to deal me a blow which would probably have relieved the reading world of this and many another page! But my mother, shrieking with alarm, had meantime besought the captain of the boat to settle the matter by paying whatever was demanded. He also jumped on shore just in time, and released us from our foes, and himself from further delay, by doing so. At the next place at which we could go on shore we made a complaint to the police officials; and it is not without satisfaction even after the lapse of half a century that I am able to say that a communication from the police in an Austrian town some days subsequently, and after we had crossed the Bavarian frontier, informed us that the old scoundrel at Pleintling had not only been made to disgorge the sum he had robbed us of, but had been trounced as he deserved. I suspect that he had imagined from the strangeness of our party, and our mode of travelling, that there were reasons why we should not be inclined to seek any interview with the officers of the police. With that sole exception our voyage from Ratisbon to Vienna was a prosperous, and on the whole, pleasant one, varied only by not unfrequently recurring difficulties occasioned by shoals and sandbanks, when all hands, save the non-working party in the bow, would take to the water in a truly amphibious fashion to drag the boat off. But I must not be led by these moving accidents by flood and field to forget a visit paid to the sculptor Dannecker in his studio at Stuttgardt. There is in my mother’s book an etching by M. Hervieu of the man and place. I remember well the affectionate reverence with which he uncovered for us his colossal bust of Schiller, as described by my mother, and the reasons which he assigned (mistaken as they appeared to me, but it is presumptuous in me to say so) for making it colossal. Schiller had been his life-long friend, and these reasons, whether artistically good or not, were at all events morally admirable and pathetically touching as given by the old man, while looking up at his work with tears in his octogenarian eyes. I do not think the reproduction of the bust in M. Hervieu’s etching is a very happy one, but I can testify to the full-length portrait of the aged sculptor being a thoroughly life-like one. It is the old man himself. He died a year or two after the date of our visit. Uhland too we visited, and Gustav Schwab. Of the former I may say literally _vidi tantum_, for I could speak then no German, and very few words now, and Uhland could speak no other language. And our interview is worth recording mainly for the case of the noticeable fact that such a man, holding the position he did and does in the literature of his country, should at that day have been unable to converse in French.