Germany Bohemia and Hungary Author:George Robert Gleig Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. OUR LANDLADY AND WASHERWOMAN. THE EINSIEDLEK- STEIN. ITS DUNGEONS AND HALL. ITS HISTORY.—IN- SCRIPTION Over The Hermit's Grave.—Lose Our Way. ... more » GUIDED BY A PEASANT.—HIS CONVERSATION. MIS- TAKEN FOR ITALIAN MUSICIANS. GABEL. Hayde, which is a burgh town, having its burgomaster and other civic authorities, contains a population of between two and three thousand souls, and can boast of a large warehouse, or handlung, in which are exhibited and sold the mirrors and other articles in glass that are fabricated at Burgstein. Like most German towns of the same size which I have visited, it is exceedingly clean, and its environs are laid out with a good deal of taste. For the Germans, while in winter they shut themselves up in their houses, all the doors and windows of which are kept hermetically sealed, seem to live, during the summer months, only in the open air. Gardens are, therefore, their delight,—public gardens, where such thingsexist,— in which the men may smoke and drink their beer, the women sip their coffee, in society; or failing this, slips of soil, close to the highway side, from which they are separated only by a low railing,—so that the owners may behold from their open summer- houses every object that shall pass and repass. And truly it is a pleasant sight to see an entire population made happy by means so simple and so innocent. For of excesses the Bohemians are seldom, if ever, guilty. The men smoke incessantly, it is true, and some of them consume in the course of a holyday a tolerably large allowance of beer. But the beer is either very weak, or their heads are accustomed to it; for it is as rare to behold a Bohemian peasant drunk at a merrymaking or fete, as it is to find, under similar circumstances, an Englishman of the same class sober. A...« less