But really the accounts that have reached us from Constantinople and other places, of the inflictions on the poor Greeks, is very bad. The unhappy wretches, some thousands of them, have been summarily ejected from house and home, reduced to ruin, and driven aboard any steamer about to leave the shores. Irishmen are sometimes packed in their emigrant vessels thick as sheep in a pen, but these Hellenic subjects are stove thicker than human beings were ever stove yet. Few of them have a shilling left in the world, and when cast ashore at the Piræus or elsewhere, they will be as destitute as when they were born, no immediate grub for their wives and little children, and no means of getting any. It's thought a lot of them will turn pirates. Weatherveer says he should be ready to turn into the arch-fiend if any despotic government used him So. "Bah!" cried he, "talk of injustice! of the cruelties and severities of war! my dear friend Bright is not far wrong after all. If we could but have the fighting without the cruelty, I should say, Go at it." "Oh, be hanged to 'if,'" retorted Major Gum, "let's take it as we can get it."

News has oozed out here, that through Lord Ellenborough (I think it was) being in a rage at the Times' correspondent's letting out about the mismanagement at Gallipoli, no reporters are to be allowed to accompany the army so that if England wants any future tidings respecting our movements and doings, victories and defeats, she may whistle for it. Our officers don't much like this: there are some old hands among them who were in the Peninsular war, and remember how its details were conducted, its wholesale, unnecessary sacrifice of human life and happiness, and they think if things are to be still done in a bag, nobody to look out and tell, and nobody to look in and advise, it will be the same again. But Cuff says his opinion is, that if all the Lords and Commons unite in trying to put the stopper upon the "own" or "special correspondent," they won't succeed in doing it. Far be it from him, he says, to insinuate that those gentlemen partake of a ferret's nature, but he does say that they always do, and always will, succeed in ferreting out anything they care to know, in spite of Lords and Commons.

It is hard to say when I may get an opportunity of writing again, but I will when I can. I keep myself very steady, as you enjoined, and play at nothing but fox-and-goose, with Gill, on the little board you gave me. I am, dear sir, yours very dutifully,

THOMAS PEPPER.

P.S. One of our officers has just got a letter (two-and-nine) stating that the dress of the British soldier is to be changed in many particulars. And it declares that the Government at home, deeming Englishmen deficient in ingenuity or brains, have sent out to foreign countries, asking for their opinion on the subject of soldiers' dress-what alterations they would recommend, and would they oblige them with the loan of the patterns? None of us believe this; it's too rich; but it set our officers laughing so immoderately, that they had to "unstock." Major Gum could not stop himself, till he thought he had done for another pair of pants, and that brought him up. He is so desperately fat that they are always going.

A CALM, clear river, flowing between mountains, steeped in light and" laughing with greenery-such was the Rhine when I saw it first. On my second visit, the picture was reversed. It was Midsummer; but Midsummer out of sorts-gusty, turbulent, fractious. The rain was pelting, the wind moaning, and the river rushing past, in brown yeasty waves, when I set foot on board the steamer at Bonn, on my way upstream to Mayence. All was changed; the mountains looked grim and ghastly, furled about with livid swathes of vapour, and their craggy summits half-hidden, half-revealed, by the trailing fringes of the storm. Kloster Nonnenwerth was weeping sore amongst its willows, under Rolandseck, the eternal watcher; and all the little hoary villages along the vales looked as if they had cried their lives out from window and door, and were about to exhale bodily into mist, as a natural sequel. Now and then, it is true, something like a smile broke through the leaden dulness, restoring its natural beauty to the scene; and in one of these brief intervals, looking sternwards, I had a view of the Seven Mountains, purple against a stone-grey sky, the mystery of clouds swept clear" from their foreheads, and all their ghostly cerements vanished out of sight. But this lull was but of brief duration, and in the midst of all sorts of inclemencies we panted and struggled on, and at last reached Mayence by a magnificent sunset, that changed the whole surface of the Rhine into one vast sheet of rose-coloured water, flickered, here and there, with silver, and pricked with the shining points of stars.

I slept at Castel, on the other side of the bridge of boats, and from my bedroom window looked out on the old town of Mayence, with its gleaming roofs and towers, and on the "noble and abounding river," sweeping grandly towards the Rheingau, in the glimmer of the rising moon.

The next morning Midsummer was as well as could be expected, after its tantrums of the day before, and we had a pleasant journey through the Hockheim vineyards and across an open pastoral country, extending to the base of the Taunus Hills. Before us rose a broad, bulky mountain, the Great Feldberg, and at its foot lay strewn the ruins of Falkenberg Castle.

Now and then we rushed out of corn-fields and pastures into the forest land, and caught glimpses of herds of deer, startled by our dragonlike approach, and scudding away athwart the sunlit glades into the sombre depths beyond.

A strange contrast, by the way, this passage of a railway train through the heart of an old forest; the noisy rush of material progress through the region of nature's immutable calm. The contrast is strange to the railway traveller, but would be far more so to any contemplative Jacques,! seated amongst the primaval beech-stems, and meandering, peradventure, at the moment, through the pellucid chapters of some "running brook."

What would Jacques do, I wonder? Lift up his eyes in an ecstasy, and break out into vehement laudation? Or would he turn aside from the clash and the uproar into some remote and more secluded dell, where only the forest creatures track their paths, and only the throstle is privileged to weave silence into song? Were I Jacques, I would do the latter, I think, so weary am I of that metallic cry of Progress, wherewith the Age, through brass pipes and iron pipes, and with eternal, wiredrawn iteration, magnifies its achievement.

But listen-from his arbour of refuge, and by the throstle's worshipful leave, a Jacques, of my way of thinking, maketh confession of faith. "The Age," quoth he,

"Culls simples

With a broad clown's back, turned broadly,

To the glory of the stars;

We are gods, by our own reck'ning,

And may well shut up the temples,

And wield on, amid the incense steam,
The thunder of our cars.

"For we throw out acclamations

Of self-thanking, self-admiring,
With, at every mile run faster,
"O the wondrous, wondrous Age!'
Little thinking if we work our SOULS,
As nobly as our iron,

Or if angels will commend us

At the goal of pilgrimage.

"Why, what is this patient entrance
Into nature's deep resources,

But the child's most gradual learning

To walk upright without bane?

When we drive out, from the cloud of steam,

Majestical white horses,

Are we greater than the first men,

Who led black ones by the mane?

If we trod the depths of ocean,

If we struck the stars in rising,
If we wrapped the globe intensely
With our hot, electric breath,
'Twere but power within our tether,
No new spirit-power conferring,
And in life we were not greater men,
Nor bolder men in death."*

Amen! And all honour to this Jacques for his noble and plain speaking, but while we have been maligning iron and steam, and lapsing therefrom, into reveries equally vindictive, those blind, unresentful instruments have borne us rapidly on, and waking at last out of my dream, I find myself at Frankfort, and soon after at Homburg, my destination. Homburg would be a healthy, enjoyable place enough, if its visitors could refrain from stewing the live-long day over the atrocious rouge-et

* "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," by E. B. Browning.

noir tables. I am not going to sermonise on these paradisal pandemoniums, but I may remark, en passant, that if proof were wanting of the evil and degrading influence of play, that proof exists and is patent to every observer in the unmitigated ugliness of all confirmed gamblers. Not a natural ugliness, in many cases, but an ugliness superinduced and compelled by the intense working of vile and low passions. Take a score of such men at haphazard, and I defy you to produce, from any sphere of ill-doing, more warped and unlovely specimens of humanity; the moral brand glares through the physical mask with a hideous and unmistakable emphasis. To the spiritual anatomist these salles de jeu offer a wide circle of observation. He walks the hospitals in them. Only, instead of whitewashed walls, and truckle-beds, and sick bodies, he has gilded ceilings, and velvet hangings, and diseased souls. He holds no camphor to his nostrils as he moves among the plague-stricken, but he knows there is an infection in the air, more fatally virulent than small-pox, and typhus, and the black death are fraught withal. The shareholders in these establishments receive dividends of ten, and twenty, and thirty per cent. ; what is the per-centage of the ruin that society entails through their action?

The town of Homburg is beautifully situated, but not near enough to the mountains, which are scarcely within walking distance. They are fine, stately-looking mountains, however, with some good effects of colour; being now black with climbing pine-woods, now brown with moorland, now golden with gorse. The town itself is a comfortable, old-fashioned, paternal-governmentish sort of place. The Landgrave's chateau is everybody's chateau, and everybody walks into it, and through it, and sits down in it, and smokes his pipe in it, and nobody ever turns anybody out. Architecturally speaking, there is not much to be said about it. There is a tall, white donjon tower, rising in the middle of the court-yard, and overlooking the length and breadth of the land; and between this tower, I observed, and the great Feldberg there is a good understanding and fellowship, for when the Feldberg's round phiz wrinkles into laughter with the first sunbeams, the white tower is sure to laugh too, with a queer sort of wink of its window-panes, and a glimmer of its gilded weather-vane atop.

There is an equestrian statue, too, of some former Landgrave, high up against the same court wall, which is laughable in its grotesqueness, for the horse, occupied apparently with looking out of a two-pair of stairs window, seems to have got his hind-legs into difficulties, and the Landgrave, holding on by the mane, stares ruefully down at the uncomfortable perspective of paving-stones below.

The castle terrace commands a magnificent view over a richly cultivated valley, backed by the far-reaching range of the Taunus mountains. For a considerable time after my arrival, these mountains wore their nightcaps all day long, not having the courage, I suppose, to attend to their coiffure in the then state of the weather. Sometimes the nightcaps were perched jauntily on the summit of their crowns; at others (when the weather thickened), they slipped down over their eyes, which made them look like confirmed invalids, propped up in bed, with a background of bolsters, and fit for any kind of physic. More than once, in an aggravation of cloudiness, and when the case grew hopeless, they

broke into vehement passions, and then, from under the flapping frills of their head-gear, gleamed forth sharp, fiery flashes, accompanied with groans that seemed to shake their very insides, so dire was the rumbling that ensued. When the sunshine came at last, for good and all, the mountains were scarcely to be recognised, so bland and benevolent were their faces, and so bald their pates. They looked quite absurdly amiable. In the Landgrave's garden there is an old fish-pond, full of old carp, and the king of them, a round-shouldered old fellow, in a brown surtout, turned up with gold, suffered himself, I remarked, to be pushed, and jostled, and poked in the ribs, just in the same paternal-governmentish sort of way as his suzerain in the chateau above. The bread that was thrown in for the royal table was so nibbled at and gobbled down by the hungry courtiers (who came sailing up in a line directly it splashed into the water), that the poor old king seldom got a breakfast, much less a bellyful. Yet I never saw him out of temper; now and then he would show the whites of his eyes, as if in protest, but nothing came of it.

Just so the Homburg citizens nibble at their suzerain's strawberries and strip his currant-bushes as they stroll through the kitchen-garden, talking of "our hay-crop," and "our apple-harvest." And the worthy old Landgrave writes up at all his gates, "Walk in, good people-men, women, and children-walk in, and welcome, only don't bring your dogs." But the dogs come too, of their own accord, and their puppies with them, and now and then, I suppose, the Landgrave, catching sight of them, shows the whites of his eyes, in a sort of protest. . . . but nothing comes of it.

The first fine day there was a review of the Homburg army-three stout lads, with brass pots on their heads, and little play-swords by their sides, who marched a yard this way and a yard that way, made funny little thrusts at each other with sham bayonets, and then strode off to their barracks, after being duly complimented by their commander-inchief. This was the infantry. The cavalry did not show on the occasion, and for a sufficient reasona-he died of the cholera, last summer, poor soul! and times having been peaceable since, he has never been replaced. Revolutionary principles, as you may imagine, have not yet threatened the stability of the Homburg government, so that its standing army (I never saw it standing but that once) is rather a matter of etiquette than anything else.

I dined daily at an uncountable table-d'hôte in the Kursaal, and in the end became inured to German cookery. That is to say, I resigned myself to the sempiternal boiled beef (which, dodge about as you will, there is no avoiding), and accepted stewed prunes with my kid, and boiled cherries with my chicken, and greengage-jam with my duck. Only, I eat these dishes separately, whereas the Germans, apparently, prefer taking a little of everything and eating it all together.

As a general rule at a German dinner, whatever is not sweet is sour, and in the latter category, say the ill-natured, are to be included all the wines. But they were pleasant, after all, those Kursaal dinners, with their merry babble and complete sans gêne, and very sumptuous was the saloon in which they were spread, enamelled from ceiling to floor with gold and arabesques, and wreaths and garlands. Pleasant, also, was the view through the open windows on to the smooth, verdant lawns, with their