o bad,"
very high praise from so sparing a talker.

Mr. Vieweg senior invited me to shoot with him on several occasions
during the winter months. The "Kettle-drive" (Kessel-Treib) is the
local manner of shooting hares. Guns and beaters form themselves into
an immense circle, a mile in diameter, over the treeless, hedgeless
flats, and all advance slowly towards the centre of the circle. At
first, it is perfectly safe to fire into the circle, but as it
diminishes in size, a horn is sounded, the guns face round, back to
back, and as the beaters advance alone, hares are only killed as they
run out of the ring. Hares are very plentiful in North Germany, and
"Kettle-drives" usually resulted in a bag of from thirty to forty of
them. To my surprise, in the patches of oak-scrub on the moor-lands,
there were usually some woodcock, a bird which I had hitherto
associated only with Ireland. Young Vieweg was an excellent shot; in
common with all his father's other guests, he was arrayed in high
boots, and in one of those grey-green suits faced with dark green, dear
to the heart of the German sportsman. The guns all looked like the
chorus in the Freischutz, and I expected them to break at any moment
into the "Huntsmen's Chorus." Young Vieweg was greatly pained at my
unorthodox costume, for I wore ordinary homespun knickerbockers, and
sported neither a green Tyrolese hat with a blackcock's tail in it, nor
high boots; my gun had no green sling attached to it, nor did I carry a
game-bag covered with green tassels, all of which, it appeared, were
absolutely essential concomitants to a Jagd-Partie.

In these country districts round Brunswick nothing but Low German
("Platt-Deutsch") was talked. Low German is curiously like English at
times. The sentence, "the water is deep," is identical in both tongues.
"Mudder," "brudder," and "sister" have all a familiar ring about them,
too. The word "watershed," as applied to the ridge separating two river
systems, had always puzzled me. In High German it is "Wasser-scheide,"
i.e. water-parting; in Low German it is "Water-shed," with the same
meaning, thus making our own term perfectly clear. "Low" German, of
course, only means the dialect spoken in the low-lying North German
plains: "High" German, the language spoken in the hilly country south
of the Harz Mountains. High German only became the literary language of
the country owing to Luther having deliberately chosen that dialect for
the translatio