picture taken? Ah! you there in the hat, you'll make a grand picture shant you?" At length another came, and cried, “haste! haste away! after your grass boys!" and each receiving the mighty sum of a kreutzer, went off in highest glee, crying to every one they came near, "See! see! a kreutzer! a kreutzer!"

There was a considerable air of poverty, and a greater air of slovenliness in this dorf. Their yards, as is usual, were chaoses of litter; heaps of wood for fuel, the little old wagons, ploughs, wheelbarrows, and children playing in the dust, besides the endless swarm of geese. These geese they cram with Indian corn, and that to such an extent that they sometimes all but choke them. They also artificially enlarge their livers, which they never eat themselves, but sell, as great dainties. Many of these people are said to be Jews-agricultural Jews—of all anomalies, according to our notions, the greatest; and their villages are said to be always distinguished by an extraordinary degree of dirt and slovenliness. Still, many of their houses, in their front windows, have flowers, particularly balsams and carnations, of the latter especially the pale yellow ones, so very rare in England. Some of these were very fine. From the upper windows, as a general and regular summer exhibition, hung out beds and mattresses of a gay red stripe, and bedside carpets to air. Here and there might be seen a smarter new house, in the peculiar style of this country; and thus you have a pretty good notion of one of the country villages of Germany.

The church had a more old and neglected air than the one we noticed in the other village, and in the churchyard scarcely a stone to mark a single grave. Slight wooden crosses of mere lath, about two feet high, stained of a red colour and dotted with black spots, were planted on a few new-made graves, and round them were lying the remains of garlands of box and ivy, intended, no doubt, as emblems of immortal greenness and unfading freshness; but all their greenness and freshness were gone. The graves themselves were heaps of dust, and a little time would remove any vestige from them of those slight memorials which these rustic people give to their departed friends.

As we returned we saw large groups of peasants dining under the trees in the fields. Women were bringing from Heidelberg

large baskets on their heads containing provisions. The dinners seemed principally contained in two large pans or dishes; one of soup, and one of small puddings called noodles, floating in sauce, or something of a pudding kind in a fluid state. Some of these puddings were little balls of flour and potatoes, dotted with little lumps of fried black bread, and which to a too fanciful eye looked

like raisins.

The people lay or sat, men and women, round the large dishes, all eating together out of them with long spoons. They formed picturesque groups. The men stripped; the women, many of them, in bodices of red-striped linen, of which the Germans make their bed-ticks, and which look very lively. Many of the girls too, bronzed with the sun, looked all health and solidity. About stood boots, which the men had pulled off to cool their feet as they lay at rest, baskets, and stone bottles. Two boys were dining under a tree on brown bread and little pears, which they drew from a bag, and seemed to divide very carefully between them. These boys had nothing to drink, and said they were accustomed to have nothing to drink to their field dinners, not even water. The homeliness of the fare of these peasants would no little astonish the stomachs of our bean-and-bacon devourers of our harvest-time in England.

We have now led our readers into the first acquaintance with German external life and scenery, up the great western river, through its plains, its dorfs of the plain, and into the towns; we will now make one more excursion amongst the woods and valleys, where the other great features of its country and country-life lie, and then dismiss our first impressions for a more intimate acquaintance with the land and its people, in all their various conditions and relationships.

It would shock the religious of England to see how, on a Sunday, the Germans of all classes are flocking off into the country, as on all other leisure occasions, in the summer. To see, early on Sunday mornings, families of sobriety and of high standing, and

even those of grave professors, setting forth for a long day's excursion. By seven o'clock you will see them going out, having not the least idea that to resort to some distant village amongst the hills, perhaps to go to church there, perhaps not, but at all events to proceed to some rural inn, and there, or in the woods, spend the day in social enjoyment, has anything at all amiss in it. Nothing is more common; and on these, and on all such occasions, they will do what would never be thought of in England. They will take tea and sugar, and if necessary, fine bread; and eating and drinking of their own, will pay the good-natured landlord for his attendance and the use of his house.

Being invited to join such a party, after attendance of Divine service at nine o'clock, we steered away with them up into the hills. It was the 2d of August, and splendid weather. From the top of the Kaiser-Stuhl above the town, a tower already mentioned, at an elevation of 1800 feet above the sea, we enjoyed a most glorious prospect. It included a circle of seventy miles or more in diameter, with the forest hills of the Odenwald in one direction, and the great Rhine-plain in another; bounded by the hills of Baden-Baden, and the Vogesen mountains in France. The towns and villages within it, it would be difficult to enumerate, but they were in scores, including Mannheim, Speir, Worms, etc., amongst the largest; the Rhine shining in its mazy windings here and there, through a vast extent of plains.

At the foot of this tower we made a lunch of fruit and bread, with a bottle of beer, and sugar-water, procured from the old man who attends at the tower with a spy-glass, and who had erected a sort of Robinson Crusoe shed, with moss walls, and mossed seats under the trees; and then steered our way through the summer woods, towards the village of Guiberg, and through Bommerthal to Neckergemünd. The ramble through the forests was one of the most delightful things that we ever enjoyed. The weather was so sunny and beautiful, yet breezy enough to prevent its becoming oppressive, but, on the contrary, to diffuse through the solemn woods a feeling of life and of poetry. There was a sense too of being in a new country and amongst a new people, that gave its charm and its novelty. Green tracks of turf, as we advanced through the forest, went branching off right and left, presenting lovely,

embowered vistas; and here and there the woods expanded into sylvan regions of much taller and mightier trees than are seen on the hill-sides, and threw the most profound silence and solemn gloom. Then again, we came out into open tracks, where the sun showered down his full splendour; where deep wild grass and new flowers, and bees and gaudy butterflies, and grashoppers and grilli, singing their husky summer songs, and lizards basking on the hot banks, and dragon-flies, blue and green, darting with their long filmy wings here and there, filled up the feeling of summer and woodland life to the heart's brim. There were young people, all happiness and gay chatter, rambling along; and those of riper years not a whit less happy; and children running in eager speed after every new object of nature's wonders; and who shall not say that it was one of those scenes and days that must long linger all sun-bright in the memory? At one moment we plunged again into close and steep-descending wood-tracks, where the green boughs had to be bent down to make way; at another, on an open height, were hills and valleys around us-the hills all covered with woods, the valleys and intervening plains with corn.

As we approached Guiberg, we saw it standing amid its cornplots, its garden-plots all unfenced, its green sloping fields, and its scattered fruit trees, having a very sweet but very German look. When we entered the village itself, of course it was like all German villages-the same scene of heavy houses, most of them having their lower story occupied by their cows; of heaps of wood, ploughs and wagons; but around it lay delightful old bowery orchards, and in one of these belonging to the Wirthshouse, or inn, we dined. With a bottle of the country wine, some roast beef, and plenty of cherries, for which this village is famous far and wide, we made as merry as if we had been dining with Joe Miller himself. The children from the neighbouring orchards came about to look on, to whom we gave bread and meat, which they were at first too shy to take, but when we turned our backs it vanished with a wonderful velocity. Two boys were set by a gentleman of the party to see which could soonest devour a piece of black bread for three kreutzers-one penny-which they did to their own danger of choking, and great merriment of the spectators. Others were set to hop for a kreutzer, and watching this, and a set of bauers playing

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