face tingling and glowing with glorious Rauenthaler wine? Has no one of all our up and down Rhinesteaming countrymen ever met him, disporting himself, like a convivial porpoise, at his iron-grey brotherin-law's in the Rhine-gau, not a hundred stunden from the entrance to the beautiful and almost unknown Wisperthal? or standing in the quaint old court-yard of his own hostelrie,' all mighty oaken beams, and wine tuns, and narrow windows, like the illustrations of Der Lied von der Glocke?

How cool, and yet how rosy he looks, under his press of white canvas jacket, clean shirt, and what brother Jonathan calls 'pants'!easy and cool, curling out gracefully about the bows, like an eighty-four gun ship under full sail. He needed no Brahminical straw girt round his portly person to tell him when he had enough!-a three-inch rope would not have prevented his having 'yet another bottle!'

I fell in with the worthy Herr in this wise-Stopping at Sitz-Bad one summer, and becoming slightly bored there, I struck up an acquaintance with the government schoolmaster, or 'sprach-lehrer-speechteacher,' as he delighted to be called a man of feeble body, and not much stronger mind, who in his mellow moments (which were not rare) was always lamenting his hard fate, as exemplified in his having married a Bauer mädchen' (who, by the bye, was a good woman, and kept him in most excellent order; so excellent, in fact, that his very soul was not his own) instead of waiting for some beautiful Englanderinn or rich Russian princess, for either of whom he had ready prepared an ear-splitting and toothfracturing German ode. This ode he read to me one evening after a light supper of cold boiled trout, à l'huile, and of course, as in duty bound, I admired it exceedingly, and compared it to every effort of the Teutonic lyre, from

Anna Mariechen wo gehest du hin! up to

Bekrantz mit Laub!

My admiration having warmed his heart, he introduced me to Herr Tröster, his great patron, as

an

Echter Englander, in whom there was no guile whatever, and gave me such a high character to that Teutonic Falstaff, that I got leave to fish in a little stream that trickled through the meadows close by, on the condition, however, of paying for the trout I bagged: an agree ment which was carried out satisfactorily to both parties, by sending the haus-mädchen' up to the great hotel every evening with the contents of my creel; and the happy return' was duly handed over to my stout friend, to his unmitigated satisfaction.

Indeed, so delighted was he with the bright silver 'gulden' I managed to extract from his stream-in which he himself was wont to popjoy in a very aboriginal manner-that one fine day he invited me to join in a great shooting expedition he had organized, over a manor on which he had the right of sporting, and (as I found out afterwards) over certain other manors on which he had not that same; in short, to take my pastime with others, as far as we could without being stopped. As it fell out, we were not stopped, which made me suspect that sundry semi-military foresters had received a quiet hint that good wine might be had literally for a song, not a hundred miles from my worthy entertainer's wirthschaft.

Hoping and expecting not so much sport as fun and novelty, I borrowed a gun-a regular popgun, good enough at twenty-five yards in a gunmaker's yard, but of very little use in the field; locks infamous, of course; laid in a mighty stock of powder and shot, the grains of one nearly as large as those of the other, and retired for the night,' as the novels say.

Some time before daylight I was aroused by the clatter of a mitraille of gravel against the windows, delivered in unsparing handsfull by Herr Tröster, who I firmly believed in my drowsy wrath to have at least two near and dear relations in the plumbing and glazing line,' so anxious he appeared to smash the glass; and,

Up I rose, and donn'd my clothes, Did up the chamber door, and went out into the morning.

How often in one's lifetime does one see a really fine morning? Horace Walpole declares that he should not know seven o'clock in the morning if he were to see it, and I really am not surprised. No two mornings are alike. If you get a bright brassy fine early morning, you are bitten to death by the gnats and grey flies till eight or nine o'clock, and then drenched to the skin for the rest of the day; and if you are going to have anything like fine weather, everything is dank and steaming, chilly and clammy, with the trees and bushes looking as cheerful as a posse of Irish peelers who have been still-hunting all night in a

moss.

An utterly dank steamy morning was it when I appeared before Herr Tröster, whose rosy close-shaven face gleaming through the mist would have done very good duty for a London November sun. Civilities (and yawns) exchanged, we proceeded on our way.

It was very melancholy all outside. Sluggish wreaths of vapour filled up the valley below, marking the twistings and turnings of the little stream, and hanging lazily on the oak-woods. All was silent and sleeping as we passed through the village, except the 'too-whoo' of a dissipated owl on the hill above us, and the chirping of the crickets in the baker's shop. No! decidedly

no!

Up in the morning's no for me, Up in the morning early. That is to say, not in wooded and comparatively low-lying countries, or by river sides. Neither beasts, fishes, nor birds (barring ducks), are worth looking after in the very early morning in such situations.

Up amongst real mountains, or by the cliff-girt sea, though even there not always, it is quite another thing. Depend upon it, that for one really beautiful dawn,' we have a dozen beautiful eves.

So through the mist and mire we plodded on, drearily enough, past the great grey Gast-haus at this early hour fast asleep-we might almost have heard the kellners snoring past the plashing Brunnen, so gay and sparkling in the afternoon, surrounded by seedy-looking old ladies, supposed to be princesses,

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and ancient warriors, riband-bedecked, with white hair and jet black moustachios-now so steamy and sloppy, like the waste-pipe of a common-place factory engine-past the broken-down wall of the old schloss, through the dripping wet belt of fir-trees, invariable companions of three Cockney-German residentzes. out of every four-then along the hollow slaty road, gradually ascending to the high table-land.

We were neither of us very cheerful or talkative in the misty morning, in spite of the grand sport which (we hoped) was in store for us. The truth is, gentle reader, if the truth must be told, which, by the bye, I rather doubt, that the worthy Herr and myself had, in Meltonian phrase, 'Come to grief' the previous afternoon. He-the Herr Wirthhad asked me down to his mighty cellar, to try all the varieties of the renowned Rauenthaler, and had carried with him a long glass tube, a candle, and a wine-glass into that temple of Bacchus. Arrived there, he had cunningly extracted the bungs from the casks, and introducing the tube into the aperture, brought up by craftily sustaining the thirty-five miles of atmosphere on his fore-finger nail, about a glassful of golden nectar. How often he repeated this feat I know not now, though possibly I did at the time, but somehow or another the tube slipped into the deepest cask, and I broke the wine-glass, and Herr Wirth tumbled over the candle, and somebody stole the cellar-steps-at least, we could not find them in the dark; and I think that at last we both fell asleep, and slept, as far as I can remember, very peaceably, till a door opened just over our heads, and Frau Wirthin appeared in the doorway, with the level rays of the setting sun streaming in on one side of her portly person, and demanded

Heinrich in Gottes Namen was der Henker machen sie so lang im Keller?'

As vulgar little boys say, 'we caught it," and possibly we deserved to catch it; but ever since that memorable afternoon I have felt perfectly convinced that the fungi developed and nourished by the alcoholic exhalations of numerous wine

T