, nor sell you to the landlord, like your
German courier, nor give you over to brigands, like your Italian valet.
It's a bargain, then; and here we are at Bonn.

It is one o'clock, and you can't do better than sit down to the table
d'hote: call it breakfast, if your prejudices run high, and take your
place. I have supposed you at 'Die Sterne' (The Star), in the little
square of the town; and, certes, you might be less comfortably housed.
The cuisine is excellent, both French and German, and the wines
delicious. The company at first blush might induce you to step back,
under the impression that you had mistaken the salon, and accidentally
fallen upon a military mess. They are nearly all officers of the cavalry
regiments garrisoned at Bonn, well-looking and well-dressed fellows,
stout, bronzed, and soldierlike, and wearing their moustaches like men
who felt hair on the upper lip to be a birthright. If a little too noisy
and uproarious at table, it proceeds not from any quarrelsome spirit:
the fault, in a great measure, lies with the language. German, except
spoken by a Saxon madchen, invariably suggests the idea of a row to an
uninterested bystander; and if Goethe himself were to recite his ballads
before an English audience, I'd venture long odds they'd accuse him of
blasphemy. Welsh and Irish are soft zephyrs compared to it.

A stray Herr Baron or two, large, portly, responsible-looking men, with
cordons at their button-holes, and pipe-sticks projecting from their
breast-pockets, and a sprinkling of students of the higher class--it
is too dear for the others--make up the party. Of course, there are
English; but my present business is not with them.

By the time you have arrived at the 'Rae-braten, with capers'--which on
a fair average, taken in the months of spring and summer, may be after
about an hour and a half's diligent performance--you'll have more time
to survey the party, who by this time are clinking their glasses, and
drinking hospitably to one another in champagne; for there is always
some newly returned comrade to be feted, or a colonel's birthday or a
battle, a poet or some sentimentalism about the Rhine or the Fatherland,
to be celebrated. Happy, joyous spirits, removed equally from the
contemplation of vast wealth or ignominious poverty! The equality so
much talked of in France is really felt in Germany; and however the
exclusives of Berlin and Vienna, or the still more exalted coteries
of Baden or Darm