-happy name! for here, after four
nights of straw-litter, we slept in beds.

Seated in the travellers' room was a group which at once arrested our
attention. A swarthy man, with scattered, raven locks, and a handsome
countenance, was filling a glass with red wine from a round-bellied
flask. His companion, a black, shaggy-bearded fellow, ragged and filthy,
sat opposite to him; while close by the wall, squatted on the ground, was
a squalid, olive-skinned woman, with black, matted hair, who was vainly
endeavouring to still the cries of a child, swaddled at her back. The
men wore slouched Spanish hats, and wide cloaks, which, partly thrown
aside, revealed the rags and dirt beneath. Bohemian gipseys--real
Bohemians were they--filchers and beggars, whose ample cloaks were
intended as much for a convenient means of concealing stolen property, as
articles of dress. Our military Lubecker thought they would be very
useful as a foraging party. They sat laughing and sipping their wine,
now and then handing a glass of the liquor, in an ungracious way, to the
woman squatted on the ground; and who received it with a real or assumed
humility which was, perhaps, the most curious part of the picture. Here
three of our companions, Alcibiade, the Viennese silversmith, and one of
the Lubeckers, were unable to proceed further on foot, and took places in
the "fast coach;" while "Hannibal" and myself tramped the remaining
twenty miles which lay between us and Brunn, the capital of Moravia.

It was again Sunday, our usual rest day, and I stood in the open square
before the huge church at Brunn, watching the motley, shifting, and
clamorous crowd which had converted its very steps into a market-place.
There was something strikingly Eastern in the character of the women's
attire: intensely gaudy and highly contrasted; and their head-dresses the
very next thing to a turban with double-frilled ends. There was also
something peculiarly Catholic in the nature of the articles exposed for
sale; beads, crosses, coloured pictures of saints, and tiny images of
suffering Saviours; but more especially in the manner in which the Sunday
had been turned into a market-day. Above all, and through all, the
impressive tones of the solemn chant, mingled with bursts of inspiring
music, pealed out of the open doorway, round which clustered the kneeling
devotees.

Our lame companions started on the following day by rail for the Austrian
capital, while we too