recollect that anything worthy of mention befel till we reached Kamnitz,—an old town, and the centre of a circle,—through which it behoved us to pass, in order to gain first Stein Jena, and ultimately Hayde. The town itself lies in a hollow, and is begirt near at hand by well-wooded hills; but in itself it offers few attractions to the stranger. Narrow and deserted streets, with shops mean and slenderly stocked, tell a tale of stagnant commerce; indeed, I may observe, once for all, of the country towns in Bohemia, that it is not among them that the traveller will find food for reflection, or sources of gratification. Far removed from the sea, with which their single communication is by the Elbe, the Bohemians have slender inducement to apply their energies to trade, which is, in consequence, not perhaps dead,—for there are manufactures of various kinds in the kingdom, and more than one iron foundry, but exceedingly sickly and torpid.

Kamnitz, like other chief towns of circles, has its schloss,—the property of the emperor,—in which the officials and the subordinates at once reside and administer justice. It can boast, likewise, of a large church and a prison; but as there was nothing in the exterior of these buildings which at all excited our admiration, we did not delay to examine them. With respect, again, to other matters, I am aware of only one custom in the place, of which it is worth while to take notice. Kamnitz, it appears, is very much of an agricultural town; that is to say, many owners of small estates dwell there, and many cattle are kept. During the winter months, both here and elsewhere, the cattle never breathe the air of heaven; but are kept mewed up in their stalls, and fed on hay, and other dry fodder. When the hay crop has been gathered in, and the fields are ready for them, they are sent abroad to graze, but always under the guidance of keepers, who, at least in Kamnitz, are strictly professional persons. Their mode of proceeding is this. At early dawn, there is a flourish of cow-horns in the streets,—a signal for opening the stable-door, and leading forth the cattle to pasture. The animals are then collected in the market-place, and handed over to the charge of their appointed keepers, who, two or three in number, drive the herd abroad, and are responsible that they commit no trespass on the growing corn. At night, a similar process takes place. The cattle are led back by the keepers to the market-place: horns are again sounded; upon which each bouerman either comes in person, or sends his deputy to receive the beasts, and so conducts them to their stalls for milking.

Kamnitz has at one period been a fortified town, though probably that period is very remote,—for against modern artillery a place so situated could not hold out a single day. Its gateways, and some fragments of the old wall, remain,—objects at all times too interesting to be wantonly removed. Beneath a couple of these venerable arches we passed,—first on entering, then on leaving the town,—after which we found ourselves traversing a long and irregular hamlet, which in the form of a suburb lines one side of the road, and so faces a pretty little stream that skirts the other. Crossing the rivulet by a bridge with two arches, we began to climb the hill, on the brow of which Stein Jena is situated, and from which our friend, the young priest of Auffenberg, had given us to understand, that we should obtain one of the most magnificent views in this part of Bohemia. Long and toilsome was this ascent; for though the main road was still beneath our feet, so perfectly had its fabricators set the rules of their art at defiance, that it ran sheer and abrupt, with scarce a trifling deflection, from the base to the summit. The sun, also, beat upon us with a power which we found it extremely uncomfortable to sustain, and our thirst was excessive. And here it may, perhaps, be worth while for the benefit of other pedestrians, to remark, that we began our march, in reference to the victualling department, on an utterly erroneous principle. Breakfasting at half past five or six o'clock in the morning, we made up our minds not to eat a solid meal again till our day's work should be accomplished; in other words, to content ourselves at noon with some slight refreshment, such as a morsel of bread, or a sandwich and a little weak brandy and water, swallowed in the shade of some grove, and to sup heartily when we should come in to our night's quarters, at six or seven o'clock in the evening. The experience of this day sufficed to convince me that in arranging this plan I had not been so successful as the Duke of Wellington used to be with his commissariat. Our bread had become hard and mouldy. Our brandy was as hot as fire, and we could not find a spring of water sufficiently sheltered to cool it. For consistency-sake, however, we twisted down a few mouthfuls, but we could not manage more; and it was unanimously voted, that thenceforth an hour's halt at mid-day in some house of call, would be an arrangement alike conducive to the refreshment of our limbs, and the well-being of our stomachs.

Having reposed about half an hour by the margin of a weedy pond, from which a loud if not an harmonious concert of bull-frogs unceasingly issued, we buckled on our knapsacks once more, and, by a desperate effort, reached Stein Jena about three o'clock in the afternoon. It seldom happens that a natural scene, of which you have been led to form high expectations, does not disappoint you; yet I am bound in justice to acknowledge that in the account which he gave of the view from this point, the interesting curate of Auffenberg used the language of moderation. Elevated to a height of perhaps two thousand feet, we beheld across the valley beneath us, hill above hill arise,—all of them pyramidal, shaggy with forests of pine, beech, and oak, and interlaced one with another, so as to form the wildest yet most graceful combinations. The scene, too, was in one striking respect different from any on which we had yet gazed; namely, that cultivation was almost entirely kept out of view, because our position was such as to throw the depths of the plain behind the screen of their overhanging mountains. It was, indeed, only when we looked to the right, where on a level with ourselves fields of rye were waving, that the fact of our not having wandered into some uncleared and uninhabited region was demonstrated.

Stein Jena itself is a large, straggling, but remarkably neat village, of which the street is on both sides shaded by rows of trees, and where the houses can in many instances boast of being planted within the range of well-kept and tasteful gardens. It was on the top of the common beyond the village, however, that we paused to obtain our view, and to make one of those rude sketches which in such situations the most unpractised hand is induced to attempt; after which we again pushed forward. Ten minutes' walk carried us over the ridge, and then what a spectacle burst upon us! A huge plain was at our feet, green with the most abundant crops of grass and corn, and here and there broken in upon by a tall conical hill, which rose like a thing of art, and stood alone in the level. Surrounding the plain on all sides, were ranges of mountains, those near at hand resembling in their general character the graceful hills upon which we had just turned our backs,—those in the distance more precipitous and rugged, and above all, white along their summits with snow. There needed, in short, but some sheet of water,—a lake or a river winding through the valley, to complete such a picture as Stanfield would love to copy, and the humbler but not less enthusiastic worshipper of nature, gaze upon for hours unwearied. For not only was there wood and pasturage, hill and dale, rock and forest, in abundance,—but the haunts of man, without which a cultivated scene is always incomplete, rose there in abundance. There lay Hayde,—a compact and apparently well-built town; about three miles to the right of it, and nestling back its own cliffs, was Burgstein; while farther