murderer of his mother and six brothers and sisters” was there portrayed in a neat suit of black, with a hatchet in his hand and a very irresolute expression of countenance, while the various members of his family, seen through the open bedroom doors, awaited their fate in peaceful slumber.  The booths, with toys, gingerbread, sausages, cheese and light literature tastefully intermingled, went on and on like the restaurants that lined each side of the long avenue.  Around primitive tables family parties clinked foaming glasses and hailed with demonstrative hospitality any stray cousin who chanced that way.  In one of the last of these improvised Trinkhallen we came upon a young man and maiden who had the place quite to themselves.  Her brown parasol kept the sun off them both, and it was of no sort of consequence that they had nothing more interesting than the back of a shed to look at.  Future prospects were the only ones they cared for:  the present had no need of anything but a faint beeriness, conducive to day-dreaming.

As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must see the new statue.  Accordingly, we drive through the town and halt before it in the square.  It is very fine, glowing like gold from the mint.  The king sits his charger well, and gazes majestically at nothing in particular:  still, one must be a little critical, and we imagine the horse’s tail is not quite right.  But then is not the whisk of a tail in bronze almost impossible to conceive of?  If the artist suffers no severer censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy man.  The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, “From his grateful people.”  High and low have contributed to it, and gladly.  “That was a man!” says our driver.  He was a soldier under him, and knows.  And in fact the old king seems to have been always doing something for the country, so that the gratitude is not without a cause.  The inhabitants of Cannstatt have special reason to remember him kindly:  he himself was grateful to them and showed it.  In the troublous times of 1848 he was sadly in need of money:  Ludwigsburg (another satellite of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came up to the mark handsomely.  The royal creditor never forgot that.  He instituted the Volksfest as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the dead.  So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened between us it flows without intermission.  His head is over his shoulder all the way as we roll back to the city under the beautiful trees of the palace grounds.  “If the old king had been living, Wuertemberg would never have joined in the last war:  he would have told Prussia to fight it out by herself.”  Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck.  He evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the generally accepted sense of that expression.  He states as a fact that there are limits,