Two results spring out of this order of things alike detrimental to the well-being of society. First there does not exist, at least in the agricultural districts, any middle class of society at all, which is everywhere divided into two orders,--the gentry and the peasantry. In cities and large towns the case is, of course, different; for there the cultivation of letters and of trade has its influence on the human mind; and professions hold something like the rank which ought of right to belong to them when they are what is called liberal. But in the country, even the doctor and the priest seldom find their way to a more lordly board than that of the bouerman; and stand, in consequence, at all times, on a level with the miller, the butcher, and the host of the gasthof. Secondly, the nobles, having little ready money at command, possess no means, whatever their inclination may be, materially to improve the condition of their dependants; while their own time being largely engrossed by the cares of buying and selling, they not unfrequently neglect to cultivate those mental powers in which many of them are naturally rich. Numerous exceptions to this latter rule doubtless everywhere prevail; for I am bound to add, that such of the nobility as honoured me with their acquaintance, were men of refined tastes and very enlarged understandings. But the rule itself holds good nevertheless, and would equally do so in any other country where a similar order of things existed. Through a succession of these villages, most of them inhabited exclusively by bouermen, we made our way, not without exciting, by the novelty of our costume, a large share of public curiosity. As often as we found it necessary, however, to put a question to one of the wonderers, we never failed to meet with a civil reply: indeed, I must do the Bohemians of all ranks the justice to record, that a kinder, more obliging, and less mercenary people, it has never been my fortune to visit. Illustrations of this fact, I shall have occasion in the course of my narrative, to give, though for the present I content myself with stating the fact broadly.