The most hardened of travellers must find the first half-hour of a solitary journey in a strange country a trifle dreary. If even, moreover, the banks of the Elbe betwixt Hamburg and Haarburg rivalled those of the same river above Dresden in beauty and variety, they must have looked dismal on the fourth of September 1839, after a night's storm, which had scattered all the first yellow leaves of the linden trees on the Jungfernstieg, and under clouds hanging low, which presently discharged themselves in a dense chill rain. The deck of the steamer was made untenable by a drove of horses on their way from the Lubeck fair to Italy. The little close cabin reeked with tobacco-smoke. I had before me a day and a night's journey through this forbidding weather, across the dreariest country conceivable, with only Patience and Pantomime to stand for my purveyors and interpreters. “What a fool have I been, ” said I, “ever to think of this Musical Festival at Brunswick! ”

But the people of North Germany have a good-natured way with them, which must put the most pertinacious feelings of strangeness and solitude to flight in a wonderfully short time. When the tobacco wreaths parted in the cabin, a group or two were revealed worth studying.