awkward kind of sportsman to encounter. Barricades may be curious structures to inspect; but it is not pleasant to be on either side of them when the Red Republic is in question; and still more ungenial to be placed exactly in the centre, as once occurred to a worthy bailie of our acquaintance, who, having been sent to Paris in 1830, on a special mission to fetch home some stray voters for an impending election in the west, found, to his intense horror, that the diligence in which he was located was built up as a popular defence; that the bullets were whistling through the windows; and that even his patron, St Rollox, seemed deaf to his intercessions for rescue. But as we do not happen to hold stock in the French lines, and therefore have not thought it necessary, as yet, to identify ourselves with any of the parties who are presently contending for the palm of mastery in France; as the crusade under the white flag or the oriflamme in favour of the descendant of Saint Louis has not yet been openly proclaimed or enthusiastically preached by any bearded representative of Peter, the Miraculous Hermit; and as, moreover, we had seen quite enough of France in her earliest stages of paroxysm, and had no wish to behold the professors of the vaudeville and palette engaged, in the present dearth of money, at the novel occupation of cobbling shoes for the Sardinian soldiery in the _ateliers nationaux_--we resolved to abstain from Paris in the meantime, and rather to bend our steps towards Germany, then in the full ferment of the Schleswig Holstein affair. Germany has been an old haunt of ours from our boyhood. So far back as 1833, we had the pleasure of witnessing a tight little skrimmage between the Heidelberg students and the soldiery in the square of Frankfort; and since that time we have watched with great interest the progress of the arts, literature, and sciences, and the development of the interior resources of the country. Right sorry were we, though not altogether surprised, to learn that quiet Germany had lighted her revolutionary pipe from the French insurrectionary fires; that Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Hanau, those notorious nests of democracy, had succeeded in perverting the minds of many throughout the circle of the Rhenish provinces; and that studentism, once comparatively harmless, had become utterly rampant throughout the land. For although we never could, even in our earlier years, take any deep pleasure in cultivating the society of the Burschenschaft, but, on the contrary, rather regarded them as a race to be eschewed by all who had a wholesome reverence for soap and a horror for the Kantean philosophy, we were not unpleased at the national spirit which they exhibited long ago; and more than once, in the vaults of the _Himmels-leiter_ and _Jammerthal_, at Nuremberg, we have joined cordially in the chorus of defiance to French aggression-- 'Sie sollen ihn nicht haben Den Deutschen freien Rhein!'