of grass, which she had reaped and stacked upon her neck, passed her by with contemptuous unconcern. It did not seem to occur to him for a moment that she was the victim of an infamous domestic tyranny.

So strangely susceptible are the German people of the deepest attachments known on earth, and yet so destitute of gallantry, and often so tyrannous over their women and children!

At Naumburg I had two hours to wait in the station, and I imprudently took out my map and newspapers, and commenced reading the war news from Bohemia. Presently a broad-faced gendarme, with a short stout sword in his scabbard, and trousers which fitted his legs as if the latter had been molten and poured into them, came and gently tapped me on the shoulder. He asked to see my "papers," meaning my passport, but as he could read no word in it-though I could hardly keep from bursting outright with laughter at the intense and inscrutable solemnity with which the fellow perused it awhile-he requested me to accompany him to police headquarters.

As nobody there could read English, we went next to the burgomaster. This personage was a blue-eyed, rather long-featured, and exquisitely bland gentleman, seated behind a desk, on which was a mountain of documents bound in the inevitable blue, official pasteboard covers of Prussia. He questioned me pretty sharply. He could by no means comprehend what any rational individual should be doing, walking about over Prussia and writing down matters in his book, without some ulterior Zweck. He was greatly concerned to know what my Zweck was. "Was haben Sie denn zum Zweck?" he asked me several times.

I explained to him, as well as I could, that my Zweck was to acquire useful and interesting information for my

self, and also to impart the same to inquiring minds. But he was not satisfied, and presently he bethought himself to call in his wife, who could speak English.

"Liebe Frau," said he, "herein."

This lady spoke English very sweetly, and it was all the more delicious from her exquisitely musical and liquid German accent. It was worth more than an hour's arrest to be questioned by such a charming inquisitor. At his command she perused my note-book pretty thoroughly, but when she found, instead of descriptions of fortresses intended for the use of the wicked Austrians, such peaceful and innocent observations as that the King of Prussia, for instance, squinted when he laughed, and that two gallons of goat's milk in Eisleben made a pound of strong cheese, she smiled feebly, and handed the note-book back. To convince her I was an American, I handed her some letters. She turned them over and over, and then looked at me with a puzzled and dubious expression.

"But they are not opened," she said, with the faintest tone of expectant triumph in her voice.

The burgomaster also looked at me more sternly than he had ever hitherto done, as if demanding that this dark mystery should be solved at once.

I squeezed one a little in my hand, causing it to gape open at the end, where it had been merely slit.

case.

They were both so chagrined that such a simple device should have escaped them that they at once dismissed the The lady explained to her lord that the contents of my note-book were not dangerous, and that she was convinced I was by no means an incendiary person, a roaring democrat going about seeking helpless monarchs to devour; and so at last they sent me away, with very sweet and bland apologies and expressions of regret.

STUDENT RAMBLES IN PRUSSIA.

III.

Thus I wag through the world, half the time on foot and the other half walking; and always as merry as a thunder-storm in the night. And so we plow along, as the fly said to the ox. Who knows what may happen? Patience and shuffle the cards.

As

LONGFELLOW.

SI left the cathedral of Frankfort, its great chime of bells were pealing out wild and wide and swift over the old imperial city their clangorous summons to matins. What a stirring and imperious voice is that of the morning bells wherewith, all round the world, the Church of the ancient Eternal City speaks yet to her worshipers !

The Prussians had occupied the city only a few days before, and Frankfort was ebullient with wrath. As I walked down the street I saw a ragged urchin run after a Prussian officer with a lady on his arm, screaming and yelling with laughter, "Kuckuk mit'nem Schmetterling!" (Cuckoo with a butterfly), until the officer became so enraged that he dropped the lady, drew his sword, and pursued the screeching youngster most furiously. He ran

into a crowd, who protected him.

I walked on, past the house of the good Rath, wherein was lived that "rich and manifold life, without any positive moral tendency;" past that lordly statue from whose troublous brow looks out the grandest mere intellect since Shakspeare; past the statues of those three men of whom

Louis XI. said, in wonder, that they spent all their time in making "plusieurs beaux livres."

In a twinkling, almost, I popped out from the narrow, reeking alleys of the old city into the superb beauty of this immensely rich metropolis.

On one of its broad avenues, so surpassingly rich in shade-trees, among the lordly piles built with "Christian ducats," but inhabited by men scarcely known beyond the bulletins of the Frankfort Bourse, there nestles in a bosky labyrinth one little white-walled cottage, to whose owner Czar and Cæsar and Kaiser do homage. It is the house of Rothschild. It is rather Oriental in shape, looking in front as if one low, flat-roofed house were placed upon another, the lower being much the wider. Across its whitewashed front, between the upper and lower ranges of casements, trails its one ornament,-full of significance to its pretentious neighbors,-a slender moulding of flowers and cornucopiæ intertwined. It was a pleasing spectacle, to find this descendant of a race once "God-beloved in old Jerusalem," now persecuted and homeless on earth, dwelling in unaffected simplicity, and content to observe that outward modesty which, like mercy, is "mightiest in the mightiest," and so beautiful in contrast with the tawdry pomp of his people's hereditary oppressors.

Once out of this wonderful wealth of suburban greenery, I entered upon the great champaign of the valley of the Main. It is early June, and a mellow, drowsy glamour spreads like an enchantment over the plain, softening the outlines of the low Wiesbaden mountains. Far down, athwart this sunny, dreamy plain, roll the light-green waters of the Main, the ancient, while the spotless cope of the heavens spreads high and wide above, resting down upon the hills, "with peaky tops engrailed,"

with which it is blended by the haze into an almost unbroken oneness. The stately poplars of the Prussian highways shade the roadsides no longer, but are wholly replaced by stout-limbed apples, wherein the birds, exultant in the grateful warmth after a chill and rainy week, twitter and chirp and shake out their feathers and twiddle their tails, and jump up and down over their callow young a hundred thousand times a day.

Whether on a noble and lordly estate of the dimensions of a house-yard, or on a bloated and grasping monopoly of a full-rounded acre, each peasant is tilling the ancestral ground, separated from his neighbor by no unsightly fence or unsociable hedgerow, and molested in his operations by no plows or cultivators, or other inconvenient and troublesome gimcracks of modern ambition. Every hamlet and every hovel is to-day deserted and silent. All the occupants are laboring in the field this sunny weather, the woman side by side with her lord, brother and sister together, chattering maiden and lover a little apart. If the clumsy hobbledehoy discovers an injurious potatoworm close by the little pink toes of his beloved, and slashes at it with his mattock to see her jump and give a pretty scream, whose business in all the world is it but his own, I should like to know? Here one group, with measured and laborious stroke, swing the heavy, twopronged mattock among the vines; others collect the wandering tendrils and teach them to clasp the espaliers; a woman moves along the highway with erect and steady tread, bearing on her head a mighty bunch of grass; there one drives a lumbering water-tank backward and forward, while a helper slings the liquid manure far and wide over the young meadow.

At frequent intervals along the wayside still stand, in neglect and decay, the memorials of a religious devotion