Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/125

 for smoke but the door." "In regard to bed, [the traveller] must tumble pell-mell in a large kind of barn, where the landlord and landlady, men and maidservants, and passengers of both sexes, cows, sheep, and horses pig all together on the ground; and happy he that's accommodated with comfortable clean straw. … In cities or large towns one is somewhat better entertained; though there is little occasion to commend their very best accommodations."

Lady Mary Montagu traveled through Germany in 1716, and, writing from Cologne, says: "We hired horses from Nimeguen hither, not having the conveniency of the post, and found but very indifferent accommodations at Reinberg, our first stage; but that was nothing to what I suffered yesterday. We were in hopes to reach Cologn; our horses tired at Stamel, three hours from it, where I was forced to pass the night in my clothes, in a room not at all better than a hovel; for though I have my own bed with me, I had no mind to undress, where the wind came from a thousand places."

When she reached Bohemia in November she pronounced it "the most desert of any I have seen in Germany. The villages are so poor, and the post-houses so miserable, that clean straw and fair water are blessings not always to be met with, and better accommodation not to be hoped for. Though I carried my own bed with me, I could not sometimes find a place to set it up in; and I rather chose to travel all night, as cold as it is, wrapped up in my furs, than to go into the common stoves, which are filled with a mixture of all sorts of ill scents."

What was true of these regions applied equally to the south side of the Erzgebirge, where the inns were "not a jot better than the Spanish ones."

In traveling through Friuli, in the extreme northeast of Italy, and the Austrian Duchy of Carniola, Dr. Moore declares, "The inns are as bad as the roads are good; for which reason we chose to sleep on the latter rather than in the former, and actually travelled five days and nights