Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/166

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WIESBADEN.
163

I watched their faces; they looked intent and eager, but I did not, with their change of fortune, detect any change of colour or expression. We walked through the smaller rooms, and found in all gambling-tables and players in plenty, and that where there were fewest spectators the passions of the players were more unveiled.

This buying and selling, and vicious amusement, is indeed a profaning of the day when God has ordained his earth to be a temple of sacred rest from labour, and sordid care, and competitions. When and where will it be so used as to do the work it might achieve—regenerate the world?

We soon emerged into the garden again, and were glad to see a great many more people outside than in. This garden, or rather, ornamented ground, for the greater part of it is merely in grass and trees, extends up the narrowing valley for two miles to the ruins of the old Castle of Sonnenberg. We passed the little lake with its fringe of bright flowers, its social squads of ducks and its lordly swans, and many a patch of bright flowers and shrubberies, and rustic benches with tête à tête pairs or family groups,and kept along a path by a little brook that seems good-naturedly to run just where it looks prettiest and is most wanted, till we mounted the eminence where the feudal castle guarded the pass between two far-reaching valleys, and where the old keep, chapel, and masses and fragments of wall still standing, extend over a space half as large as our village covers. Fragments of the wall form one side