Of course, when one begins to find fault with foreign people’s ways, he is very likely to get a reminder to look nearer home, before he gets far with it.  I open my note-book to see if I can find some more information of a valuable nature about Baden-Baden, and the first thing I fall upon is this: 

“Baden-Baden (no date).  Lot of vociferous Americans at breakfast this morning.  Talking at everybody, while pretending to talk among themselves.  On their first travels, manifestly.  Showing off.  The usual signs—­airy, easy-going references to grand distances and foreign places.  ’Well good-by, old fellow —­if I don’t run across you in Italy, you hunt me up in London before you sail.’”

The next item which I find in my note-book is this one: 

“The fact that a band of 6,000 Indians are now murdering our frontiersmen at their impudent leisure, and that we are only able to send 1,200 soldiers against them, is utilized here to discourage emigration to America.  The common people think the Indians are in New Jersey.”

This is a new and peculiar argument against keeping our army down to a ridiculous figure in the matter of numbers.  It is rather a striking one, too.  I have not distorted the truth in saying that the facts in the above item, about the army and the Indians, are made use of to discourage emigration to America.  That the common people should be rather foggy in their geography, and foggy as to the location of the Indians, is a matter for amusement, maybe, but not of surprise.

There is an interesting old cemetery in Baden-Baden, and we spent several pleasant hours in wandering through it and spelling out the inscriptions on the aged tombstones.  Apparently after a man has laid there a century or two, and has had a good many people buried on top of him, it is considered that his tombstone is not needed by him any longer.  I judge so from the fact that hundreds of old gravestones have been removed from the graves and placed against the inner walls of the cemetery.  What artists they had in the old times!  They chiseled angels and cherubs and devils and skeletons on the tombstones in the most lavish and generous way—­as to supply—­but curiously grotesque and outlandish as to form.  It is not always easy to tell which of the figures belong among the blest and which of them among the opposite party.  But there was an inscription, in French, on one of those old stones, which was quaint and pretty, and was plainly not the work of any other than a poet.  It was to this effect: 

    Here Reposes in God, Caroline de Clery, a Religieuse
    of St. Denis aged 83 years—­and blind.  The light
    was restored to her in Baden the 5th of January, 1839

We made several excursions on foot to the neighboring villages, over winding and beautiful roads and through enchanting woodland scenery.  The woods and roads were similar to those at Heidelberg, but not so bewitching.  I suppose that roads and woods which are up to the Heidelberg mark are rare in the world.