announcing to an admiring world
that "_Herzoglich. Sachsen-Meiningen Stadtesbeamter_" lives within.
Cocks and hens, dogs and children, make common playground of these
narrow streets, and one sees in them pretty well every form of animal
life represented, except horses. Now a long cart, drawn by oxen and
well filled, toils up the hill, and not long after follows one drawn
by a big dog. At a pump two tiny girls are busily employed filling
stone jars, which by the beauty and purity of their outlines might
have been Etruscan. Mothers beat mats at their cottage doors, and
shrilly scream at their children to get out of the way of the passing
carts; and the world in this remote village goes on pretty much as it
does elsewhere.

But the fashionable life of Liebenstein does not concern itself with
such mean sights and bucolic sounds as oxen-carts and crowing of
cocks. It takes its pleasure up and down the long avenues of beech
trees which lie between the Kur-Haus and the Hotel Bellevue. It
rallies round the bandstand, and makes great show of studying the
programmes of the daily concert. It chatters glibly over the previous
evening's illuminations, and describes them as "_colossal!_" and
"_wunderschoen_." Beauty is not in vogue at Liebenstein, judging by the
middle-class Kur guests who haunt the shade of the beech trees.
Indeed, if anywhere in the world an Englishman might be forgiven for
thanking God that he is not as other men are, it would be here among
the "_Ober-Lieutenants_" and "Herr Professors" and their mates.
Figures, both male and female, seem to be of the switchback
order--faces rudimentary in their modelling, and uncompromising in
their plainness, dressing of the ugliest. Yet, _Gott sei Dank!_ Hans
thinks his Gretchen perfection, and it would never enter into innocent
Gretchen's head, as it does mine, to bestow upon Hans the carping
criticism of Portia upon Monsieur Le Bon: "God made him, and therefore
let him pass for a man."

TREVES

The dominant glory of the Moselle region is Treves. No town or city
near has the smallest affinity with its peculiar character, and all
seem modern and prosaic compared with its well-preserved tale of
antiquity. "Nowhere north of the Alps," we are told in weary
iteration, "exist such magnificent Roman remains." It is generally on
the obvious that the unimaginative English parson takes upon himself
to comment. We listen submissively to much s