has a week's leisure before business
commences, for the worthy pedlars are not at all
disposed to hurry. A holiday is such a rarity
to them that they enjoy it to their hearts'
content.

While the pedlars are busied in regulating
their domestic affairs and bothering their brains
over the different currencies which represent
their floating capital, the commercial gentlemen
indulge in their sole recreation— drinking and
playing at skittles. How large their consumption
of liquids might be is proved by the fact that
mine host of the Traube is enabled to keep his
house open, year out year in, on his six weeks'
receipts. No one would visit Ehningen save
on compulsion. The quantity of champagne
consumed in those six weeks would run the
Widow dry, but, fortunately for her, the rhubarb
juice answers the purpose indifferently well.
With the German commercial travellers quantity
is the rule, quality the exception.

"When business begins in earnest, it is
satisfactory. If the pedlar wants your article he
gives you a large order; if already overstocked,
he tells you so at once. There is no beating
about the bush, no buying job lots at a discount,
because the hawker has no ready money: that
is swallowed up by back debts. He simply
lives from hand to mouth, and never can become
rich, because he must pay what the wholesale
houses think proper to charge in order to cover
the risk. The traveller advises his house, the
goods are delivered at various points on the
pedlar's round, and so soon as the last order has
been obtained the Congress breaks up. There
is no signing of parchments.

So soon as the commercial travellers have
departed, the pedlar sets his house in order, puts a
clumsy padlock on the door, and recommences
his life's dull round. The articles in which he
deals are principally laces, calico, shawls,
ribbons, silk handkerchiefs, woollens of every
description, and, at times, mock jewellery. So
soon as the fair is over, he packs his traps on his
own and his family's back and trudges off to
the next town. It was always a puzzle why every
German almanack contained such an accurate
list of fairs, but Pedlars' Congress solves the
riddle. The list is drawn up for the special
information of the pedlars.

Pedlars' Congress goes to prove how far
back the Germans still remain on the path
of progress. Among us, a pedlar is a rarity;
his place is occupied by the tallyman or the
duffer, who sells cotton-backed silks as
smuggled French goods, and takes silly women
in. In Germany, we see that the pedlars are a
very important trade factor. But the cream has
been skimmed from the Ehningen Congress.
German peasants, ignorant though they may be
in other respects, have a keen eye for a kreutzer
saved. With modern progress, and increased
locomotive advantages, they learn that it is cheaper
to buy at the Residenz, and the pedlars are
gradually finding goods left on their hands, the
payment for which depends on quick returns.
Hence, before long, there will be a grand
commercial crisis in Germany, and Pedlars' Congress
will come to be reckoned among the things of
the past.

A DAY'S RIDE: A LIFE'S ROMANCE.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

I HAD no writing materials, but I had just
composed a long letter to the Times on "the
outrageous treatment and false imprisonment of
a British subject in Austria," when my door was
opened by a thin, lank-jawed, fierce-eyed man,
in uniform, who announced himself as the
Rittmeister von Mahony, of the Keyser Hussars.

"A countryman— an Irishman," said I,
eagerly, clasping his hand with warmth.

"That is to say, two generations back,"
replied he; "my grandfather Terence was a
lieutenant in Trenck's Horse, but since that none
of us have ever been out of Austria."

If these tidings fell coldly on my heart just
beginning to glow with the ardour of home and
country, I soon saw that it takes more than two
generations to wash out the Irishman from a
man's nature. The honest Rittmeister, with
scarcely a word of English in his vocabulary,
was as hearty a countryman as if he had never
journeyed out of the land of Bog.

"He had heard 'all about it,'" he said, by
way of arresting the eloquent indignation that
filled me; and he added, "And the more fool
myself to notice the matter;" asking me,
quaintly, if I never had heard of our native
maxim that says, "One man ought never to
fall upon forty"? "Well," said he, with a
sigh, "what's done can't be undone; and let
us see what's to come next? I see you are a
gentleman, and the worse luck yours."

"What do you mean by that?" asked I.

"Just this: you'll have to fight; and if you
were a 'Gemeiner'— a plebeian— you'd get off."

I turned away to the window to wipe a tear
out of my eye; it had come there without my
knowing it, and, as I did so, I devoted myself
to the death of a hero.

"Yes," said I, "she is in this incident— she
has her part in this scene of my life's drama,
and I will not disgrace her presence. I will die
like a man of honour rather than that her name
should be disparaged."

He went on to tell me of my opponent, who
was brother to a reigning sovereign, and himself
a royal highness— Prince Max of Swabia. "He
was not," he added, "by any means a bad fellow,
though not reputed to be perfectly sane on
certain topics." However, as his eccentricities
were very harmless ones, merely offshoots of an
exaggerated personal vanity, it was supposed
that some active service, and a little more
intercourse with the world, would cure him. "Not,"
added he, "that one can say he has shown,
many signs of amendment up to this, for he
never makes an excursion of half a dozen days
from home without coming back filled with the
resistless passion of some young queen or
archduchess for him. As he forgets these as fast as
he imagines them, there is usually nothing to