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GERMANI A.

CHAPTER I.

THE SNOW.

"TRAVELLING is so easy now-a-days!" that is the phrase one hears on all hands. "Since the establishment of railroads, there are no distances." Granted. It is easy to go to Egypt, and the journey up the Nile is a mere nothing. Shooting parties may be accepted on the borders of the Mississippi, and from the Havannah to Liverpool you may cross in a fortnight. I met a gentleman last winter who told me of the great railroad by means of which we shall go to Calcutta in eleven days, passing through Persia and Asia Minor, (fancy the "Babylon Station!") and as to the Holy Land, why it will soon be our next

VOL. II.

B

door neighbour: all this I do not dispute, and it may, for aught I know, be very easy to take one's

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And toast upon the wall of China,"

but it is not easy to go from Munich to Vienna.

The cold came on suddenly; on the 19th of November, the warmth was so great, that the only explanation of it was, that "the sweet South," in its passage from Italy, had not had time to cool itself by the contact with the Alps; on the 20th, early dawn saw Munich swathed in snow!

And now, get away as you can. No railroad connects Bavaria and Austria; the Danube is frozen over-what is to be done? It is provoking to be obliged, in the nineteenth, to do as people did in the seventeenth century, and travel à petites journées, neither more nor less than Madame la Marquise de Sévigné used to do when she went from Paris into Brittany, in the year 1670. I would almost as soon contemplate a voyage en litière, which she declares no two persons, however friendly, can accomplish without hating each other at the end. "You had better stay here," said our kind Munich friend.

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"I must be in Vienna for Christmas."

"They are going to give Lachner's opera of Catarina Cornaro' on Wednesday, mit festlich

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