unpleasantly, when you are listened to as an
oracle, be the listeners who they may; and
the dawn broke in upon us quite
unexpectedly. My journey has little else worth
recording. We drove for some six hours
through a trackless waste of bogs and water;
I expected every moment that the horses
would come to a dead halt, but they held on,
and at about three o'clock in the afternoon we
approached Bucharest. The capital of
Wallachia covers a very large extent of ground,
and the entrance to it on this side is pretty and
even imposing to the traveller who is
accustomed to the wretched appearance of the
Turkish cities beyond the Danube. There is
an air of wealth, comfort, and cleanliness
about the European-looking white houses
with their verandas, balconies, and
conservatories, which is very pleasant. Carriages
and servants in gay liveries, too, flaunting
about the streets, with crowds of glittering
uniforms, told me plainly enough that I had
passed back into the world of civilisation
again.

I had an opportunity, now, of contrasting
the advantages of travelling in Wallachia,
by post-cart, with the plan I adopted. The
result was certainly unfavourable to the
post-cart. My companion had also been
delayed on the road by a general breakdown.
He arrived in Bucharest only one
hour before me, and he was subsequently
confined to his bed for two months by a
severe illness brought on by the fatigue and
exposure of the journey.

A DIP IN THE BRINE.

LET no one be charged with levity until he
has had a dip in the brine. It is then that
his levity is indeed apparent. He flounders
about, and tries to sink, but cannot; his
gravity is too little, his levity too much; the
brine buoys him up, with or without his own
consent,—and float he must.

But where and what is this brine? Even
at Droitwich, and perhaps elsewhere. Brine,
however, is not intended mainly to float upon,
but mainly to prepare salt from; and therefore
its bathing qualities must be regarded in
a secondary sense. Droitwich is one of the
spots enriched with our invaluable stores of
salt. Worcestershire is far inferior to Cheshire
as a salt-producing country; still is the supply
in and around the districts of Droitwich and
Bromsgrove very important. If Worcester
town has a fashionable neighbour on the one
side, Malveru, it has a sober industrious
neighbour on the other, Droitwich. The one
spends money, the other makes money;
Worcester acts as a metropolis for both.

All the world knows what table salt is;
but some portions of the world do not know
that much of this salt is procured from liquid
transparent brine, pumped up from the
bowels of the earth. Droitwich makes its
salt in this way; while Cheshire both pumps
up the brine, and digs up the rock-salt. In
Cheshire there are two beds of salt underlying
the river Weaver and tributaries; the
lowermost being the richer of the two, is the
one most worked, at a depth of, perhaps,
three hundred feet. Miners dig down to the
salt, as they would to coal or iron; they
use the pick and the shovel, the blast and the
forge, just as other miners do. The material
which they dig up, rock-salt, is a very hard,
dirty whitish substance, requiring great force
to separate it from the parent bed, and
brought up to the surface in lumps of various
size and shape. Almost the whole of this
rock-salt is exported to foreign countries,
where it is applied to various uses. If a
subterranean stream flow over any part of the
bed of salt, the water becomes saturated with
salt, and converted into brine. It is from
such brine that by far the largest quantity of
English salt is obtained; for, it is cheaper to
pump up the liquid than to dig up the solid.

A picture of an old town placed in
juxtaposition to a picture of a new town,—or
rather two pictures of the same town in
different periods of its career—will tell us many
things which pictorial people do not think
about. Are there tall chimneys in the newer
picture, and none in the old? Then is there
some manufacturing process carried on, which
has had its birth since the sketching of the
earlier picture. A safe conclusion, certainly,
in many respects, but as certainly unsafe in
respect to Droitwich. In Nash's Worcestershire,
the first edition of which appeared
about seventy years ago, Droitwich is
honoured with a copper-plate engraving, in
which there are two tranquil churches, four
tranquil sheep, many stiff, tranquil trees, and
a few quaint tranquil houses; but of tall
chimneys we can see none. There are, it is
true, a few slender bits rising from certain
lowish roofs to a height a little above the
ordinary houses; but, if these be chimneys,
they are humble indeed to the pretentious
brick stalks now visible in that town. And
yet Droitwich was busily making salt in
those days as in the present. Changes of
process have much to do with these changes
of chimney.

Nash was terribly puzzled to determine
the meaning of Droitwich. The town was
first named Wic or Wich. Then some say
that wic is derived from the Roman vicus, a
street or village; and others say that it comes
from the Saxon wic, a station or mansion;
while others will have it that wic is a
transformation of wi, or wye, a sanctuary or holy
spot, and that all salt-springs were in early
times held almost sacred; but, that wic,
or wich signifies a salt-spring in its primitive
sense, was more than Nash could take
upon himself to determine. Then what is
Droit, and why was Droit married to Wick?
After roaming among Druids and Romans,
Saxons and Danes, our antiquary settles