are built on the pinnacles of the rocks, or on the summits of the lower mountains. The hotels and inns, even in the smallest villages, are very nice and elegant in all their interior arrangements. These small villages consist usually of a crowded collection of the most quaint and queer-looking houses, or rather huts, of stone, with an antique and venerable-looking church in the midst of them, looking still more quaint and queer than the houses. The hotels, however, in these villages, or rather on the borders of them,--for the hotels are often built on the open ground beyond the town, where there is room for gardens and walks, and raised terraces around them,--are palaces in comparison with the dwellings of the inhabitants. And well they may be, for the villagers are almost all laborers of a very humble class--boatmen, who get their living by plying boats up and down the river; vinedressers, who cultivate the vineyards of the neighboring hills; or hostlers and coachmen, who take care of the carriages and of the horses employed in the traffic of the river. A great number of horses are employed; for not only are the carriages of such persons as choose to travel on the Rhine by land, or to make excursions on the banks of the river, drawn by them, but almost all the boats, except the steamboats that go up the river, are _towed_ up by these animals. To enable them to do this, a regular tow path has been formed all the way up the river, on the left bank, and boats of all shapes and sizes are continually to be seen going up, drawn, like canal boats in America, by horses--and sometimes even by men. Once I saw some boys drawing up a small boat in this way. It seems they had been going down the stream to take a sail, or perhaps to convey a traveller down; and now they were coming up again, drawing their boat by walking along the bank, the current being so rapid that it is much easier to draw a boat up than it is to row it. The boys had a long line attached to the mast of their boat, and both of them were drawing upon this line by means of broad bands, forming a sort of harness, which were passed over their shoulders. [Illustration]