, he invited us to write our names in the album for
strangers. While we were doing this, a poor handwerker lingered behind,
apparently for the same object, whom he scornfully dismissed, shaking
the fifteen cent piece in his hand, and saying: "The album is not for
such as you--it is for noble gentlemen!"

On our way through the city, we often noticed a house on the southern
side of St. Stephen's Platz, dedicated to "the Iron Stick." In a niche
by the window, stood what appeared to be the limb of a tree, completely
filled with nails, which were driven in so thick that no part of the
original wood is visible. We learned afterwards the legend concerning
it. The Vienna Forest is said to have extended, several hundred years
ago, to this place. A locksmith's apprentice was enabled, by the devil's
help, to make the iron bars and padlock which confine the limb in its
place; every locksmith's apprentice who came to Vienna after that, drove
a nail into it, till finally there was room for no more. It is a
singular legend, and whoever may have placed the limb there originally,
there it has remained for two or three hundred years at least.

We spent two or three hours delightfully one evening in listening to
Strauss's band. We went about sunset to the Odeon, a new building in the
Leopoldstadt. It has a refreshment hall nearly five hundred feet long,
with a handsome fresco ceiling and glass doors opening into a garden
walk of the same length. Both the hall and garden were filled with
tables, where the people seated themselves as they came, and conversed
sociably over their coffee and wine. The orchestra was placed in a
little ornamental temple in the garden, in front of which I stationed
myself, for I was anxious to see the world's waltz-king, whose magic
tones can set the heels of half Christendom in motion. After the band
had finished tuning their instruments, a middle-sized, handsome man
stepped forward with long strides, with a violin in one hand and bow in
the other, and began waving the latter up and down, like a magician
summoning his spirits. As if he had waved the sound out of his bow, the
tones leaped forth from the instruments, and guided by his eye and hand,
fell into a merry measure. The accuracy with which every instrument
performed its part, was truly marvellous. He could not have struck the
measure or the harmony more certainly from the keys of his own piano,
than from that large band. The sounds struggled forth, so pe