on of innkeepers, time out of mind, and even yet, he spoke of
those days with transport.

It was amusing, too, to hear him talk of Luther, as familiarly as though
he had known him personally, mentioning little anecdotes of his career,
and repeating his opinions as if they were things of yesterday;
but indeed his mind had little more perspective than a Chinese
tea-tray--everything stood beside its neighbour, without shadow, or
relief of any kind, and to hear him talk, you would say that Melancthon
and Marshal Macdonald might have been personal friends, and Martin
Luther and Ney passed an evening in the blue salon of the Reuten Krantz.
As for Eisenach and all about it, he knew as little as though it were
a city of Egypt. He _hoped_ there was a public library now--he _knew_
there was in his father's time, but the French used to make cartridges
with the books in many towns they passed through--perhaps they had done
the same here. These confounded French--they seemed some way to fill
every avenue of his brain--there was no inlet of his senses, without a
French sentinel on guard over it.

Now,--for my sins, I suppose,--it so chanced that I was laid up here for
several weeks, with a return of an old rheumatism I had contracted in
one of my wanderings. Books, they brought me, but alas! the only volumes
a German circulating library ever contains are translations of the very
worst French and English works. The weather was, for the most part,
rainy and broken, and even when my strength permitted me to venture into
the garden, I generally got soundly drenched before I reached the house
again. What insupportable ennui is that which inhabits the inn of a
little remote town, where come few travellers, and no news! What a
fearful blank in existence is such a place. Just think of sitting in
the little silent and sanded parlour, with its six hard chairs, and one
straight old sofa, upholstered with flock and fleas; counting over the
four prints in black wood frames, upon the walls. Scripture subjects,
where Judith, with a quilted petticoat and sabots, cuts the head off a
Holofernes in buckskins and top boots, and catches the blood in a soup
tureen; an Abraham with a horse pistol, is threatening a little Isaac in
jacket and trowsers, with a most villanous expression about the corners
of his eyes; and the old looking-glass, cracked in the middle, and
representing your face, in two hemispheres, with a nose and one eye to
each--the whole tin