loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts
through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor
of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes
one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are
commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,
women, and children, live in amicable community: yet there was an
appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I
measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken
off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small
interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two
where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight
feet in depth. The faces of the cows &c. were turned towards the room;
indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing
each other's faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,
a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to
entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different
feelings. The wood-work of these buildings on the outside is left
unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and
green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within
three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,
the country, as far as I could see it was a dead flat, only varied by
woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to
Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred
and twenty-six miles.

The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a
mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very
unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a
narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense
length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island
the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage, together
with the _Amtmann's, Amtsschreiber's_, and the church, stands near the
summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little
bridge, fr