_Monday, 29th._--Set off at 5 o’clock, and bid adieu to the clean cottages and bold, craggy mountains of Switzerland. We were advised against the Basle road, as it approaches so very near the French frontier that we might unwillingly have seen some skirmishes. Here the dwellings of the inhabitants resemble those of Lincolnshire, mud walls, and the inhabitants as filthy as the ground they tread on. The circle of Swabia is reckoned to be a fertile and well-cultivated country and its population proves that its peasantry are well fed. The hills are well covered with fir and oak, the remains of the old Hercynian Forest that once overspread this part of Germany from the Danube to the Rhine. The wild boar and the wolf are the only savage animals that inhabit these regions. The clearing of the forest has very much influenced the climate of Italy; Kirwan thinks by its destruction Lombardy is become warmer. We crossed a ridge of sand hills; on the top of them I observed the rills of water to run in different directions, forming small rivulets to the north and south sides. These continue their course from their original direction. A lively imagination might fancy their lamentations at the impossibility of their ever meeting again in their native country. ‘I go,’ says the northern drop, ‘to join the slow-flowing Danube, and quench the thirst of the heavy-paced, mechanical German, the proud, independent, but crushed Hungarian, and the lazy, ignorant, slavish Turk. In my way I shall wash the walls of Vienna, Presburg, and Belgrade, and then in company with the waters of Poland and of Russia will try to live in harmony with the waters of the Euxine Sea.’ ‘And I,’ says the merry southern drop, ‘will rush on to the rapid Rhine, wash the coast of the brave and hardy Swiss, will then avoid the once cheerful Frenchmen, and frisk down to the North Sea,’ and, if he is of my mind, will avoid the chalky coast of England. Arrived at midnight at Pallingen; I slept in a billiard room, a _meuble_ neither ornamental, comfortable, nor useful.