use and meaning of common things, such as
windmills, milestones, and the like, with a
naïveté and simple-mindedness, deliriously
delightful to contemplate; she will give you
little meat-pies and sweet cakes to eat from
her own amply stored bags; she will even—
if you are very agreeable and well-behaved—
allow you to comfort yourself outwardly with
a dash of eau-de-cologne from a silver-
mounted phial, and inwardly with a sip from
a wicker-covered flask containing a liquid
whose nature it is no business of yours to
inquire; she will sing you little German songs,
cut the leaves of your book with an imitation
poinard;—and all this she will do with such
an unaffected kindness and simple dignity
that the traveller who would presume upon
it, or be rude to her, must be a double-
distilled brute and pig, and only fit to travel
in the last truck of an Eastern Counties fish-
train, or to take care of the blind monkeys in
the zoological gardens.

And all good spirits bless and multiply the
fair ladies of Germany! They never object
to smoking. There are certain carriages—
"fur Damen"—into which the men creatures
do not penetrate, and from which tobacco
smoke is, as a rule, prohibited; but the ladies
seldom (the nice ones never) patronise the
carriages specially affected to their use. They
just take railway luck with the ruder sex;
and as for smoking—cigar smoking always
understood—they like it; they delight in it.
They know, sagacious creatures, that a
traveller with a cigar in his mouth is twice a
man; that the fumes of the fragrant
Havannah loosen the tongue, and open the
heart, and dispel awkwardness and diffidence;
that he who wants to smoke, and is
prevented from smoking, always feels aggrieved
and oppressed, and is correspondingly sulky,
disobliging and morose. The only drawback
to the society of the German lady in the
railway is this: that when she alights at a
station, and in her silvery voice bids you
adieu and bon voyage, there are always
waiting on the platform for her other ladies
young and pretty as herself, or else
moustachioed relations (I hope they are relations),
who fall-to kissing her, and pressing both
her hands, till you fall into despair, and howl
with rage in your crimson velvet prisoners'
van. Then the train rolls away, and you
feel that there is a nature-abhorred vacuum
in the left-hand corner of your waistcoat,
and that Fraulein von Name Unknown has
taken your heart away with her, and is now,
probably, hanging it over her chimney-piece
as a trophy, as an Indian chief does the
scalps of his enemies to the poles of his
hunting lodge.

On this present due northern journey I
must confess I did not lose my heart, for we
were ladyless all the way; but the average
first-class travelling companions I had.
There was a prince—so at least I conjectured
the asthmatic old gentleman who left us at
Dusseldorf to be; for who but a prince
could have such a multiplicity of parti-
coloured ribbons belonging to as many orders
(a little soap and water would have done
them a world of good) pinned on the breast
of his brown surtout, so much fragrant snuff
on his embroidered jabot, and such an
impenetrably wise and aristocratic face? Yes,
he must have been a prince, with seventy-
five quarterings at least. Then there was an
Englishman (besides your humble servant),
and there was a Fool. Such a fool! He was
a Frenchman, fat, fair, and smiling, with
some worsted-work embroidery on his head
like a kettle-holder pinned into a circular
form. There were letters worked on it, and
I tried hard to read "Polly put the kettle
on" but could not. He was going to Dresden,
where he was to stay a week, and exhibited
to us every ten minutes or so a letter
of credit on a banker there, and asked us if
we thought four thousand florins would be
enough to last him during his sojourn. He
was as profoundly, carelessly, gaily, contentedly
ignorant of things which the merest
travelling tyro is usually conversant with as
a Frenchman could be; but he knew all
about the Boulevard des Italiens, and that
was quite enough for him. He laughed and
talked incessantly, but, like the jolly young
waterman, about nothing at all. He could
not smoke: it gave him a pain in his limbs,
he said; but he liked much to witness the
operation. Like most fools, he had a fixed
idea; and this fixed idea happened to
be a most excellent one—being no other
than this, that the German beer was very
good (so it is, after the Strasbourg and
Biere de Mars abominations), and that it
was desirable to drink as much of it as could
possibly be obtained. He alighted at every
station, to drink a draught of creaming
though mawkish beverage, and seemed deeply
mortified when the train did not stop long
enough for him to make a journey to the
buffet, and half inclined to quarrel with me
when I persuaded him to take a petit verre
of cognac at Minden, as a corrective to the
malt. But he was a hospitable and liberal
simpleton, and, when we declined to alight,
he would come with a beaming countenance
and a Tom-fool's joke to the carriage window,
holding a great foaming tankard of Bock
Bier, or else a bottle of it to last to the
next station. I am not ashamed to say
that I drank his health several times
between Dusseldorf and Hanover, and, what
is more, wished him good health with all my
heart.

The German railway buffets are capital
places of restoration: true oases in the great
desert of cuttings and embankments. The
fare is plentiful, varied, and cheap—cheap, at
least, if you received anything like Christian
money in change for the napoleons or five-
franc pieces; but what intensity of disgustful
reprobation can describe the vile dross that