Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 1.djvu/295

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AND ITALY.
271

Gipsies was said in old times to have emigrated. I do not know whether there was any Gipsy blood in these girls—their eyes had not the peculiar cast of the race. One of the three was very handsome, and looked proud—as indeed she was—and listened with an air of haughty disdain to every compliment. They had on their faces, that which too often rests on the countenances of the lower order of Germans—an expression of sullenness. I soon grew too tired to listen, and left them playing. The waning moon rose over the sea of hills on which I looked from my window; I was almost too fatigued to see. At sunrise I started up to gaze;—the glory of awakening day was on the mountain-tops, which looked more like a stormy ocean than a scene of earth. I scarcely know what I saw; my eyes were drooping with sleep; I knew my companions would not rise, so I went again to bed, and when I awoke, it seemed as if I had dreamed of a glorious sunrise in fairy-land. I looked from the tiny casement of my room—we were on the highest of many hundred hills, nearly two thousand feet above the level of the sea, and commanded a wide horizon, inclosing a district strangely convulsed, wildly heaped up with mountains and rocks of various and fantastic shapes, clothed with wood.

Murray speaks of the inn at the Grosse Winterberg