We spent a few days very pleasantly at Prague; but when preparing to start for Teplitz, I was horrified at finding that I had lost the receipt for my passport—and that too, in Austria! The Commissionaire at the “DREI LINDEN,” seemed even more terrified than myself, and thinking he would contrive to make a job of the business, I marched off to the Bureau, and candidly stated the loss I had sustained. The officer, having cast a scrutinizing glance at me, took down a huge pile of passports, and soon singled mine out. “Voila, Monsieur, votre passport,” was all he said, and he never made the least difficulty, or seemed to consider it the slightest favour, to deliver me the precious document, without producing a receipt! I say again, and again, the Austrian police is grossly slandered. They are the most civil and polite on the Continent. TEPLITZ.[79] A long journey of sixty odd miles from Prague, through a country varied, and often interesting, brings us to the fertile valley of Teplitz studded with chateaux and villas, and well cultivated. The hills and mountains, for many miles before we reach Teplitz, are all conical and volcanic. This is the great WASH-TUB of Germany. What prodigious masses of exuviæ, suds, and sordes, must annually float down the Elbe to fertilize its shores! Three great public baths (and now a fourth, at Schoneau) for men, women, and children, respectively, display an immense number of human beings—all Adams and Eves without fig-leaves—immersed in water at a temperature sometimes of 114° of Fahrenheit, inhaling a dense steam, through which you could formerly have scarcely distinguished them—panting, perspiring, and streaming blood from scarifications on their backs to prevent their brains from being torn up by the excited circulation! Such _was_ a picture from which DANTE might have drawn some of his scenes in the inferno—except that here, it was not the “PURGATORY” of guilty souls, but the “expurgatorium,” of unclean bodies.[80]