gation of the shallow river—returned soberly
home. The environs of Berlin are of no great
beauty, the city being built on a sandy plain,
with the single eminence of the Kreutzberg,
from which it can be viewed with advantage;
but in and about the city there are beautiful
gardens, private and of royal foundation, and
these are invariably open to the public. One
happy Sunday afternoon we spent in
Charlottenburg, the pleasure palace of the king ;
and one other in the noble botanical gardens
in the city ; while on a fine day the avenue
of lime-trees, Unter-den-Linden, in its crowd
of promenaders, and social groups at the
refreshment-tables, presented an animated,
and, to my mind, a recreative and humanising
spectacle. Music was everywhere ; and in
the theatres, in the display of pyrotechnic
eccentricities, or perhaps in ballooning—but
that was English—the evening was variously
spent. There may be dance-houses and other
abominations in Berlin, as in Hamburgh, but
I never heard of them, and if they existed,
more was the pity. For my own part, I was
happy in enjoying the moderate pleasures of
life in company with the majority of my
fellow-workmen, who, I must again say, and
insist upon, were not at work, but at rest, on
the Sunday. It is true that here, as
elsewhere, tailors and bootmakers (master men)
were content to take measures, and receive
orders from the workmen, for very little
other opportunity presented itself for such
necessary service.

A few hours' whirl on the railway on a
Sunday saw us in Leipsic. This was at the
Easter festival; and we stayed two mouths
in this Saxon market of the world, embracing
in their course the most important of the
three great markets in the year. If ever
there was a fair opportunity of judging the
question of Sunday labour and Sunday rest,
it was in Leipsic, at this period. If Sunday
work be a necessary consequence of Sunday
recreation—an absurd paradox, surely—it
would have been exhibited in a commercial
town, at a period when all the elements of
frivolity, as gathered together at a fair, and all
the wants of commerce compressed into a few
brief weeks, were brought into co-existence.
Yet in no town in Germany did I witness so
complete a cessation from labour on the
Sunday. There was no question of working.
Early in the morning there was, it is true, a
domestic market in the great square, highly
interesting to a stranger from the number of
curious costumes collected together; the
ringletted Polish Jew, old Germans from
Altenburg, seeming masqueraders from the
mining districts of the Erzgeberge, and
country folks from every neighbouring village,
who flocked to Leipsic with their wares and
edibles. But all this was at an end long before
the church service commenced. I have been
in the Nicolai-Kirke (remarkable for its lofty
roof, upheld by columns in the form of palm
trees), and the congregation thronged the
whole edifice. And at a smaller church, I was
completely wedged in by the standing crowd
of unmistakeable working people, whose
congregational singing was particularly effective.
The German Protestant church service
is not so long as our own. There are only a
few pews in the body of the building ; and
the major part of the audience stand during
the service. I was not so well pleased with
one sermon I heard in the English church,
for it happened to be the effort of a German
preacher, a student in our tongue, whose
discourse was indeed intrinsically good, and
would have been solemn, if the pauses
and emphases had only been in the right
places.

I never worked on Sunday in Leipsic, nor
was I ever acquainted with any one who
did. The warehouses were strictly closed;
and a few booths, with trifling gewgaws,
were alone to be seen. The city was at
rest. Leipsic has but one theatre, and to
this the prices of admission are doubled in
fair-times, which placed it out of our reach.
Thus we were forced to be content with
humbler sources of amusement, and to find
recreation, which we readily did, in the
beautiful promenades round the city, laid out
by Dr. Müller; in country rambles to Breitenfeld,
and other old battle-fields; in tracing
the winding paths of a thin wood, near the
town, wonderful to us from the flakes of wool
(baumwolle) which whitened the ground.
Or again, among the bands of music and
happy crowds which dotted the Rosenthal—
a title, by the bye, more fanciful than just,
seeing that the vale in question is only a
grassy undulating plain. Here we sometimes
met the Herr, with wife on arm, and
exchanged due salutations.

The fair, such as we understand by the
name, commenced in the afternoon, and was
a scene of much noise and some drollery.
The whole town teemed with itinerant
musicians, whose violent strains would sometimes
burst from the very ground under your feet,
as it appeared, issuing as they did from the
open mouths of beer and wine-cellars. Quiet
coffee-houses there were, in which grave
citizens smoked and read; and admirable
concerts in saloons, and in the open air. To
one of these latter I was seduced, by the
mendacious announcement of a certain Wagner
of Berlin, that a whole troop of real Moors
would perform fantastic tricks before high
heaven; on paying the price of admission,
I had to run the gauntlet through a score
of black-headed Fentons, who salaamed and
grinned as they ushered me into the blank
space beyond, containing nothing more
interesting than a few tables and chairs, a dumb
brass baud, and a swarm of hungry waiters.
I saw no dance-houses, such as there were
in Hamburgh; and by nine o'clock the
festivities of the day were at an end. The
Easter fair lasted some five or six weeks,
and at its termination its merriment dis-