e; and there are restaurants in the Marienburg and in the
Stadt garden, and the Flora and Zoological Gardens. At every little town
on either bank there are one or more taverns with a view where the usual
atrocities which pass as food in provincial Germany are to be obtained,
good beer, and generally excellent wine made from the vineyards on the
mountain side. Now and again some restaurant-keeper has a little pool of
fresh water in front of his house, and one can select one's particular
fish to be cooked for breakfast. The wines of the district are far
better than its food.

Rudesheim, Geisenheim, Schloss Johannisberg, the Steinberg Abbey above
Hattenheim, are of course household words, and the man who said that
travelling along the Rhine was like reading a restaurant wine-list had
some justification for his Philistine speech. One does not expect to
discover the real Steinberg Cabinet in a village inn, and the
Johannisberg generally found in every hotel in Rhineland is a very
inferior wine to that of the Schloss, and is grown in the vineyards
round Dorf Johannisberg. I have memories of excellent bottles of wine at
the Ress at Hattenheim, and at the Engel at Erbach; but the fact that I
was making a walking tour may have added to the delight of the draughts.
The Marcobrunn vineyards lie between Hattenheim and Erbach. The Hotel
Victoria at Bingen has its own vineyards and makes a capital wine; and
in the valley of the river below Bingen almost every little town and
hill--Lorch, Boppard, Horcheim, and the Kreuzberg--has its own
particular brand, generally excellent. Assmanhausen, which gives such an
excellent red wine, is on the opposite bank to Bingen and a little below
it. The Rhine boats have a very good assortment of wines on board, but
it is wise to run the finger a little way down the list before ordering
your bottle, for the very cheapest wines on the Rhine are, as is usual
in all countries, of the thinnest description. Most of the British
doctors on the Continent make the greater part of their living by
attending their fellow-countrymen who drink everywhere anything that is
given them free, and who hold that the _vin du pays_ must be drinkable
because it _is_ the wine of the country. Our compatriots often swallow
the throat-cutting stuff which the farm labourers and stable hands
drink, sooner than pay a little extra money for the sound wine of the
district. The foreigner who came to Great Britain and drank our cheapes