buys up, before anybody else, the delicacies of the season. It is supposed to be a sort of class vanity,—a way of asserting the position of the purchaser of green geese and early peas, the first sucking-pigs, grouse, woodcocks, costly hams, and foreign fruits. I am not of the opinion of some of my acquaintance,—the expressed opinion of some public writers,—that it is our habit as a people to eat too much. I believe that a very large proportion of my countrymen of all ranks, and yet more of my countrywomen, do not eat enough of the best kinds of food; but an exception must certainly be made in regard to that part of our middle-class population which the doctors know well as “the over-eating class.” Their charity would be doubly blessed if they gave their surplus food, or the price of it, to the needy. It is probable that very many have done so, as the impulse to self-denial seems to be universal throughout the kingdom, except among the scattered unfortunates who are too strictly moral in their attention to their maxim that “Parsimony is a virtue.”
There had been a general impression till a month ago that these Lancashire operatives had themselves been of the luxurious class of “workies:” and here again is one of the disclosures which the cotton famine has induced. We now know how wisely a large proportion of them have laid by money in their prosperous days. Their accounts in the Savings’ Banks, in Building Societies, and above all in those noble Cooperative Institutions at Rochdale, have vindicated their character as a class, in regard to the duty of accumulating savings, and creating capital. Good as it is for us, as a people, that our reserve as to our morals and habits of expenditure should have been broken through, it is especially a great benefit that the ways and views and characters of our chief company of operatives should have been laid open in so favourable a way. When affairs resume their natural course, we shall all know one another better, make more allowance perhaps for one another’s ways, feel less sensitive or respectful towards the merely rich, and more ready and eager to show the labouring classes how to make the best of their means. It will have been good for us to see how, while certain rich people have exercised their ingenuity in contriving how to give least with the least discredit, a great many more poor men and women have exercised their ingenuity in an opposite direction,—in contriving to cut off some personal expenditure hitherto considered necessary, in order to give something more necessary still to an impoverished brother labourer. It is good for us to find that, generally speaking, among the orderly people of all ranks, it is the rule and practice to lay by something for somebody, and thus to satisfy the claims of the next generation: but it is also good for us to be for once shaken out of our routine, and impelled to spend whatever we can muster out of our income (whatever it may be), and able to do so with a frank satisfaction, worth more to us and our neighbours than any pleasure that money can buy.
ASTLEY’S HORSE.
To the Editor of Once a Week.
Sir,—
The horse mentioned in your paper as “Astley’s old horse” was not a white one, but a dark bay. I painted him when he was more than thirty years old, and when, having lost all his teeth, he was fed on soaked bread.
Mr. Davis, in whose possession he was after Astley’s death, being my uncle, I had frequent opportunities of seeing the horse, and knew him well. He was called “the old Spanish horse.”
Abr. Cooper, R. A.19, New Millman Street.
A PEEP INTO THE PALATINATE.
PART I.—THE CASTLE OF TRIFELS.
That Danube voyage from Ratisbon to Vienna is worth the Rhine, Rhone, and Elbe voyages put together. There is one place, near Linz, where the gorge opens into a plain, and on one side the distant summits of the Austrian Alps appear only for some minutes, that suggests theatrical scene-shifting on an enormous scale. But this by the way. I had once seen the castle of Dürrenstein, where Richard Cœur de Lion was confined, and thought that I should like to see the castle of Trifels, to which he was transferred from Dürrenstein. A striking object from the neighbourhood of Worms is the long-backed Donnersberg mountain. This mountain is seen by everybody who goes up the hill behind Heidelberg Castle. I had visited it in 1861. The chief objects of interest on that walk, which began at Worms and ended at Kreuznach, were Pfeddersheim, with its crumbling mediæval walls; Zell, with its pure fountains and fine view; the village of Dannenfels, perched beautifully a little way up the Donnersberg, approached through a glade of chestnuts terminating a long prairie, the long flat top of the steep 2126 feet high; Thunder mountain, with its panoramic view; the gigantic beeches on the descent, with boles like the main-masts of three-deckers; the lower valley of the Alsenz, cragged and castellated, a miniature of the Nahe, which again is a miniature of the Rhine. This time we pass the Donnersberg and the first mountains of the Palatinate, and are duly delivered as ticketed and directed at the Neustadt station, where a branch of the railway pierces the hill-country, and connects it with Metz and Paris.
First appears the castle of Maxburg, on a most commanding position above the long village of Hamsbach. It was intended to restore this grand old historic ruin as a summer palace for the present king of Bavaria, Maximilian; and why the process of reconstruction was arrested we cannot tell. Probably his Alpine retreat of Hohenschwangau has greater charms of much the same nature. It often strikes one that princes and great folk who have many houses must experience to a certain degree that want of home which those feel who have no houses of their own. A feeling of desolation and failure is produced by the uninhabited state of the ambitious castle, while the respectability of the ruin has been destroyed. From the Donnersberg to the valley of the Queich extends the so-called Haardtgebirge, which is rather a
