the plain, and reached the village at dusk....

My friend arrived at three o'clock the next morning, and, after two or
three hours' talk about home and the friends whom he expected to see so
much sooner than I, a young farmer drove me in his wagon to Offenburg, a
small city at the foot of the Black Forest, where I took the cars for
Freiburg. The scenery between the two places is grand. The broad
mountains of the Black Forest rear their fronts on the east, and the
blue lines of the French Vosges meet the clouds on the west. The night
before, in walking over the plain, I saw distinctly the whole of the
Strassburg minster, whose spire is the highest in Europe, being four
hundred and ninety feet, or but twenty-five feet lower than the Pyramid
of Cheops.

I visited the minster of Freiburg yesterday morning. It is a grand,
gloomy old pile, dating back from the eleventh century--one of the few
Gothic churches in Germany that have ever been completed. The tower of
beautiful fretwork rises to the height of three hundred and ninety-five
feet, and the body of the church, including the choir, is of the same
length. The interior is solemn and majestic. Windows stained in colors
that burn let in a "dim religious light" which accords very well with
the dark old pillars and antique shrines. In two of the chapels there
are some fine altar-pieces by Holbein and one of his scholars, and a
very large crucifix of silver and ebony, kept with great care, which is
said to have been carried with the Crusaders to the Holy Land....

We went this afternoon to the Jaegerhaus, on a mountain near, where we
had a very fine view of the city and its great black minster, with the
plain of the Briesgau, broken only by the Kaiserstuhl, a long mountain
near the Rhine, whose golden stream glittered in the distance. On
climbing the Schlossberg, an eminence near the city, we met the grand
duchess Stephanie, a natural daughter of Napoleon, as I have heard. A
chapel on the Schoenberg, the mountain opposite, was pointed out as the
spot where Louis XV.--if I mistake not--usually stood while his army
besieged Freiburg. A German officer having sent a ball to this chapel
which struck the wall just above the king's head, the latter sent word
that if they did not cease firing he would point his cannons at the
minster. The citizens thought it best to spare the monarch and save the
cathedral.

After two days delightfully spent, we shouldered our knapsacks and left
Fr