"To a stranger to Catholic countries it would seem extraordinary that wherever we have been we have lighted on processions and holiday making. To the utilitarian this loss of time would be distressing; and really, I cannot but think it very injurious to a country. I cannot fail to suppose that it must engender indolent habits and encourage a certain love of dissipation. However that may be, it seems to make the people very happy, and they use their holidays without abusing them. Holiday amusement seems to come to them as natural as work. Indeed, everything is conducted with so much decorum, quiet and order, and with such an amount of cheerfulness and gaiety, that one would hardly like to put a stop to it, were that in one's power. Moreover, I cannot help thinking that a little more of holiday would be of considerable service to our own hard-working poor. But, it is said that our labouring class do not know how to use a holiday when they get one. On such an occasion the roads and the pot-houses are full of drunken men. My opinion is that the very absence of days of recreation is the cause of this misuse, as such days occur so seldom, and as the toil of the labourer is so severe and so continuous, that when a day of relaxation does come he uses his freedom to excess. He is like a galley slave escaped from the oar and hard rowing-bench."
It had been my father's intention to rent a house or a suite of rooms for the rest of the summer; and for this purpose he went to Innsbruck, but found it impossible to obtain there what he sought, and he then made up his mind to go in quest of a quiet resting-place at Salzburg, where we children with our mother might be deposited whilst he wandered in the Salzkammer Gut making sketches.
We reached Salzburg in the evening of June 18th, 1842, and were fortunate in soon finding a very comfortable house about half an hour's walk from the town, on very reasonable terms, two bedrooms and a sitting-room, breakfast, dinner and tea, linen, etc. and attendance, all at about seven shillings and seven-pence a day. In our salle-à-manger was a man-in-armour in one corner.
"I doubt whether any portion of Germany has gone through more political changes during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century. It was taken to pieces and put together again,
