are so built as to afford every facility for the
unloading of boats that bring salt barrels
from the mine by the highway of the Traun.
The warehouses consisted simply of a large
number of sheds piled with the salt in barrels,
a few offices, and a low but spacious hall,
filled, in a confused way, with dusty models.
There were models of river-boats and salt
moulds, mining tools, and tram ways,
hydraulic models of all kinds, miniature furnaces,
wooden troughs, and seething pans. I looked
through these until the bell from the adjacent
pier warned me, at five o'clock in the evening,
to go on board the steamer that was quite
ready to puff and splash its way across the
beautiful green lake. We went under the
shadow of the black and lofty Traunstein, and
among pine-covered rocks, of which the reflections
were mingled in the water with a ruddy
glow, that streamed across a low shore from
some fires towards which we were steering.

The glow proceeded from the fires of the
Imperial Saltern, erected at Ebensee. I paid
a short visit to the works, which have been
erected at great cost; and display all the most
recent improvements in the art of getting the
best marketable, salt from saline water. I
found that the water, heavily impregnated, is
conducted from the distant mines by wooden
troughs into the drying pan. The pan is a
large shallow vessel of metal, supported by
small piles of brick, and a low brick wall
about three feet high, extending round two-
thirds of its circumference, and leaving one-
third, as the mouth of the furnace, open to
the air. Among the brick columns, and
within the wall, the fire flashed and curled
under the seething pan. Ascending next
into the house over the great pan, and looking
down upon the surface and its contents
through sliding doors upon the floor, I saw
the white salt crusting like a coat of snow
over the boiling water, and being raked as it
is formed by workmen stationed at each of
the trap doors in the floor above me. As the
water evaporated, the salt was stirred and
turned from rake to rake; and finally, when
quite dry, raked into the neighbourhood of a
long-handled spade, with which one workman
was shovelling among the dried salt, and
filling a long row of wooden moulds, placed
ready to his hand. These moulds are sugar-
loaf shaped, and perforated at the bottom
like a sugar mould, in order that any remaining
moisture may drain out of them. The
moulds will be placed finally in a heated room
before the salt will be considered dry enough
for storeage as a manufactured article.

The brine that pours with an equable flow
into the seething pan at Ebensee, is brought
by wooden troughs from the salt mine at
Hallein, a distance of thirty miles in a direct
line. It comes by way of mountains and
along a portion of the valley of the Traun,
through which I continued my journey the
same evening from Ebensee, until the darkness
compelled me to rest for the night at a
small inn on a hill side. The next day I went
through Ischl and Wolfgang, and spent three
hours of afternoon in climbing up the Scharfberg,
which is more than a thousand feet
higher than Snowdon, to see the sunset and the
sunrise. There was sleeping accommodation
on the top : so there is on the top of Snowdon.
On the Scharfberg I had a hay-litter in a
wooden shed and ate goat's cheese and bread
and butter. I saw no sunset or sunrise, but
had a night of wind and rain, and came down
in the morning through white mist within a
rugged gully ploughed up by the rain, to get
a wholesome breakfast at St. Gilgen on the
lake. More I need not say about the journey
than that, on the fifth day after leaving
Ebensee, having rested a little in the very
beautiful city of Salzburg, I marched into the
town of Hallein, at the foot of the Dürrnberg,
the famous salt mountain, called Tumal by old
chroniclers, and known for a salt mountain
seven hundred and thirty years ago.

After a night's rest in the town, I was astir
by five o'clock in the morning, and went
forward on my visit to the mines. In the case of
the Dürrnberg salt mine, as I have already
said, the miner enters at the top and comes out
at the bottom. My first business, therefore,
was to walk up the mountain, the approach
to which is by a long slope of about four
English miles.

I met few miners by the way, and
noticed in them few peculiarities of manners
or costume. The national dress about these
regions is a sort of cross between the Swiss
Alpine costume and a common peasant dress
of the lowlands. I saw indications of the
sugar-loafed hat; jackets were worn almost
by all, with knee-breeches and coloured
leggings. The clothing was always neat and
sound, and the clothed bodies looked reasonably
healthy, except that they had all
remarkably pale faces. The miners did not
seem bodily to suffer from their occupation.

As I approached the summit of the Dürrnberg,
the dry brownish limestone showed its
bare front to the morning sun. I entered the
offices, partly contained in the rock, and
applied for admission into the dominion of the
gnomes. My arrival was quite in the nick of
time, for I had not to be kept waiting, as I
happened to complete the party of twelve,
without which the two guides do not start.
It was a Tower of London business; and, as
at the Tower, the demand upon our purses
was not very heavy. One gulden-schein—
about tenpence—is the regulated fee. Our
full titles having been duly put down in the
register, each of us was furnished with a
miner's costume, and, so habited, off we set.

We started from a point that is called the
Obersteinberghauptstollen; our guides only
having candles, one in advance, the other in
the rear.

We were sensible of a pleasant coldness in
the air when we had gone a little way into
the sloping tunnel. The tunnel was lofty,