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The first evening of our arrival being very warm, I walked out through the city, and some little distance into the country beyond it. Heidelberg is surrounded by high woody hills. It consists of one long street, the Hauptstrasse, or High-street, and short narrow streets which run off at right angles on each hand; on one side bounded by the river, on the other by the feet of the hills. The scene, as you move along, is novel and beautiful. The houses, as in all German towns, are mostly built with large gateways in their centres. Over these are balconies, generally filled with flowering shrubs. The houses are all white, or of light shades of colouring, as of green and grey. The windows are all furnished with lattices, which are so contrived as to serve various purposes; they may be closed, and shut out light and much cold. When the weather is warm they may be thrown open, or may be closed, yet with raised bars, and admit light, without too great a glare or too much heat. Or if it be very bright, by means of hinges inserted between the outer and inner frame, they may be elevated at the bottom, and form a projecting shade.

As I advanced up the street this evening, these lattices were all thrown open, and numbers of well-dressed and handsome women were seated at them. Music came from numerous houses, accompanied by occasional voices of great sweetness. Though it was ten o'clock, people swarmed in the street, walking up and down, especially the students, whose swaggering air, open frock-coats, little caps, like common travelling caps, with a leathern shade in front; their bush of hair, their inseparable pipes, their stout sticks and numerous spectacles, left no doubt about their identity. This street is their great promenade, and was filled with them.

As I passed the cross streets, the high hills at their terminations had a striking aspect, appearing with their woods to overhang the city; and many picturesque dwellings shewed themselves, perched in their glens and leafy sides. The huge ruins of the ancient castle towered aloft on the right. I passed one or two little squares-one the Museum Platz, in which the Museum, or place of general entertainment, and the University stand; another, the Karl Platz, surrounded by those engrafted acacia trees with round heads, so much admired in this country. The whole scene, with its shops and people, had a thoroughly continental and very southern

air. As I advanced into the suburbs along the side of the Neckar, the southern character became more striking. Houses of an oldfashioned kind stood at the foot of the high rocky hills. In their orchards and beneath their trees sate various parties enjoying themselves, with lamps and wine-bottles on their tables, and the smoke of their long pipes curling up around them. But what was to me the most novel and beautiful feature of the scene, was the host of lovely fire-flies soaring about on every side, with all the emerald light of the glowworm, illuminating the dusky way, and floating amongst the trees, and up the hill-sides to the highest steeps. I had never seen them before, and was not expecting to see them there, and the surprise and pleasure were proportionably great. Groups of children were coming towards the city singing in chorus, and the whole scene had a character, new, beautiful, and poetic.

Even at that late hour an old man was fishing in the Neckar, with one of those nets so different to what are used in England. In Rotterdam I saw a man standing on the wall of a bridge in the midst of the city, throw a net, which had a rope fastened to its centre, and which in descending, spread itself out and covered a circumference of a few yards. This being heavily loaded so as to go suddenly to the bottom, he allowed it to remain for a few seconds, in order that any fish under it might become entangled in it, and then drew it up with wonderful success. This man, however, as is common all over Germany, was fishing on a different principle. Those who have ascended the Rhine have seen, here and there, a solitary man standing by the river-brink, with a long stout pole supported on a boat, or on a frame set in the water, and moved by a swivel at the top of the frame, so that he could elevate his pole or depress it at his pleasure by leverage, that is, by weighing on its end, while he had a rope to this end, by which, when it ascended into the air, on the withdrawal of his pressure, he could pull it down again at will. At the other end of his pole he had a flat square net of a few yards in diameter, suspended by two bows from this pole, and this net he let go to the bottom, and there lie till any good-natured fish came and laid themselves upon it, when he hoisted his net out of the water and took them. A priori one would never have imagined fish so obliging, or so abundant, as to be taken in

quantities by so simple a means,-but no fishing is so common as this throughout Germany. In the smaller streams the pole and the net are so light that they are lifted entirely by hand, and are dropped into the water from boats in all directions. Thus was the old man fishing in this evening's walk, giving another peculiar feature to the dusky but delightful scene.

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AMONGST those things which make a vivid impression on strangers in a new country, the abodes, habits, and pursuits of the country people are not only some of the very first, but the most interesting. You have there simple nature in the character which it has worn for ages. You speedily penetrate, unobstructed by forms and conventional novelties, into the whole circle and system of their existence, and feel a lively sympathy with those who make so large a proportion of the people of the land, especially as you compare their form of life and comforts with those of the same class in your own country. Here too we cannot help admitting the idea that we behold a picture, no doubt much refined and improved, comparatively rude as it yet remains, of the life of those Saxons who emigrated in such swarms into England, and have left us so many

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traces in our laws, speech, and opinions, of their once lordship there.

Early in July, soon after our arrival, we walked to Handschuhsheim, a farming village about two miles from Heidelberg, on the Darmstadt road, at the foot of the hills, and on the edge of the great corn plain. This village affords many glimpses of the rural life of this country; and it and the others which follow, with all the scenes and people belonging to them, may be taken as specimens of tens of thousands scattered through Germany, many of which, in all parts, we have since seen.

This village is built in the same massy style as the others we passed through, and, indeed, as German villages in general. Almost every house has its great round gateway, as if bearing evidence of the Saxon love of those round heavy arches which are the distinguishing feature of the ecclesiastical architecture of their ancestors; and most have their ample farm-yard. All German houses are large; space seems no object. Through the whole place there is a curious mixture of rudeness and attempt at ornament. Most houses are heavy and rude, and weather-worn; but others, again, bright, neatly painted, and their upper windows filled with gay flowering plants. Here an old framed house painted up in the most tawdry flaunting manner, in imitation of yellow and red marble, and of Corinthian pillars. Here quantities of little funny children sitting in the dust, with bare legs, and the girls with plaited tails of hair reaching down their backs. The village is wonderfully supplied with streams of water, which, like all their villages at the foot of hills, are furnished with fountains in the shape of ever-running pumps, and large stone troughs or receiving-basins, on which are painted boards, warning every one against muddying or defiling the water. At these fountains, or brunnens, the women, as they always are, were plentifully congregated. In fact, they are the great gossiping places of the village. Accordingly Goethe, the great painter of German life, brings Gretchen, in his "Faust," there in her trouble and impending disgrace, and makes her hear news which strikes sensibly home to her own condition. She and another damsel, Lieschen, appear at the brunnen with their jugs. Here the conversation which fills her with so much trouble, commences in true gossip style: thus

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