description contains, at least once, the word bottle. The moralists of Nieder-Selters preach on bottles. Life, they say, is a sound bottle, and death a cracked one-thoughtless men are empty bottles-drunken men are leaky ones; and a man highly educated, fit to appear in any country and in any society, is, of course, a bottle corked, rosined, and stamped with the seal of the Duke of Nassau.

As soon as I reached the village inn, I found there all the slight accommodation I required: a tolerable dinner soon smoked on the table before me; and, feeling that I had seen quite enough for one day of brown stone-bottles, I ventured to order (merely for a change a long-necked glass one of a vegetable fluid superior to all the mineral water in the world.

The following morning, previous to returning to the brunnen, I strolled for some time about the village; and the best analysis I can offer of the Selters water is the plain fact, that the inhabitants of the village, who have drank it all their lives, are certainly, by many degrees, the healthiest and ruddiest looking peasants I have anywhere met with in the dominions of the Duke of Nassau.

This day being a festival, on reaching the brunnen at eleven o'clock, I found it entirely désertedno human being was to be seen all had been Working from three o'clock in the morning till nine, but they were now in church, and were not to return to their labour till twelve. I had, therefore, the whole establishment to myself; and going to the famous brunnen, my first object was to taste its water. On drinking it fresh from the source, I observed that it possessed a strong chalybeate taste, which I had never perceived in receiving it from the bottle. The three iron crates sus

pended to the arms of the crane were empty, and there was nothing at all upon the wooden dressers which, the evening before, I had seen so busily crowded and surrounded : in the middle of the great square were the stools on which the cork-covering women had sat; while, at some distance to the left, were the solid columns, or regiments, of uncorked bottles, which I had seen filled brimful with pure crystal water the evening before. On approaching this brown-looking army, I was exceedingly surprised at observing from a distance, that several of the bottles were noseless, and I was wondering why such should ever have been filled, when, on getting close to these troops, I perceived, to my utter astonishment, that not only about one-third of them were in the same mutilated state, but that their noses were calmly lying by their sides supported by the adjoining bottles! What could possibly have been the cause of the fatal disaster which in one single night had so dreadfully disfigured them, I was totally at a loss to imagine: the devastation which had taken place resembled the riddling of an infantry regiment under heavy fire; yet few of our troops, even at Waterloo, lost so great a proportion of their men as had fallen in twelve hours among these immovable phalanxes of bottles. Had they been corked, one might have supposed that they had exploded, but why nothing but their noses had suffered I really felt quite incompetent to explain.

As it is always better honestly to confess one's ignorance, rather than exist under its torture, with a firm step I walked to the door of the governor of the brunnen; and sending up to him a card, bearing the name under which I travelled, he

instantly appeared, politely assuring me that he should have much pleasure in affording any information I desired.

Instantly pointing to the noseless bottles, my instructor was good enough to inform me, that bottles in vast numbers being supplied to the Duke from various manufactories, in order to prove them, they are filled brimfull as I had seen them) with water, and being left in that state for the night, they are the next morning visited by an officer of the Duke, whose wand of office is a thin, long-handled, little hammer, which at the moment happened to be lying before us on the ground.

It appears that the two prevailing sins to which stone bottles are prone, are having cracks, and being porous, in either of which case they, of course, in twelve hours, leak a little.

The Duke's officer, who is judge and jury in his own court-yard, carries his own sentences into execution with a rapidity which even our Lord Chancellor himself can only hope eventually to imitate. Glancing his hawk-like eye along each line, the instant he sees a bottle not brimfull, without listening to longwinded arguments, he at once decides "that there can be no mistake-that there shall be no mistake;" and thus at one blow or tap of the hammer, off goes the culprit's nose. "So much for Buckingham!"

Feeling quite relieved by this solution of the mystery, I troubled the governor with a few questions, to reply to which he very kindly conducted me to his counting-house, where, in the most liberal and gentlemenlike manner, he gave me all the data I required.

The following, which I extracted from the daybook, is a statement showing the number of bottles which were filled for exportation during the year 1832, with the proportionate number field during each month.

Besides the above, there is a private consumption, amounting, on an average, to very nearly half a million of bottles per annum.

It will, I hope, be recollected that by the time a bottle is sealed it has undergone fifteen operations, all performed by different people. The Duke, in his payments, does not enter into these details, but delivering his own bottles, he gives 17/2 kreuzers (nearly sixpence) for every hundred, large or small, which are placed, filled, in his magazines. The peasants, therefore, either share their labour and profits among themselves, or the whole of the operations are occasionally performed by the different members of one family; but so much activity is required in constantly stooping and carrying off the bottles, that this work is principally performed by young women of eighteen or

nineteen, assembled from all the neighbouring villages; and who, by working from three in the morning till seven at night, can gain a florin a day, or 30 florins a month, Sunday (excepting during prayers) not being, I am sorry to say, at NiederSelters, a day of rest.

For the bottles themselves the Duke pays 4/2 florins per cent. for the large ones, and 3 florins per cent. for the small ones. The large bottles, when full, he sells at the brunnen for 13 florins a hundred.

His profit, last year, deducting all expenses, appeared to be, as nearly as possible, 50,000 florins; and yet, this brunnen was originally sold to the Duke's ancestor for a single butt of wine!

On coming out of the office, the establishment was all alive again, and the peasants being in their Sunday clothes, the picture was highly coloured. Young women in groups of four and five, with little white or red caps perched on the tops of their heads, from which streamed three or four broad ribands, of different colours, denoting the villages they proceeded from, in various directions, singing as they went, were walking together, heavily laden with bottles. They were dressed in blue petticoats, clean white shifts tucked up above the elbows, with coloured stays laced, or rather half unlaced, in front. Old women, covering the corks with leather, in similar costume, but in colours less gaudy, were displaying an activity much more vigorous than their period of life. Across this party-coloured, well-arranged system, which was as regular in its movements as the planets in their orbits, an officer of the Duke, like a comet, occasionally darted from the office to the burnnen, or