borhood, and the table is
provided with almost as many delicacies and niceties as you can have in
Paris.

The roads along the banks of the Rhine, too, are absolutely perfect.
Well they may be so in fact, for workmen have been constantly employed
in making and perfecting them for nearly two thousand years. Julius
Caesar worked upon them. Charlemagne worked upon them. Frederic the
Great worked upon them. Napoleon worked upon them. They are walled up
wherever necessary on the side towards the river; the rock is cut away
on the side towards the land; valleys have been filled up; hill sides
have been terraced, and ravines bridged over; until the road, though
passing along the margin of a very mountainous region, is almost as
level as a railway throughout the whole of its course. And as it is
macadamized throughout, and is kept in the most perfect condition, it is
always, in wet weather as well as dry, as firm, and hard, and smooth as
a floor.

With such roads and such carriages on the land, and such pretty
steamboats as they have upon the water, it would be very pleasant going
up through the highlands of the Rhine, if there were nothing but the
natural scenery to attract the eye of the traveller. But besides the
quaint and ancient villages, and the curious old churches which adorn
them,--villages which sometimes line the margin of the water, and
sometimes cling to the slopes of the hills, or nestle in the higher
valleys,--there are other still stronger attractions, in the castles,
towers, and palaces, which are seen scattered every where on the river
banks, adorning every prominent and commanding position along the
shores, and crowning, in many cases, the summits of the hills. Many of
these castles and towers, though built originally hundreds of years ago,
are still kept in repair and inhabited, some being used as the summer
residences of princes, or of private men of fortune, and others, being
armed with cannon and garrisoned with soldiers, are held as strongholds
by the kings, or dukes, or electors, in whose dominions they lie. There
are a great many of them, however, that have been allowed to go to
decay; and the ruins of these still stand, presenting to the eye of the
traveller who gazes up to them from the deck of the steamer, or from his
seat in his carriage, or who climbs up to visit them more closely, by
means of the zigzag paths which lead to them, very interesting relics
and memorials of ancient times. The ruins