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26
FAMOUS SCOTS

forlorn-looking objects, trying evidently to look like trees, but whether they would really turn out to be trees on a nearer inspection is what I very much doubt.' At Cologne he had an amusing meeting with an Englishman, 'whom I at once twigged to be an Oxford man, and more, even, an Oxford tutor. There is a stiff twitch in the right shoulder of the tribe, answering to a similar one in the hip-bone on the same side, which there is no mistaking.' The tutor appears to have done valiant service in making known the traveller's wants in French to waiters, etc., though 'he spent rather too much of his time in scheming how to abridge the sixpence which, "time out of mind," has been the perquisite of Boots, doorkeepers, etc.' 'But,' he adds in excuse, 'his name was Bull, and therefore, as the authentic epitome of his countrymen, he would not fail to possess this along with the other peculiarities of Englishmen.' From Cologne, Ferrier went to Bonn, where he had an introduction to Dr. Welsh, and then proceeded up the Rhine to Mayence. He does not form a very high estimate of the beauty of the scenery. He feels 'a want of something; in fact, to my mind, there is a want of everything which makes earth, wood, and water something more than mere water, wood, and earth. We have here a constant and endless variety of imposing objects (imposing is just the word for them), but there is no variety in them, nothing but one round-backed hill after another, generally carrying their woods, when they have any, very stiffly, and when they have none presenting to the eye a surface of tawdry and squalid patchwork,' thus suggesting, in his view, a series of children's gardens—an impression often left on travellers when visiting this same country. His next letters find him settled in the University town of Heidelberg.