him. He took snuff with a constant
click of the lid.

The hills of Champagne, green with vines, and white as with an underlay
of chalk, rose behind us. We crossed the frontier, and German hills took
their places, with a castle topping each. I was at the time of life when
interest stretches eagerly toward every object; and though this journey
cannot be set down in a story as long as mine, the novelty--even the
risks, mischances and wearinesses of continual post travel, come back
like an invigorating breath of salt water.

The usual route carried us eastward to Cracow, the old capital of
Poland, scattered in ruined grandeur within its brick walls. Beyond it I
remember a stronghold of the Middle Ages called the fortress of
Landskron.

The peasants of this country, men in shirts and drawers of coarse linen,
and women with braided hair hanging down under linen veils, stopped
their carts as soon as a post-carriage rushed into sight, and bent
almost to the earth. At post-houses the servants abased themselves to
take me by the heel. In no other country was the spirit of man so
broken. Poles of high birth are called the Frenchmen of the north, and
we saw fair men and women in sumptuous polonaises and long robes who
appeared luxurious in their traveling carriages. But stillness and
solitude brooded on the land. From Cracow to Warsaw wide reaches of
forest darkened the level. Any open circle was belted around the horizon
with woods, pines, firs, beech, birch, and small oaks. Few cattle fed on
the pastures, and stunted crops of grain ripened in the melancholy
light.

From Cracow to Warsaw is a distance of one hundred and thirty leagues,
if the postilion lied not, yet on that road we met but two carriages and
not more than a dozen carts. Scattering wooden villages, each a line of
hovels, appeared at long intervals.

Post-houses were kept by Jews, who fed us in the rooms where their
families lived. Milk and eggs they had none to offer us; and their beds
were piles of straw on the ground, seldom clean, never untenanted by
fleas.

Beggars ran beside us on the wretched roads as neglected as themselves.
Where our horses did not labor through sand, the marshy ground was paved
with sticks and boughs, or the surface was built up with trunks of trees
laid crosswise.

In spacious, ill-paved Warsaw, through which the great Vistula flows, we
rested two days. I knelt with confused thoughts, trying to pray in the
Gothic cathedral. We w