From Schaffhausen I continued my road towards Ulm. The country presents tilled basins, in which detached and wooded hillocks bathe their feet. In those woods, which were then being cultivated for sale, the eye saw oaks, some felled, others left standing: the first stripped of their bark where they lay, their trunks and branches white and bare, like the skeleton of a strange beast; the second bearing the fresh green of spring on their hirsute and dark, moss-grown limbs: they combined what is never found in man, the two-fold beauty of old age and youth. In the fir-plantations of the plain, uprootings had left empty spaces; the land had been turned into meadows. Those circuses of grass in the middle of the slate-grey forests have something severe and smiling and recall the prairies of the New World. The cottages retain the Swiss character; the hamlets and inns are distinguished by that appetizing cleanliness unknown in our country. Stopping for dinner, between six and seven o'clock, at Mösskirch, I sat musing at the window of my inn: herds were drinking at a fountain, a heifer leapt and frolicked like a roe-deer. Wherever men are kind to their beasts, they are lively and love man. In Germany and England, the horses are not beaten, they are not ill-treated with words: they back towards the pole of themselves; they start and stop at the least sound of the voice, at the smallest movement of the bridle-rein. Of all nations, the French are the most inhumane: do you see our postillions harnessing their horses? They drive them into the shafts with kicks of their boots in the flanks, with blows of their whip-handles on the head, breaking their mouths with the bit to make them go back, accompanying the whole with oaths, shouts and insults at the poor brute. Beasts of burden are compelled to draw or carry loads which are beyond their strength and, to oblige them to go on, the drivers cut up their hides with twists of the thong. The fierceness of the Gauls is with us still: it is only hidden under the silk of our stockings and neckcloths. I was not alone in gaping; the women were doing as much at all the windows of their houses. I have often asked myself, when passing through unknown hamlets: "Would you live here?" I have always answered: "Why not?" Who, in the mad hours of youth, has not said with Pierre Vidal[518], the troubadour: Don n'ai mais d'un pauc cordo Que Na Raymbauda me do, Quel reys Richartz ab Peitieus Ni ab Tors ni ab Angieus[519]. [Sidenote: Mösskirch.]