A few nights ago there was a wedding of peasants across the river.  In order to celebrate it particularly, the guests went to the house where it was given, by torchlight.  The night was quite dark, and the bright red torches glowed on the surface of the Neckar, as the two couriers galloped along the banks to the bridegroom’s house.  Here, after much shouting and confusion, the procession was arranged, the two riders started back again with their torches, and the wagons containing the guests followed after with their flickering lights glancing on the water, till they disappeared around the foot of the mountain.  The choosing of Conscripts also took place lately.  The law requires one person out of every hundred to become a soldier, and this, in the city of Heidelberg, amounts to nearly 150.  It was a sad spectacle.  The young men, or rather boys, who were chosen, went about the city with cockades fastened on their hats, shouting and singing, many of them quite intoxicated.  I could not help pitying them because of the dismal, mechanical life they are doomed to follow.  Many were rough, ignorant peasants, to whom nearly any kind of life would be agreeable; but there were some whose countenances spoke otherwise, and I thought involuntarily, that their drunken gaiety was only affected to conceal their real feelings with regard to the lot which had fallen upon them.

We are gradually becoming accustomed to the German style of living, which is very different from our own.  Their cookery is new to us, but is, nevertheless, good.  We have every day a different kind of soup, so I have supposed they keep a regular list of three hundred and sixty-five, one for every day in the year!  Then we have potatoes “done up” in oil and vinegar, veal flavored with orange peel, barley pudding, and all sorts of pancakes, boiled artichokes, and always rye bread, in loaves a yard long!  Nevertheless, we thrive on such diet, and I have rarely enjoyed more sound and refreshing sleep than in their narrow and coffin-like beds, uncomfortable as they seem.  Many of the German customs are amusing.  We never see oxen working here, but always cows, sometimes a single one in a cart, and sometimes two fastened together by a yoke across their horns.  The women labor constantly in the fields; from our window we can hear the nut-brown maidens singing their cheerful songs among the vineyards on the mountain side.  Their costume, too, is odd enough.  Below the light-fitting vest they wear such a number of short skirts, one above another, that it reminds one of an animated hogshead, with a head and shoulders starting out from the top.  I have heard it gravely asserted that the wealth of a German damsel may be known by counting the number of her “kirtles.”  An acquaintance of mine remarked, that it would be an excellent costume for falling down a precipice!