half the grandams and infants in the place a-cackling with felicity.

Mighty glad was I to make my escape; and in about an hour or two, we
entered a wild tract of country, not unlike the skirts of a princely
park. A little farther on stands a cluster of cottages, where we
stopped to give our horses some bread, and were pestered with swarms
of flies, most probably journeying to Munich fair, there to feast
upon sugared tarts and bottle-noses.

The next post brought us over hill and dale, grove and meadow, to a
narrow plain, watered by rivulets and surrounded by cliffs, under
which lies scattered the village of Wollrathshausen, consisting of
several cottages, built entirely of fir, with strange galleries
hanging over the way. Nothing can be neater than the carpentry of
these simple edifices, nor more solid than their construction; many
of them looked as if they had braved the torrents which fell from the
mountains a century ago; and, if one may judge from the hoary
appearance of the inhabitants, here are patriarchs who remember the
Emperor Lewis of Bavaria. Orchards of cherry-trees impend from the
steeps above the village, which to our certain knowledge produce no
contemptible fruit.

Having refreshed ourselves with their cooling juice, we struck into a
grove of pines, the tallest and most flourishing perhaps we ever
beheld. There seemed no end to these forests, save where little
irregular spots of herbage, fed by cattle, intervened. Whenever we
gained an eminence it was only to discover more ranges of dark wood,
variegated with meadows and glittering streams. White clover and a
profusion of sweet-scented flowers clothe their banks; above, waves
the mountain-ash, glowing with scarlet berries; and beyond, rise