tance in front of these memorials, at which a peasant
living in the tower told us, the field-preacher had delivered an oration
on the occasion.

In the morning, at five o'clock, we began to ascend the neighboring
heights of Melibocus. It took us an hour and a quarter. The guide
carried my knapsack; and as we went, men came up through different
footpaths in the woods, with hoes on their shoulders. When we arrived
on the top, we found others, and among them some women, accompanied by a
policeman. They were peasants who had been convicted of cutting wood for
fuel in the hills, and were adjudged to pay a penalty, or in default, to
work it out in hoeing and clearing the young plantations for a
proportionate time--a much wiser way than shutting them up in a prison,
where they are of no use either to themselves or the state.

The view from the tower, eighty feet in height, over the great Rhine
plain, is immense and splendid, including two hundred villages, towns,
and cities. The windings of the magnificent Rhine lie mapped out below
you, and on its banks are seen, as objects of peculiar interest, the
cathedral of Speier, the lofty dome of the Jesuits' church at Mannheim,
and the four towers of the noble cathedral of Worms. In the remote
distance, as a fitting termination to this noble landscape, are seen the
heights of the Donnersberg, the Vosges, and the Schwarzwald.

The policeman, who followed us up into the tower, mentioned the time
when the inhabitants of that district had hastened thither to watch the
approach of the French armies, and pointed out the spot where they were
first seen, and described their approach, and the terrors and anxieties
of the people, in the most lively and touching manner.

The wind was strong on this lofty height, and the rattling of the
shutters in the look-out windows in the tower, and of their fastenings,
would have been dismal enough on a stormy night, and gave quite a
wildness to it even then. The view over the Odenwald was beautiful. Half
covered with wood, as far as you could see, with green, winding straths
between them, distant castles, and glimpses of the white walls of
low-lying dorfs or villages, it gave you an idea of a region at once
solitary and attractive. The whole was filled with the cheerful light of
morning, and the wooded hills looked of the most brilliant green. We
descended, and pursued our way through the forest glades with that
feeling of enjoyment which the entrance i