t, and one is
thus enabled to set up his own _menage_ at an hour's notice. This mode
is more economical for a large family, than living at an hotel, vastly
more comfortable, and more respectable. Dinners can be had from the
taverns, if desired. Francois being something of a cook, with the aid
of the Spa assistant, we lived entirely within ourselves. You will
remember that in hiring the house by the day, I reserved the right to
quit it at any moment.

Spa, like most other places that possess chalybeate waters, stands in
the centre of a country that can boast but little of its fertility.
Still, time and cultivation have left it the character of pale verdure
of which I have just spoken, and which serves for a time to please by
its novelty. The hue looked neither withered nor sickly, but it was
rather that of young grasses. It was a ghostly green. The eye wanders
over a considerable extent of naked fields, when one is on the steep
wooded hills, under whose very brows the village is built, and I
scarcely can recall a spot where a stronger impression of interminable
vastness is left, than I felt while gazing at the illimitable swells of
land that stretch away towards France. The country is said to be in the
mountains of the Ardennes, and once there was the forest through which
the "Boar of Ardennes" was wont to roam; but of forest there is now
none; and if there be a mountain, Spa must stand on its boundless
summit. High and broken hills do certainly appear, but, as a whole, it
is merely an upland region.

The glory of Spa has departed! Time was when the idle, the gay and the
dissolute crowded to this retired village to intrigue and play, under
the pretence of drinking the waters; when its halls were thronged with
princes and nobles, and even monarchs frequented its fetes and partook
of its festivities. The industrious inhabitants even now spare no pains
to render the abode pleasant, but the capricious taste of the age lures
the traveller to other springs, where still pleasanter haunts invite
their presence. Germany abounds with watering-places, which are usually
rendered agreeable by a judicious disposition of walks, and by other
similar temptations. In nothing are the money-grasping and shiftless
habits of America rendered more apparent, than in the inferiority of her
places of public resort. In all these particulars nature has done a
good deal for some of them, but nowhere has man done anything worth
naming.

A triflin