n't pretend to say that the method
I prescribed for making expiation for taking away a life is better than
that taught in our holy religion, which, according to the Catholic
Church, consists in masses and in giving away your goods to the Church.
But I do think it better than the Hindoo practice, and I think the theory
of the famous scapegoat is not to be compared with that which is taught
us by pure religion.

A NIGHT IN THE WOODS.

CHAPTER I.

My worthy uncle, Bernard Hertzog, the historian and antiquary, surmounted
with his grand three-cornered hat and wig, and with a long iron-shod
mountain-pole firmly grasped in his hand, was coming down one evening by
the Luppersberg, hailing every turn in the landscape with enthusiastic
exclamations.

Years had never quenched in him the love of knowledge. At sixty he was
still at work upon his _History of Alsacian Antiquities_, and never
allowed himself to write a complete account of a ruined and defaced
monument, or any relic of former days, until he had examined it a hundred
times from every point of view.

"No man," said he, "who has had the happy privilege of being born in the
Vosges, between Haut Bar, Nideck, and Geierstein has any business to
think of travelling. Where are there nobler forests, older fir and beech
trees, more lovely smiling valleys, wilder rocks? Where is the country
with richer possessions in memorable story? Here, in olden times, used
the high and powerful lords of Lutzelstein, Dagsberg, Leiningen, and
Fenetrange, to fight clad in mail from head to foot. Here the eldest son
of the Church and the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire exchanged blows in
the Middle Ages with swords two yards long. What are our wars compared
with those terrible battles where warriors fought hand to hand, where
they hammered upon each other's skulls with huge battle-axes, and drove
the dagger between the bars of the closed visor? Were not those heroic
feats of arms? was not that a courage worthy to be chronicled to all
posterity? But our young people want to see new things; they are not
satisfied with their own native land: they must wander through Germany,
make tours in France. Worse still, they abandon science and its noble
fields for trade, arts, industry, as if there had not been in the former
glorious days much more curious industrial arts and pursuits than in our
own day! Witness the Hanseatic League, the maritime enterprise of Venice,
Genoa, and the Levant,