ssing labour. Fritzerl soon took his
place as a leader beside the dog, and helped to pull the load; while the
Starling's cage was fastened on the sheltered side of the little cart,
and there he travelled quite safe and happy.

I never heard that Fritz was struck--as he might possibly, with reason,
have been--that, as he came into Bavaria, where the wide-stretching
plains teem with yellow corn and golden wheat, the peasants seemed far
poorer than among the wild mountains of his own Tyrol; neither have
I any recollection that he experienced that peculiar freedom of
respiration, that greater expansion of the chest, travellers so
frequently enumerate as among the sensations whenever they have
passed over the Austrian frontier, and breathed the air of liberty, so
bounteously diffused through the atmosphere of other lands. Fritz, I
fear, for the sake of his perceptive quickness, neither was alive to the
fact nor the fiction above quoted; nor did he take much more notice
of the features of the landscape, than to mark that the mountains
were further off and not so high as those among which he lived--two
circumstances which weighed heavily on his heart, for a Dutchman loves
not water as well as a Tyroler loves a mountain.

The impression he first received did not improve as he drew near the
Dorf where the old Bauer lived, The country was open and cultivated; but
there were few trees: and while one could not exactly call it flat,
the surface was merely a waving tract that never rose to the dignity of
mountain. The Bauer houses, too, unlike the great wooden edifices of
the Southern Tyrol--where three, ay, sometimes four, generations may be
found dwelling under one roof--were small, misshapen things, half
stone, half wood. No deep shadowing eave along them to relieve the
heat of a summer sun;--no trellised vines over the windows and the
doorway;--no huge yellow gourds drying on the long galleries, where
bright geraniums and prickly aloes stood in a row;--no Jager either,
in his green jacket and gold-tas-selled hat, was there, sharing his
breakfast with his dog; the rich spoils of his day's sport strewed
around his feet--the smooth-skinned chamois, or the stag with gnarled
horns, or the gorgeously-feathered wild turkey, all so plentiful in the
mountain regions. No; here was a land of husbandmen, with ploughs, and
harrows, and deep-wheeled carts, driven along by poor-looking, ill-clad
peasants, who never sung as they went along, sca