It was not the weather alone, which prevented our making a pilgrimage to it, nor was it alone a peculiar fondness for rain which induced us to persist in walking in the storm.  Our feeble pockets, if they could have raised an audible jingle, would have told another tale.  Our scanty allowance was dwindling rapidly away, in spite of a desperate system of economy.  We left Ulm with a florin and a half apiece—­about sixty cents—­to walk to Heidelberg, a distance of 110 miles.  It was the evening of the third day, and this was almost exhausted.  As soon therefore as the rain slackened a little, we started again, although the roads were very bad.  At Betigheim, where we passed the night, the people told us of a much nearer and more beautiful road, passing through the Zabergau, a region fumed for its fertility and pastoral beauty.  At the inn we were charged higher than usual for a bed, so that we had but thirteen kreutzers to start with in the morning.  Our fare that day was a little bread and water; we walked steadily on, but owing to the wet roads, made only thirty miles.

A more delightful region than the Zabergau I have seldom passed through.  The fields were full of rich, heavy grain, and the trees had a luxuriance of foliage that reminded me of the vale of the Jed, in Scotland.  Without a single hedge or fence, stood the long sweep of hills, covered with waving fields of grain, except where they were steep and rocky, and the vineyard terraces rose one above another.  Sometimes a fine old forest grew along the summit, like a mane waving back from the curved neck of a steed, and white villages lay coiled in the valleys between.  A line of blue mountains always closed the vista, on looking down one of these long valleys; occasionally a ruined castle with donjon tower, was seen on a mountain at the side, making the picture complete.  As we lay sometimes on the hillside and looked on one of those sweet vales, we were astonished at its Arcadian beauty.  The meadows were as smooth as a mirror, and there seemed to be scarcely a grass-blade out of place.  The streams wound through ("snaked themselves through,” is the German expression,) with a subdued ripple, as if they feared to displace a pebble, and the great ash trees which stood here and there, had lined each of their leaves as carefully with silver and turned them as gracefully to the wind, us if they were making their toilettes for the gala-day of nature.

That evening brought us into the dominions of Baden, within five hours’ walk of Heidelberg.  At the humblest inn in an humble village, we found a bed which we could barely pay for, leaving a kreutzer or two for breakfast.  Soon after starting the next morning, the distant Kaiserstuhl suddenly emerged from the mist, with the high tower on its summit, where nearly ten months before, we sat and looked at the summits of the Vosges in France, with all the excitement one feels on entering a foreign land. Now,