antique silver buttons on his coat, and paid him twice its weight in silver money for the big silver buckle at his belt.  We were stopped at the frontier, and accommodatingly rose while the custom-officers politely looked under the carriage-seats.  The wine we had just drunk was not taxable, while that we were about to drink was:  so we presented our remaining bottles to the officers to save them the trouble of making change.  Up to that time we had turned our horses to the right:  once over the Austrian line, custom demanded we should turn to the left, a change to which the Kutscher readily accommodated himself.  One is kept geographically informed in that region by this difference in manners on the high-road in Austria and Bavaria.

We argued a little about the fittingness of women working in the fields.  Cecilia thought it preferable to washing dishes, and one of us, who believes herself not born to sew, maintained that to rake hay was more agreeable than sitting at sewing-machines or making shirts at twenty cents apiece after the manner of New-York workwomen.  But once indignation and excitement took possession of us all as we caught sight of a bare-footed, slight young girl toiling up a ladder and carrying mortar along a scaffold to men laying bricks on the second story of a new building.  The girl had a complexion like a rose-leaf, her uncovered hair gleamed like gold in the sunshine, her head was exquisitely set on her shoulders.  The curate sighed deeply, Samayana uttered a strong word in Hindoostanee, and there was a feminine cry of “Shameful!” when the girl, putting down her load, folded her white arms, whose sinew and muscle an athlete might have envied, and, with teeth and smile as faultless as our Elise’s, threw us down a “Gruss Gott!” If there ever beamed content and happiness from human face we saw it in that of this peasant beauty, who had no conception of our commiseration.  We gave her back a “God greet thee!” “All the same,” said Cecilia indignantly, “women should not carry mortar.”  We had noticed that Cecilia’s indignation on account of the workingwoman of Germany was extreme if the woman was pretty.

We came at last to the mouth of the mine, from which issued a narrow railway for the transportation of the salt-ore, and above, zigzag on the mountain-side, ran the conduit carrying the salt, still in liquid form, to the boiling-house.  A waterfall four hundred feet high furnished power for the great pump.  About the entrance to the mine clustered a number of buildings.  Many carriages were already there, for it was the height of the tourists’ season, and this was the show-mine of the Salzkammergut.  Some military officers were standing about, a dozen or more natives lounged on the piazzas, and nearly every carriage contained one or more occupants, evidently waiting for travelling-companions then in the mine.  There was the fat woman who couldn’t think of such an exploration, the nervous woman who hated dark