no ticket, but she persisted, saying:  “Has he a twenty kreutzer piece?—­will he give it?  Lay it in his hand and make a cross over it, and I will reveal the numbers!” On my refusal, she became angry, and left me, saying:  “Let him take care—­the third day something will happen to him!” An old, wrinkled hag made the same proposition to my companion with no better success.  They reminded me strikingly of our Indians; their complexion is a dark brown, and their eyes and hair are black as night.  These belonged to a small tribe who wander through the forests of Bohemia, and support themselves by cheating and stealing.

We stopped the fourth night at Enns, a small city on the river of the same name, which divides Upper from Lower Austria.  After leaving the beautiful little village where we passed the night before, the road ascended one of those long ranges of hills, which stretch off from the Danube towards the Alps.  We walked for miles over the broad and uneven summit, enjoying the enchanting view which opened on both sides.  If we looked to the right, we could trace the windings of the Danube for twenty miles, his current filled with green, wooded islands; white cities lie at the foot of the hills, which, covered to the summit with grain fields and vineyards, extended back one behind another, till the farthest were lost in the distance.  I was glad we had taken the way from Vienna to Linz by land, for from the heights we had a view of the whole course of the Danube, enjoying besides, the beauty of the inland vales and the far-off Styrian Alps.  From the hills we passed over we could see the snowy range as far as the Alps of Salzburg—­some of them seemed robed to the very base in their white mantles.  In the morning the glaciers on their summit glittered like stars; it was the first time I saw the sun reflected at a hundred miles’ distance!

On descending we came into a garden-like plain, over which rose the towers of Enns, built by the ransom money paid to Austria for the deliverance of the Lion-hearted Richard.  The country legends say that St. Florian was thrown into the river by the Romans in the third century, with a millstone around his neck, which, however, held him above the water like cork, until he had finished preaching them a sermon.  In the villages we often saw his imago painted on the houses, in the act of pouring a pail of water on a burning building, with the inscription beneath—­“Oh, holy Florian, pray for us!” This was supposed to be a charm against fire.  In Upper Austria, it is customary to erect a shrine on the road, wherever an accident has happened, with a painting and description of it, and an admonition to all passers-by to pray for the soul of the unfortunate person.  On one of them, for instance, was a cart with a wild ox, which a man was holding by the horns; a woman kneeling by the wheels appeared to be drawing a little girl by the feet from under it, and the inscription stated:  “By calling on Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the girl was happily rescued.”  Many of the shrines had images which the people no doubt, in their ignorance and simplicity, considered holy, but they were to us impious and almost blasphemous.