s and chairs ready for any person who might choose to take coffee
or any other refreshments there. Mr. George's room was on this side of
the hotel, and being pretty high it overlooked the gardens, and the
terrace, and the river, and afforded a charming view. Up the river, on
the other side, about three or four miles off, the Sieben Gebirgen were
plainly to be seen, the summits of them tipped with ancient ruins.

After Rollo had been sitting there about half an hour, Mr. George came
home. It was then about one o'clock.

"Well, Rollo," said he, "we are going up the river. I have engaged the
landlord to send us up in a carriage to some pleasant place on the bank
of the river among the mountains, where we can spend the Sabbath."

"Why, what day is it?" asked Rollo.

"It is Saturday," replied Mr. George.

Rollo was quite surprised to find that it was Saturday. In fact, in
travelling on the Rhine, as there is so little to mark or distinguish
one day from another, we almost always soon lose our reckoning.

"What is the name of the place where we are going?" asked Rollo.

"I don't know," replied Mr. George. "I cannot understand very well. He
is going to send us somewhere. How it will turn out I cannot tell. We
must trust to the fortune of war."

Mr. George often called the luck that befell him in travelling the
fortune of war. "If we were contented," he would say, "to travel over
and over again in places that we know, then we could make some
calculations, and could know beforehand, in most cases, where we were
going and how we should come out. But in travelling in new and strange
places we cannot tell at all, especially when there is no language that
we can communicate well with the people in. So we have to trust to the
fortune of war."

Mr. George, however, determined to make one more effort to find out
where he was going; and so, when the carriage came to the door, and he
and Rollo were about to get into it, he asked the porter of the
house--who was the man that "spoke English"--what the name of the place
was where they were going to stop.

"Yes, sare," replied the man. "You will stop. You will go to Poppensdorf
and to Kreitzberg, and then you will go to Gottesberg, and then you will
go to Rolandseck, where there is a boat that will take you to
Drachenfels, or to Koenigswinter."

He said all this with so strong a German accent, and pronounced the
barbarous words with so foreign an intonation, that no trace or
imp