To see the Wends ethnographically at their best, you should seek them in their forest homes, all through that vast stretch of more or less pine-clad plain, mostly sand, extending northwards from the last distant spurs of the "Riesengebirge" (which bounds at the same time Bohemia and Silesia), to the utmost limits of their territory in the March of Brandenburg, and much beyond that--or else in that uniquely beautiful Spreewald, some hundred of miles or so south of Berlin, a land of giant forest and water, an archipelago of turfy islets. That is the ancient headquarters of the Wendish nation, still peopled by a peculiar tribe, with peculiar, very quaint dress, with traditions and customs all their own, settled round the venerated site of their old kings' castle. It is all a land of mystic romance, sylvan silence, old-world usages, such as well become the supposed "Sacred Forest" of the ancient "Suevi." Alders and oaks--the former of a size met with nowhere else--cast a dense, black shade over the whole scene, which is in reality but one vast lake, on whose black and torpidly moving waters float wooded _kaupes_ or isles, scattered over which dwell in solitude and practical isolation the toilsome inhabitants, having no means of communication open to them except the myriads of arms of the sluggishly flowing Spree. A parish covers many square miles. Each little cottage, a picture by itself amid its bold forest surroundings, stands long distances away from its neighbours. The outskirts of the forest consist of wide tracts of wobbling meadow, a floating web of roots and herbage, over which one can scarcely move without sinking into water up to the hips. Were you to tread through, down you would go helplessly into the fathomless black swamp. On those vast meadows grow the heavy crops of sweet nutritious grass which make the Spreewald hay valued at Berlin for its quality as is the hay of the Meuse at Paris. On their little islands, as in the _Hortillonages_ of the Somme, the _kaupers_ raise magnificent crops of vegetables (more particularly cucumbers, without which Berlin would scarcely be itself), which, as on the Somme, they are constrained to carry to market by boat. Boats and skates, in fact, supply in that wooded Holland the only means of locomotion. And thanks to its canals and its water, all in it is so fresh, and so luxuriant, and so remarkably silent, that, while one is there, there seems no place like the Spreewald in which to be thoroughly alone with Nature. On a mound artificially raised upon one of these islands, at Burg, once stood the castle of the great Wendish kings, whose sceptre is supposed still to descend in secret from sire to son in a particular family, known only to the best initiated of Wends. To this country more specifically, together with some scores of distinctive water sprites (each endowed with its own attribute), does Wendish mythology owe its numerous