the virtue of those Lazaruses who, witnessing the feasting of the Dives, go hungry every day.
I have given you an exact inventory of the dinner, "setting down naught in malice" or in misery; and when you are told that it costs but one florin (forty-two cents), that it is served with nice table-linen, large napkins, and silver forks, you must conclude that provisions are cheap, and that the traveller—if he can "catch the turbot"—is a happy man in Germany.[1]
When we got into the diligence at Bieberich there were two neat peasant-women beside us. We saw the Russian princess, whose carriage had disappointed her, waddling about, attended by her suit, in quest of a passage to Wiesbaden. One of the gentlemen said to her, "The sun is hot; it will be tiresome waiting," and counselled her highness to take a seat in the diligence. "It is quite shocking," she said, "to go in this way." "But there is no other, madame." So she yielded to necessity, and put her royal foot on the step, when, looking up, she shrunk back, exclaiming, "Comment? il y a des paysannes!" ("How is this? there are peasants here!") I am sure we should not have been more dismayed if we had been shoved in with the asses that carried us in the morning. We drove off; and when I compared this woman, with her vacant, gross
- ↑ The Englishman goes from here to London in two days, and there must pay at a hotel, for the single item in his dinner of a lobster sauce to his salmon, seventy-five cents! No wonder he "puts up" with Germany.
