I purchase a rude tool that might have been fashioned on the anvil of a village blacksmith.  From Saverne my road leads over another divide and down into the glorious valley of the Rhine, for a short distance through a narrow defile that reminds me somewhat of a canon in the Sierra Nevada foot-hills; but a fine, broad road, spread with a coating of surface-mud only by this morning’s rain, prevents the comparison from assuming definite shape for a cycler.  Extensive and beautifully terraced vineyards mark the eastern exit.  The road-beds of this country are hard enough for anything; but a certain proportion of clay in their composition makes a slippery coating in rainy weather.  I enter the village of Marienheim and observe the first stork’s nest, built on top of a chimney, that I have yet seen in Europe, though I saw plenty of them afterward.  The parent stork is perched solemnly over her youthful brood, which one would naturally think would get smoke-dried.  A short distance from Marlenheim I descry in the hazy distance the famous spire of Strasburg cathedral looming conspicuously above everything else in all the broad valley; and at 1.30 P.M.  I wheel through the massive arched gateway forming part of the city’s fortifications, and down the broad but roughly paved streets, the most mud-be-spattered object in all Strasburg.  The fortifications surrounding the city are evidently intended strictly for business, and not merely for outward display.  The railway station is one of the finest in Europe, and among other conspicuous improvements one notices steam tram-cars.  While trundling through the city I am imperatively ordered off the sidewalk by the policeman; and when stopping to inquire of a respectable-looking Strasburger for the Appeuweir road, up steps an individual with one eye and a cast off military cap three sizes too small.  After querying, " Appenweir.  Englander?” he wheels “about face” with military precision doubtless thus impelled by the magic influence of his headgear — and beckons me to follow.  Not knowing what better course to pursue I obey, and after threading the mazes of a dozen streets, composed of buildings ranging in architecture from the much gabled and not unpicturesque structures of mediaeval times to the modern brown-stone front, he pilots me outside the fortifications again, points up the Appenweir road, and after the never neglected formality of touching his cap and extending his palm, returns city-ward.

Crossing the Rhine over a pontoon bridge, I ride along level and, happily, rather less muddy roads, through pleasant suburban villages, near one of which I meet a company of soldiers in undress uniform, strung out carelessly along the road, as though returning from a tramp into the country.  As I approach them, pedalling laboriously against a stiff head wind, both myself and the bicycle fairly yellow with clay, both officers and soldiers begin to laugh in a good-natured, bantering sort of manner, and a round dozen of them