dimly outlined; sometimes they were red with the gorgeous sunsets of that summer; sometimes, when the dark thunder-clouds hung over them, of a deep neutral tint, in which all trace of their snowy covering was lost. Our nearer view was a green acclivity, on the summit of which stood a large sycamore tree, encircled with a seat, the favourite lounge of those who took a day's pleasure at Sternberg; and, beyond this, was a small but well-placed villa belonging to Prince Karl, the uncle of the reigning King of Bavaria. This was generally closed; for there are painful associations with the spot. It was the favourite residence of the wife of Prince Karl, a lady to whom he was united by a Morganatic marriage. Her death, which had occurred some years before I visited Sternberg, left her royal husband inconsolable. To her memory he erected a simple mausoleum, standing a little way from the road, amid glades and groves so rich in verdure and wild flowers, as to justify the partiality which the lamented lady had always expressed for the spot. And there her remains are interred.

Deserted as it was, we profited by open gates, and enjoyed many an hour amid the repose of Prince Karl's shrubberies. They opened into meadows, then adorned with all the gorgeous garniture of wild flowers, such as that marshy half-drained land produces in abundance. I have already spoken of the gentian; its luxuriance in the openings of the forest-land about Sternberg is something inconceivable. It is succeeded by the blue Salvia in large masses, as if some careful gardener had chosen the spot whereon it could best be reared. Campanulas enrich the careless beauties of the parterre. Orchises throw up their curious pyramids of diversified form and hue; and, as you turn into the woods, lilies of the valley would, if you please, complete your nosegay of wild flowers. And thus, sauntering along, entranced by what you tread upon, so rich is the enamelling of Nature's hand, you may stroll on by the woods to Possenhofen, without counting the time you take in that long ramble.

Here resides, in summer, another branch of that numerous and royal family, the daughters of which have been so prized as wives, so exemplary in every relation of life in the various unions which the House of Bavaria has formed with other German princes.

At Possenhofen Maximilian Duke of Bavaria, the cousin of the reigning King, has a handsome château, close upon the shores of the lake, where a large family of sons and daughters have hitherto passed their summers. But we were almost continually tempted to avail ourselves of the skill of the capital boatmen of Sternberg, and we soon became acquainted with every object upon the shore.

One night we were rowed over to Leoni. It is a straggling hamlet, upon the very brink of the lake, and just opposite to Posenhofen. A few detached houses, let for the season, and a sort of gast-haus, corresponding to our old-fashioned tea-gardens, excepting that no tea was ever made, drunk, or dreamed of there,

composed Leoni. We landed, and stood for some minutes to admire the fresco-painting on the exterior of a farmhouse, which was characterized by all the inconsistences of a Bavarian domicile. Over the front were fresco-paintings of great merit, and of sacred subjects, which, I have been told, are the performances of the elder Karlbach, now the most eminent artist of his day, in Munich. At the other extremity of the abode there is, annexed to the house, a huge cowhouse, in which the kine are kept, winter and summer; for one great drawback to the scenery in the lowlands of Bavaria is, that no cattle, nor sheep, are to be seen about the meads, or even on the common lands, as in smiling England. We sauntered along

"By the margin, willow-veiled,”

of the transparent lake, and found a pathway to the royal gardens of Berg.

An open wicket gave us entrance; for to the meanest of his subjects the demesnes of the King of Bavaria are open. There were no officious gardeners to challenge our rights as passengers, and we threaded a walk amid dense woods, over which the gloom of evening was already stealing. But Nature had lent one of her most fanciful modes of illumination for that season. It was then June; the day of St. John the Baptist was near at hand; and the fire-flies, endowed with their temporary brightness by him who was the messenger of the Messiah, were abroad upon their insect-mission of commemoration. For it is believed among the peasantry that St. John, happening one evening to walk abroad, and crossing a brook, observed one of these insects, then not endowed with the gift of brilliancy, and took it into his hand to examine it. The blessed object of his attention, as it flew away, displayed, for the first time, that starlike ray, which ever after, on St. John's eve, distinguishes its course; illuminated by the honour which it had received, year after year, century after century, the resplendent little harbinger of the Saint's holyday comes to light up woods and meads; a fit accompaniment for a midsummer's night-dream. How we used to watch them clustering in the dark hollows of the groves, then on the stems of the fragile grasses, now mounting aloft on the wavy branches of the forest-trees, now preceding our very pathway in their indescribable brightness-a brightness so peculiar, so unlike any radiance known to man, that one might almost fancy that the legend was true, and that Heaven had lent one of its smallest gleams of ethereal light to these creatures of earth, to these poor little creatures, in form resembling one of the humblest of our insects, a beetle, but brown, and small, carrying their mystical lights in both the head and the tail, as far as we could ascertain, and extinguishing them at pleasure. They flutter for a few weeks after the Baptist's day, and then their glory is extinct until the following year. Never did I see them in such myriads as in the gardens of Berg; probably from those gardens being near the lake, and also but little intruded upon by visitors.

We passed the Château de Plaisance, a mass of unsightly antiquity; tall, unadorned, commodious: but the renovating taste of King Max was even then devising improvements. At each angle, turrets were being constructed: and a garden in better style, and adapted to the cultivation of flowers-which few Bavarian gardens aspire to was even then planned. I trust it has been formed, and carried out in that sweet spot-that it flourishes in those scenes where, so often, in such varied modes of thought, I have sought a solace from vexation in the groves of Berg. We passed a bason formed of stone, in a sort of little bay, out of the lake where the young and lovely Queen Marie of Bavaria has her bath. It is approached by an arched walk of syringa, which was then in bloom, and the archway was a mass of white blossoms. At the shore, we called for a boatman, in place of whom appeared an old woman about sixty. She and her husband had long owned the principal boats at Berg; when her helpmate was engaged she took his place, and as we were then a party of ladies only, we had no scruples, but much reluctance, at allowing her to row us across.

She was a stern, hard-featured old woman, weather-beaten, and anxious looking; and her features were not softened by her coiffure. She wore the Bavarian fur cap, which was almost as worn and aged, and miserable-looking as herself. The lake was five miles across I trembled lest she should not have strength to take us safely to Sternberg. The moon had risen, and the expanse of waters rejoiced as it seemed in her friendly beams. It was long since the bells of Sternberg Church had rung the curfew. I ventured to hint to our old woman that it was late-she would therefore soon be fatigued; even if she took us safely across, how was she to return? She cast upon me a look of ineffable scorn, and answered, that it was for that reason she had undertaken to ferry us across, for she was stronger than her husband, who was gone to bed. Having condescended thus much, she relapsed into a haughty silence; but she had performed what she had undertaken admirably. We were landed safely, after a delicious hour, spent in the languid enjoyment of another person's trouble. She would have been contented with twenty-four kreutzers, or eightpencebut I gave her a florin, and had the satisfaction of seeing a smile upon her grim face. We stood some minutes on the shore to see her put off again; and soon she was to be observed, toiling away, in the midst of the moonlit waters, her boat and herself seeming but a speck. I afterwards heard that she and her husband had accumulated by their industry the sum of eighty florins. With the suspicion of old people they kept their treasure under their bed. One night their poor home was broken into-they were spared, but their money was carried off. This occurred in the dreary summer of 1848, when the worst characters in the neighbourhood were let loose upon society.

But Sternberg was now becoming fashionable, and the charms. of its lake were all annihilated by the clusters of Bavarians-chiefly bourgeoisie, who amused themselves on the shore, or sat in

Gasthaus Gardens, smoking, and chattering, or a worse sacrilege, haunted the exquisite walk amid the sources of the Seven Springs (Sieven Mellen) which flow through a leafy vale in Prince Karl's pleasure-grounds.

Here, one morning, as I sat reading, I made acquaintance with two ladies from the north of Germany, who were making an annual journey to various baths, having, for a time, taken up their residence at Bambourg. As they were not inapt specimens of a class of vieilles filles, which we know little of in England, I was amused in speculating upon their history. One of them had been dame d'honneur to a German princess, who had died, and left her attendant nothing but the empty honour of talking of "ma princesse," and some little stipend upon which these good ladies ate and drauk―for to say lived is too generous a term-dressed, and danced, and travelled, and were genteel.

Their travels were often performed on foot. They were immense walkers, formidable talkers, very civil, very loud, and very good-natured. I think I see them now, sitting and knitting under the plane-tree where I then left them, chatting to the next comer about "ma princesse," &c., protected by the dead bones, as it were, of that good lady-for the dame d'honneur takes all the dignity of a married woman, without the trouble of having a husband-sitting down to dinner in the gardens of a gasthaus, and rowing on the lake in the evening, in large hats, whilst merry voices, not the clearer for sundry potations of Bavarian beer, arose in chorus around them.

Stimulated by the peripatetic example of these ladies, whose ancestry and position put mine to the blush, to say nothing of the sainted memory of "ma princesse," we set out to walk to Wolfratshausen, being assured that we were doing nothing vulgar in making use of our feet, instead of going a great round by the road. We crossed the lake, therefore, and taking for our guide an aged man from Berg, who, in addition to his alacrity in wheeling our luggage in a wheelbarrow all the way, proved intelligent, and had been a soldier in Napoleon's time. Traversing an unfrequented morass, studded over with mounds of turf, where, our guide told us, the French had been encamped under Moreau, we reached Wolfratshausen, a place not large enough to be esteemed a town, but too large to be termed a village, and therefore styled by Bavarians a "markt." It consists of a long, irregular street of curious old houses, with impending roofs. It is situated in the rich plain of the Iserthal, bounded on the south by the same range of mountains that we saw at Sternberg, and almost encircled by two winding rivers, the Loisach and the Iser. The varied foliage about the rising grounds, on steppes above, would have reminded me of Derbyshire, had not the scenery round this flourishing place been on a far bolder scale than any in England. And here we rested some days. Our host was named "Gracchi," of Italian origin; his unclassical trade was the sale of those handsome silvermounted Bavarian jugs, made to contain beer, but adapted, from

their beauty, in some instances, to quaff nectar from-or, at any rate, to hold generous wine. The "Gracchi" were civil, clever, prosperous; and we saw with regret our gallant voiturier from Munich drive up to our door one fine evening, to take us away from their peaceful home.

One word about travelling in Bavaria. It is exquisitely cheap -forgive the word. Our carriage, an open landau, held four, with a moderate supply of luggage; and for an expense of ten florins a day, we journeyed almost luxuriously through the magnificent scenery of the Tyrol. Our party, I ought before to have mentioned, was now augmented by a young Cantab., devoted to sketching-yet in the midst of his enthusiasm rarely forgetful of his dinner-and by a still younger Oxonian, addicted to newlyfledged attempts at rowing, in the course of which he had nearly consigned a whole family to join other "treasures of the deep," in the depth of the lake of Sternberg; and this, I must say, for the time, made me somewhat shy of lakes, and not sorry that at Wolfratshausen, the Iser "flowing rapidly," and the Loisach, being very shallow, the science of navigation was not practicable on a small scale.

We travelled, however, cheerfully along the high road, which, after leaving Wolfratshausen, passes through Benedict-cavern; and thereby, the day after we had left Wolfratshausen, reached a small lake, which laves the sides of those precipices called the Benedictwand; this was the Kochelsee; one of the sweetest spots that we had then seen in Bavaria: secluded and tranquil, yet bearing traces of former conventual importance, which had caused that part of the country to be styled the Priests' corner; and boasting a sort of Schloss from a mound, where we looked down into the calm water; in the depth of shadow, under the high cliffs to the east, a little skiff, spreading its white sail, formed the only moving object.

Though Kochelsee is one day's journey from Munich, I counsel every one not to do as we did-not to sleep, or rather to attempt to sleep at it, but to stop at Wolfratshausen, and merely to rest an hour or two at Kochelsee. Oh, the horrors of that low-browed and low-bred inn, of the dirty floors, dirty table-cloths, dirty persons, that it presents-to say nothing of the consequent state of temper which it betrays one into. We rose at five: and whilst the dew still hung on every leaf of the forest through which we passed, and the rosy morning cast her glow over the glassy lake and dark rocky point-the skiff had disappeared-we ascended the steep pass of the Kesselberg, over which poor Inglis has described his solitary and pedestrian excursion. I know not why I should call him poor Inglis, for with such a rare appreciation of nature's delights, with so stored a mind, to say nothing of legs so capable to walk, he ought not to be termed poor. But he is deadhis fate was untimely-his circumstances were, possibly, not brilliant. There is something mournful in tracing the steps of one whose path was solitary, and amid scenes which certainly require compan