he travellers
continued their route by Ghent and along the valley of the Meuse, "which,
on a fine warm day in July, appears as rich and beautiful as any valley
can well be on this side of ancient Paradise," to Aix-la-Chapelle. At this
famous Prussian watering-place Mr Waterton found much to move his bile,
not only in the sight of ladies risking their fortunes at the public
gaming-tables authorised and protected by government, but in the folly of
the valetudinarians, who perversely counteract the beneficial effects of
the waters by "resorting to the _salle-a-manger_, and there partaking of
all the luxuries from the cornucopia of Epicurus, Bacchus, and Ceres." He
derived some consolation, however, from the contemplation of the
magnificent and varied prospect from the wooded heights of the Louisberg
above the town; and the sight, on his last visit, of a pair of ravens
circling over his head in aerial revolutions, and then winging their way
towards the forest of Ardennes, awakened recollections of home, and "of
the rascally cobbler who desecrated the Sunday morning by robbing the last
raven's nest in this vicinity." At Freyburg they encountered a phenomenon,
in the shape of a poetical German waiter--and a poet, too, in the English
language, though he had never been in England, nor much among English; but
the waiter's effusions, the subject of which was the cathedral of
Freyburg, were never destined to reach England, but now lie, with the rest
of Mr Waterton's travelling goods and chattels, in the wreck of the
Pollux, at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea.

The passage of the Alps disappointed our traveller's hopes of finding
among their heights some of the rarer European birds:--"the earth appeared
one huge barren waste, and the heavens produced not a single inhabitant of
air." On descending the southern side of the mountains, they at length
received ocular demonstration of their being really in Italy, by observing
matronly-looking woman engaged in certain offices touching the long black
hair of her daughter, which showed that combs were still as scarce as when
Horace stigmatized the "incomptum caput" of Canidia; and the necessity of
lavender water, to pass with any thing like comfort through the town and
villages which looked so enchanting at a distance in the midst of their
olive groves and cypresses, is feelingly commented upon. But before
entering Rome, we must give Mr Waterton's own account of an exploit which
made som