their indentures, to travel into some distant province, and depend upon charity and their own exertions for two or three years before becoming masters at their trade. It is a singular custom, and, I should think, a useful lesson in hardship and self-reliance. They held out their hats with a confident independence of look that quite satisfied me they felt no degradation in it.

We soon entered the province of Styria; and brighter rivers, greener woods, richer and more graceful uplands and meadows, do not exist in the world. I had thought the scenery of Stockbridge, in my own state, unequalled till now. I could believe myself there, were not the women alone working in the fields, and the roads lined for miles together with military waggons and cavalry upon march. The conscript law of Austria compels every peasant to serve fourteen years! and the labours of agriculture fall, of course, almost exclusively upon females. Soldiers swarm like locusts through the country, but they seem as inoffensive and as much at home as the cattle in the farm-yards. It is a curious contrast, to my eye, to see parks of artillery glistening in the midst of a wheat-field, and soldiers sitting about under the low thatches of these peaceful-looking cottages. I do not think, among the thousands that I have passed in three days' travel, I have seen a gesture or heard a syllable. If sitting, they smoke and sit still, and, if travelling, they economise motion to a degree that is wearisome to the eye.

Words are limited, and the description of scenery becomes tiresome. It is a fault that the sense of beauty, freshening constantly on the traveller, compels him who makes a note of impressions to mark every other line with the same everrecurring exclamations of pleasure. I saw a hundred miles of unrivalled scenery in Styria, and how can I describe it? It were keeping silence on a world of enjoyment to pass it We come to a charming descent into a valley. The town beneath, the river, the embracing mountains, the swell to the ear of its bells ringing some holiday, affect my imagination powerfully. I take out my tablets. What shall I say? How convey to your minds, who have not seen it, the charm of a scene I can only describe as I have described a thousand others?

over.

GRATZ-VIENNA ST. ETIENNE- THE TOMB OF THE SON OF NAPOLEON.

JULY 15, 1833.

WE had followed stream after stream through a succession of delicious valleys for a hundred miles. Descending from a slight eminence, we came upon the broad and rapid Muhr, and soon after caught sight of a distant citadel upon a rock. As we approached, it struck me as one of the most singular freaks of nature I had ever seen. A pyramid, perhaps three hundred feet in height, and precipitous on every side, rose abruptly in the midst of a broad and level plain, and around it, in a girdle of architecture, lay the capital of Styria. The fortress on the summit hung like an eagle's nest over the town, and from its towers a pistol-shot would reach the outermost point of the wall.

Wearied with travelling near three hundred miles without sleep, I dropped upon a bed at the hotel, with an order to be called in two hours. It was noon, and we were to remain at Gratz till the next morning. My friend, the Hungarian, had promised, as he threw himself on the opposite bed, to wake and accompany me in a walk through the town; but the shake of a stout German chambermaid at the appointed time had no effect upon him, and I descended to my dinner alone. I had lost my interpreter. The carte was in German, of which I did not know even the letters. After appealing in vain in French and Italian to the persons eating near me, I fixed my finger at hazard upon a word, and the waiter disappeared. The result was a huge dish of cabbage cooked in some filthy oil and graced with a piece of beef. I was hesitating whether to dine on bread or make another attempt, when a gentlemanlike man of some fifty years came in and took the vacant seat at my table. He addressed me immediately in French, and, smiling at my difficulties, undertook to order a dinner for me something less national. We improved our acquaintance with a bottle of Johannesberg, and after dinner he

kindly offered to accompany me in my walk through the city.

The

Gratz is about the size of Boston; a plain German city, with little or no pretensions to style. The military band was playing a difficult waltz very beautifully in the public square, but no one was listening except a group of young men dressed in the worst taste of dandyism. We mounted by a zig-zag path to the fortress. On a shelf of the precipice half way up, hangs a small casino used as a beer-shop. The view from the summit was a feast to the eye. wide and lengthening valley of the Muhr lay asleep beneath its loads of grain, its villas and farm-houses the picture of "waste and mellow fruitfulness;" the rise to the mountains around the head of the valley was clustered with princely dwellings; thick forests with glades between them, and churches with white slender spires shooting from the bosom of elms; and right at our feet, circling around the precipitous rock for protection, lay the city enfolded in its rampart, and sending up to our ears the sound of every wheel that rolled through her streets. Among the striking buildings below, my friend pointed out to me a palace which he said had been lately purchased by Joseph Bonaparte, who was coming here to reside. The people were beginning to turn out for their evening walk upon the ramparts, which are planted with trees and laid out for a promenade, and we descended to mingle in the crowd.

My old friend had a great many acquaintances. He presented me to several of the best-dressed people we met, all of whom invited me to supper. I had been in Italy almost a year and a half, and such a thing had never happened to me. We walked about until six, and as I preferred going to the play, which opened at that early hour, we took tickets for Der Schlimme Leisel, and were seated presently in one of the simplest and prettiest theatres I have ever seen.

Der Schlimme Leisel was an old maid who kept house for an old batchelor brother, proposing, at the time the play opens, to marry. Her dislike to the match, from the dread of losing her authority over his household, formed the humour of the piece, and was admirably represented. After various unsuccessful attempts to prevent the nuptials,

the lady is brought to the house, and the old maid enters in a towering passion, throws down her keys, and flirts out of the room with a threat that she "will go to America!" Fortunately she is not driven to that extremity. The lady has been already married secretly to a poorer lover; and the old bachelor, after the first shock of the discovery, settles a fortune on them, and returns to his celibacy and his old maid sister, to the satisfaction of all parties. Certainly the German is the most unmusical language of Babel. If my good old friend had not translated it for me word for word, I should scarce have believed the play to be more than a gibbering pantomime. I shall think differently when I have learned it, no doubt, but a strange language strikes upon one's ear so oddly! I was too tired when the play was over, (which, by the way, was at the sober hour of nine,) to accept any of the kind invitations of which my companion reminded me. We supped tête-àtéte, instead, at the hotel. I was delighted with my new acquaintance. He was an old citizen of the world. He had left Gratz at twenty, and, after thirty years wandering from one part of the globe to the other, had returned to end his days in his birthplace. His relations were all dead; and, speaking all the languages of Europe, he preferred living at an hotel for the society of strangers. With a great deal of wisdom, he had preserved his good-humour towards the world; and I think I have rarely seen a kinder and never a happier man. I parted from him with regret, and the next morning at daylight had resumed my seat in the Eil-waggon.

Imagine the Hudson, at the highlands, reduced to a sparkling little river a bowshot across, and a rich valley threaded by a road occupying the remaining space between the mountains, and you have the scenery for the first thirty miles beyond Gratz. There is one more difference. On the edge of one of the most towering precipices, clear up against the clouds, hang the ruins of a noble castle. The rents in the wall, and the embrasures in the projecting turrets, seem set into the sky. Trees and vines grow within and about it, and the lacings of the twisted roots seem all that keep it together. It is a perfect "castle in the air."

A long day's journey and another long night (during

which we passed Neustadt, on the confines of Hungary,) brought us within sight of Baden, but an hour or two from Vienna. It was just sun-rise, and market-carts, and pedestrians, and suburban vehicles of all descriptions notified us of our approach to a great capital. A few miles farther we were stopped in the midst of an extensive plain by a crowd of carriages. A criminal was about being guillo

tined. What was that to one who saw Vienna for the first time? A few steps farther the postilion was suddenly stopped. A gentleman alighted from a carriage in which were two ladies, and opened the door of the diligence. It was the bride of the soldier-apothecary come to meet him with her mother and brother. He was buried in dust, just waked out of sleep, a three days' beard upon his face, and, at the best, not a very lover-like person. He ran to the carriage-door, jumped in, and there was an immediate cry for water. The bride had fainted! We left her in his arms and drove on. The courier had no bowels for love. There is a small Gothic pillar before us, on the rise of a slight elevation. Thence we shall see Vienna. Stop, thou tasteless postilion! Was ever such a scene revealed to mortal sight? It is like Paris from the Barrière de l'Etoile -it seems to cover the world. What is that broad water on which the rising sun glances so brightly? The Danube! What is that unparalleled Gothic structure piercing the sky? What columns are these? What spires? Beautiful! beautiful city!

*

It must be a fine city that impresses one with its splendour before breakfast, after driving all night in a mail-coach. It was six o'clock in the morning when I left the post-office in Vienna. to walk to an hotel. The shops were still shut, the milk-women were beating at the gates, and the short, quick ring upon the church-bells summoned all early risers to mass. A sudden turn brought me upon a square. In its centre stood one of the most imposing fabrics that has ever yet filled my eye. It looked like the structure of a giant, encrusted by fairies-a majestically proportioned mass, and a spire tapering to the clouds, but a surface so curiously beautiful, so traced and fretted, so full of exquisite ornament, that it seemed rather some curious cabinet