covered with flowers—­beautiful purple salvias, pinks such as we have at home in our gardens and glowing buttercups, color the banks of every stream.  I never saw richer or more luxuriant foliage.  Magnificent forests clothe the hills, and the villages are imbedded in fruit trees, shrubbery and flowers.  Sometimes we go for miles through some enchanting valley, lying like a paradise between the mountains, while the distant, white Alps look on it from afar; sometimes over swelling ranges of hills, where we can see to the right the valley of the Danube, threaded by his silver current and dotted with white cottages and glittering spires, and farther beyond, the blue mountains of the Bohemian Forest.  To the left, the range of the Styrian Alps stretches along the sky, summit above summit, the farther ones robed in perpetual snow.  I could never tire gazing on those glorious hills.  They fill the soul with a conception of sublimity, such as one feels when listening to triumphal music.  They seem like the marble domes of a mighty range of temples, where earth worships her Maker with an organ-anthem of storms!

“There is a luxury in traveling here.  We walk all day through such scenes, resting often in the shade of the fruit trees which line the road, or on a mossy bank by the side of some cool forest.  Sometimes for enjoyment as well as variety, we make our dining-place by a clear spring instead of within a smoky tavern; and our simple meals have a relish an epicure could never attain.  Away with your railroads and steamboats and mail-coaches, or keep them for those who have no eye but for the sordid interests of life!  With my knapsack and pilgrim-staff, I ask not their aid.  If a mind and soul full of rapture with beauty, a frame in glowing and vigorous health, and slumbers unbroken even by dreams, are blessings any one would attain, let him pedestrianize it through Lower Austria!”

I have never been so strongly and constantly reminded of America, as during this journey.  Perhaps the balmy season, the same in which I last looked upon the dear scenes of home, may have its effect; but there is besides a richness in the forests and waving fields of grain, a wild luxuriance over every landscape, which I have seen nowhere else in Europe.  The large farm houses, buried in orchards, scattered over the valleys, add to the effect.  Everything seems to speak of happiness and prosperity.

We were met one morning by a band of wandering Bohemian gipsies—­the first of the kind I ever saw.  A young woman with a small child in her arms came directly up to me, and looking full in my face with her wild black eyes, said, without any preface:  “Yes, he too has met with sorrow and trouble already, and will still have more.  But he is not false—­he is true and sincere, and will also meet with good luck!” She said she could tell me three numbers with which I should buy a lottery ticket and win a great prize.  I told her I would have nothing to do with the lottery, and would buy