in the army continuously three years; and every man between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five must go with his regiment into camp or barrack several weeks in each year, no matter if the harvest rots in the field, or the customers desert the uncared-for shop. The service takes three of the best years of a young man's life. Most of the soldiers in Munich are young one meets hundreds of mere boys in the uniform of officers. I think every seventh man you meet is a soldier. There must be between fifteen and twenty thousand troops quartered in the city now. The young officers are everywhere, lounging in the cafes, smoking and sipping coffee, on all the public promenades, in the gardens, the theaters, the churches. And most of them are fine-looking fellows, good figures in elegantly fitting and tasteful uniforms; but they do like to show their handsome forms and hear their sword-scabbards rattle on the pavement as they stride by. The beer-gardens are full of the common soldiers, who empty no end of quart mugs in alternate pulls from the same earthen jug, with the utmost jollity and good fellowship. On the street, salutes between officers and men are perpetual, punctiliously given and returned,—the hand raised to the temple, and held there for a second. A young gallant, lounging down the Theatiner or the Maximilian Strasse, in his shining and snug uniform, white kids, and polished boots, with jangling spurs and the long sword clanking on the walk, raising his hand ever and anon in condescending salute to a lower in rank, or with affable grace to an equal, is a sight worth beholding, and for which one cannot be too grateful. We have not all been created with the natural shape for soldiers, but we have eyes given us that we may behold them.

Bavaria fought, you know, on the wrong side at Sadowa; but the result of the war left her in confederation with Prussia. The company is getting to be very distasteful, for Austria is at present more liberal than Prussia. Under Prussia one must either be a soldier or a slave, the democrats of Munich say. Bavaria has the most liberal constitution in Germany, except that of Wurtemberg, and the people are jealous of any curtailment of liberty. It seems odd that anybody should look to the house of Hapsburg for liberality. The attitude of Prussia compels all the little states to keep up armies, which eat up their substance, and burden the people with taxes. This is the more to be regretted now, when Bavaria is undergoing a peaceful revolution, and throwing off the trammels of galling customs in other respects.

THE EMANCIPATION OF MUNICH

The 1st of September saw go into complete effect the laws enacted in 1867, which have inaugurated the greatest changes in business and social life, and mark an era in the progress of the people worthy of fetes and commemorative bronzes. We heard the other night at the opera-house "William Tell" unmutilated. For many years this liberty- breathing opera was not permitted to be given in Bavaria, except with all the life of it cut out. It was first presented entire by order of young King Ludwig, who, they say, was induced to command its unmutilated reproduction at the solicitation of Richard Wagner, who used to be, and very likely is now, a "Red," and was banished from Saxony in 1848 for fighting on the people's side of a barricade in Dresden. It is the fashion to say of the young king, that he pays no heed to the business of the kingdom. You hear that the handsome boy cares only for music and horseback exercise: he plays much on the violin, and rides away into the forest attended by only one groom, and is gone for days together. He has composed an opera, which has not yet been put on the stage. People, when they speak of him, tap their foreheads with one finger. But I don't believe it. The same liberality that induced him, years ago, to restore "William Tell" to the stage has characterized the government under him ever since.

Formerly no one could engage in any trade or business in Bavaria without previous examination before, and permission from, a magistrate. If a boy wished to be a baker, for instance, he had first to serve four years of apprenticeship. If then he wished to set up business for himself, he must get permission, after passing an examination. This permission could rarely be obtained; for the magistrate usually decided that there were already as many bakers as the town needed. His only other resource was to buy out an existing business, and this usually costs a good deal. When he petitioned for the privilege of starting a bakery, all the bakers protested. And he could not even buy out a stand, and carry it on, without strict examination as to qualifications. This was the case in every trade. And to make matters worse, a master workman could not employ a journeyman out of his shop; so that, if a journeyman could not get a regular situation, he had no work. Then there were endless restrictions upon the manufacture and sale of articles: one person could make only one article, or one portion of an article; one might manufacture shoes for women, but not for men; he might make an article in the shop and sell it, but could not sell it if any one else made it outside, or vice versa.

Nearly all this mass of useless restriction on trades and business, which palsied all effort in Bavaria, is removed. Persons are free to enter into any business they like. The system of apprenticeship continues, but so modified as not to be oppressive; and all trades are left to regulate themselves by natural competition. Already Munich has felt the benefit of the removal of these restrictions, which for nearly a year has been anticipated, in a growth of population and increased business.

But the social change is still more important. The restrictions upon marriage were a serious injury to the state. If Hans wished to marry, and felt himself adequate to the burdens and responsibilities of the double state, and the honest fraulein was quite willing to undertake its trials and risks with him, it was not at all enough that in the moonlighted beergarden, while the band played, and they peeled the stinging radish, and ate the Switzer cheese, and drank from one mug, she allowed his arm to steal around her stout waist. All this love and fitness went for nothing in the eyes of the magistrate, who referred the application for permission to marry to his associate advisers, and they inquired into the applicant's circumstances; and if, in their opinion, he was not worth enough money to support a wife properly, permission was refused for him to try. The consequence was late marriages, and fewer than there ought to be, and other ill results. Now the matrimonial gates are lifted high, and the young man has not to ask permission of any snuffy old magistrate to marry. I do not hear that the consent of the maidens is more difficult to obtain than formerly.

No city of its size is more prolific of pictures than Munich. I do not know how all its artists manage to live, but many of them count upon the American public. I hear everywhere that the Americans like this, and do not like that; and I am sorry to say that some artists, who have done better things, paint professedly to suit Americans, and not to express their own conceptions of beauty. There is one who is now quite devoted to dashing off rather lamp-blacky moonlights, because, he says, the Americans fancy that sort of thing. I see one of his smirchy pictures hanging in a shop window, awaiting the advent of the citizen of the United States. I trust that no word of mine will injure the sale of the moonlights. There are some excellent figure-painters here, and one can still buy good modern pictures for reasonable prices.

FASHION IN THE STREETS

Was there ever elsewhere such a blue, transparent sky as this here in Munich? At noon, looking up to it from the street, above the gray houses, the color and depth are marvelous. It makes a background for the Grecian art buildings and gateways, that would cheat a risen Athenian who should see it into the belief that he was restored to his beautiful city. The color holds, too, toward sundown, and seems to be poured, like something solid, into the streets of the city.

You should see then the Maximilian Strasse, when the light floods the platz where Maximilian in bronze sits in his chair, illuminates the frescoes on the pediments of the Hof Theater, brightens the Pompeian red under the colonnade of the post-office, and streams down the gay thoroughfare to the trees and statues in front of the National Museum, and into the gold-dusted atmosphere beyond the Isar. The street is filled with promenaders: strangers who saunter along with the red book in one hand,—a man and his wife, the woman dragged reluctantly past the windows of fancy articles, which are "so cheap," the man breaking his neck to look up at the buildings, especially at the comical heads and figures in stone that stretch out from the little oriel-windows in the highest story of the Four Seasons Hotel, and look down upon the moving throng; Munich bucks in coats of velvet, swinging light canes, and smoking cigars through long and elaborately carved meerschaum holders; Munich ladies in dresses of that inconvenient length that neither sweeps the pavement nor clears it; peasants from the Tyrol, the men in black, tight breeches, that button from the knee to the ankle, short jackets and vests set thickly with round silver buttons) and conical hats with feathers, and the women in short quilted and quilled petticoats, of barrel-like roundness from the broad hips down, short waists ornamented with chains and barbarous brooches of white metal, with the oddest head-gear of gold and silver heirlooms; students with little red or green embroidered brimless caps, with the ribbon across the breast, a folded shawl thrown over one shoulder, and the inevitable switch-cane; porters in red caps, with a coil of twine about the waist; young fellows from Bohemia, with green coats, or coats trimmed with green, and green felt hats with a stiff feather stuck in the side; and soldiers by the hundreds, of all ranks and organizations; common fellows in blue, staring in at the shop windows, officers in resplendent uniforms, clanking their swords as they swagger past. Now and then, an elegant equipage dashes by,—perhaps the four horses of the handsome young king, with mounted postilions and outriders, or a liveried carriage of somebody born with a von before his name. As the twilight comes on, the shutters of the shop windows are put up. It is time to go to the opera, for the curtain rises at half-past six, or to the beer-gardens, where delicious music marks, but does not interrupt, the flow of excellent beer.

Or you may if you choose, and I advise you to do it, walk at the same hour in the English Garden, which is but a step from the arcades of the Hof Garden,—but a step to the entrance, whence you may wander for miles and miles in the most enchanting scenery. Art has not been allowed here to spoil nature. The trees, which are of magnificent size, are left to grow naturally;—the Isar, which is turned into it, flows in more than one stream with its mountain impetuosity; the lake is gracefully indented and overhung with trees, and presents ever- changing aspects of loveliness as you walk along its banks; there are open, sunny meadows, in which single giant trees or splendid groups of them stand, and walks without end winding under leafy Gothic arches. You know already that Munich owes this fine park to the foresight and liberality of an American Tory, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford), born in Rumford, Vt, who also relieved Munich of beggars.

I have spoken of the number of soldiers in Munich. For six weeks the Landwehr, or militia, has been in camp in various parts of Bavaria. There was a grand review of them the other day on the Field of Mars, by the king, and many of them have now gone home. They strike an unmilitary man as a very efficient body of troops. So far as I could see, they were armed with breech-loading rifles. There is a treaty by which Bavaria agreed to assimilate her military organization to that of Prussia. It is thus that Bismarck is continually getting ready. But if the Landwehr is gone, there are yet remaining troops enough of the line. Their chief use, so far as it concerns me, is to make pageants in the streets, and to send their bands to play at noon in the public squares. Every day, when the sun shines down upon the mounted statue of Ludwig I., in front of the Odeon, a band plays in an open Loggia, and there is always a crowd of idlers in the square to hear it. Everybody has leisure for that sort of thing here in Europe; and one can easily learn how to be idle and let the world wag. They have found out here what is disbelieved in America,—that the world will continue to turn over once in about twenty-four hours (they are not accurate as to the time) without their aid. To return to our soldiers. The cavalry most impresses me; the men are so finely mounted, and they ride royally. In these sparkling mornings, when the regiments clatter past, with swelling music and shining armor, riding away to I know not what adventure and glory, I confess that I long to follow them. I have long had this desire; and the other morning, determining to satisfy it, I seized my hat and went after the prancing procession. I am sorry I did. For, after trudging after it through street after street, the fine horsemen all rode through an arched gateway, and disappeared in barracks, to my great disgust; and the troopers dismounted, and led their steeds into stables.

And yet one never loses a walk here in Munich. I found myself that morning by the Isar Thor, a restored medieval city gate. The gate is double, with flanking octagonal towers, inclosing a quadrangle. Upon the inner wall is a fresco of "The Crucifixion." Over the outer front is a representation, in fresco painting, of the triumphal entry into the city of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria after the battle of Ampfing. On one side of the gate is a portrait of the Virgin, on gold ground, and on the other a very passable one of the late Dr. Hawes of Hartford, with a Pope's hat on. Walking on, I came to another arched gateway and clock-tower; near it an old church, with a high wall adjoining, whereon is a fresco of cattle led to slaughter, showing that I am in the vicinity of the Victual Market; and I enter it through a narrow, crooked alley. There is nothing there but an assemblage of shabby booths and fruit-stands, and an ancient stone tower in ruins and overgrown with ivy.

Leaving this, I came out to the Marian Platz, where stands the column, with the statue of the Virgin and Child, set up by Maximilian I. in 1638 to celebrate the victory in the battle which established the Catholic supremacy in Bavaria. It is a favorite praying-place for the lower classes. Yesterday was a fete day, and the base of the column and half its height are lost in a mass of flowers and evergreens. In front is erected an altar with a broad, carpeted platform; and a strip of the platz before it is inclosed with a railing, within which are praying-benches. The sun shines down hot; but there are several poor women kneeling there, with their baskets beside them. I happen along there at sundown; and there are a score of women kneeling on the hard stones, outside the railing saying their prayers in loud voices. The mass of flowers is still sweet and gay and fresh; a fountain with fantastic figures is flashing near by; the crowd, going home to supper and beer, gives no heed to the praying; the stolid droschke-drivers stand listlessly by. At the head of the square is an artillery station, and a row of cannon frowns on it. On one side is a house with a tablet in the wall, recording the fact that Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden once lived in it.

When we came to Munich, the great annual fair was in progress; and the large Maximilian Platz (not to be confounded with the street of that name) was filled with booths of cheap merchandise, puppet-shows, lottery shanties, and all sorts of popular amusements. It was a fine time to study peasant costumes. The city was crowded with them on Sunday; and let us not forget that the first visit of the peasants was to the churches; they invariably attended early mass before they set out upon the day's pleasure. Most of the churches have services at all hours till noon, some of them with fine classical and military music. One could not but be struck with the devotional manner of the simple women, in their queer costumes, who walked into the gaudy edifices, were absorbed in their prayers for an hour, and then went away. I suppose they did not know how odd they looked in their high, round fur hats, or their fantastic old ornaments, nor that there was anything amiss in bringing their big baskets into church with them. At least, their simple, unconscious manner was better than that of many of the city people, some of whom stare about a good deal, while going through the service, and stop in the midst of crossings and genuflections to take snuff and pass it to their neighbors. But there are always present simple and homelike sort of people, who neither follow the fashions nor look round on them; respectable, neat old ladies, in the faded and carefully preserved silk gowns, such as the New England women wear to "meeting."

No one can help admiring the simplicity, kindliness, and honesty of the Germans. The universal courtesy and friendliness of manner have a very different seeming from the politeness of the French. At the hotels in the country, the landlord and his wife and the servant join in hoping you will sleep well when you go to bed. The little maid at Heidelberg who served our meals always went to the extent of wishing us a good appetite when she had brought in the dinner. Here in Munich the people we have occasion to address in the street are uniformly courteous. The shop-keepers are obliging, and rarely servile, like the English. You are thanked, and punctiliously wished the good-day, whether you purchase anything or not. In shops tended by women, gentlemen invariably remove their hats. If you buy only a kreuzer's worth of fruit of an old woman, she says words that would be, literally translated, "I thank you beautifully." With all this, one looks kindly on the childish love the Germans have for titles. It is, I believe, difficult for the German mind to comprehend that we can be in good standing at home, unless we have some title prefixed to our names, or some descriptive phrase added. Our good landlord, who waits at the table and answers our bell, one of whose tenants is a living baron, having no title to put on his doorplate under that of the baron, must needs dub himself "privatier;" and he insists upon prefixing the name of this unambitious writer with the ennobling von; and at the least he insists, in common with the tradespeople, that I am a "Herr Doctor." The bills of purchases by madame come made out to "Frau——, well-born." At a hotel in Heidelberg, where I had registered my name with that distinctness of penmanship for which newspaper men are justly conspicuous, and had added to my own name "& wife," I was not a little flattered to appear in the reckoning as "Herr Doctor Mamesweise."

THE GOTTESACKER AND BAVARIAN FUNERALS

To change the subject from gay to grave. The Gottesacker of Munich is called the finest cemetery in Germany; at least, it surpasses them in the artistic taste of its monuments. Natural beauty it has none: it is simply a long, narrow strip of ground inclosed in walls, with straight, parallel walks running the whole length, and narrow cross-walks; and yet it is a lovely burial-ground. There are but few trees; but the whole inclosure is a conservatory of beautiful flowers. Every grave is covered with them, every monument is surrounded with them. The monuments are unpretending in size, but there are many fine designs, and many finely executed busts and statues and allegorical figures, in both marble and bronze. The place is full of sunlight and color. I noticed that it was much frequented. In front of every place of sepulcher stands a small urn for water, with a brush hanging by, with which to sprinkle the flowers. I saw, also, many women and children coming and going with watering-pots, so that the flowers never droop for want of care. At the lower end of the old ground is an open arcade, wherein are some effigies and busts, and many ancient tablets set into the wall. Beyond this is the new cemetery, an inclosure surrounded by a high wall of brick, and on the inside by an arcade. The space within is planted with flowers, and laid out for the burial of the people; the arcades are devoted to the occupation of those who can afford costly tombs. Only a small number of them are yet occupied; there are some good busts and monuments, and some frescoes on the panels rather more striking for size and color than for beauty.

Between the two cemeteries is the house for the dead. When I walked down the long central all& of the old ground, I saw at the farther end, beyond a fountain) twinkling lights. Coming nearer, I found that they proceeded from the large windows of a building, which was a part of the arcade. People were looking in at the windows, going and coming to and from them continually; and I was prompted by curiosity to look within. A most unexpected sight met my eye. In a long room, upon elevated biers, lay people dead: they were so disposed that the faces could be seen; and there they rested in a solemn repose. Officers in uniform, citizens in plain dress, matrons and maids in the habits that they wore when living, or in the white robes of the grave. About most of them were lighted candles. About all of them were flowers: some were almost covered with bouquets. There were rows of children, little ones scarce a span long,—in the white caps and garments of innocence, as if asleep in beds of flowers. How naturally they all were lying, as if only waiting to be called! Upon the thumb of every adult was a ring in which a string was tied that went through a pulley above and communicated with a bell in the attendant's room. How frightened he would be if the bell should ever sound, and he should go into that hall of the dead to see who rang! And yet it is a most wise and humane provision; and many years ago, there is a tradition, an entombment alive was prevented by it. There are three rooms in all; and all those who die in Munich must be brought and laid in one of them, to be seen of all who care to look therein. I suppose that wealth and rank have some privileges; but it is the law that the person having been pronounced dead by the physician shall be the same day brought to the dead-house, and lie there three whole days before interment.

There is something peculiar in the obsequies of Munich, especially in the Catholic portion of the population. Shortly after the death, there is a short service in the courtyard of the house, which, with the entrance, is hung in costly mourning, if the deceased was rich. The body is then carried in the car to the dead-house, attended by the priests, the male members of the family, and a procession of torch-bearers, if that can be afforded. Three days after, the burial takes place from the dead-house, only males attending. The women never go to the funeral; but some days after, of which public notice is given by advertisement, a public service is held in church, at which all the family are present, and to which the friends are publicly invited. Funeral obsequies are as costly here as in America; but everything is here regulated and fixed by custom. There are as many as five or six classes of funerals recognized. Those of the first class, as to rank and expense, cost about a thousand guldens. The second class is divided into six subclasses. The third is divided into two. The cost of the first of the third class is about four hundred guldens. The lowest class of those able to have a funeral costs twenty-five guldens. A gulden is about two francs. There are no carriages used at the funerals of Catholics, only at those of Protestants and Jews.

I spoke of the custom of advertising the deaths. A considerable portion of the daily newspapers is devoted to these announcements, which are printed in display type, like the advertisements of dry-goods sellers with you. I will roughly translate one which I happen to see just now. It reads, "Death advertisement. It has pleased God the Almighty, in his inscrutable providence, to take away our innermost loved, best husband, father, grandfather, uncle, brother-in-law, and cousin, Herr—-, dyer of cloth and silk, yesterday night, at eleven o'clock, after three weeks of severe suffering, having partaken of the holy sacrament, in his sixty-sixth year, out of this earthly abode of calamity into the better Beyond. Those who knew his good heart, his great honesty, as well as his patience in suffering, will know how justly to estimate our grief." This is signed by the "deep-grieving survivors,"—the widow, son, daughter, and daughter-in-law, in the name of the absent relatives. After the name of the son is written, "Dyer in cloth and silk." The notice closes with an announcement of the funeral at the cemetery, and a service at the church the day after. The advertisement I have given is not uncommon either for quaintness or simplicity. It is common to engrave upon the monument the business as well as the title of the departed.

THE OCTOBER FEST THE PEASANTS AND THE KING

On the 11th of October the sun came out, after a retirement of nearly two weeks. The cause of the appearance was the close of the October Fest. This great popular carnival has the same effect upon the weather in Bavaria that the Yearly Meeting of Friends is known to produce in Philadelphia, and the Great National Horse Fair in New England. It always rains during the October Fest. Having found this out, I do not know why they do not change the time of it; but I presume they are wise enough to feel that it would be useless. A similar attempt on the part of the Pennsylvania Quakers merely disturbed the operations of nature, but did not save the drab bonnets from the annual wetting. There is a subtle connection between such gatherings and the gathering of what are called the elements,—a sympathetic connection, which we shall, no doubt, one day understand, when we have collected facts enough on the subject to make a comprehensive generalization, after Mr. Buckle's method.

This fair, which is just concluded, is a true Folks-Fest, a season especially for the Bavarian people, an agricultural fair and cattle show, but a time of general jollity and amusement as well. Indeed, the main object of a German fair seems to be to have a good time and in this it is in marked contrast with American fairs. The October Fest was instituted for the people by the old Ludwig I. on the occasion of his marriage; and it has ever since retained its position as the great festival of the Bavarian people, and particularly of the peasants. It offers a rare opportunity to the stranger to study the costumes of the peasants, and to see how they amuse themselves. One can judge a good deal of the progress of a people by the sort of amusements that satisfy them. I am not about to draw any philosophical inferences,—I am a mere looker-on in Munich; but I have never anywhere else seen puppet-shows afford so much delight, nor have I ever seen anybody get more satisfaction out of a sausage and a mug of beer, with the tum-tum of a band near, by, than a Bavarian peasant.

The Fest was held on the Theresien Wiese, a vast meadow on the outskirts of the city. The ground rises on one side of this by an abrupt step, some thirty or forty feet high, like the "bench" of a Western river. This bank is terraced for seats the whole length, or as far down as the statue of Bavaria; so that there are turf seats, I should judge, for three quarters of a mile, for a great many thousands of people, who can look down upon the race-course, the tents, houses, and booths of the fair-ground, and upon the roof and spires of the city beyond. The statue is, as you know, the famous bronze Bavaria of Schwanthaler, a colossal female figure fifty feet high, and with its pedestal a hundred feet high, which stands in front of the Hall of Fame, a Doric edifice, in the open colonnades of which are displayed the busts of the most celebrated Bavarians, together with those of a few poets and scholars who were so unfortunate as not to be born here. The Bavaria stands with the right hand upon the sheathed sword, and the left raised in the act of bestowing a wreath of victory; and the lion of the kingdom is beside her. This representative being is, of course, hollow. There is room for eight people in her head, which I can testify is a warm place on a sunny day; and one can peep out through loopholes and get a good view of the Alps of the Tyrol. To say that this statue is graceful or altogether successful would be an error; but it is rather impressive, from its size, if for no other reason. In the cast of the hand exhibited at the bronze foundry, the forefinger measures over three feet long.

Although the Fest did not officially begin until Friday, October 12, yet the essential part of it, the amusements, was well under way on the Sunday before. The town began to be filled with country people, and the holiday might be said to have commenced; for the city gives itself up to the occasion. The new art galleries are closed for some days; but the collections and museums of various sorts are daily open, gratis; the theaters redouble their efforts; the concert-halls are in full blast; there are dances nightly, and masked balls in the Folks' Theater; country relatives are entertained; the peasants go about the streets in droves, in a simple and happy frame of mind, wholly unconscious that they are the oddest-looking guys that have come down from the Middle Ages; there is music in all the gardens, singing in the cafes, beer flowing in rivers, and a mighty smell of cheese, that goes up to heaven. If the eating of cheese were a religious act, and its odor an incense, I could not say enough of the devoutness of the Bavarians.

Of the picturesqueness and oddity of the Bavarian peasants' costumes, nothing but a picture can give you any idea. You can imagine the men in tight breeches, buttoned below the knee, jackets of the jockey cut, and both jacket and waistcoat covered with big metal buttons, sometimes coins, as thickly as can be sewed on: but the women defy the pen; a Bavarian peasant woman, in holiday dress, is the most fearfully and wonderfully made object in the universe. She displays a good length of striped stockings, and wears thin slippers, or sandals; her skirts are like a hogshead in size and shape, and reach so near her shoulders as to make her appear hump-backed; the sleeves are hugely swelled out at the shoulder, and taper to the wrist; the bodice is a stiff and most elaborately ornamented piece of armor; and there is a kind of breastplate, or center-piece, of gold, silver, and precious stones, or what passes for them; and the head is adorned with some monstrous heirloom, of finely worked gold or silver, or a tower, gilded and shining with long streamers, or bound in a simple black turban, with flowing ends. Little old girls, dressed like their mothers, have the air of creations of the fancy, who have walked out of a fairy-book. There is an endless variety in these old costumes; and one sees, every moment, one more preposterous than the preceding. The girls from the Tyrol, with their bright neckerchiefs and pointed black felt hats, with gold cord and tassels, are some of them very pretty: but one looks a long time for a bright face among the other class; and, when it is discovered, the owner appears like a maiden who was enchanted a hundred years ago, and has not been released from the spell, but is still doomed to wear the garments and the ornaments that should long ago have mouldered away with her ancestors.

The Theresien Wiese was a city of Vanity Fair for two weeks, every day crowded with a motley throng. Booths, and even structures of some solidity, rose on it as if by magic. The lottery-houses were set up early, and, to the last, attracted crowds, who could not resist the tempting display of goods and trinkets, which might be won by investing six kreuzers in a bit of paper, which might, when unrolled, contain a number. These lotteries are all authorized: some of them were for the benefit of the agricultural society; some were for the poor, and others on individual account: and they always thrive; for the German, above all others, loves to try his luck. There were streets of shanties, where various things were offered for sale besides cheese and sausages. There was a long line of booths, where images could be shot at with bird-guns; and when the shots were successful, the images went through astonishing revolutions. There was a circus, in front of which some of the spangled performers always stood beating drums and posturing, in order to entice in spectators. There were the puppet-booths, before which all day stood gaping, delighted crowds, who roared with laughter whenever the little frau beat her loutish husband about the head, and set him to tend the baby, who continued to wail, notwithstanding the man knocked its head against the doorpost. There were the great beer- restaurants, with temporary benches and tables' planted about with evergreens, always thronged with a noisy, jolly crowd. There were the fires, over which fresh fish were broiling on sticks; and, if you lingered, you saw the fish taken alive from tubs of water standing by, dressed and spitted and broiling before the wiggle was out of their tails. There were the old women, who mixed the flour and fried the brown cakes before your eyes, or cooked the fragrant sausage, and offered it piping hot.

And every restaurant and show had its band, brass or string,—a full array of red-faced fellows tooting through horns, or a sorry quartette, the fat woman with the harp, the lean man blowing himself out through the clarinet, the long-haired fellow with the flute, and the robust and thick-necked fiddler. Everywhere there was music; the air was full of the odor of cheese and cooking sausage; so that there was nothing wanting to the most complete enjoyment. The crowd surged round, jammed together, in the best possible humor. Those who could not sit at tables sat on the ground, with a link of an eatable I have already named in one hand, and a mug of beer beside them. Toward evening, the ground was strewn with these gray quart mugs, which gave as perfect evidence of the battle of the day as the cannon-balls on the sand before Fort Fisher did of the contest there. Besides this, for the amusement of the crowd, there is, every day, a wheelbarrow race, a sack race, a blindfold contest, or something of the sort, which turns out to be a very flat performance. But all the time the eating and the drinking go on, and the clatter and clink of it fill the air; so that the great object of the fair is not lost sight of.

Meantime, where is the agricultural fair and cattle-show? You must know that we do these things differently in Bavaria. On the fair-ground, there is very little to be seen of the fair. There is an inclosure where steam-engines are smoking and puffing, and threshing-machines are making a clamor; where some big church-bells hang, and where there are a few stalls for horses and cattle. But the competing horses and cattle are led before the judges elsewhere; the horses, for instance, by the royal stables in the city. I saw no such general exhibition of do mestic animals as you have at your fairs. The horses that took the prizes were of native stock, a very serviceable breed, excellent for carriage-horses, and admirable in the cavalry service. The bulls and cows seemed also native and to the manor born, and were worthy of little remark. The mechanical, vegetable, and fruit exhibition was in the great glass palace, in the city, and was very creditable in the fruit department, in the show of grapes and pears especially. The products of the dairy were less, though I saw one that I do not recollect ever to have seen in America, a landscape in butter. Inclosed in a case, it looked very much like a wood-carving. There was a Swiss cottage, a milkmaid, with cows in the foreground; there were trees, and in the rear rose rocky precipices, with chamois in the act of skipping thereon. I should think something might be done in our country in this line of the fine arts; certainly, some of the butter that is always being sold so cheap at St. Albans, when it is high everywhere else, must be strong enough to warrant the attempt. As to the other departments of the fine arts in the glass palace, I cannot give you a better idea of them than by saying that they were as well filled as the like ones in the American county fairs. There were machines for threshing, for straw-cutting, for apple-paring, and generally such a display of implements as would give one a favorable idea of Bavarian agriculture. There was an interesting exhibition of live fish, great and small, of nearly every sort, I should think, in Bavarian waters. The show in the fire-department was so antiquated, that I was convinced that the people of Munich never intend to have any fires.

The great day of the fete was Sunday, October 5 for on that day the king went out to the fair-ground, and distributed the prizes to the owners of the best horses, and, as they appeared to me, of the most ugly-colored bulls. The city was literally crowded with peasants and country people; the churches were full all the morning with devout masses, which poured into the waiting beer-houses afterward with equal zeal. By twelve o'clock, the city began to empty itself upon the Theresien meadow; and long before the time for the king to arrive —two o'clock—there were acres of people waiting for the performance to begin. The terraced bank, of which I have spoken, was taken possession of early, and held by a solid mass of people; while the fair-ground proper was packed with a swaying concourse, densest near the royal pavilion, which was erected immediately on the race-course, and opposite the bank.

At one o'clock the grand stand opposite to the royal one is taken possession of by a regiment band and by invited guests. All the space, except the race-course, is, by this time, packed with people, who watch the red and white gate at the head of the course with growing impatience. It opens to let in a regiment of infantry, which marches in and takes position. It swings, every now and then, for a solitary horseman, who gallops down the line in all the pride of mounted civic dignity, to the disgust of the crowd; or to let in a carriage, with some overdressed officer or splendid minister, who is entitled to a place in the royal pavilion. It is a people' fete, and the civic officers enjoy one day of conspicuous glory. Now a majestic person in gold lace is set down; and now one in a scarlet coat, as beautiful as a flamingo. These driblets of splendor only feed the popular impatience. Music is heard in the distance, and a procession with colored banners is seen approaching from the city. That, like everything else that is to come, stops beyond the closed gate; and there it halts, ready to stream down before our eyes in a variegated pageant. The time goes on; the crowd gets denser, for there have been steady rivers of people pouring into the grounds for more than an hour.

The military bands play in the long interval; the peasants jabber in unintelligible dialects; the high functionaries on the royal stand are good enough to move around, and let us see how brave and majestic they are.

At last the firing of cannon announces the coming of royalty. There is a commotion in the vast crowd yonder, the eagerly watched gates swing wide, and a well-mounted company of cavalry dashes down the turf, in uniforms of light blue and gold. It is a citizens' company of butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers, which would do no discredit to the regular army. Driving close after is a four-horse carriage with two of the king's ministers; and then, at a rapid pace, six coal-black horses in silver harness, with mounted postilions, drawing a long, slender, open carriage with one seat, in which ride the king and his brother, Prince Otto, come down the way, and are pulled up in front of the pavilion; while the cannon roars, the big bells ring, all the flags of Bavaria, Prussia, and Austria, on innumerable poles, are blowing straight out, the band plays "God save the King," the people break into enthusiastic shouting, and the young king, throwing off his cloak, rises and stands in his carriage for a moment, bowing right and left before he descends. He wears to-day the simple uniform of the citizens' company which has escorted him, and is consequently more plainly and neatly dressed than any one else on the platform,—a tall (say six feet), slender, gallant-looking young fellow of three and twenty, with an open face and a graceful manner.

But, when he has arrived, things again come to a stand; and we wait for an hour, and watch the thickening of the clouds, while the king goes from this to that delighted dignitary on the stand and converses. At the end of this time, there is a movement. A white dog has got into the course, and runs up and down between the walls of people in terror, headed off by soldiers at either side of the grand stand, and finally, becoming desperate, he makes a dive for the royal pavilion. The consternation is extreme. The people cheer the dog and laugh: a white-handed official, in gold lace, and without his hat, rushes out to "shoo" the dog away, but is unsuccessful; for the animal dashes between his legs, and approaches the royal and carpeted steps. More men of rank run at him, and he is finally captured and borne away; and we all breathe freer that the danger to royalty is averted. At one o'clock six youths in white jackets, with clubs and coils of rope, had stationed themselves by the pavilion, but they did not go into action at this juncture; and I thought they rather enjoyed the activity of the great men who kept off the dog.

At length there was another stir; and the king descended from the rear of his pavilion, attended by his ministers, and moved about among the people, who made way for him, and uncovered at his approach. He spoke with one and another, and strolled about as his fancy took him. I suppose this is called mingling with the common people. After he had mingled about fifteen minutes, he returned, and took his place on the steps in front of the pavilion; and the distribution of prizes began. First the horses were led out; and their owners, approaching the king, received from his hands the diplomas, and a flag from an attendant. Most of them were peasants; and they exhibited no servility in receiving their marks of distinction, but bowed to the king as they would to any other man, and his majesty touched his cocked hat in return. Then came the prize-cattle, many of them led by women, who are as interested as their husbands in all farm matters. Everything goes off smoothly, except there is a momentary panic over a fractious bull, who plunges into the crowd; but the six white jackets are about him in an instant, and entangle him with their ropes.

This over, the gates again open, and the gay cavalcade that has been so long in sight approaches. First a band of musicians in costumes of the Middle Ages; and then a band of pages in the gayest apparel, bearing pictured banners and flags of all colors, whose silken luster would have been gorgeous in sunshine; these were followed by mounted heralds with trumpets, and after them were led the running horses entered for the race. The banners go up on the royal stand, and group themselves picturesquely; the heralds disappear at the other end of the list; and almost immediately the horses, ridden by young jockeys in stunning colors, come flying past in a general scramble. There are a dozen or more horses; but, after the first round, the race lies between two. The course is considerably over an English mile, and they make four circuits; so that the race is fully six- miles,—a very hard one. It was a run in a rain, however, which began when it did, and soon forced up the umbrellas. The vast crowd disappeared under a shed of umbrellas, of all colors,—black, green, red, blue; and the effect was very singular, especially when it moved from the field: there was then a Niagara of umbrellas. The race was soon over: it is only a peasants' race, after all; the aristocratic races of the best horses take place in May. It was over. The king's carriage was brought round, the people again shouted, the cannon roared, the six black horses reared and plunged, and away he went.

After all, says the artist, "the King of Bavaria has not much power."

"You can see," returns a gentleman who speaks English, "just how much he has: it is a six-horse power."

On other days there was horse-trotting, music production, and for several days prize-shooting. The latter was admirably conducted: the targets were placed at the foot of the bank; and opposite, I should think not more than two hundred yards off, were shooting-houses, each with a room for the register of the shots, and on each side of him closets where the shooters stand. Signal-wires run from these houses to the targets, where there are attendants who telegraph the effect of every shot. Each competitor has a little book; and he shoots at any booth he pleases, or at all, and has his shots registered. There was a continual fusillade for a couple of days; but what it all came to, I cannot tell. I can only say, that, if they shoot as steadily as they drink beer, there is no other corps of shooters that can stand before them.

INDIAN SUMMER

We are all quiet along the Isar since the October Fest; since the young king has come back from his summer castle on the Starnberg See to live in his dingy palace; since the opera has got into good working order, and the regular indoor concerts at the cafes have begun. There is no lack of amusements, with balls, theaters, and the cheap concerts, vocal and instrumental. I stepped into the West Ende Halle the other night, having first surrendered twelve kreuzers to the money-changer at the entrance,—double the usual fee, by the way. It was large and well lighted, with a gallery all round it and an orchestral platform at one end. The floor and gallery were filled with people of the most respectable class, who sat about little round tables, and drank beer. Every man was smoking a cigar; and the atmosphere was of that degree of haziness that we associate with Indian summer at home; so that through it the people in the gallery appeared like glorified objects in a heathen Pantheon, and the orchestra like men playing in a dream. Yet nobody seemed to mind it; and there was, indeed, a general air of social enjoyment and good feeling. Whether this good feeling was in process of being produced by the twelve or twenty glasses of beer which it is not unusual for a German to drink of an evening, I do not know. "I do not drink much beer now," said a German acquaintance,—"not more than four or five glasses in an evening." This is indeed moderation, when we remember that sixteen glasses of beer is only two gallons. The orchestra playing that night was Gungl's; and it performed, among other things, the whole of the celebrated Third (or Scotch) Symphony of Mendelssohn in a manner that would be greatly to the credit of orchestras that play without the aid of either smoke or beer. Concerts of this sort, generally with more popular music and a considerable dash of Wagner, in whom the Munichers believe, take place every night in several cafes; while comic singing, some of it exceedingly well done, can be heard in others. Such amusements—and nothing can be more harmless —are very cheap.

Speaking of Indian summer, the only approach to it I have seen was in the hazy atmosphere at the West Ende Halle. October outdoors has been an almost totally disagreeable month, with the exception of some days, or rather parts of days, when we have seen the sun, and experienced a mild atmosphere. At such times, I have liked to sit down on one of the empty benches in the Hof Garden, where the leaves already half cover the ground, and the dropping horse-chestnuts keep up a pattering on them. Soon the fat woman who has a fruit-stand at the gate is sure to come waddling along, her beaming face making a sort of illumination in the autumn scenery, and sit down near me. As soon as she comes, the little brown birds and the doves all fly that way, and look up expectant at her. They all know her, and expect the usual supply of bread-crumbs. Indeed, I have seen her on a still Sunday morning, when I have been sitting there waiting for the English ceremony of praying for Queen Victoria and Albert Edward to begin in the Odeon, sit for an hour, and cut up bread for her little brown flock. She sits now knitting a red stocking, the picture of content; one after another her old gossips pass that way, and stop a moment to exchange the chat of the day; or the policeman has his joke with her, and when there is nobody else to converse with, she talks to the birds. A benevolent old soul, I am sure, who in a New England village would be universally called "Aunty," and would lay all the rising generation under obligation to her for doughnuts and sweet-cake. As she rises to go away, she scrapes together a half-dozen shining chestnuts with her feet; and as she cannot possibly stoop to pick them up, she motions to a boy playing near, and smiles so happily as the urchin gathers them and runs away without even a "thank ye."

A TASTE OF ULTRAMONTANISM

If that of which every German dreams, and so few are ready to take any practical steps to attain,—German unity,—ever comes, it must ride roughshod over the Romish clergy, for one thing. Of course there are other obstacles. So long as beer is cheap, and songs of the Fatherland are set to lilting strains, will these excellent people "Ho, ho, my brothers," and "Hi, hi, my brothers," and wait for fate, in the shape of some compelling Bismarck, to drive them into anything more than the brotherhood of brown mugs of beer and Wagner's mysterious music of the future. I am not sure, by the way, that the music of Richard Wagner is not highly typical of the present (1868) state of German unity,—an undefined longing which nobody exactly understands. There are those who think they can discern in his music the same revolutionary tendency which placed the composer on the right side of a Dresden barricade in 1848, and who go so far as to believe that the liberalism of the young King of Bavaria is not a little due to his passion for the disorganizing operas of this transcendental writer. Indeed, I am not sure that any other people than Germans would not find in the repetition of the five hours of the "Meister-Singer von Nurnberg," which was given the other night at the Hof Theater, sufficient reason for revolution.

Well, what I set out to say was, that most Germans would like unity if they could be the unit. Each State would like to be the center of the consolidated system, and thus it happens that every practical step toward political unity meets a host of opponents at once. When Austria, or rather the house of Hapsburg, had a preponderance in the Diet, and it seemed, under it, possible to revive the past reality, or to realize the dream of a great German empire, it was clearly seen that Austria was a tyranny that would crush out all liberties. And now that Prussia, with its vital Protestantism and free schools, proposes to undertake the reconstruction of Germany, and make a nation where there are now only the fragmentary possibilities of a great power, why, Prussia is a military despot, whose subjects must be either soldiers or slaves, and the young emperor at Vienna is indeed another Joseph, filled with the most tender solicitude for the welfare of the chosen German people.

But to return to the clergy. While the monasteries and nunneries are going to the ground in superstition-saturated Spain; while eager workmen are demolishing the last hiding-places of monkery, and letting the daylight into places that have well kept the frightful secrets of three hundred years, and turning the ancient cloister demesne into public parks and pleasure-grounds,—the Romish priesthood here, in free Bavaria, seem to imagine that they cannot only resist the progress of events, but that they can actually bring back the owlish twilight of the Middle Ages. The reactionary party in Bavaria has, in some of the provinces, a strong majority; and its supporters and newspapers are belligerent and aggressive. A few words about the politics of Bavaria will give you a clew to the general politics of the country.

The reader of the little newspapers here in Munich finds evidence of at least three parties. There is first the radical. Its members sincerely desire a united Germany, and, of course, are friendly to Prussia, hate Napoleon, have little confidence in the Hapsburgs, like to read of uneasiness in Paris, and hail any movement that overthrows tradition and the prescriptive right of classes. If its members are Catholic, they are very mildly so; if they are Protestant, they are not enough so to harm them; and, in short, if their religious opinions are not as deep as a well, they are certainly broader than a church door. They are the party of free inquiry, liberal thought, and progress. Akin to them are what may be called the conservative liberals, the majority of whom may be Catholics in profession, but are most likely rationalists in fact; and with this party the king naturally affiliates, taking his music devoutly every Sunday morning in the Allerheiligenkirche, attached to the Residenz, and getting his religion out of Wagner; for, progressive as the youthful king is, he cannot be supposed to long for a unity which would wheel his throne off into the limbo of phantoms. The conservative liberals, therefore, while laboring for thorough internal reforms, look with little delight on the increasing strength of Prussia, and sympathize with the present liberal tendencies of Austria. Opposed to both these parties is the ultramontane, the head of which is the Romish hierarchy, and the body of which is the inert mass of ignorant peasantry, over whom the influence of the clergy seems little shaken by any of the modern moral earthquakes. Indeed I doubt if any new ideas will ever penetrate a class of peasants who still adhere to styles of costume that must have been ancient when the Turks threatened Vienna, which would be highly picturesque if they were not painfully ugly, and arrayed in which their possessors walk about in the broad light of these latter days, with entire unconsciousness that they do not belong to this age, and that their appearance is as much of an anachronism as if the figures should step out of Holbein's pictures (which Heaven forbid), or the stone images come down from the portals of the cathedral and walk about. The ultramontane party, which, so far as it is an intelligent force in modern affairs, is the Romish clergy, and nothing more, hears with aversion any hint of German unity, listens with dread to the needle-guns at Sadowa, hates Prussia in proportion as it fears her, and just now does not draw either with the Austrian Government, whose liberal tendencies are exceedingly distasteful. It relies upon that great unenlightened mass of Catholic people in Southern Germany and in Austria proper, one of whose sins is certainly not skepticism. The practical fight now in Bavaria is on the question of education; the priests being resolved to keep the schools of the people in their own control, and the liberal parties seeking to widen educational facilities and admit laymen to a share in the management of institutions of learning. Now the school visitors must all be ecclesiastics; and although their power is not to be dreaded in the cities, where teachers, like other citizens, are apt to be liberal, it gives them immense power in the rural districts. The election of the Lower House of the Bavarian parliament, whose members have a six years' tenure of office, which takes place next spring, excites uncommon interest; for the leading issue will be that of education. The little local newspapers—and every city has a small swarm of them, which are remarkable for the absence of news and an abundance of advertisements—have broken out into a style of personal controversy, which, to put it mildly, makes me, an American, feel quite at home. Both parties are very much in earnest, and both speak with a freedom that is, in itself, a very hopeful sign.

The pretensions of the ultramontane clergy are, indeed, remarkable enough to attract the attention of others besides the liberals of Bavaria. They assume an influence and an importance in the ecclesiastical profession, or rather an authority, equal to that ever asserted by the Church in its strongest days. Perhaps you will get an idea of the height of this pretension if I translate a passage which the liberal journal here takes from a sermon preached in the parish church of Ebersburg, in Ober-Dorfen, by a priest, Herr Kooperator Anton Hiring, no longer ago than August 16, 1868. It reads: "With the power of absolution, Christ has endued the priesthood with a might which is terrible to hell, and against which Lucifer himself cannot stand,-a might which, indeed, reaches over into eternity, where all other earthly powers find their limit and end,—a might, I say, which is able to break the fetters which, for an eternity, were forged through the commission of heavy sin. Yes, further, this Power of the forgiveness of sins makes the priest, in a certain measure, a second God; for God alone naturally can forgive sins. And yet this is not the highest reach of the priestly might: his power reaches still higher; he compels God himself to serve him. How so? When the priest approaches the altar, in order to bring there the holy mass-offering, there, at that moment, lifts himself up Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, upon his throne, in order to be ready for the beck of his priests upon earth. And scarcely does the priest begin the words of consecration, than there Christ already hovers, surrounded by the heavenly host, come down from heaven to earth, and to the altar of sacrifice, and changes, upon the words of the priest, the bread and wine into his holy flesh and blood, and permits himself then to be taken up and to lie in the hands of the priest, even though the priest is the most sinful and the most unworthy. Further, his power surpasses that of the highest archangels, and of the Queen of Heaven. Right did the holy Franciscus say, 'If I should meet a priest and an angel at the same time, I should salute the priest first, and then the angel; because the priest is possessed of far higher might and holiness than the angel.'"

The radical journal calls this "ultramontane blasphemy," and, the day after quoting it, adds a charge that must be still more annoying to the Herr Kooperator Hiring than that of blasphemy: it accuses him of plagiarism; and, to substantiate the charge, quotes almost the very same language from a sermon preached in 1785—In this it is boldly claimed that "in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, there is nothing mightier than a priest, except God; and, to be exact, God himself must obey the priest in the mass." And then, in words which I do not care to translate, the priest is made greater than the Virgin Mary, because Christ was only born of the Virgin once, while the priest "with five words, as often and wherever he will," can "bring forth the Saviour of the world." So to-day keeps firm hold of the traditions of a hundred years ago, and ultramontanism wisely defends the last citadel where the Middle Age superstition makes a stand,—the popular veneration for the clergy.

And the clergy take good care to keep up the pomps and shows even here in skeptical Munich. It was my inestimable privilege the other morning—it was All-Saints' Day—to see the archbishop in the old Frauenkirche, the ancient cathedral, where hang tattered banners that were captured from the Turks three centuries ago,—to see him seated in the choir, overlooked by saints and apostles carved in wood by some forgotten artist of the fifteenth century. I supposed he was at least an archbishop, from the retinue of priests who attended and served him, and also from his great size. When he sat down, it required a dignitary of considerable rank to put on his hat; and when he arose to speak a few precious words, the effect was visible a good many yards from where he stood. At the close of the service he went in great state down the center aisle, preceded by the gorgeous beadle—a character that is always awe-inspiring to me in these churches, being a cross between a magnificent drum-major and a verger and two persons in livery, and followed by a train of splendidly attired priests, six of whom bore up his long train of purple silk. The whole cortege was resplendent in embroidery and ermine; and as the great man swept out of my sight, and was carried on a priestly wave into his shining carriage, and the noble footman jumped up behind, and he rolled away to his dinner, I stood leaning against a pillar, and reflected if it could be possible that that religion could be anything but genuine which had so much genuine ermine. And the organ-notes, rolling down the arches, seemed to me to have a very ultramontane sound.

CHANGING QUARTERS

Perhaps it may not interest you to know how we moved, that is, changed our apartments. I did not see it mentioned in the cable dispatches, and it may not be generally known, even in Germany; but then, the cable is so occupied with relating how his Serenity this, and his Highness that, and her Loftiness the other one, went outdoors and came in again, owing to a slight superfluity of the liquid element in the atmosphere, that it has no time to notice the real movements of the people. And yet, so dry are some of these little German newspapers of news, that it is refreshing to read, now and then, that the king, on Sunday, walked out with the Duke of Hesse after dinner (one would like to know if they also had sauerkraut and sausage), and that his prospective mother-in-law, the Empress of Russia, who was here the other day, on her way home from Como, where she was nearly drowned out by the inundation, sat for an hour on Sunday night, after the opera, in the winter garden of the palace, enjoying the most easy family intercourse.

But about moving. Let me tell you that to change quarters in the face of a Munich winter, which arrives here the 1st of November, is like changing front to the enemy just before a battle; and if we had perished in the attempt, it might have been put upon our monuments, as it is upon the out-of-cannon-cast obelisk in the Karolina Platz, erected to the memory of the thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers who fell in the disastrous Russian winter campaign of Napoleon, fighting against all the interests of Germany,—"they, too, died for their Fatherland." Bavaria happened also to fight on the wrong side at Sadowa and I suppose that those who fell there also died for Fatherland: it is a way the Germans have of doing, and they mean nothing serious by it. But, as I was saying, to change quarters here as late as November is a little difficult, for the wise ones seek to get housed for the winter by October: they select the sunny apartments, get on the double windows, and store up wood. The plants are tied up in the gardens, the fountains are covered over, and the inhabitants go about in furs and the heaviest winter clothing long before we should think of doing so at home. And they are wise: the snow comes early, and, besides, a cruel fog, cold as the grave and penetrating as remorse, comes down out of the near Tyrol. One morning early in November, I looked out of the window to find snow falling, and the ground covered with it. There was dampness and frost enough in the air to make it cling to all the tree-twigs, and to take fantastic shapes on all the queer roofs and the slenderest pinnacles and most delicate architectural ornamentations. The city spires had a mysterious appearance in the gray haze; and above all, the round-topped towers of the old Frauenkirche, frosted with a little snow, loomed up more grandly than ever. When I went around to the Hof Garden, where I late had sat in the sun, and heard the brown horse-chestnuts drop on the leaves, the benches were now full of snow, and the fat and friendly fruit-woman at the gate had retired behind glass windows into a little shop, which she might well warm by her own person, if she radiated heat as readily as she used to absorb it on the warm autumn days, when I have marked her knitting in the sunshine.

But we are not moving. The first step we took was to advertise our wants in the "Neueste Nachrichten" ("Latest News ") newspaper. We desired, if possible, admission into some respectable German family, where we should be forced to speak German, and in which our society, if I may so express it, would be some compensation for our bad grammar. We wished also to live in the central part of the city,—in short, in the immediate neighborhood of all the objects of interest (which are here very much scattered), and to have pleasant rooms. In Dresden, where the people are not so rich as in Munich, and where different customs prevail, it is customary for the best people, I mean the families of university professors, for instance, to take in foreigners, and give them tolerable food and a liberal education. Here it is otherwise. Nearly all families occupy one floor of a building, renting just rooms enough for the family, so that their apartments are not elastic enough to take in strangers, even if they desire to do so. And generally they do not. Munich society is perhaps chargeable with being a little stiff and exclusive. Well, we advertised in the "Neueste Nachrichten." This is the liberal paper of Munich. It is a poorly printed, black-looking daily sheet, folded in octavo size, and containing anywhere from sixteen to thirty-four pages, more or less, as it happens to have advertisements. It sometimes will not have more than two or three pages of reading matter. There will be a scrap or two of local news, the brief telegrams taken from the official paper of the day before, a bit or two of other news, and perhaps a short and slashing editorial on the ultramontane party. The advantage of printing and folding it in such small leaves is, that the size can be varied according to the demands of advertisements or news (if the German papers ever find out what that is); so that the publisher is always giving, every day, just what it pays to give that day; and the reader has his regular quantity of reading matter, and does not have to pay for advertising space, which in journals of unchangeable form cannot always be used profitably. This little journal was started something like twenty years ago. It probably spends little for news, has only one or, at most, two editors, is crowded with advertisements, which are inserted cheap, and costs, delivered, a little over six francs a year. It circulates in the city some thirty-five thousand. There is another little paper here of the same size, but not so many leaves, called "The Daily Advertiser," with nothing but advertisements, principally of theaters, concerts, and the daily sights, and one page devoted to some prodigious yarn, generally concerning America, of which country its readers must get the most extraordinary and frightful impression. The "Nachrichten" made the fortune of its first owner, who built himself a fine house out of it, and retired to enjoy his wealth. It was recently sold for one hundred thousand guldens; and I can see that it is piling up another fortune for its present owner. The Germans, who herein show their good sense and the high state of civilization to which they have reached, are very free advertisers, going to the newspapers with all their wants, and finding in them that aid which all interests and all sorts of people, from kaiser to kerl, are compelled, in these days, to seek in the daily journal. Every German town of any size has three or four of these little journals of flying leaves, which are excellent papers in every respect, except that they look like badly printed handbills, and have very little news and no editorials worth speaking of. An exception to these in Bavaria is the "Allgerneine Zeitung" of Augsburg, which is old and immensely respectable, and is perhaps, for extent of correspondence and splendidly written editorials on a great variety of topics, excelled by no journal in Europe except the London "Times." It gives out two editions daily, the evening one about the size of the New York "Nation;" and it has all the telegraphic news. It is absurdly old-grannyish, and is malevolent in its pretended conservatism and impartiality. Yet it circulates over forty thousand copies, and goes all over Germany.

But were we not saying something about moving? The truth is, that the best German families did not respond to our appeal with that alacrity which we had no right to expect, and did not exhibit that anxiety for our society which would have been such a pleasant evidence of their appreciation of the honor done to the royal city of Munich by the selection of it as a residence during the most disagreeable months of the year by the advertising undersigned. Even the young king, whose approaching marriage to the Russian princess, one would think, might soften his heart, did nothing to win our regard, or to show that he appreciated our residence "near" his court, and, so far as I know, never read with any sort of attention our advertisement, which was composed with as much care as Goethe's "Faust," and probably with the use of more dictionaries. And this, when he has an extraordinary large Residenz, to say nothing about other outlying palaces and comfortable places to live in, in which I know there are scores of elegantly furnished apartments, which stand idle almost the year round, and might as well be let to appreciative strangers, who would accustom the rather washy and fierce frescoes on the walls to be stared at. I might have selected rooms, say on the court which looks on the exquisite bronze fountain, Perseus with the head of Medusa, a copy of the one in Florence by Benvenuto Cellini, where we could have a southern exposure. Or we might, so it would seem, have had rooms by the winter garden, where tropical plants rejoice in perennial summer, and blossom and bear fruit, while a northern winter rages without. Yet the king did not see it "by those lamps;" and I looked in vain on the gates of the Residenz for the notice so frequently seen on other houses, of apartments to let. And yet we had responses. The day after the announcement appeared, our bell ran perpetually; and we had as many letters as if we had advertised for wives innumerable. The German notes poured in upon us in a flood; each one of them containing an offer tempting enough to beguile an angel out of paradise, at least, according to our translation: they proffered us chambers that were positively overheated by the flaming sun (which, I can take my oath, only ventures a few feet above the horizon at this season), which were friendly in appearance, splendidly furnished and near to every desirable thing, and in which, usually, some American family had long resided, and experienced a content and happiness not to be felt out of Germany.

I spent some days in calling upon the worthy frauen who made these alluring offers. The visits were full of profit to the student of human nature, but profitless otherwise. I was ushered into low, dark chambers, small and dreary, looking towards the sunless north, which I was assured were delightful and even elegant. I was taken up to the top of tall houses, through a smell of cabbage that was appalling, to find empty and dreary rooms, from which I fled in fright. We were visited by so many people who had chambers to rent, that we were impressed with the idea that all Munich was to let; and yet, when we visited the places offered, we found they were only to be let alone. One of the frauen who did us the honor to call, also wrote a note, and inclosed a letter that she had just received from an American gentleman (I make no secret of it that he came from Hartford), in which were many kindly expressions for her welfare, and thanks for the aid he had received in his study of German; and yet I think her chambers are the most uninviting in the entire city. There were people who were willing to teach us German, without rooms or board; or to lodge us without giving us German or food; or to feed us, and let us starve intellectually, and lodge where we could.

But all things have an end, and so did our hunt for lodgings. I chanced one day in my walk to find, with no help from the advertisement, very nearly what we desired,—cheerful rooms in a pleasant neighborhood, where the sun comes when it comes out at all, and opposite the Glass Palace, through which the sun streams in the afternoon with a certain splendor, and almost next door to the residence and laboratory of the famous chemist, Professor Liebig; so that we can have our feelings analyzed whenever it is desirable. When we had set up our household gods, and a fire was kindled in the tall white porcelain family monument, which is called here a stove,— and which, by the way, is much more agreeable than your hideous black and air-scorching cast-iron stoves,—and seen that the feather-beds under which we were expected to lie were thick enough to roast the half of the body, and short enough to let the other half freeze, we determined to try for a season the regular German cookery, our table heretofore having been served with food cooked in the English style with only a slight German flavor. A week of the experiment was quite enough. I do not mean to say that the viands served us were not good, only that we could not make up our minds to eat them. The Germans eat a great deal of meat; and we were obliged to take meat when we preferred vegetables. Now, when a deep dish is set before you wherein are chunks of pork reposing on stewed potatoes, and another wherein a fathomless depth of sauerkraut supports coils of boiled sausage, which, considering that you are a mortal and responsible being, and have a stomach, will you choose? Herein Munich, nearly all the bread is filled with anise or caraway seed; it is possible to get, however, the best wheat bread we have eaten in Europe, and we usually have it; but one must maintain a constant vigilance against the inroads of the fragrant seeds. Imagine, then, our despair, when one day the potato, the one vegetable we had always eaten with perfect confidence, appeared stewed with caraway seeds. This was too much for American human nature, constituted as it is. Yet the dish that finally sent us back to our ordinary and excellent way of living is one for which I have no name. It may have been compounded at different times, have been the result of many tastes or distastes: but there was, after all, a unity in it that marked it as the composition of one master artist; there was an unspeakable harmony in all its flavors and apparently ununitable substances. It looked like a terrapin soup, but it was not. Every dive of the spoon into its dark liquid brought up a different object,—a junk of unmistakable pork, meat of the color of roast hare, what seemed to be the neck of a goose, something in strings that resembled the rags of a silk dress, shreds of cabbage, and what I am quite willing to take my oath was a bit of Astrachan fur. If Professor Liebig wishes to add to his reputation, he could do so by analyzing this dish, and publishing the result to the world.

And, while we are speaking of eating, it may be inferred that the Germans are good eaters; and although they do not begin early, seldom taking much more than a cup of coffee before noon, they make it up by very substantial dinners and suppers. To say nothing of the extraordinary dishes of meats which the restaurants serve at night, the black bread and odorous cheese and beer which the men take on board in the course of an evening would soon wear out a cast-iron stomach in America; and yet I ought to remember the deadly pie and the corroding whisky of my native land. The restaurant life of the people is, of course, different from their home life, and perhaps an evening entertainment here is no more formidable than one in America, but it is different. Let me give you the outlines of a supper to which we were invited the other night: it certainly cannot hurt you to read about it. We sat down at eight. There were first courses of three sorts of cold meat, accompanied with two sorts of salad; the one, a composite, with a potato basis, of all imaginable things that are eaten. Beer and bread were unlimited. There was then roast hare, with some supporting dish, followed by jellies of various sorts, and ornamented plates of something that seemed unable to decide whether it would be jelly or cream; and then came assorted cake and the white wine of the Rhine and the red of Hungary. We were then surprised with a dish of fried eels, with a sauce. Then came cheese; and, to crown all, enormous, triumphal-looking loaves of cake, works of art in appearance, and delicious to the taste. We sat at the table till twelve o'clock; but you must not imagine that everybody sat still all the time, or that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the principal object of the entertainment was eating. The songs that were sung in Hungarian as well as German, the poems that were recited, the burlesques of actors and acting, the imitations that were inimitable, the take-off of table-tipping and of prominent musicians, the wit and constant flow of fun, as constant as the good-humor and free hospitality, the unconstrained ease of the whole evening, these things made the real supper which one remembers when the grosser meal has vanished, as all substantial things do vanish.

CHRISTMAS TIME-MUSIC

For a month Munich has been preparing for Christmas. The shop windows have had a holiday look all December. I see one every day in which are displayed all the varieties of fruits, vegetables, and confectionery possible to be desired for a feast, done in wax,—a most dismal exhibition, and calculated to make the adjoining window, which has a little fountain and some green plants waving amidst enormous pendent sausages and pigs' heads and various disagreeable hashes of pressed meat, positively enticing. And yet there are some vegetables here that I should prefer to have in wax,—for instance, sauerkraut. The toy windows are worthy of study, and next to them the bakers'. A favorite toy of the season is a little crib, with the Holy Child, in sugar or wax, lying in it in the most uncomfortable attitude. Babies here are strapped upon pillows, or between pillows, and so tied up and wound up that they cannot move a muscle, except, perhaps, the tongue; and so, exactly like little mummies, they are carried about the street by the nurses,—poor little things, packed away so, even in the heat of summer, their little faces looking out of the down in a most pitiful fashion. The popular toy is a representation, in sugar or wax, of this period of life. Generally the toy represents twins, so swathed and bound; and, not infrequently, the bold conception of the artist carries the point of the humor so far as to introduce triplets, thus sporting with the most dreadful possibilities of life.

The German bakers are very ingenious; and if they could be convinced of this great error, that because things are good separately, they must be good in combination, the produce of their ovens would be much more eatable. As it is, they make delicious cake, and of endless variety; but they also offer us conglomerate formations that may have a scientific value, but are utterly useless to a stomach not trained in Germany. Of this sort, for the most part, is the famous Lebkuchen, a sort of gingerbread manufactured in Nurnberg, and sent all over Germany: "age does not [seem to] impair, nor custom stale its infinite variety." It is very different from our simple cake of that name, although it is usually baked in flat cards. It may contain nuts or fruit, and is spoiled by a flavor of conflicting spices. I should think it might be sold by the cord, it is piled up in such quantities; and as it grows old and is much handled, it acquires that brown, not to say dirty, familiar look, which may, for aught I know, be one of its chief recommendations. The cake, however, which prevails at this season of the year comes from the Tyrol; and as the holidays approach, it is literally piled up on the fruit-stands. It is called Klatzenbrod, and is not a bread at all, but and amalgamation of fruits and spices. It is made up into small round or oblong forms; and the top is ornamented in various patterns, with split almond meats. The color is a faded black, as if it had been left for some time in a country store; and the weight is just about that of pig-iron. I had formed a strong desire, mingled with dread, to taste it, which I was not likely to gratify,—one gets so tired of such experiments after a time—when a friend sent us a ball of it. There was no occasion to call in Professor Liebig to analyze the substance: it is a plain case. The black mass contains, cut up and pressed together, figs, citron, oranges, raisins, dates, various kinds of nuts, cinnamon) nutmeg, cloves, and I know not what other spices, together with the inevitable anise and caraway seeds. It would make an excellent cannon-ball, and would be specially fatal if it hit an enemy in the stomach. These seeds invade all dishes. The cooks seem possessed of one of the rules of whist,—in case of doubt, play a trump: in case of doubt, they always put in anise seed. It is sprinkled profusely in the blackest rye bread, it gets into all the vegetables, and even into the holiday cakes.

The extensive Maximilian Platz has suddenly grown up into booths and shanties, and looks very much like a temporary Western village. There are shops for the sale of Christmas articles, toys, cakes, and gimcracks; and there are, besides, places of amusement, if one of the sorry menageries of sick beasts with their hair half worn off can be so classed. One portion of the platz is now a lively and picturesque forest of evergreens, an extensive thicket of large and small trees, many of them trimmed with colored and gilt strips of paper. I meet in every street persons lugging home their little trees; for it must be a very poor household that cannot have its Christmas tree, on which are hung the scanty store of candy, nuts, and fruit, and the simple toys that the needy people will pinch themselves otherwise to obtain.

At this season, usually, the churches get up some representations for the children, the stable at Bethlehem, with the figures of the Virgin and Child, the wise men, and the oxen standing by. At least, the churches must be put in spick-and-span order. I confess that I like to stray into these edifices, some of them gaudy enough when they are, so to speak, off duty, when the choir is deserted, and there is only here and there a solitary worshiper at his prayers; unless, indeed, as it sometimes happens, when I fancy myself quite alone, I come by chance upon a hundred people, in some remote corner before a side chapel, where mass is going on, but so quietly that the sense of solitude in the church is not disturbed. Sometimes, when the place is left entirely to myself, and the servants who are putting it to rights and, as it were, shifting the scenes, I get a glimpse of the reality of all the pomp and parade of the services. At first I may be a little shocked with the familiar manner in which the images and statues and the gilded paraphernalia are treated, very different from the stately ceremony of the morning, when the priests are at the altar, the choir is in the organ-loft, and the people crowd nave and aisles. Then everything is sanctified and inviolate. Now, as I loiter here, the old woman sweeps and dusts about as if she were in an ordinary crockery store: the sacred things are handled without gloves. And, lo! an unclerical servant, in his shirt-sleeves, climbs up to the altar, and, taking down the silver-gilded cherubs, holds them, head down, by one fat foot, while he wipes them off with a damp cloth. To think of submitting a holy cherub to the indignity of a damp cloth!

One could never say too much about the music here. I do not mean that of the regimental bands, or the orchestras in every hall and beer-garden, or that in the churches on Sundays, both orchestral and vocal. Nearly every day, at half-past eleven, there is a parade by the Residenz, and another on the Marian Platz; and at each the bands play for half an hour. In the Loggie by the palace the music-stands can always be set out, and they are used in the platz when it does not storm; and the bands play choice overtures and selections from the operas in fine style. The bands are always preceded and followed by a great crowd as they march through the streets, people who seem to live only for this half hour in the day, and whom no mud or snow can deter from keeping up with the music. It is a little gleam of comfort in the day for the most wearied portion of the community: I mean those who have nothing to do.

But the music of which I speak is that of the conservatoire and opera. The Hof Theater, opera, and conservatoire are all under one royal direction. The latter has been recently reorganized with a new director, in accordance with the Wagner notions somewhat. The young king is cracked about Wagner, and appears to care little for other music: he brings out his operas at great expense, and it is the fashion here to like Wagner whether he is understood or not. The opera of the "Meister-Singer von Nurnberg," which was brought out last summer, occupied over five hours in the representation, which is unbearable to the Germans, who go to the opera at six o'clock or half-past, and expect to be at home before ten. His latest opera, which has not yet been produced, is founded on the Niebelungen Lied, and will take three evenings in the representation, which is almost as bad as a Chinese play. The present director of the conservatoire and opera, a Prussian, Herr von Bulow, is a friend of Wagner. There are formed here in town two parties: the Wagner and the conservative, the new and the old, the modern and classical; only the Wagnerites do not admit that their admiration of Beethoven and the older composers is less than that of the others, and so for this reason Bulow has given us more music of Beethoven than of any other composer. One thing is certain, that the royal orchestra is trained to a high state of perfection: its rendition of the grand operas and its weekly concerts in the Odeon cannot easily be surpassed. The singers are not equal to the orchestra, for Berlin and Vienna offer greater inducements; but there are people here who regard this orchestra as superlative. They say that the best orchestras in the world are in Germany; that the best in Germany is in Munich; and, therefore, you can see the inevitable deduction. We have another parallel syllogism. The greatest pianist in the world is Liszt; but then Herr Bulow is actually a better performer than Liszt; therefore you see again to what you must come. At any rate, we are quite satisfied in this provincial capital; and, if there is anywhere better music, we don't know it. Bulow's orchestra is not very large,—there are less than eighty pieces, but it is so handled and drilled, that when we hear it give one of the symphonies of Beethoven or Mendelssohn, there is little left to be desired. Bulow is a wonderful conductor, a little man, all nerve and fire, and he seems to inspire every instrument. It is worth something to see him lead an orchestra: his baton is magical; head, arms, and the whole body are in motion; he knows every note of the compositions; and the precision with which he evokes a solitary note out of a distant instrument with a jerk of his rod, or brings a wail from the concurring violins, like the moaning of a pine forest in winter, with a sweep of his arm, is most masterly. About the platform of the Odeon are the marble busts of the great composers; and while the orchestra is giving some of Beethoven's masterpieces, I like to fix my eyes on his serious and genius-full face, which seems cognizant of all that is passing, and believe that he has a posthumous satisfaction in the interpretation of his great thoughts.

The managers of the conservatoire also give vocal concerts, and there are, besides, quartette soiries; so that there are few evenings without some attraction. The opera alternates with the theater two or three times a week. The singers are, perhaps, not known in Paris and London, but some of them are not unworthy to be. There is the baritone, Herr Kindermann, who now, at the age of sixty-five, has a superb voice and manner, and has had few superiors in his time on the German stage. There is Frau Dietz, at forty-five, the best of actresses, and with a still fresh and lovely voice. There is Herr Nachbar, a tenor, who has a future; Fraulein Stehle, a soprano, young and with an uncommon voice, who enjoys a large salary, and was the favorite until another soprano, the Malinger, came and turned the heads of king and opera habitues. The resources of the Academy are, however, tolerably large; and the practice of pensioning for life the singers enables them to keep always a tolerable company. This habit of pensioning officials, as well as musicians and poets, is very agreeable to the Germans. A gentleman the other day, who expressed great surprise at the smallness of the salary of our President, said, that, of course, Andrew Johnson would receive a pension when he retired from office. I could not explain to him how comical the idea was to me; but when I think of the American people pensioning Andrew Johnson,—well, like the fictitious Yankee in "Mugby Junction," "I laff, I du."

There is some fashion, in a fudgy, quaint way, here in Munich; but it is not exhibited in dress for the opera. People go—and it is presumed the music is the attraction in ordinary apparel. They save all their dress parade for the concerts; and the hall of the Odeon is as brilliant as provincial taste can make it in toilet. The ladies also go to operas and concerts unattended by gentlemen, and are brought, and fetched away, by their servants. There is a freedom and simplicity about this which I quite like; and, besides, it leaves their husbands and brothers at liberty to spend a congenial evening in the cafes, beer-gardens, and clubs. But there is always a heavy fringe of young officers and gallants both at opera and concert, standing in the outside passages. It is cheaper to stand, and one can hear quite as well, and see more.

LOOKING FOR WARM WEATHER

FROM MUNICH TO NAPLES

At all events, saith the best authority, "pray that your flight be not in winter;" and it might have added, don't go south if you desire warm weather. In January, 1869, I had a little experience of hunting after genial skies; and I will give you the benefit of it in some free running notes on my journey from Munich to Naples.

It was the middle of January, at eleven o'clock at night, that we left Munich, on a mixed railway train, choosing that time, and the slowest of slow trains, that we might make the famous Brenner Pass by daylight. It was no easy matter, at last, to pull up from the dear old city in which we had become so firmly planted, and to leave the German friends who made the place like home to us. One gets to love Germany and the Germans as he does no other country and people in Europe. There has been something so simple, honest, genuine, in our Munich life, that we look back to it with longing eyes from this land of fancy, of hand-organ music, and squalid splendor. I presume the streets are yet half the day hid in a mountain fog; but I know the superb military bands are still playing at noon in the old Marian Platz and in the Loggie by the Residenz; that at half-past six in the evening our friends are quietly stepping in to hear the opera at the Hof Theater, where everybody goes to hear the music, and nobody for display, and that they will be at home before half-past nine, and have dispatched the servant for the mugs of foaming beer; I know that they still hear every week the choice conservatoire orchestral concerts in the Odeon; and, alas that experience should force me to think of it! I have no doubt that they sip, every morning, coffee which is as much superior to that of Paris as that of Paris is to that of London; and that they eat the delicious rolls, in comparison with which those of Paris are tasteless. I wonder, in this land of wine,—and yet it must be so,—if the beer-gardens are still filled nightly; and if it could be that I should sit at a little table there, a comely lass would, before I could ask for what everybody is presumed to want, place before me a tall glass full of amber liquid, crowned with creamy foam. Are the handsome officers still sipping their coffee in the Caf‚ Maximilian; and, on sunny days, is the crowd of fashion still streaming down to the Isar, and the high, sightly walks and gardens beyond?

As I said, it was eleven o'clock of a clear and not very severe night; for Munich had had no snow on the ground since November. A deputation of our friends were at the station to see us off, and the farewells between the gentlemen were in the hearty fashion of the country. I know there is a prejudice with us against kissing between men; but it is only a question of taste: and the experience of anybody will tell him that the theory that this sort of salutation must necessarily be desirable between opposite sexes is a delusion. But I suppose it cannot be denied that kissing between men was invented in Germany before they wore full beards. Well, our goodbyes said, we climbed into our bare cars. There is no way of heating the German cars, except by tubes filled with hot water, which are placed under the feet, and are called foot-warmers. As we slowly moved out over the plain, we found it was cold; in an hour the foot-warmers, not hot to start with, were stone cold. You are going to sunny Italy, our friends had said: as soon as you pass the Brenner you will have sunshine and delightful weather. This thought consoled us, but did not warm our feet. The Germans, when they travel by rail, wrap themselves in furs and carry foot-sacks.

We creaked along, with many stoppings. At two o'clock we were at Rosenheim. Rosenheim is a windy place, with clear starlight, with a multitude of cars on a multiplicity of tracks, and a large, lighted refreshment-room, which has a glowing, jolly stove. We stay there an hour, toasting by the fire and drinking excellent coffee. Groups of Germans are seated at tables playing cards, smoking, and taking coffee. Other trains arrive; and huge men stalk in, from Vienna or Russia, you would say, enveloped in enormous fur overcoats, reaching to the heels, and with big fur boots coming above the knees, in which they move like elephants. Another start, and a cold ride with cooling foot-warmers, droning on to Kurfstein. It is five o'clock when we reach Kurfstein, which is also a restaurant, with a hot stove, and more Germans going on as if it were daytime; but by this time in the morning the coffee had got to be wretched.

After an hour's waiting, we dream on again, and, before we know it, come out of our cold doze into the cold dawn. Through the thick frost on the windows we see the faint outlines of mountains. Scraping away the incrustation, we find that we are in the Tyrol, high hills on all sides, no snow in the valley, a bright morning, and the snow-peaks are soon rosy in the sunrise. It is just as we expected,—little villages under the hills, and slender church spires with brick-red tops. At nine o'clock we are in Innsbruck, at the foot of the Brenner. No snow yet. It must be charming here in the summer.

During the night we have got out of Bavaria. The waiter at the restaurant wants us to pay him ninety kreuzers for our coffee, which is only six kreuzers a cup in Munich. Remembering that it takes one hundred kreuzers to make a gulden in Austria, I launch out a Bavarian gulden, and expect ten kreuzers in change. I have heard that sixty Bavarian kreuzers are equal to one hundred Austrian; but this waiter explains to me that my gulden is only good for ninety kreuzers. I, in my turn, explain to the waiter that it is better than the coffee; but we come to no understanding, and I give up, before I begin, trying to understand the Austrian currency. During the day I get my pockets full of coppers, which are very convenient to take in change, but appear to have a very slight purchasing, power in Austria even, and none at all elsewhere, and the only use for which I have found is to give to Italian beggars. One of these pieces satisfies a beggar when it drops into his hat; and then it detains him long enough in the examination of it, so that your carriage has time to get so far away that his renewed pursuit is usually unavailing.

The Brenner Pass repaid us for the pains we had taken to see it, especially as the sun shone and took the frost from our windows, and we encountered no snow on the track; and, indeed, the fall was not deep, except on the high peaks about us. Even if the engineering of the road were not so interesting, it was something to be again amidst mountains that can boast a height of ten thousand feet. After we passed the summit, and began the zigzag descent, we were on a sharp lookout for sunny Italy. I expected to lay aside my heavy overcoat, and sun myself at the first station among the vineyards. Instead of that, we bade good-by to bright sky, and plunged into a snowstorm, and, so greeted, drove down into the narrow gorges, whose steep slopes we could see were terraced to the top, and planted with vines. We could distinguish enough to know that, with the old Roman ruins, the churches and convent towers perched on the crags, and all, the scenery in summer must be finer than that of the Rhine, especially as the vineyards here are picturesque,—the vines being trained so as to hide and clothe the ground with verdure.

It was four o'clock when we reached Trent, and colder than on top of the Brenner. As the Council, owing to the dead state of its members for now three centuries, was not in session, we made no long tarry. We went into the magnificent large refreshment-room to get warm; but it was as cold as a New England barn. I asked the proprietor if we could not get at a fire; but he insisted that the room was warm, that it was heated with a furnace, and that he burned good stove-coal, and pointed to a register high up in the wall. Seeing that I looked incredulous, he insisted that I should test it. Accordingly, I climbed upon a table, and reached up my hand. A faint warmth came out; and I gave it up, and congratulated the landlord on his furnace. But the register had no effect on the great hall. You might as well try to heat the dome of St. Peter's with a lucifer-match. At dark, Allah be praised! we reached Ala, where we went through the humbug of an Italian custom-house, and had our first glimpse of Italy in the picturesque-looking idlers in red-tasseled caps, and the jabber of a strange tongue. The snow turned into a cold rain: the foot-warmers, we having reached the sunny lands, could no longer be afforded; and we shivered along till nine o'clock, dark and rainy, brought us to Verona. We emerged from the station to find a crowd of omnibuses, carriages, drivers, runners, and people anxious to help us, all vociferating in the highest key. Amidst the usual Italian clamor about nothing, we gained our hotel omnibus, and sat there for ten minutes watching the dispute over our luggage, and serenely listening to the angry vituperations of policemen and drivers. It sounded like a revolution, but it was only the ordinary Italian way of doing things; and we were at last rattling away over the broad pavements.

Of course, we stopped at a palace turned hotel, drove into a court with double flights of high stone and marble stairways, and were hurried up to the marble-mosaic landing by an active boy, and, almost before we could ask for rooms, were shown into a suite of magnificent apartments. I had a glimpse of a garden in the rear,—flowers and plants, and a balcony up which I suppose Romeo climbed to hold that immortal love-prattle with the lovesick Juliet. Boy began to light the candles. Asked in English the price of such fine rooms. Reply in Italian. Asked in German. Reply in Italian. Asked in French, with the same result. Other servants appeared, each with a piece of baggage. Other candles were lighted. Everybody talked in chorus. The landlady—a woman of elegant manners and great command of her native tongue—appeared with a candle, and joined in the melodious confusion. What is the price of these rooms? More jabber, more servants bearing lights. We seemed suddenly to have come into an illumination and a private lunatic asylum. The landlady and her troop grew more and more voluble and excited. Ah, then, if these rooms do not suit the signor and signoras, there are others; and we were whisked off to apartments yet grander, great suites with high, canopied beds, mirrors, and furniture that was luxurious a hundred years ago. The price? Again a torrent of Italian; servants pouring in, lights flashing, our baggage arriving, until, in the tumult, hopeless of any response to our inquiry for a servant who could speak anything but Italian, and when we had decided, in despair, to hire the entire establishment, a waiter appeared who was accomplished in all languages, the row subsided, and we were left alone in our glory, and soon in welcome sleep forgot our desperate search for a warm climate.

The next day it was rainy and not warm; but the sun came out occasionally, and we drove about to see some of the sights. The first Italian town which the stranger sees he is sure to remember, the outdoor life of the people is so different from that at the North. It is the fiction in Italy that it is always summer; and the people sit in the open market-place, shiver in the open doorways, crowd into corners where the sun comes, and try to keep up the beautiful pretense. The picturesque groups of idlers and traffickers were more interesting to us than the palaces with sculptured fronts and old Roman busts, or tombs of the Scaligers, and old gates. Perhaps I ought to except the wonderful and perfect Roman amphitheater, over every foot of which a handsome boy in rags followed us, looking over every wall that we looked over, peering into every hole that we peered into, thus showing his fellowship with us, and at every pause planting himself before us, and throwing a somerset, and then extending his greasy cap for coppers, as if he knew that the modern mind ought not to dwell too exclusively on hoary antiquity without some relief.

Anxious, as I have said, to find the sunny South, we left Verona that afternoon for Florence, by way of Padua and Bologna. The ride to Padua was through a plain, at this season dreary enough, were it not, here and there, for the abrupt little hills and the snowy Alps, which were always in sight, and towards sundown and between showers transcendently lovely in a purple and rosy light. But nothing now could be more desolate than the rows of unending mulberry-trees, pruned down to the stumps, through which we rode all the afternoon. I suppose they look better when the branches grow out with the tender leaves for the silk-worms, and when they are clothed with grapevines. Padua was only to us a name. There we turned south, lost mountains and the near hills, and had nothing but the mulberry flats and ditches of water, and chilly rain and mist. It grew unpleasant as we went south. At dark we were riding slowly, very slowly, for miles through a country overflowed with water, out of which trees and houses loomed up in a ghastly show. At all the stations soldiers were getting on board, shouting and singing discordantly choruses from the operas; for there was a rising at Padua, and one feared at Bologna the populace getting up insurrections against the enforcement of the grist-tax,—a tax which has made the government very unpopular, as it falls principally upon the poor.

Creeping along at such a slow rate, we reached Bologna too late for the Florence train, It was eight o'clock, and still raining. The next train went at two o'clock in the morning, and was the best one for us to take. We had supper in an inn near by, and a fair attempt at a fire in our parlor. I sat before it, and kept it as lively as possible, as the hours wore away, and tried to make believe that I was ruminating on the ancient greatness of Bologna and its famous university, some of whose chairs had been occupied by women, and upon the fact that it was on a little island in the Reno, just below here, that Octavius and Lepidus and Mark Antony formed the second Triumvirate, which put an end to what little liberty Rome had left; but in reality I was thinking of the draught on my back, and the comforts of a sunny clime. But the time came at length for starting; and in luxurious cars we finished the night very comfortably, and rode into Florence at eight in the morning to find, as we had hoped, on the other side of the Apennines, a sunny sky and balmy air.

As this is strictly a chapter of travel and weather, I may not stop to say how impressive and beautiful Florence seemed to us; how bewildering in art treasures, which one sees at a glance in the streets; or scarcely to hint how lovely were the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace, the roses, geraniums etc, in bloom, the birds singing, and all in a soft, dreamy air. The next day was not so genial; and we sped on, following our original intention of seeking the summer in winter. In order to avoid trouble with baggage and passports in Rome, we determined to book through for Naples, making the trip in about twenty hours. We started at nine o'clock in the evening, and I do not recall a more thoroughly uncomfortable journey. It grew colder as the night wore on, and we went farther south. Late in the morning we were landed at the station outside of Rome. There was a general appearance of ruin and desolation. The wind blew fiercely from the hills, and the snowflakes from the flying clouds added to the general chilliness. There was no chance to get even a cup of coffee, and we waited an hour in the cold car. If I had not been so half frozen, the consciousness that I was actually on the outskirts of the Eternal City, that I saw the Campagna and the aqueducts, that yonder were the Alban Hills, and that every foot of soil on which I looked was saturated with history, would have excited me. The sun came out here and there as we went south, and we caught some exquisite lights on the near and snowy hills; and there was something almost homelike in the miles and miles of olive orchards, that recalled the apple-trees, but for their shining silvered leaves. And yet nothing could be more desolate than the brown marshy ground, the brown hillocks, with now and then a shabby stone hut or a bit of ruin, and the flocks of sheep shivering near their corrals, and their shepherd, clad in sheepskin, as his ancestor was in the time of Romulus, leaning on his staff, with his back to the wind. Now and then a white town perched on a hillside, its houses piled above each other, relieved the eye; and I could imagine that it might be all the poets have sung of it, in the spring, though the Latin poets, I am convinced, have wonderfully imposed upon us.

To make my long story short, it happened to be colder next morning at Naples than it was in Germany. The sun shone; but the northeast wind, which the natives poetically call the Tramontane, was blowing, and the white smoke of Vesuvius rolled towards the sea. It would only last three days, it was very unusual, and all that. The next day it was colder, and the next colder yet. Snow fell, and blew about unmelted: I saw it in the streets of Pompeii.

The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks of the marble statues in the Chiaia. And yet the oranges glowed like gold among their green leaves; the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed in all the gardens. It is the most contradictory climate. We lunched one day, sitting in our open carriage in a lemon grove, and near at hand the Lucrine Lake was half frozen over. We feasted our eyes on the brilliant light and color on the sea, and the lovely outlined mountains round the shore, and waited for a change of wind. The Neapolitans declare that they have not had such weather in twenty years. It is scarcely one's ideal of balmy Italy.

Before the weather changed, I began to feel in this great Naples, with its roaring population of over half a million, very much like the sailor I saw at the American consul's, who applied for help to be sent home, claiming to be an American. He was an oratorical bummer, and told his story with all the dignity and elevated language of an old Roman. He had been cast away in London. How cast away? Oh! it was all along of a boarding-house. And then he found himself shipped on an English vessel, and he had lost his discharge-papers; and "Listen, your honor," said he, calmly extending his right hand, "here I am cast away on this desolate island with nothing before me but wind and weather."

RAVENNA

A DEAD CITY

Ravenna is so remote from the route of general travel in Italy, that I am certain you can have no late news from there, nor can I bring you anything much later than the sixth century. Yet, if you were to see Ravenna, you would say that that is late enough. I am surprised that a city which contains the most interesting early Christian churches and mosaics, is the richest in undisturbed specimens of early Christian art, and contains the only monuments of Roman emperors still in their original positions, should be so seldom visited. Ravenna has been dead for some centuries; and because nobody has cared to bury it, its ancient monuments are yet above ground. Grass grows in its wide streets, and its houses stand in a sleepy, vacant contemplation of each other: the wind must like to mourn about its silent squares. The waves of the Adriatic once brought the commerce of the East to its wharves; but the deposits of the Po and the tides have, in process of time, made it an inland town, and the sea is four miles away.

In the time of Augustus, Ravenna was a favorite Roman port and harbor for fleets of war and merchandise. There Theodoric, the great king of the Goths, set up his palace, and there is his enormous mausoleum. As early as A. D. 44 it became an episcopal see, with St. Apollinaris, a disciple of St. Peter, for its bishop. There some of the later Roman emperors fixed their residences, and there they repose. In and about it revolved the adventurous life of Galla Placidia, a woman of considerable talent and no principle, the daughter of Theodosius (the great Theodosius, who subdued the Arian heresy, the first emperor baptized in the true faith of the Trinity, the last who had a spark of genius), the sister of one emperor, and the mother of another,—twice a slave, once a queen, and once an empress; and she, too, rests there in the great mausoleum builded for her. There, also, lies Dante, in his tomb "by the upbraiding shore;" rejected once of ungrateful Florence, and forever after passionately longed for. There, in one of the earliest Christian churches in existence, are the fine mosaics of the Emperor Justinian and Theodora, the handsome courtesan whom he raised to the dignity and luxury of an empress on his throne in Constantinople. There is the famous forest of pines, stretching—unbroken twenty miles down the coast to Rimini, in whose cool and breezy glades Dante and Boccaccio walked and meditated, which Dryden has commemorated, and Byron has invested with the fascination of his genius; and under the whispering boughs of which moved the glittering cavalcade which fetched the bride to Rimini,—the fair Francesca, whose sinful confession Dante heard in hell.

We went down to Ravenna from Bologna one afternoon, through a country level and rich, riding along toward hazy evening, the land getting flatter as we proceeded (you know, there is a difference between level and flat), through interminable mulberry-trees and vines, and fields with the tender green of spring, with church spires in the rosy horizon; on till the meadows became marshes, in which millions of frogs sang the overture of the opening year. Our arrival, I have reason to believe, was an event in the old town. We had a crowd of moldy loafers to witness it at the station, not one of whom had ambition enough to work to earn a sou by lifting our traveling-bags. We had our hotel to ourselves, and wished that anybody else had it. The rival house was quite aware of our advent, and watched us with jealous eyes; and we, in turn, looked wistfully at it, for our own food was so scarce that, as an old traveler says, we feared that we shouldn't have enough, until we saw it on the table, when its quality made it appear too much. The next morning, when I sallied out to hire a conveyance, I was an object of interest to the entire population, who seemed to think it very odd that any one should walk about and explore the quiet streets. If I were to describe Ravenna, I should say that it is as flat as Holland and as lively as New London. There are broad streets, with high houses, that once were handsome, palaces that were once the abode of luxury, gardens that still bloom, and churches by the score. It is an open gate through which one walks unchallenged into the past, with little to break the association with the early Christian ages, their monuments undimmed by time, untouched by restoration and innovation, the whole struck with ecclesiastical death. With all that we saw that day,—churches, basilicas, mosaics, statues, mausoleums,—I will not burden these pages; but I will set down is enough to give you the local color, and to recall some of the most interesting passages in Christian history in this out- of-the-way city on the Adriatic.