Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/270

260 by the house, and she assailed us again, but in a different tone. She had discovered that she was a poor woman, that times were bad, and that she had a large family. Finally, she said that she would be very glad to take what we had offered. At first my German friend was inexorable, and, indeed, would have driven off without giving her a kreuzer, if I had not begged that this argumentum ad misericordiam might prevail. The castle of Rabenstein is a picturesque old schloss, which has been added to and altered from time to time, until it was finally modernised into a German summer residence. It belongs to Count Schörnborn, and is plainly fitted up—the frauenzimmerisch details of the furniture contrasting strangely with the grim and solemn aspect of the walls and ceilings.

Nothing can be more romantic than the situation of the castle itself, perched as it is on the edge of a lofty precipice overhanging the Ahornthal. You walk out of one of the portals in the rear across a trim little garden, and look over an ivy-clad wall, almost straight down a depth of 150 feet, into a maple valley below, through which the Essbach winds its course, half hidden here and there by the dense foliage with which it is surrounded. The grandeur and beauty of the view from this point pass all description. Gösweinstein, a little hamlet also situated on a lofty eminence, commands a splendid panorama of the surrounding country, and will amply repay a visit.

It would be difficult indeed, to mention any of this lovely country which has not some attraction, be it artistic, geological, or piscatory, for the tourist. Those to whom time and economy are objects, will find it more accessible and infinitely cheaper than Switzerland. Five francs a day will cover the traveller’s expenses at the inns of Muggendorf or Streitberg, and it is even possible to live for less, en pension, at a lodging-house. A carriage at either of these places may be hired for a few shillings a day, but the short distances which separate the principal points of interest offer peculiar advantages to the pedestrian. You may “do” the place (as the phrase goes) in a week, but those who seek real seclusion from town life, who enjoy pure invigorating air, and charming scenery, may spend a month very pleasantly in Franconia. C. L. E.

Beauchamp was in a state of excitement on the 30th of April. In former days a fair had been held there on May-day, but it had gradually degenerated with the fortunes of the village, and for several years past had served only as an excuse for certain disorderly revels which the rural police of the district were powerless in attempting to put down. Tom had devised a plan which he thought would neutralise much of its evil effect. He gave notice some time previously that he should give a feast to the school-children in the rectory meadow on May-day, on which occasion he offered a prize to the cricket club, and arranged an unusually good match with the Chanleigh players. He engaged the services of the village band, and invited the presence of the “Green,” which verdant but unwieldy emblem of the day was to be decorated with flowers from his own garden. Several customs which had fallen into desuetude were scarcely worth revival. The erection of a greasy pole, with a leg of mutton on the top; the sale of a flabby kind of cheesecake, called a Beauchamp custard, for the making of which every third person in the village became temporarily a confectioner: these were doings of doubtful pleasure and profit. Tom depended rather upon the judicious commingling of rich and poor, the excellence of his home-brewed, and the strong animal spirits of the children, whose enjoyment was to be his first consideration. He had invited several of his neighbours, and fine weather alone was needful to make his little fête-day go off pleasantly.

On this 30th of April, therefore, Tom’s hands were full of business. It is not to be supposed that a bachelor expecting on the morrow thirty or forty private guests, in addition to a large public assemblage, can be without various hospitable cares; and he had been so absorbed in considering whether the round of beef and the sirloin, and the two hams and the pigeon-pies, would be enough for the cold dinner that was to be laid in his dining-room, that the circumstances which had weighed down his spirits a few weeks back, were almost driven from his recollection. All the morning his attention had been given to detail, and that of a very matter-of-fact character: how many tea-spoons he was possessed of; where the fat ponies that drew the various little four-wheeled carriages which he expected, could be put up; even the recipe for syllabub in his housekeeper’s cookery-book, the excellence of which he somehow doubted.

But all these questions were settled at last, and Tom’s mind grew easy towards evening on the score of his next day’s responsibilities. In the midst of his last injunctions to his household, he heard with some surprise the voice of the village post-mistress asking to see him. She was a hard-working woman, who kept a shop in which every necessary of life was to be sold, with the exception of the few articles she was perpetually “out of.”

“I’ve got a letter for you, Mr. Morland,” she said, “which ought by rights to have been delivered this morning. When I was a-sorting of the letters and a-putting of them into the different bags, Mrs. Carter’s Susan comes into the shop with the youngest child in her arms, which she sets down on the counter, and she asks for half-a-pound of treacle: of course I get the jar down, and just as I take the lid off, she changes her mind. Mr. Carter’s Susan is always a-changing of her mind, and she says, ‘No, Mrs. Barnet, I’ll have half-a-pound of golden syrup instead,’ and I go to the last shelf next my back-parlour door to get it, and while I’m gone I suppose Mrs. Carter’s youngest child—which is a boy, Mr. Morland—takes up one of the letters I’ve been a-sorting of and lets it fall into the jar of treacle, for there I found it not half-an-hour ago.”

Mrs. Barnet unfolded a clean blue and white handkerchief as she spoke, and displayed a letter of doubtful hue, which had evidently been