wist it in waving folds round their legs, wrap themselves
for a moment in its whirling maze, and then lightly skip away from it,
dry and smiling.

But that is not the manner in which the dripping, untaught Briton
attempts to wipe himself upon a sheet. The method he adopts is, to
clutch the sheet with both hands, lean up against the wall, and rub
himself with it. In trying to get the thing round to the back of him, he
drops half of it into the water, and from that moment the bathroom is not
big enough to enable him to get away for an instant from that wet half.
When he is wiping the front of himself with the dry half, the wet half
climbs round behind, and, in a spirit of offensive familiarity, slaps him
on the back. While he is stooping down rubbing his feet, it throws
itself with delirious joy around his head, and he is black in the face
before he can struggle away from its embrace. When he is least expecting
anything of the kind, it flies round and gives him a playful flick upon
some particularly tender part of his body that sends him springing with a
yell ten feet up into the air. The great delight of the sheet, as a
whole, is to trip him up whenever he attempts to move, so as to hear what
he says when he sits down suddenly on the stone floor; and if it can
throw him into the bath again just as he has finished wiping himself, it
feels that life is worth living after all.

We spent two days at Heidelberg, climbing the wooded mountains that
surround that pleasant little town, and that afford, from their
restaurant or ruin-crowned summits, enchanting, far-stretching views,
through which, with many a turn and twist, the distant Rhine and nearer
Neckar wind; or strolling among the crumbling walls and arches of the
grand, history-logged wreck that was once the noblest castle in all
Germany.

We stood in awed admiration before the "Great Tun," which is the chief
object of interest in Heidelberg. What there is of interest in the sight
of a big beer-barrel it is difficult, in one's calmer moments, to
understand; but the guide book says that it is a thing to be seen, and so
all we tourists go and stand in a row and gape at it. We are a
sheep-headed lot. If, by a printer's error, no mention were made in the
guide book of the Colosseum, we should spend a month in Rome, and not
think it worth going across the road to look at. If the guide book says
we must by no means omit to pay a visit to some famous pincushion that