Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/146

Rh of potatoes, oats, pease, and beans; no fences, hedges or barrier of any sort—one vast sea of agricultural wealth.

We are now, as Mr. Murray tells us, "in the largest and wealthiest city on the Rhine," and have more than enough to do if we see the half set forth on the eight well-filled pages of his best of all guide-books. We leave here at four P.M.; so you see how slight a view we can have even of the outside of things. Our habit of breakfasting at nine abridges our active time, but it gives me a quiet morning hour for my journal. Do you know—I did not—that Cologne received its name from Agrippina, Nero's mother—surely the most wretched of women? She was born here, and sent hither a Roman colony, calling the place Colonia Aggrippina. A happy accident I should think it, if I were a Colognese, that blotted out her infamous name from my birthplace.

passed the day most diligently; and as it is not in human nature not to value that which costs us labour, you must feel very grateful to me if I spare you the description of church after church, reliques, and pictures. Such reliques, too, as the real bones of St Ursula and her thirteen thousand virgins! the bones, real too, of the Magi, the three kings of Cologne (whose vile effigies are blazoned on half the sign-boards on the Continent), and such pictures as Ruben's crucifixion of St. Peter, which