contains eleven million pins, we travel five hundred miles on purpose to
see it!

From Heidelberg we went to Darmstadt. We spent half-an-hour at
Darmstadt. Why we ever thought of stopping longer there, I do not know.
It is a pleasant enough town to live in, I should say; but utterly
uninteresting to the stranger. After one walk round it, we made
inquiries as to the next train out of it, and being informed that one was
then on the point of starting, we tumbled into it and went to Bonn.

From Bonn (whence we made one or two Rhine excursions, and where we
ascended twenty-eight "blessed steps" on our knees--the chapel people
called them "blessed steps;" _we_ didn't, after the first fourteen) we
returned to Cologne. From Cologne we went to Brussels; from Brussels to
Ghent (where we saw more famous pictures, and heard the mighty "Roland"
ring "o'er lagoon and lake of sand"). From Ghent we went to Bruges
(where I had the satisfaction of throwing a stone at the statue of Simon
Stevin, who added to the miseries of my school-days, by inventing
decimals), and from Bruges we came on here.

Finding out and arranging our trains has been a fearful work. I have
left the whole business with B., and he has lost two stone over it. I
used to think at one time that my own dear native Bradshaw was a
sufficiently hard nut for the human intellect to crack; or, to transpose
the simile, that Bradshaw was sufficient to crack an ordinary human nut.
But dear old Bradshaw is an axiom in Euclid for stone-wall obviousness,
compared with a through Continental time-table. Every morning B. has sat
down with the book before him, and, grasping his head between his hands,
has tried to understand it without going mad.

"Here we are," he has said. "This is the train that will do for us.
Leaves Munich at 1.45; gets to Heidelberg at 4--just in time for a cup of
tea."

"Gets to Heidelberg at 4?" I exclaim. "Does the whole distance in two
and a quarter hours? Why, we were all night coming down!"

"Well, there you are," he says, pointing to the time-table. "Munich,
depart 1.45; Heidelberg, arrive 4."

"Yes," I say, looking over his shoulder; "but don't you see the 4 is in
thick type? That means 4 in the morning."

"Oh, ah, yes," he replies. "I never noticed that. Yes, of course. No!
it can't be that either. Why, that would make the journey fourteen
hours. It can't take fourteen hours. No, of course not. That's not
meant for thick type,