470 Notes oil Sport and Travel ix 



last June ; and too truly have his expectations 

 been fulfilled. Who has shot anything this year ? 

 ' Seven men laying hold of the skirts of one part- 

 ridge,' to escape the disgrace of a blank day ! . 



i\.lack and well-a-day ! for want of sport, let us 

 fall back on the pleasures of memory, and dream 

 of what has been. As we are not to have any sport 

 in England this year, let us go abroad for one day. 



Does any one know Herr Troster, that ' fat 

 knight of the castle,' broad in the shoulder, still 

 broader in the beam, radiant of visage, with every 

 capillary of his handsome honest face tingling and 

 glowing with glorious Rauenthaler wine ? Has no 

 one of all our up-and-down-Rhine-steaming country- 

 men ever met him, disporting himself, like a convivial 

 porpoise, at his iron -gray brother-in-law's in the 

 Rhine-au, not a hundred stunden from the entrance 

 to the beautiful and almost unknown Wisperthal ; 

 or standing in the quaint old courtyard of his 

 own hostelrie, all mighty oaken beams, and wine 

 tuns, and narrow windows, like the illustrations of 

 Der Lied von der Glocke ? 



How cool, and yet how rosy he looks, under 

 his press of white canvas jacket, clean shirt, and 

 what brother Jonathan calls ' pants,' easy and cool, 

 curling out gracefully about the bows, like an eighty- 

 four gun ship under full sail ! He needed no 

 Brahminical straw girt round his portly person to tell 

 him when he had enough ! — a three-inch rope would 

 not have prevented his having yet another bottle ! 



