shown in their “Duke Ernest.”  The narrator of this news was a tailor, a neat little youth, but so thin that the stars might have shone through him as through Ossian’s misty ghosts.  Altogether, he was made up of that eccentric mixture of humor and melancholy peculiar to the German people.  This was especially expressed in the droll and affecting manner in which he sang that extraordinary popular ballad, “A beetle sat upon the hedge, summ, summ!” There is one fine thing about us Germans—­no one is so crazy but that he may find a crazier comrade who will understand him.  Only a German can appreciate that song, and in the same breath laugh and cry himself to death over it.  On this occasion I also remarked the depth to which the words of Goethe have penetrated the national life.  My lean comrade trilled occasionally as he went along—­“Joyful and sorrowful, thoughts are free!” Such a corruption of text is usual among the multitude.  He also sang a song in which “Lottie by the grave of Werther” wept.  The tailor ran over with sentimentalism in the words—­

  “Sadly by the rose-beds now I weep,
  Where the late moon found us oft alone! 
  Moaning where the silver fountains sleep,
  Once which whispered joy in every tone.”

* * * * *

The hills here became steeper, the fir-woods below were like a green sea, and white clouds above sailed along over the blue sky.  The wildness of the region was, as it were, tamed by its uniformity and the simplicity of its elements.  Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions.  Clouds, however fantastically formed they may at times appear, still have a white, or at least a subdued hue, harmoniously corresponding with the blue heaven and the green earth; so that all the colors of a landscape blend into one another like soft music, and every glance at such a natural picture tranquilizes and reassures the soul.  The late Hofmann would have painted the clouds spotted and chequered.  And, like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.  She has, after all, only a sun, trees, flowers, water, and love to work with.  Of course, if the latter be lacking in the heart of the observer, the whole will, in all probability, present but a poor appearance; the sun is then only so many miles in diameter, the trees are good for firewood, the flowers are classified according to their stamens, and the water is wet.

A little boy who was gathering brushwood in the forest for his sick uncle pointed out to me the village of Lerrbach, whose little huts with gray roofs lie scattered along for over a mile through the valley.  “There,” said he, “live idiots with goitres, and white negroes.”  By white negroes the people mean “albinos.”  The little fellow lived on terms of peculiar understanding with the trees, addressing them like old acquaintances, while they in turn seemed by their waving and rustling to return