en before us, and we saw them now
descending in such a direction as to ensure our falling in with them
during our upward progress. They proved to be three Dutch gentlemen,
with a guide, who had come direct through Silesia from Schandau, and
were able to tell us, when they discovered who we were, that a few days
previously our friends at the baths were all alive and well. I need
scarcely add that we stopped and chatted together, and finally parted
as if we had been acquaintances of ten years' standing; for your bleak
mountain's brow, like your cabin of an Edinburgh steam-ship, is an
admirable concoctor of mushroom intimacies.

Having parted from our friends, not, however, without receiving from
them some useful hints as to the descent into Silesia, we proceeded on,
till we gained the loftiest peak of all. It is a huge cairn of loose
stones, among which an innkeeper from Warmbrunn has built a tower;
whither in the summer months he conveys food, wine, and beds, for all
of which he, as may be expected, charges enormously. We had a pint of
indifferent Rhine wine from him, which cost us a dollar, and we
purchased a couple of long sticks, for which we paid twenty groschens
more. But we were not induced, by his suggestions that sunrise and
sunset were both exceeding glorious when watched from such a situation,
to spend the night under his roof. On the contrary, after looking about
us only to ascertain that the view, intercepted by the fog, was not to
be compared with what we had seen in the morning, we wished him
farewell; and, beholding at our feet the town of Warmbrunn, we plunged
down towards it.

The ascent had been tolerably fatiguing; the descent was scarcely less
so; and it proved to the full as tedious. The snow lay in extensive
fields, to cross which occasioned a good deal of trouble, and when that
was accomplished, we found ourselves diving through the heart of a
thick forest. A road there certainly was, but whither it would lead us
we could not tell; and though the glimpses which, from time to time, we
obtained of the bold corries that indent the Silesian sides of the
mountains, were uncommonly grand, we became, by degrees, too tired to
enjoy them fully. Vainly, too, did we look about for some one to direct
us aright. Two or three cottages, just under the cone, were the only
haunts of men which we passed in our progress from the top to the
bottom; and the solitary individual who met us,--a youth with a heavy
burden