Some of the peasants are fearfully and wonderfully attired:  the men wear high top-boots, polished from the sole to the uppermost hair’s breadth of leather; black, broad-brimmed felt hats, frequently with a peacock’s feather a yard long stuck through the band, the stem protruding forward, and the end of the feather behind; and their coats and waistcoats are adorned with long rows of large, ancestral buttons.  I am now in the Swabian district, and these buttons that form so conspicuous a part of the holiday attire are made of silver coins, and not infrequently have been handed down from generation to generation for several centuries, they being, in fact, family heirlooms.  The costumes of the Swabish peasant women are picturesque in the extreme:  their finest dresses and that wondrous head-gear of brass, silver, or gold — the Schwabische Bauernfrauenhaube (Swabish farmer-woman hat) — being, like the buttons of the men, family heirlooms.  Some of these wonderful ancestral dresses, I am told, contain no less than one hundred and fifty yards of heavy material, gathered and closely pleated in innumerable perpendicular folds, frequently over a foot thick, making the form therein incased appear ridiculously broad and squatty.  The waistbands of the dresses are up in the region of the shoulder-blades; the upper portion of the sleeves are likewise padded out to fearful proportions.

The day is most lovely, the fields are deserted, and the roads and villages are alive with holiday-making peasants.  In every village a tall pole is erected, and decorated from top to bottom with small flags and evergreen wreaths.  The little stone churches and the adjoining cemeteries are filled with worshippers chanting in solemn chorus; not so preoccupied with their devotional exercises and spiritual meditations, however, as to prevent their calling one another’s attention to me as I wheel past, craning their necks to obtain a better view, and, in one instance, an o’er-inquisitive worshipper even beckons for me to stop — this person both chanting and beckoning vigorously at the same time.

Now my road leads through forests of dark firs; and here I overtake a procession of some fifty peasants, the men and women alternately chanting in weird harmony as they trudge along the road.  The men are bareheaded, carrying their hats in hand.  Many of the women are barefooted, and the pedal extremities of others are incased in stockings of marvellous pattern; not any are wearing shoes.  All the colors of the rainbow are represented in their respective costumes, and each carries a large umbrella strapped at his back; they are trudging along at quite a brisk pace, and altogether there is something weird and fascinating about the whole scene:  the chanting and the surroundings.  The variegated costumes of the women are the only bright objects amid the gloominess of the dark green pines.  As I finally pass ahead, the unmistakable expressions of interest on the faces of the men, and the even rows of ivories displayed by the women, betray a diverted attention.