, and limits your diet so strictly. At one
of the well-known places where people who eat too much all the year
round go to reduce their figures, there is in the chief hotels a table
known as the _Corpulententisch_, and a man who sits there is not
allowed an ounce of bread beyond what his physician has prescribed.

But the German _Luxusbad_, the fashionable watering-place where the
guests are cosmopolitan and the prices high--Marienbad, Homburg,
Karlsbad, Schwalbach, Wiesbaden--all these places are as well known to
English people as their own Bath and Buxton. Homburg they have
swallowed, and I have somewhere come across a paragraph from an
English newspaper objecting to the presence of Germans there. It is
the quiet German watering-place where no English come that is
interesting and not impossible to find. During the summer I spent in a
Bavarian forest village I only saw one English person the whole time,
except my own two or three friends. I heard the other day that the
village and the life there have hardly altered at all, but that some
English people have discovered the trout streams and come every year
for fishing. In my time no one seemed to care about fishing. You went
for walks in the forest. There was nothing else to do, unless you
played _Kegel_ and drank beer; for it was only a _Luftkur_. There was
no _Badearzt_ and no mineral water. To be sure, there were caves, huge
limestone caves that you visited with a guide the day after you
arrived, and never thought about again. There were various ruined
castles, too, in the neighbourhood that made a goal for a drive in
cases where there was a restaurant attached, and not far off there was
a curious network of underground beer-cellars that I did not see, but
which seemed to attract the men of our party sometimes. There were
several inns in the straggling village, for the place lay high up
amongst the dolomite hills of Upper Franconia, and people came there
from the neighbouring towns for _Waldluft_. The summer I was there
Richard Wagner passed through with his family, and we saw him more
than once. He stayed at the Kurhaus, a hotel of more pretentions than
the village inns, for it had a good sized garden and did not entertain
peasants. My inn, recommended by an old Nuremberg friend, was owned
and managed by a peasant proprietor, his wife, their elderly daughter,
and two charming orphan grandchildren in their early teens. The
peasant customers had as usual a large rough