ore especially an indispensable
portion of the working dress of the labouring miner.

From Leipsic, the mines are distant about seventy English miles. We--who
are a happy party of foot-wanderers bound for Vienna--spend three
careless days upon the road. Look at this glorious old castle of
Altenburg, gravely nodding from its towering rock upon the quaint town
below. It is the first station we come to, and is the capital of the
ancient dukedom of Saxon-Altenburg. Look at the people about us! Does
it not strike you as original, that what is here called modest attire,
would elsewhere be condemned as immoral and ridiculous? Each of the
males, indeed, presents an old German portrait, with short plaited and
wadded jacket, trunk breeches, and low hat, with a rolled brim. But the
women! With petticoats no deeper than a Highlandman's kilt, and their
legs thus guiltless of shoes or stockings, the bust and neck are
hideously covered by a wooden breastplate, which, springing from the
waist, rises at an angle of forty-five degrees as high as the chin; and
on the edge of it is fastened a handkerchief, tied tightly round the
neck. A greater disfigurement of the female form could scarcely have
been devised. Yet, to these good people, it is doubtless beauty and
propriety itself; for it is old, and national.

Through pretty woods and cultivated lands; beside rugged, roadside dells,
we trudge along. We halt in quiet villages, snug and neat even in their
poverty; or wend our way, in the midst of sunshine, through endless
vistas of fruit-laden woods, the public road being one rich orchard of
red-dotted cherry-trees: purchasable for a mere fraction, but not to be
feloniously abstracted. Through Altenburg, Zwickau, Oederon, and
Chemnitz; up steep hill paths, and by the side of unpronounceable
villages, until, on the morning of the fourth day, we straggle into
Freiberg.

Freiberg is the walled capital of the Saxon ore mountains, the
Erzgebirge; the centre of the Saxon mining administration. One of its
most spacious buildings is the Mining Academy, which dates from 1767.
Here are rich collections of the wonderful produce of these mountains;
models of mining machines, of philosophical and chemical apparatus; class
and lecture rooms, and books out of number. Here Werner, the father of
geology, and Humboldt, the systematiser of physical geography, were
pupils. The former has bequeathed an extensive museum of mineralogy to
the Acad