It was at nightfall that I drove into Kalbbratonstadt, my postilion announcing my advent at the gates, and all the way to the Platz where the inn stood, by a volley of whip-crackings which might have announced a Grand-Duke or a prima donna. Some casements were hastily opened, as we rumbled along, and the guests of a _café_ issued hurriedly into the street to watch us; but these demonstrations over, I gained the “Schwein” without further notice, and descended. Herr Krainm looked suspiciously at the small amount of luggage of the traveller who arrived by “extra post,” but, like an honest German, he was not one to form rash judgments, and so he showed me to a comfortable apartment, and took my orders for supper in all respectfulness. He waited upon me also at my meal, and gave me opportunity for conversation. While I ate my Carbonade mit Kartoffel-Salad, therefore, I learned that, being already nine o'clock, it was far too late an hour to present myself at the English Embassy,--for so he designated our minister's residence; that, at this advanced period of the night there were but few citizens out of their beds: the Ducal candle was always extinguished at half-past eight, and only roisterers and revellers kept it up much later. My first surprise over, I owned I liked all this. It smacked of that simple patriarchal existence I had so long yearned after. Let the learned explain it, but there is, I assert, something in the early hours of a people that guarantee habits of simplicity, thrift, and order. It is all very well to say that people can be as wicked at eight in the evening as at two or three in the morning; that crime cares little for the clock, nor does vice respect the chronometer; but does experience confirm this, and are not the small hours notorious for the smallest moralities? The Grand-Duke, who is fast asleep at nine, is scarcely disturbed by dreams of cruelties to his people. The police minister, who takes his bedroom candle at the same hour, is seldom harassed by devising new schemes of torture for his victims. I suffered my host to talk largely of his town and its people; and probably such a listener rarely presented himself, for he certainly improved the occasion. He assured me, with a gravity that vouched for the conviction, that the capital, though by no means so dear as London or Paris, contained much, if not all, these more pretentions cities could boast. There was a court, a theatre, a promenade, a public fountain, and a new jail, one of the largest in all Germany. Jenny Lind had once sung at the opera on her way to Vienna; and to prove how they sympathized in every respect with greater centres of population, when the cholera raged at Berlin, they, too, lost about four hundred of their townsfolk. Lastly, he mentioned, and this boastfully, that though neither wanting organs of public opinion, nor men of adequate ability to guide them, the Kalbbratoners had never mixed themselves up in politics, but proudly