bath in his house—I descend, find an oasis of
cups and plates in a desert of tablecloth (laid
for the table d'hôte breakfast), and start out to
explore.

The enormous lake in front of me, is the Alster
Bassin, and no doubt, in summer when it is the
grand resort of the Hamburgers, who, making
up pleasant parties, float over its waters in
painted boats, or booze and smoke in pavilion
cafés on its banks, it is a delightful place.
Now, however, it is one vast sheet of ice, on
which the thaw is just beginning to take effect,
for in the distance is seen a line of men, half a
dozen paces apart, extending from shore to
shore, busily engaged in breaking holes in the
ice to admit the air, and so tend to its more
speedy dissolution.  In the comely gardens
fringing the lake, I find nurse-girls and their
charges, of course attendant soldiers, old gentlemen,
evidently bent on "constitutionals,"
priests with bent heads hurrying to the service
the bells inviting to which are now resonant,
and little children scampering about—not unlike
a foreign edition of St. James's Park, barring
the ducks.  Between the two Alster Bassins, the
greater and the less, I cross over a barren strip
of land, where there is a lock and a big windmill,
brown and skeletony, and reminding one of the
background of a sketch by Ostade, and on the
other side I find a high road, and on the high road
I find two horses, and on the horses I find two
Austrian officers coming very much to grief,
partly on account of the slippery state of the
roads, and partly on account of their not having
yet acquired the rudiments of equitation; for I
take it that to pull a horse's nose on a level with
his eye by the aid of a very sharp curb, and then
to kick him in the flank with sharp-rowelled spurs,
clutching meanwhile by anything permanent, is
not the best way to keep ahorse on his legs.  Then
across the Jungfernstieg into the shop-streets,
where there is plate-glass, and gilding, and
decoration, and lavish expenditure on every side.  To
eat, seems the great end of the Hamburger's life
—to eat and so to enjoy.  Not only are there large
hotels, restaurants, conditorei or pastrycooks,
and fruiterers in every street, but at every dozen
doors you find a board announcing that in the
basement, below the level of the pavement, is
an oyster-cellar.  "Austern und Frühstuck,"
Oysters and Breakfasts, that is the hospitable
announcement of the signboard, and there do the
fast young merchants congregate before they
arrive at their counting-houses, and plunge so
deeply into the many-lined, thinly-written, thin
rustling leaves of letter paper, all relating to that
"first of Exchange."  These oyster-cellars are
cool yet snug resorts, suggestive of pleasant and
soothing alkaline waters, succulent bivalves,
appetising anchovies and devilled biscuits; for
your Hamburger has anything but poor brains
for drinking, and could give your swag-bellied
Hollander, and the rest of Cassio's friends, a
long start and catch him easily.  Likewise,
as a new feature, do I notice at the doors of the
restaurants, venison: not in its prepared and
floured state—as with us—but in its natural
state, skin on, horns, hoofs, severed jugular and
all.

High change in Hamburg is at one o'clock.
As it is rapidly approaching that hour, I make
my way towards the Börse, and enter the building
as it is beginning to fill.  A handsome edifice this,
with a large spiral hall in the centre, surrounded
by a colonnade.  Up-stairs, all sorts of little rooms,
with names on the doors, merchants' offices like
our London pattern at Lloyd's, and a big room,
empty and locked, which, I am told, is the seat of
the Chamber of Commerce.  From below comes
a roar of voices, and, looking down, I see the
Hamburg merchants literally "at it."  There they are,
Hamburgers proper, rotund of body, heavy of
jowl, fishy of eye, stubbly of hair, bushy of beard,
thumb-beringed and hands-begrimed, listening
and grunting; young Hamburg, blotchy,
sodden, watery-eyed, strongly reminiscent of "last
night," slung into business for business' sake,
and for the sake of making more money for the
encouragement of Veuve Cliquot, and Mumm,
and Roederer, and Heidzecker, and other
compounders of Sillery Sec and Pommery Greno;
old Jewry, gabardined to the heels in fur, with
cotton wool in its ears, screaming, yelling,
checking off numbers in its interlocutor's face
with skinny yellow fingers; young Jewry, with
an avalanche of black satin round its throat,
and a big brilliant diamond therein, cool, calm,
specious, and a trifle oleaginous; middle-aged
France, heaving in the waistband which props
its rotund stomach under its double-chin, with
scarcely any face to be seen between the
rim of its fore and aft hat and the points of its
gummed moustache; here and there, an Englishman,
chimney-pot-hatted, solemn and awfully
respectable; little olive-skinned Greeks, Russians
in sable, and two Parsees in brown-paper
headdresses. But the noise!  It floods you, drenches
you, soaks you through and through.

When I leave the Exchange it is past two
o'clock, which I am glad of; but it is beginning
to rain, which I am sorry for; Streit's table
d'hôte does not take place until four, and I
must fain walk about, dreading the thoughts of
my dreary bedroom looking on the back yard.
So I walk about, and look at the church of St.
Nicholas, which is one of the best Gothic
triumphs of our own great architect, Mr.
Gilbert Scott, and I bend my neck very far
back indeed endeavouring to see the spire of
St. Michael's, and I visit the Rathhaus and am
not impressed thereby, and I inspect the promenading
female beauty, with the same result: for
the Hamburg females are neither better nor
worse looking than the majority of their German
sisters, and have the coarse hair, and the dull
thick skins, and the coarse hands, and the
elephantine ankles, for which your Deutsches
Madchen is renowned.  They seem to find favour,
though, in the eyes of the Prussian and Austrian
officers, who are everywhere, and who ogle
them in the true military manner; but the
maidens do not respond, and only halt in their
walk to contemplate occasional regiments marching
by, with the invariable accompaniment of