Neither the douaniers, nor the police, gave us the slightest inconvenience; the former, and without any fee, accepted our assurance that our carriage contained nothing contraband, and did not open a single box; the latter _visé’d_ our Belgian passports without delay, and within ten minutes from passing under the barrier, we found ourselves rolling quickly, over an excellent road, to Aix-la-Chapelle. The barrier itself, by the way, is a change from the Belgian;--a ponderous beam of wood, painted, as usual, in circular stripes of white and black, rests right across the road, and being loaded with a heavy weight at one end, is allowed to rise upon a pivot, to allow the traveller to drive under. Throughout, not only Prussia, but Germany in general, we found the same polite facilities regarding passports, at every frontier and police station at which it was necessary to present them; and although they were, of course, required to be formal, we had neither delay nor annoyance in their investigation. In fact, I am satisfied, from my own experience, that nine-tenths of the outcry against the “tyrannous nuisance of passports,” on the continent, arises from the irregularity of those who carry them, in complying with the stated requirements, or their absurd impatience of a custom, in which, though it is applied indiscriminately to all the world, their self-importance suspects something personal to themselves. An English gentleman from the West Indies, who was travelling some years ago in Switzerland, attended by a faithful negro slave was feelingly assured by him, when fuming at some annoyance of the passport system in the successive cantons, “that it was quite evident they would find no real liberty till they returned to Jamaica.” On gaining the summit of a long hill, we suddenly looked down upon the turrets and domes of the venerable and imperial city of Charlemagne, in the basin of a deep woody amphitheatre, which rises around it on all sides, covered with waving forests to the very top. No situation could be imagined more charming without anything very picturesque or magnificent. The suburbs extend a long way beyond the old fortifications, and after driving past innumerable villas and pleasant cottages, we passed under a massy square gate surmounted by a high slated roof, and rattled along a coarse lumpy pavement through streets of dirty and desolate houses, with little appearance of either wealth, comfort, or prosperity, on any side. The most striking edifices are the huge hotels, which seem still to enjoy a pretty fair share of patronage, though Aix, like Spa, has of late years been postponed for the baths of Bohemia and the Rhine, and the majority of the travellers whom we meet in the streets are only on the wing, hastening to or returning from a visit to its more distant rivals.