I must relate a joke. Mrs. C---- and my wife had been conducted over the vast ruins one forenoon. In the afternoon, I climbed on to the rocky height where the castle sits. When I rang at the castle door, the guide who came seemed to have spent his last pourboire for whisky. He showed me to the main tower, remarking in bad and muddled Dutch that it was once great, but the “French Army had blown it all up--all up.” He walked ahead of me, constantly smoking and muttering to himself--“Yes--Ja, by Gott! blown up--all blown up.” Each wall or tower or room he conducted me to, was “great,” but he quickly added “blown up.” I wondered where the ladies were, and inquired of my maudlin guide if he had seen two women that afternoon, with dark dresses and white parasols. “Ja,” he answered, “saw them”--paused a moment, took his cob out of his mouth and continued--“_all blown up_.” The French invasion of some old century had been too much for him. He had talked of it and the exploded castle until he could think of nothing else, and as he closed the door behind, looking at the little coin I had dropped into his hand, I heard him mutter, “Ja--_all blown up_.” _June 8._--As we drive through out of the way places, and to unfrequented hamlets in the Black Forest, far away from railroads, we find a simplicity of life that possibly has changed little in centuries. Living is very cheap. We never pay more than twenty cents for breakfast. The brooks are all full of delicious trout, and at wayside inns they take them right out of the brook for us, and charge but a trifle for all we can eat. The scene is everywhere entirely different from Switzerland; yet the green hills, the great woods, the white roads, the flash of hundreds of bright waterfalls, the village church towers, with a stork’s nest on the top of every one, are almost as interesting to us as the Alps themselves. Often when our showy equipage passed some farm, the peasants stopped work and stood stock still, leaning on their hoes and looking at us. Many men doff their caps and the women courtesy, guessing no doubt, from the showy four-horse drag, it was the Kaiser himself passing. The seclusion of the old, old hamlets in the woods, the quiet everywhere, almost makes us lonesome. Yesterday we were invited to visit a big farmhouse a little distance from the road. The owner was a rich bauer--“very rich,” his neighbors said. Yet, his big, good-looking daughter in wooden shoes and _very_ short petticoats, was engaged in cleaning out the stables. She came to us with the big stable fork in her hand, and in the most agreeable way showed us about the place. She was all smiles and jokes and good humor. She was “smart” too. I thought of “M’liss” in one of Bret Harte’s stories.