firm-set lips and teeth, the trembling, but clenched hand of the desperate player for life and death, as he sits opposite to the comfortable and very portly person of some secure and far more indifferent adventurer, or some dowager-looking lady, pricking down on her card very composedly the moves, and having no feeling for all that goes on around, feeling indeed only occasionally her purse, which lies beside her, and the pile of gold pieces, which she now and then lifts, and sets down again calculatingly.

These are the sights that you continually witness; and from day to day still find many of the same figures occupying the same places at these tables. The sturdy and white head of the Elector of Hesse Cassel, who annually spends much time, and it is said about 40007. sterling, at these and other tables, was not then visible; nor those of the expert Russians, who in the former summer had broke the bank twice, and carried off with them several thousand pounds; but there were, to say nothing of the gentlemen, three ladies who daily attracted much attention. One was an actress of some eminence, whom I had before met on the Rhine, and whose amiable expression of countenance and happy spirit had very much charmed me. Here she was, but apparently not the same person. While engaged in play, the selfish greediness which devoured her, darkened and deformed her in a wonderful manner. The sunny smile, the cordial and friendly temperament, and the open, quiet beaming of the blue eye and pleasant face, had now given way to an expression dark and wolfish.

Another was a little Italian, who seemed to play with a very steady and calculating air, but so far as I could discern with very little gain or loss. The third was a full-formed lady of, perhaps, fifty-five, who came every evening, seated herself in very businesslike style; took off her shawl, drew off her gloves, discovering hands well garnished with jewelled rings; took out her purse, and laid it, with her pocket handkerchief, before her on the table; took out a certain quantity of gold, and counting it, set it up in a pile as a certain monument to victory; refreshed herself with a few sniffs from her scent-bottle, and then steadily surveying the table, as if to say "Now, what goes on?" put down her stake, and then for the whole evening sate steadily reaping no inconsiderable harvest.

Revolting as this view of human nature is, it is difficult to avoid, day after day, being drawn to its contemplation. I suppose pretty much under the same fascination that people are drawn to witness an execution, though they shriek or groan when they are there. Let us now away from this scene of heartless speculation and victimized misery. We will not even stay to enter the re-union saloon, where the select party of subscribers meet for conversation or private concerts, nor into any other part of this temple of folly, which, as well as the pleasure-grounds around, are all built or maintained out of the profits of gaming. Rather let us up into the hills and the woods.

We observed that a magnificent new pump-room was building close by the stream. We walked along the banks of this rivulet, down the delightful valley of Lichtenthal, beneath its fine avenue of trees, a couple of miles in length. In our walks through the town, the number of shops with French signs, shops of fashionable milliners, hairdressers, jewellers, and such like; the number of notices in French and English of lodgings to let; the number of servants about the streets in livery; of equipages, and of English, did not suffer us for a moment to forget that we were in one of the most fashionable watering-places of Germany. In the inns, all the waiters spoke French or English. They seemed to have a contempt for you if you addressed them in German. One heard so much of every language but German, that one seemed to long again for its homely, hearty sound.

In our way up the hills we visited the castle. It is a large building having more the air of an old manor-house than of a ducal castle. The Grand Duchess is said to be fond of it, and often to come hither in summer, while the Duke has a greater liking for his castle of Eberstein in the Murg Thal. The dungeons of this castle are the great attraction to travellers, and have been so often described with great gusto, that we may be excused from doing it again. They present revolting evidences of the dark cruelties perpetrated in these underground prisons in past ages. The castle is built on the foundations of one still older, and you are conducted through the remains of a Roman bath to these horrible vaults. The passages are secured with stone doors of a foot or so in thickness, and weighing from one to two hundred

weight, which still remain, and as they turn on their hinges make a deep and moaning sort of music. The iron doors which used to be again within these, with their bars and bolts, have also left vestiges. There is the pit descending down through the whole castle, from the top to these vaults, down which the prisoners were let with a rope and pulley. The traces of the sloping passage from the castle, along which the lord used to enter, and where tradition says that the notorious Ulric of Würtemberg once accompanied him to this horrid tribunal, are yet visible. There is the recess in the wall where the figure of the Virgin stood, which the unhappy victim was ordered to advance and kiss, when a trap-door opened and sent him down into a tremendous pit filled with wheels armed with knives, which revolving in all directions tore him to pieces. You now walk over this pit on planks with which it is concealed.

We issued from the dismal, but still wonderfully dry dungeons, with pleasure, to the daylight, and found our way through the

pleasant gardens, up towards the older castle. This caught our eyes aloft in its wood at about two miles distance. A winding way, a great part of it through fine woods, leads you with ease.

thither, especially as you have seats here and there by the waysides. At the ruins you find a rustic inn, where wine and refreshments may be had. You ascend the lofty ruins by broken steps, and stand on crumbling towers, protected by handrails; and gaze over one of the finest and most extensive landscapes imaginable. The town far below you; the conical hills rising round it, crowned with their pine woods; the vast plain with smoking villages; the dark hills of the Black Forest in one direction, those of the Odenwald in another, and the Vogesen on the French frontiers on a third.

At every hour of the day parties on foot or in carriages are ascending to this airy height, and we found an English family there who amused us exceedingly by their adventures. These good people, who had evidently been fortunate in the world, and had made their way bravely through it, without original education, had been inspired with the very rational desire to see more of the world than is cooped within the four seas. They had travelled in France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere; and were as merry as anybody could be at the accidents which befell them through their ignorance of the languages and customs of these countries. Every summer, father, mother, and two or three children of ten or twelve years old, made a trip. The summer before they were in Austria, but they did not like it. To say nothing of

the botheration of dining by the cart, where they had to pick the names of the dishes out of a lingo worse than Greek, they had got into a hell-wagon to go to Vienna, and a hell it was. They were shook into a jelly, and tumbled about for days and nights like cogs in a mill wheel; and when they got to Vienna, they found that their luggage had not been allowed to go with them, but had been sent by a fore-wagon (Fuhr-wagen), which instead of going before, was so far behind that they had to lie in bed for a week for want of their clothes. The really good-natured people were, however, not a whit daunted. They were on their way to the Tyrol, and said while they had health and strength they meant every summer to make a trip somewhere.

The walks through these lofty woods are fine and solitary. One conducts you to a rustic bridge, which leads you out upon an isolated rock of vast height above the valley. But, in fact, the

whole country round Baden-Baden is full of delicious walks and rides. In the very outskirts of this little Babel of Fashion you find villages of the most old-fashioned description buried in their orchards, and exhibiting the aspect and manners of far past ages. But one thing to us was very striking. The surliness and incommunicativeness of the peasantry in the immediate neighbourhood. This, so different to the general character of the German bauers, however, required no explanation. It is the result of the haughty and insolent treatment which they have received from the crowds of empty, corrupt, and purse-proud upstarts, which come in flocks round such a place.

3. JOURNEY BY WILDBAD TO STUTTGARD.

OUR journey from Baden-Baden by Wildbad to Stuttgard, in finest summer weather, was most charming. The way was for the greater part of the distance to Wildbad, through the Black Forest. Besides a very Swiss character, which we immediately discerned in the houses with their outside galleries and projecting roofs, and the church towers with their domes and short spires covered with bright zink or with coloured and burnished tiles, the novelty of this peculiar forest scenery was in itself a great delight. We were now surrounded by those dark woods of which we had heard so much, and whose noble timber we had seen so often floating down the Neckar and the Rhine. Here now lay around us in profoundest stillness these forest tracts. Here reared aloft on the hills, or came shooting up from the deep glens below us, those magnificent trees which we had so long desired to see. We were surprised to find that these were not, as we had imagined, like our Scotch fir, but all of the silver fir (Pinus Pinacea), a tree which when it grows alone stands aloft, gradually contracting its dimensions, like a tall Chinese pagoda, and hung with its large cones, as that is with its bells. In these mountain woods it is somewhat different, but not the less striking. Its clear and regular stems, rise in perfect cylinders to the height often of two hundred feet, and generally of more than one; hence an air of vigour and youthful majesty about them which is very beautiful. These stems of a leaden or silvery colour, whence the name, are so perfectly round, so clear, and rise so high without any sensible diminution of their