but that of the men was highly becoming. It consisted of a jacket of dark cloth, trimmed with Astrakan fur (generally the very finest) and silver buttons; closely fitting trousers, and Russia leather boots, reaching sometimes over the knee.

When upon the ground, the music-car took up its. position, with its green boughs nodding, and gay banners floating in the wind, and the musicians began to play their most inspiriting airs. The judges of the course (on horseback) took their places, and at a certain signal the race commenced. Off went the thirteen, one after the other-for the sliding-path made round the vast field, on the borders of the Inn, would only admit of two abreast.

Now, they go on regularly enough for awhile: but one has gained upon the rest as they turn, near the river and now another gains upon him! They whirl anew past the starting-point, and a cannon fired from the town announces the first round. And now, the lines are broken, and sledge presses on sledge, and when they come again dashing by the startingpoint, two are considerably in advance. Boum! goes the second cannon: and round they go again, and still No. 9-for it is No. 9-is far before the rest. And then comes No. 11, and then the others. Boum! goes the cannon again, and so a fourth and a fifth time, and No. 9 looks half mad, and whoops

and halloos like a Red Skin, and the music plays furiously, and the whole crowd of spectators whoop and halloo, and hurrah too (eight thousand of them! as Mère Peyrer said, I leave you to guess how the welkin rang!) and the sixth round is completed, and the sixth cannon fired, and No. 9 is victorious.

And now begins the homeward procession, and in less than an hour all the eight thousand are housed in the different breweries, and Scherding is almost as tranquil as before.

All Scherding was at the race course. I do not think a single creature stayed in its home. Oh, yes! one did. Look over the way;-at a window opposite mine, sits a delicate looking young woman, with a child upon her knee-a little child of some eighteen months old; such a very weakly-looking pale infant. There is a flower-pot on the ledge inside the window, with a rose in it that looks as sickly as the baby. The mother parts the child's hair, and kisses, and fondles it, and I can see she talks to it; and then it stretches out its poor little thin hand towards the

*This winning horse was bought by a peasant-farmer, about fifteen months previously, from Count de Khevenhüller, and cost more than a hundred guineas! It had won the prize the year before also. A hundred guineas is not a very uncommon price for a rich peasant to pay for a horse, particularly in Upper Austria.

There

flower-pot, and the mother takes it down; and mother, child, and flower, seem to me all equally wan. was something inexpressibly sad in this picture, and I could not help remarking it to the doctor, who just then came in. He cast a glance at the group and smiled.

"You do not seem to sympathize with yon poor mother sorrowing for her child," observed I.

The doctor looked somewhat sceptical. may be she's sorrowing for the fête," said he.

"It's

I recollect a popular Austrian song, wherein a woman is told by a friend to go home, for her husband is ill. ("Weib! du sollst Heimath gehen" it is called). "One other dance!" cries she: "Noch

a' Tanzerl! Noch a' Tanzerl!"

"Your husband is dying," says the friend"Noch a' Tanzerl !"-" Your husband is dead," says at last the monitress.

"Then he will not be impatient," replies the Valseuse, and off she flies: "Noch a' Tanzerl! Noch a' Tanzerl!

CHAPTER III.

TO VIENNA !

GREAT were the hand-kissings in Scherding on the morning of the 16th of December, and manifold the recommendations to take care, and not catch cold again, and numerous the warnings to Hans'l (I will tell you by-and-bye who was Hans'l) not to forget the inn at Peuerbach, where the Herrschaften would have the best chance of dining; and then came the prayer, "not to be forgotten," sent forth in every variety of tone from gruff to shrill, parting from every lip, from the septagenarian hostess down to the wee errand-boy of nine years old. "Think of us sometimes!"-"If we could but know how you get to Vienna !"-" If it were not too great a liberty. if one word could be written . . . just to say. . . only one word!"

...

"We will write directly we arrive," was the unanimous answer; and I added, "We will come back some day!" At this announcement, if I had had a dozen hands, they would hardly have sufficed for all the kisses that were rained upon them. Jacobine made a desperate plunge, and mastered the little finger of my left hand, whilst the old Hausknecht had secured to himself the other three, the right one being, whole and entire, absorbed by the urchin of nine years old, who held on to it tenaciously, kissing it in downright earnest, and not by any means pour la forme.

Hans'l cracked his whip and off we drove, in the midst of the thousand-fold repeated exclamations of sympathy of these gentle-hearted, affectionate-natured, simple friends.

The Austrians have more of this cordiality than any nation I know of, and "a way with them," as the Irish say, that is quite and inimitably their own They are creatures of impulse to the full, as much as: the French, and possess quite as much of what our neighbours term spontaneity; but with them the impulse is always a good one, and what is more, the act it have occasioned is never regretted. An Austrian has that one great mark of a really guileless, noble nature, that he is not sorry for having been "taken in ;" and were he duped ninety-times,

may