In a day or two, by the help of a _valet de place_, who spoke half a dozen words of English, we obtained rooms in a large house overhanging the Neckar. From one side we looked upon the Heiligenberg, so near that we could hear the girls singing among the vines every morning, and all day long the rapid river below us was noisy with raftsmen, guiding the pines they had felled among the Suabian hills down to the Rhine. On the other side the Kaiserstuhl stood between us and the eastern sky, and we always saw the sunrise first on the opposite mountains. In the cool, cloudless autumn mornings, the air was full of church-chimes and merry voices, which came echoed back from the hills, so that our first waking sensation was one of pleasure, and every day brought us some new form of enjoyment. The valley of the Neckar is narrow, and only the little slopes which here and there lie between the feet of its wooded mountains are capable of cultivation. Higher up, there are glens and meadows of luxuriant grass, to which the peasants drive their cattle, further still, it is barren and rocky, and upon the summits dwells a solitude as complete as upon the unsettled prairies of the far West. An hour’s walk takes one from the busy streets of the little city to this beautiful and lonely region, and the stranger may explore the paths he finds leading far away among the hills, for weeks together, without exhausting their store of new scenes and influences. The calm impressiveness of these mountain landscapes disposes the mind to quiet thought, and one who has felt them till their spirit grew familiar, is at no loss to comprehend the inspiration from which Schiller, Uhland and Hauff have sung. It is a favorite habit with the Heidelbergers, and one into which the traveler willingly falls, to spend the last hour or two of daylight in a walk by the Neckar, in the gardens of the castle, or off in the forests. At spots of especial beauty rustic inns have been erected, where, at tables in the shade, the visiter is furnished with beer, cool from its underground vaults, and thick curds, to which a relish is given by sugar and powdered cinnamon. The most noted of these places is the Wolfsbrunnen, about a mile and a half from the city, in a lonely glen, high up on the mountain. A large stone basin, two centuries old, stands there, pouring out a stream of the coldest and purest water, dammed up below to form a small pool, in which hundreds of trout breed and grow fat from the benevolence of visiters. A wooden inn, two stories high, with balconies on all sides, is nestled among the trees, and farther down the stream a little mill does its steady work from year to year.