ables you to pay your passage to a certain place, and avail yourself of each boat or all, as suits your convenience. You are at liberty, at any point you please, to quit the steamer, ramble for two or three hours on the shore, and then proceed on your expedition. We are descending the river rapidly; the current runs at the rate of six miles an hour.
The big Russian princess, who is a sort of "man of the sea" to us, is flourishing up and down the deck with two of her suite, one on each side, as if to guard her from contact with the plebeian world. Every look and motion says "I do not love the people." The royal brood may wince, but they must submit to the democratic tendencies of the age. These steamers and rail-cars are undermining their elevations. I have not, as you know, my dear C., any vulgar hostility to those who are the heirs of the usurpations of elder times—"the accident of an accident"—but when I see a person, radically vulgar like this woman, queening it among those who are her superiors in everything but this accidental greatness, my Puritan blood and republican breeding get the better of my humanity.
We are passing the chateau of Johannisberg—a castle of Prince Metternich, an immense white edifice which, as we see it, looks much like a Saratoga hotel. It is on a gently-sloping hill, covered with vines which confessedly produce the best Rhine wine. "The extent of the vineyard is," Murray says, "fifty-five acres. Its produce in good years amounts to about forty butts, and has been valued at
