the cunning workmanship of some clever artists of former days, and the taste and splendour of the ancient possessors. The family occupy the story above, consisting of a suite of fine lofty apartments, where I often partook of the hospitality of the estimable owner and his polished and most amiable lady, the happy circle sometimes increased by the presence of their son, a tall, manly-looking-fellow, with his very beautiful wife, a country woman of ours, I am proud to say, and who live at a pretty place about a mile from St. Wolfgang.

The little town of St. Wolfgang is a straggling sort of place, and not in character with its environs. The hotel is in a dull, low situation, and not at all alluring in its outward appearance, yet I passed upwards of a week there most comfortably and agreeably. Mine host and his wife were so attentive and obliging, my nice breakfast of such excellent coffee and good etceteras, and for my dinner, fish so fresh and welldressed, a cotelette worthy of Ude, with capital beer and wine, my clean and comfortable chamber; all these agrémens combined, with my contiguity to the schloss, to render me indisposed to depart. Indeed, this said White Horse hotel may be well recommended for a temporary sojourn, and as a point of departure to many objects and places of attraction in the immediate neighbourhood. Primo, it is by far the nearest and most convenient spot to start from for the ascent of the Schafberg, which no traveller, possessing vigour or perseverance, will fail to make, if he has any regard for his reputation as an enterprising and courageous tourist, or any earnest desire of enjoying a most wonderful survey of the world he is in. To the infirm or indolent, and to the fair sex, there are facilities offered, which remove at once all difficulties and objections. For eight florins you are conveyed, in an easy chair, to the very summit, and down again to your easy chair in your room. For one person four porters are required, who take their turns two at a time; but, although the ascent in some places is so steep as to require great exertion of their strength, yet those fellows make nothing of it, and heavy as you may be, make light of you. Instead of taking their turns with reluctance, quite the contrary; they resume their places with alacrity, and with an apparent preference of the honour of carrying you to walking unemployed. Yet I should suppose they would rather have the pleasure of taking up that young lady with the slender form, than her husband or brother of sixteen stone. Before deciding upon the ascent some precautions are necessary, with respect to the weather and time of the year; nor should the stranger, however young, agile, and adventurous, attempt it without a guide, for sometimes the fogs arise suddenly, and there would be great danger in being alone, and unacquainted with the paths and turnings, especially in descending. Also in unfavourable weather, supposing the summit gained, there would be nothing else gained to repay one for so much fatigue and exertion, for the world below is enveloped in mist and obscurity, to say nothing of the difficult and slippery descent. In the next place the mind must be made up to remain all the night on the summit, if we would enjoy one of the principal anticipations which urge on those who climb the steep ascent, I mean the setting, and especially the rising of the sun. When all fatigues and difficulties are surmounted, and you have reached the top, it is extremely agreeable to find a resting-place, and especially a shelter for the night, however short the night and rude the shelter. For these comforts, the new arrivals have to thank the landlord of the

White Horse below, who has established himself landlord above, far out of reach of supervisors or licensing magistrates, I should suppose. The hotel he has here constructed is not on a grand scale, but in that substantial hut it is much better to sleep, than making your bed on the cold ground. There are beds for eight, and to ensure one, it is necessary to be provided with a ticket, which is given at the White Horse, and for which you pay 30 kreuzers. Although one always finds on the mountain, coffee, bread, saucisson, cheese, wine, &c., yet I would advise every one to order something substantial, according to his taste, to be carried up by the guide or one of the porters, for one arrives on the summit pretty hungry, and the air there is very keen and appetizing. Sometimes one meets pleasant parties on that high eminence, and of course there can be no other alternative but to become sociable. I met a young Englishman at Ischl, who, from some words which escaped him, had not long before made first acquaintance with his intended wife in that hut; but they say that marriages are made in the heavens. It is only during the three months of July, August, and September, that open house is kept on the mountain, then the landlord descends from his exalted position, and for the remainder of the year the eagles reign lords paramount. Before setting out, it is well to be provided with a stout walking-stick, or a staff well spiked, which they will give you at the hotel, and very useful in mountain excursions. Regard well, also, the solidity of your boots or shoes, and if you take up a good telescope, your enjoyment of the scene below will be much increased. Let your guide also carry an additional light coat, if you happen to have one, for the sharp air on the summit is apt to check the perspiration excited by the laborious ascent. For the young and active, about three hours and a half are sufficient for the ascent, but if not pressed for time, I advise every one to take it easy. It is better to leave St. Wolfgang about three in the afternoon, for then you reach the top in good time to enjoy the sunset. At all the picture shops they sell a small panorama for 10 kreuzers, which will be found very useful, and will enable the spectator to ascertain the name and position of each lake, and also the name of the most conspicuous mountains, among the infinite number which present themselves on all sides to your view. With a good glass, on a clear day, one can see the distant towers of Munich and Ratisbon; but it would be impossible to particularize the numberless attractions of the wonderful panorama around. But the visitor must not let the fatigue of the preceding day prevent him from rising before the dawn commences, for it is the first glimmering approach, and the gradual increase of light which ushers in Aurora, and the receding shades of darkness by degrees withdrawing the veil which covers the face of Nature, which form the wonderful beauty of that most glorious spectacle, and which must impress every rational mind with feelings of awe, and grateful adoration towards the Almighty Creator, who called such a beautiful world out of darkness, and gave it to us for our habitation.

The Church at St. Wolfgang is very interesting in itself, and as so connected with the life of the holy man, the canonized bishop of that name. He was bishop of Ratisbon in the tenth century, who, to escape from the almost idolatrous worship of the people, fled from his bishopric, and took refuge in the then wild country bordering the lake. He erected a chapel, and made himself a cell at Frankenstein, where he lived an anchorite five years. His piety soon attracted pilgrims, of

whom there came annually twelve thousand to receive his benediction. Being recognised by a mountaineer, he was prevailed upon to return to Ratisbon, where he died. About a century after his death, they erected a church to his memory, which was destroyed by fire in 1420, and replaced by the present church, the interior of which is very fine, as well as interesting, particularly the altar, a beautiful piece of workmanship by a sculptor in wood, named Michael Packer, a Tyrolean artist, and a scholar of Albert Durer. Besides other altars they show you the missal, the cross and chalice of the saint, and his cell, enclosed with an iron grating. On the Sunday I heard some excellent music, but I could not help remarking the extraordinary plainness of the female peasant part of the congregation, and the premature shrivelled appearance of their tawny skin. Their shapes too were most frightfully disfigured by those hideous brown stuff spencers which they all wear, and which give them the appearance of being hump-backed, or at least of being very round-shouldered. I suppose some chilly fashionable of that class, having desired her milliner to well stuff her spencer to protect her from the cold, was followed by a host of imitators, each rivalling the other in the quantity of padding about the shoulders, and which, even in the summer heat, they do not abandon. However, I must say, that the coquetries of their toilette did not distract their attention from their religious duties, for I never saw a more attentive congregation, and which indeed is the case throughout Austria, as far as I have seen. In the vicinity of St. Wolfgang, there are three other lakes well worth visiting, should the tourist have time and inclination to see all. The Schwarzen See (Black Lake), so called from the dark appearance of its water, and very interesting on account of its solitary and elevated situation, but very fatiguing to ascend, and very disagreeable to descend, especially after wet weather. Next the Attersee, the largest of all the lakes, on the borders of which there is a very good hotel at Weissenbach, where one dines well and sleeps comfortably. Then the Mondsee, across which one sails to visit the town of that name, the church of which is the finest in this country, after the celebrated Dom at Salzburg. An agreeable excursion may be made to these two lakes by leaving St. Wolfgang early in the morning, with a boat and a couple of rowers. In about three quarters of an hour you arrive opposite the rock at Falkenstein, where there is an extraordinary echo, which repeats words and even phrases several times. If you are provided with a pistol, you will be much struck with the report it makes, or with a cornet-àpiston, producing the effect of a concert. Then a most charming sail to the farthest extremity of the lake takes you to Fierberg, where you land, and if hungry will find some excellent fish. A walk of about an hour will bring you to Scharfling, on the borders of the Mondsee, where you take boat to Au, from whence there is a path by the side of the canal to Unterrach, where you embark for the hotel at Weissenbach, before mentioned. If you wish to visit the town of Mondsee, or to loiter at any intervening spot, you can dismiss your boat when you reach Fierberg, and from Schaffing you have a picturesque way to St. Gilgen, and after exploring the beauties of that place, you can return to Ischl by the direct post road, or cross the lake again to St. Wolfgang. There is also a very interesting walk of about an hour and a half, through a silent shady forest, to the rock of Falkenstein, where one sees the hermitage, and the cavern which St. Wolfgang inhabited.

THE SCRAPES AND ESCAPES OF TOM BAGGS.

THERE is a class of men who seem to be the footballs of Fate, for she kicks them about, now up, now down, in a most unaccountable manner, and yet with no very great apparent detriment to themselves. They always "fall on their feet," like a cat thrown out of a second floor window, and though occasionally a little shaken by their tumble, they are never much hurt, and go on again shortly as fresh and as lively as before. One upset in the hunting field will break one man's neckanother has had fifty in his life, and never been the worse for them—all from a lucky way he has of coming down. So it is, morally, with the men we are writing of: they are ruined in fortune, hopes, reputation or something of the kind, a hundred times in the course of a lifetime, and yet you meet them a few months after each of such disasters looking as happy and flourishing as ever, while you have known many a man hang himself, or jump into a canal, or rush off to California, or do something equally demented, for a less cause than any one of the other's hundred mishaps. What is the cause of this difference? Is it temperament? To a great extent. Or education? Perhaps a little so. Or digestion? Immensely so. But yet it is none of these three individually, though they all operate considerably in producing the enviable result.

Probably almost every reader will call to mind one such individual among his acquaintance. The best specimen I ever knew myself, was my old schoolfellow, Tom Baggs.

At school, Tom was never out of a scrape. He had always some new plan for infallible "construing," or for unerring mathematical demonstrations; but somehow or other, when he put them in practice, he never knew his classical lesson at all, and his mathematical exercise invariably "demonstrated" the very reverse of the truth. He had wonderful schemes, too, for procuring unlimited supplies of apples and hard-bake, without the possibility of an inconvenient discovery on the part of our dominie, but the schemes were always fallacious, and ended in heaven knows how many hundred lines of task-work to every one engaged in them, with the addition of a sound birching of poor Tom, the concoctor. Still Tom was never out of spirits. "Here's a pretty go!" he'd say, on the first discovery of any of his nefarious plots; "I'm done for. Of course I shall be expelled. Well, it can't be helped, can it?" And with that comfortable reflection, he submitted patiently to the prescribed punishment, and then set his brain to work on new schemes.

When Tom left school he went to college, where he was rusticated more than once, and every one said, "What a lucky fellow to escape expulsion!" but he managed to pull through for his degree, and the very day after he got it, in a town and gown row, he "pitched in" to the first man he came near, who proved to be the principal of a neighbouring college. He was recommended to leave the university forthwith, and he did so; but it was of little consequence, as he had just saved his degree.

What was to be done with a fellow like Tom Baggs? You could n't make him a lawyer or a doctor, to say nothing of a parson. If you gave him a commission in the army, he was safe to be broken in a year for

some absurd prank; and if he went into the navy (but he was too old for that) he would have been at the head of a mutiny or the bottom of the sea on his first voyage. After all, the army perhaps was best suited to him, and so Baggs senior, who, entre nous, was mortally afraid of his son, got him a commission in the 127th foot.

The first fortnight of Tom's noviciate had hardly passed away, before he was the most popular man in the regiment. He was extremely goodnatured, always in high spirits, ever ready for a lark, and as daring a fellow as ever rode a steeple-chase or led a forlorn hope.

The 127th had a grievance. The officers were a set of jolly fellows, with one exception, and that was the lieut.-colonel. The latter was one of those anomalous beings, a straight-laced, psalm-singing soldier ; a man who publicly reprimanded his men if they played at football on Sunday afternoon, and positively refused to let the band of the regiment play at any theatre, ball, or race-meeting. This was unendurable to the rest of the officers; they had a fine band, and each one, of course, contributed to its maintenance, and yet the colonel, as commander of the regiment, could forbid it playing at the very places where the officers most wanted it. As soon as Tom heard of this, he resolved to remedy the evil, or perish in the attempt.

Tom's regiment was quartered in one of the quietest old cathedral towns in the south of England; a place, in fact, abounding in clerical gentlemen and serious old ladies addicted to charitable societies for aiding everybody in the world-except their poor neighbours at their very doors. In this same town was also a goodly sprinkling of young damsels, whose natural tastes by no means coincided with those of their seniors, nor were they half so much pleased at the sight of a cassock and a shovel hat, as of a red jacket and a shako. A young curate had occasionally charms for some of them, but he stood no chance when even the newest ensign entered the lists against him. The elderly dames, on the contrary, looked on the military dress as Satan's uniform, and shunned the sight of young officers of every grade almost as religiously as the latter avoided them. One exception alone did the devout antiques make in their renunciation of red-coats, and that exception was in favour of the psalmsinging lieut.-colonel of the 127th.

He was considered eligible to figure among deans and canons and prebendaries, on the committees of church-building, colonial-bishop-making, Hindoo-converting, universal protestantizing, and every other sort of societies, to which they were devoting their time, energies, and spare half-crowns; while the rest of the regiment were looked upon as lost sheep.

"Ensign Baggs presents his compliments to Miss Penelope Prue, and humbly begs permission to wait on her, in order to unfold to her comprehensive intellect and all-sympathizing heart, the outlines of a society he wishes to see formed, having for its object the amelioration of the spiritual and moral condition of the benighted inhabitants of the island of Tamarayhoo.

"Ensign Baggs is aware of Miss Prue's reasonable prejudice against men of his profession, but he assures her that she will be doing him deep injustice if she judges him by the ordinary standard, as he trusts that in principles, sentiments, and conduct, he is more free from the vanities and follies of this sinful world than the generality of his age and order." Such were the contents of a little note forwarded by Tom Baggs one

VOL. XXXII.

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