But this we soon found did not meet the case by any means. We had been guilty of a serious misdemeanour and offence against the law by having such things (undeclared too) amongst our baggage! There must be a report, and a written petition, setting forth with due contrition, and humble _peccavi_ admissions, our lamentable ignorance, and perhaps the enormity might be condoned to a foreigner! After a little talk, however, and the incense of a little consternation on our faces, duly offered to the official Jove (who entirely spurned any offering of another sort), the said Jove wrote the petition for us himself, carried it somewhere behind the scenes, and shortly announced that it was benignly granted: as I believe, by himself! The accursed thing was ceremoniously destroyed before our eyes, and we were free to walk forth into the streets of the Kaiserstadt. I revisited Vienna two or three years ago, and found that “_ein Wien_” had become at least three! If the increase and changes of London and Paris have made my early recollections of those cities emphatically those of a former age, the changes at Vienna, though of course smaller in absolute extent, have yet more entirely metamorphosed the character of the place. The abolition of the wall, which used to shut in the exclusive little city, and placed between it and the suburbs not only a material barrier, but a gulf such as that which divided Dives from Lazarus, has changed the social habitudes and even the moral characteristics of the inhabitants. In the days of my first visit, now just a little more than fifty years ago, nobody who was anybody would have dreamed of living on the outside of the sacred barrier of the wall, any more than a member of the fashionable world of London would dream of living to the eastward of Temple Bar. I think, indeed, that the former would have been more utterly out of the question than the latter. I remember that even in the case of foreigners like ourselves, it was deemed, in accordance with the best advice we could procure on the subject, necessary, or at least expedient, that we should find lodgings _in the city_, despite the exceeding difficulty and the high price involved in procuring them. The division of the society into classes, still more marked in Vienna than probably in any other city of Europe, at that time almost amounted to a division into castes; and in the case of the higher aristocracy to have lived in any one of the suburbs would assuredly have involved a loss of social caste.