to the necessity of following the high road; but taking our
observations carefully, and bearing with wonderful exactness from point
to point, we had already arrived within an hour's walk of Liebenau,
before we were aware. While compassing the space that intervened
between the village where our guide quitted us and this, which had been
marked down as our resting-place for the night, we passed many striking
and beautiful landscapes, such as I would willingly pause to describe,
were human language capable of describing them faithfully. Everywhere
around us, bold conical hills stood up, not a few of which bore upon
their summits the ruins of old castles, while all were more or less
clothed throughout with noble forests. For the portion of Bohemia which
we were now crossing, may with perfect truth be represented as a
succession of glorious valleys, overshadowed by not less glorious
mountains. The straths are all of them fertile to an extraordinary
degree, and as I have already stated, both they and the hill-sides
abound with inhabitants. Yet is the country a mountain district, in
every sense of the word, though the very mountains either are by
nature, or have by industry been rendered, uncommonly fertile.

The great defect in Bohemian scenery, is the absence of water. There is
scarcely a lake in the whole kingdom, and, with the exception of two or
three, such as the Elbe, the Iser, the Bober, &c., the rivers hardly
deserve to take rank with the larger class of our mountain streams.
Such a defect is sorely felt by him who, looking down from the brow of
a lofty hill over a wide plain, beholds perfection in every particular,
except that there is no water there; and when from the narrower ravines
you miss the lochs and tarns, which give to Cumberland and the
Highlands of Scotland their peculiar character, your disappointment
scarcely falls short of mortification. Perhaps, indeed, a double motive
may have operated with us to produce this feeling. Our eyes pined, in
the first place, for the object on which, in such situations, they had
been accustomed at home to repose; and secondly, our fishing-rods felt
like useless burdens in our hands. But it was not destined to be so for
ever, as I shall have occasion, in the course of my narrative, to show.

We had walked well and stoutly,--the sort of half-rest which we enjoyed
the day before giving fresh vigour to our limbs,--so that between two
and three o'clock we ventured to calculate t