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tle fruit, and its foliage, faded to a yellowish hue, was already falling. Said F., "I tried, last year, an experiment on that vine, by sulphuring well only the half you see so healthy now, letting the disease have its way with the other. I did this to learn if. my neighbors in America were right, who say oïdium can not be cured."

Evidently the result showed, first, that the oïdium can rage in the Department of the Marne as well as elsewhere; and, secondly, that it is perfectly curable. They apply sulphur three times in the course of the season, and with a bellows and dredging-box. All with whom I spoke thought it important to make the application early enough in the day for the sulphur to adhere to the dew on the lower side of the leaves. F. had been a practical vine-dresser on an Ohio River hill-side, and had seen the disease there in its worst form. So his opinion was worth heeding, that with thorough and judicious sulphur treatment it may be conquered.

After another day spent in seeing the cathedral and visiting the principal cellars in Rheims, I took a train for the north, and, crossing first the ultimate boundary of the vine zone and then the Belgian frontier, was soon far away from gay France, and

among a people whose language is French, but whose temperament is not, for they produce no wine.

I was a few days, too, in Holland, where, though water abounds, it has nevertheless so evil a quality, the people abstain from it almost totally, and drink instead a clear liquid looking much like it, called gin; being, in fact, a wine after Gall's recipe, namely, diluted alcohol flavored with juniper-berries. Notwithstanding, however, their abstinence and their antidote, so humid is the atmosphere, much water enters by the lungs and pores, rendering them lymphatic, hepatic, splenetic, and heavy.

Finding my way out of Holland by the Rhine Valley, I entered Germany, and slept for the first night in the ancient city of Cologne, where the traveler finds a grand cathedral, a sweet perfume, and some uncommonly offensive odors.

CHAPTER XI.

THE RHINE AND JOHANNISBERG.

To ascend the Rhine, I took passage on a small boat, called a Mississippi steamer because she had a little saloon under the quarter-deck and even with the main-deck, for shelter from the weather and to eat in. In this craft, comfortably enough, we worked up stream, going slowly, as we ought when a double line of curious and beautiful objects is to be seen, enjoyed, and committed to memory.

The vineyards terraced on the stone sides of the steep hills were very well worth seeing-the hard handiwork of a determined people, resolved on getting wine to drink, even if they must smite the rock for it, as Moses did for water. This hardscrabble sort of vine-culture is one of the attractions of the Rhine, and, like Drachenfels, "The Cats," "The Mice," and other well-kept and beautiful ruins, serves to draw yearly crowds of tourists, whose plunder is more valuable to the inhabitants than was formerly that of

the travelers and pilgrims upon whom the nobility and gentry-original builders of the towers and castles now in ruins-used to swoop down like eagles of prey, as they were. The region of steep, terraced hills, however, is not the Rhinegau, where are Rudesheim, Steinberg, and Johannisberg. The wines wrung with so much toil from those surfaces of basalt is mostly sour and hard, like our own Catawba grown on strong ground, abounding, like it, in tartaric acid, which Liebig says is good for gout, gravel, and stone-by homœopathic rule of contraries, maybe. It is the base of much Gallization.

The Grand Turk, returning from a visit to Napoleon, happened to need our comfortable "Mississippi," and so at Coblentz we were put upon a still smaller craft-an "Ohio," perhaps in whose close hold the entire company of passengers had to pack themselves for shelter from a hard storm of rain, and so we went by the celebrated district without seeing it. I blamed myself, on reaching Mayence, for not getting off at Coblentz, to come on the day after, so as to see the Rhinegau in clear weather; but, had I so planned it, the memorable things which happened to me on that day—a day to be marked in my calendar with a white stone-yea, with a pearlwould have been missed forever.

JOHANNISBERG.

The cliffs of basalt that close in on the Rhine as you pass Coblentz in going up stream, and which, according to a habit that hardest of rocks has for always reposing on the softest, lies on a bed of sandstone, give way after you pass Bingen, allowing the sandstone to appear and occupy the surface, which it does in a series of gentle swells and hills. The course of the river is here from east to west, which brings the right bank to face directly south. The zone called the Rhinegau extends from Wallauf, a little below Mayence, down to Rudesheim, a distance of 12 or 15 miles, with a breadth of three or four.

The most conspicuous of its hills is one of moundlike shape and individuality, on whose southern exposure are some fifty or sixty acres in vines, while the top is crowned by the castle or palace of Johannisberg, which is, however, no great things as either palace or castle-no great things, I mean, considering how precious is the ground it stands on.

Every body has heard of it, and knows how it came to the great Metternich on the downfall of the first Napoleonic empire, and is now owned by his descendant, the present Prince Metternich, and Austrian embassador at the court of the Tuileries.

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