Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/167

164 of a range of cottages, serving a better purpose than when they were the bulwark of a half-savage warrior.

Sonnenberg is kept in beautiful order by the duke's command and money. There are plantations of furze about the old walls, narrow labyrinthine walks enclosed with shrubbery and imbowered with clematis, and seats wherever rests are wanted. I unluckily disturbed a tête à tête to-day, which, if there be truth in "love's speechless messages," will make a deep mark in the memory of two happy-looking young people.

There is a compact village nestled close under the ruins of the castle. Here it was that the feudal dependants of the lord lived, and here the rural population is still penned. These villages are picturesque objects in the landscape, but, on a close infection, they are squalid, dirty, most comfortless places, where the labouring poor are huddled together without that good gift—sweet air, and plenty of it, which seems as much their right as the birds'.

When I see the young ones here playing round a heap of manure that is stacked up before the door, I think how favoured are the children of the poorest poor of our New-England villages—but softly—the hard-pressed German peasant, in his pent-up village, has a look of contentment and cheerfulness that our people have not. If his necessities are greater, his desires are fewer. God is the father of all, and these are his compensations.

We got home to Burgh-strasse just as the last hues