But now the infallible Bradshaw could not help me with the canoe one iota, and Baedeker was not written for a boat; so at Freyburg my plans resolved themselves into the simple direction, "Go at once to the source of the Danube." Next morning, therefore, found the Rob Roy in a cart, and the grey-clothed traveller walking beside it on the dusty Höllenthal road. The gay, light-hearted exultation of being strong and well, and on a right errand, and with unknown things to do and places to see and people to meet, who can describe this? How easy it is at such times to be glad, and to think this is being "thankful." After moralizing for a few miles, a carriage full of English people overtook me, and soon we became companions. "The English are so distant, so silent, such _hauteur_, and gloomy distrust," forsooth! A false verdict, say I. The ladies carried me off through the very pretty glen, and the canoe on its cart trundled slowly after us behind, through the Höllenthal Pass, which is too seldom visited by travellers, who so often admire the spire of Freyburg (from the railway perhaps), passing it on their route to Switzerland. This entrance to the Schwartzwald, or Black Forest, is a woody, rocky, and grim defile, with an excellent road, and good inns. The villages are of wood, and there is a saw-mill in every other house, giving a busy, wholesome sound, mellowed by the patter of the water-wheel. Further on, where tourists' scenery stops, it is a grand, dark-coloured ocean of hills. The houses get larger and larger, and fewer and fewer, and nearly every one has a little chapel built alongside, with a wooden saint's image of life-size nailed on the gable end. One night I was in one of these huge domiciles, when all the servants and ploughboys came in, and half said, half sung, their prayers, in a whining but yet musical tone, and then retired for a hearty supper. Our carriage mounted still among crags, that bowed from each side to meet across the narrow gorge, and were crested on high by the grand trees that will be felled and floated down the Rhine on one of those huge rafts you meet at Strasbourg. But everybody must have seen a Rhine raft, so I need not describe it, with its acres of wood and its street of cabin dwellings, and its gay bannerets. A large raft needs 500 men to navigate it, and the timber will sell for 30,000_l._ At the top of this pass was the watershed of this first chain of hills, where my English friends took leave of me. The Rob Roy was safely housed in the Baar Inn, and I set off for a long walk to find if the tiny stream there would possibly be navigable. Alone on a hillside in a foreign land, and with an evening sun on the wild mountains, the playful breeze and the bleating sheep around you--there is a certain sense of independent delight that possesses the mind then with a buoyant gladness; but how can I explain it in words, unless you have felt this sort of pleasure?