there. I have a spacious chamber in an airy
corridor, not too high up. The furniture of
my room is handsome, but substantial. I
have a big bed with an eider-down quilt
(they don't give you the regular German
doubled feather-bed at the G. H.); there are
pictures on the walls, representing subjects full
of the sly, obese, rather cruel-humour, which
distinguishes the Teutons—schoolmasters
discovering boys robbing orchards; old ladies
dragging out hussars by the ear from under
the kitchen-dresser; trouts and pikes facetiously
angling for human sportsmen; elephants
sportively overturning their howdahs and playfully
kneeling on their drivers. The Germans
like these snug little practical jokes. Wherever
I go about the hotel, there is music; a brass
band on the terrace, a blind clarionet-player
at the back of the house; a harp and violin
in the court-yard, and half-a-dozen piano-
fortes in as many private sitting-rooms. A
waiter off duty is practising the accordion in
a summer-house; and a white-capped cook,
whose hour of returning to penal fires is
not yet come, is leaning out of a window,
gravely whistling a motivo from the first
Walpurgis Night. There is music on all
sides, from the horn of the omnibus conductor,
executing a lively fantasia as the ramshackle
old vehicle sets off for the railway-station;
from that solemn, pudgy little boy who is
sitting on a doorstep and composedly thwacking
a tambourine instead of going to school;
from the two carpenters who are sawing
beams in a half-finished house, and who
suddenly knock off work, place their arms
round one-another's necks, strike A natural
with a tuning-fork, and break out into a
"trinklied," singing first and second with
admirable correctness; and when the duet is
concluded returning to their labour, as if choral-
carpentry were the most natural thing in the
world. Were my tympanum sensitive enough
I might hear, I dare say, the stout-ankled,
fubsy, ruddy, yellow-haired, German maidens
singing in chorus as they wash their linen in
the little river Knaster; the Lifeguardsmen
of his Impecuniosity, the Grand Duke, growling
forth bass ballads as they black their
jack-boots; nay, even the melancholy-winding
cor-de-chasse of his Impecuniosity's chief
jäger, as the Grand Ducal hunting-party set
forth from the Schloss in the forest to track
the wild boar. They say his Impecuniosity
makes five hundred a-year by consigning his
hams to the English market.

Surely Germany is the Own Home of
music. The bells at the horses' collars, the
snuff-boxes, the clocks, the children's toys;
all play some tune or other. All the people
—save the deaf and dumb—sing and
whistle; and, as for the birds, I never heard
the feathered choristers to so much
advantage in any other part of the continent.
The hours I have passed in Germany, lying
on my back, under a tree, and listening to the
birds;—the pounds of tobacco I have smoked
for the sake of the skylarks; the castles I
have built in the air; the bottles of
Hockheimer I have drunk in the morning because
I have heard the nightingale the night before
—Are not these all written in the Book of
Pleasant Memories—the book clasped,
locked, sprucely bound, gilt-edged, that stands
side by side in the mind's library, with the
great black book of things that should never
have been.

Back to the Gross-Herzog: a week there
will chase away all your splenetic humours;
be they as numerous as an Englishman's
in a French vaudeville. I have described
my chamber. In the morning I take my
walk into the delightful country, and
watch the blue smoke of my cigar, curling
and eddying in relief against the great
black belt of forest in the distance. Then
I join the early crowd of promenaders at the
Marguérite Fontaine, and wish I were
Lavater, or Gall, or Spurzheim, that I might
found some arguments upon the wondrous
countenances in every variety of grimace
that are swallowing the abominable ferruginous
water at the hot-springs. Heaven help
us! What mountebanks we are! How we
catch at the frailest straw of an excuse to be
able to indulge in our pet vices. I do believe
that if I had a well, and could contrive to
keep a constant stock of rusty keys in it, or any
other substance that would make the water
permanently nasty; if I could afford to
build a neat ridotto, casino, kursaal near it,
with every appliance for flirting, leg-shaking,
and gambling, and hire a quack to write a
pamphlet about the medicinal virtues of my
spring, I—or you—or Jack Pudding yonder,
would have as crowded a gathering, as the
Gross-Herzog attracts every year. Yes, and
the people will know me to be a humbug, and
the pamphlet a lie, and the rusted iron water
a blind; but they will come and make my
fortune all the same. That fellow who used
to sell straws with seditious songs in the
good old Sidmouth and Castlereagh times, was
a philosopher. Dear me, sell us but one
blade of morality, one little ear of pious
chickweed, and we will accept a whole stack
of wickedness—free gratis. When I see the
pure-minded aristocracy gambling for dear
life at German spas, under sanitary pretences,
I think of the straws and the sedition.

During the rest of my day I behold
Palsy, ogling under pink bonnets; barège
muslins flirting with scoundrelism in lacquered
moustaches; eighty years and eighty thousand
pounds in a Bath chair, besieged by a fortune-
hunter; your tailor with a valet-de-chambre
and a courrier; your wife's milliner in ruby
velvet; the English peerage punting for
half crowns; blacklegs running on errands
for duchesses; ballet-dancers making Russian
princes greater slaves than their own serfs;
French actresses enjoying more of the
revenues of Lord Muffineer's broad acres than
would furnish marriage-portions for all his