oyous revellings to
anticipate, when there were free tables even for strangers. In those
days--

"A Christmas banquet oft would cheer
A poor man's heart for half the year."

This Middle Age lasted effectively until the epoch of the Revolution and
railroads, or, to fix a date, till about 1848. And then all at once, as
at a breath, it all disappeared, and now lives, so to speak, only in
holes and corners. For as soon as railroads came, factories sprang up
and Capital began to employ Labour, and Labour to plot and combine
against Capital; and what with scientific inventions and a sudden
stimulus to labour, and newspapers, the multitude got beyond fancy
dresses and the being amused to keep them quiet like children, and so the
_juventus mundi_ passed away. "It is a perfect _shame_!" say the dear
young lady tourists, "that the peasantry no longer wear their beautiful
dresses; they ought to be _obliged_ to keep them up." "But how would
_you_ like, my dear, if you were of the lower orders, to wear a dress
which proclaimed it?" Here the conversation ceaseth, for it becomes too
deep for the lady tourist to follow.

How it was we wandered I do not distinctly remember, but having visited
Nuremberg, Prague, and Dresden, we went to Breslau, where a fancy seized
us to go to Cracow. True, we had not a special _vise_ from a Russian
minister to enter the Muscovite dominions, but the police at Breslau, who
(as I was afterwards told) loved to make trouble for those on the
frontier, bade us be of good cheer and cheek it out, neither to be afraid
of any man, and to go ahead bravely. Which we did.

There was a sweet scene at the frontier station on the Polish-Russian
line at about three o'clock in the morning, when the grim and insolent
officials discovered that our passports had only the police _vise_ from
Breslau! I was asked why I had not in my native country secured the
_vise_ of a Russian minister; to which I replied that in America the very
existence of such a country as Russia was utterly unknown, and that I
myself was astonished to find that Russians knew what passports were.
Also that I always supposed that foreigners conferred a great benefit on
a country by spending their money in it; but that if I could not be
admitted, that was an end of it; it was a matter of very trifling
consequence, indeed, for we really did not care twopence whether we saw
Russia or not; a country more or less made very little difference t