In the roundabout route from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Mediterranean, Cassel, the electorate in former years of Hesse-Cassel, afforded a most suggestive visit. To be sure, its history is not altogether pleasant to an American, for the fact that the old elector hired his troops to England to fight us during the Revolutionary war, is not a savory bit of German history. Even Frederick the Great saw the meanness of it, for when he heard they were to take their route to England by Prussian roads, he sent word, “if they did so, he would levy a cattle tax on them.” Perhaps some of the money paid by England at that time was laid up in the public treasury and expended afterward upon the extravagant ornamentation of the grounds of the elector’s summer residence, “Wilhelmshöhe.” The palace is in itself one of the most magnificent in Europe. Above the cascades in front of it is the highest fountain on the continent. One stream, twelve inches in diameter, is thrown to the height of two hundred feet. The colossal Hercules which crowned the summit of this artificial grandeur was thirty feet high, and the cascades are nine hundred feet long. The whole arrangement is said to have kept two thousand men engaged for fourteen years, and to have cost over ten million dollars! Jerome Napoleon occupied this palace of Wilhelmshöhe when he was king of Westphalia. A walk of three miles under the straight and narrow road shaded by lime trees, leads one back to Cassel, after this visit to Wilhelmshöhe. The town is beautifully situated on either side of the river Fulda, and has a population of thirty-two thousand. The beautiful terrace overlooking the _angarten_, crowned by its new picture gallery, offers as delightful promenades as the celebrated Dresden Terrace. The strains of sweet music coming up from the _angarten_ (meadow) while one is looking at the beautiful Rembrandts and Van Dykes in the gallery, give the enchantment which one never fails to find in a German town. Napoleon carried away many of the most valuable pictures from the Cassel gallery—but it is redeemed from the number of horrible Jordaens and Teniers by possessing the “pearl of Rembrandts,” a portrait of “Saskia,” his wife. Chemical products, snuff included, are manufactured in Cassel, and it is quite a wide-awake business place—the old town preserved for picturesque effect, and the new town building up for enterprising manufacturers.