A Hospitable Reception—A Rustic Household—The Mother's Talk—Pressing Invitations—A Docile Visitor—The Family Room—Trophies of Industry—Overheating—A Walk in Ulrichsthal—A Glass Polisher and his Family—His Notions—A Glass Engraver—His Skill and Ingenuity—His Earnings—A Bohemian's Opinion on English Singing—Military Service—Beetle Pictures—Glass-making in Bohemia—An Englishman's Forget-me-Not—The Dinner—Dessert on the Hill—An Hour with the Haymakers—Magical Kreutzers—An Evening at the Wirthshaus—Singing and Poetry—A Moonlight Walk—The Lovers' Test.

I once promised a Bohemian glass engraver, who showed me specimens of his skill under the murky sky of ugly Birmingham, that when the favourable time came I would find out his native place, and have a talk with his kinsfolk. The favourable time had come in all ways, for no sooner did I make myself known to the old man who was summoned to the door, than he took my hand and said, "Be welcome to my house." Suiting action to word, he led me into a large, low room, hot as an oven, where his wife and daughters and a sweetheart sat chatting away the dusk. At first they were somewhat shy; but when I brought out a little letter from the son in England, and the eldest daughter, having lit a candle, read it aloud, the mother, overjoyed at hearing news from "our Wilhelm," sprang up, gave me a kiss, and cried, "Only think, an Englishman is come to see us!" Here was an end to the shyness; and having shaken hands with all the lasses and the sweetheart, I became as one of the family.

Of course I would stay all night; they could not think of letting me go to seek quarters at the public-house, unless, indeed, their own rustic entertainment would make me uncomfortable; and the entreaties were accompanied by preparations for supper. Who could resist such hearty hospitality? Not I; and forthwith an understanding prevailed that whatever pleased them best would please me best; excepting, that I should have leave to open one of the casements and sit close to it, for to me the temperature of the room was unbearable. Besides the heat from the stove, there was an odour of kine from the cowstall, which forms one half of the house, separated from the living room only by a passage.

We had merry talk while I ate my supper of eggs, coffee, and bread and butter. "Our Wilhelm" was, however, the mother's favourite topic, and she returned to it again and again. She must tell me, too, of her other sons, one in America, another at Pesth; and how that one night they were all awoke by a loud knocking at the door, and a voice begging for a night's lodging. How that the stranger would not go away, but continued to knock and beseech, until all at once the mother recognised a tone, and cried, "Father, father, open the door! That's our David's voice. Our David, come home to see us, all the way from Hungary!" And then the joyful meeting that followed! Her eyes glistened with tears as she told me this.

There were two beds in a little slip of a chamber opening from the principal room, of which the one nearest the window was given up to me, as I again had to stipulate for an open casement; and the more so, as notwithstanding the heat, I was expected to bury myself between two feather-beds, as the custom of the country is; the other was occupied by the old man. As for mother and daughters, they retreated to some place overhead, which must have been very like a loft.

Had I slept well? was the question next morning; and this being answered in the affirmative, the family resolved by acclamation that I should stay with them a fortnight at least, nor would they at first believe that I could only spare them a single day. Could not an Englishman do anything? What mattered it if I returned to London a week sooner or later? The theatre at SteinschÖnau would be opened on Sunday, and it would be such a nice walk to go and see the play. Why should I be in a hurry to reach the mountains? Would it not be the same if I went to the top of all the hills around Ulrichsthal?

So said the daughters, with much more of the like purport, and to resist persuasions backed by bright eyes, good looks, and blithesome voices, was a hard trial for my philosophy. However, I kept my resolution even when the mother rounded up with, "Only a day! that's not long enough to taste all my cookery." The good soul had risen early to make fresh Semmel for breakfast.

To pacify them, I promised to eat as much as ever I could, and to let them do whatever they liked with me during the day. Thereupon two of the damsels put on their broad-brimmed straw hats, shouldered their rakes, and betook themselves to the hay-field; the youngest, a lassie of fifteen, apprenticed to a glass engraver, said, "Leb' wohl," and went away to her work; the old man, privileged to be idle through age and infirmity, crept forth to find a sunshiny bit of grass on which to have a snooze; the mother began to bustle with pot and pan about the stove; and the eldest daughter, having put on her hat and a pink scarf, claimed the right to show me all that was worth seeing in Ulrichsthal.

We began with the room itself. Its furniture was simple enough: wooden walls and ceiling; an uncomfortable wooden seat fixed to the wall along two sides; a table and a few wooden chairs; and the old man's polishing-bench, a fixture in one corner. The treadle and crank were still in place, but motionless; half a dozen wheels and sundry tools hung on the wall, memorials of the veteran's forty years of industry, and the bench did duty as dresser and bookshelf. Among the books were Schiller's Werken, in sixteen volumes, belonging to "our Wilhelm." With that simple machinery, hoarsely whirring day after day all through the prime of his manhood, had he gained wherewith to buy his two plots of land, and the comfort of repose in declining age. Here, in this overheated room, at once workshop, kitchen, and parlour, had been reared those four comely daughters, and the tall son whom I had met in England; all strong and hearty, in spite of high temperature and certain noxious influences arising out of a want of proper decency in the household economy. "We are used to it," was the answer, when I expressed my surprise that they could bear to live familiar with things offensive, and yet fearful of a passing breath from spring and summer. But this want of perception is not confined to Ulrichsthal; you cannot help noticing it in many, if not in most, Bohemian villages, and on the Silesian side of the mountains.

But the damsel is impatient. We set off towards a row of houses on a higher part of the slope. Each has its long and narrow piece of land, an orchard immediately behind the house; then patches of wheat, barley, poppies, beetroot, grass, and potatoes, cultivated, with few exceptions, by the several families. But labourers can be hired when wanted, who are willing to work for one or two florins a week.

We went into one of the houses. There sat a family grinding and polishing glass, alternating field-work by a day at the treadles. The operations were not new to me, but there was novelty to see them carried on in such a homely way; to see elegant vases, dishes, goblets, and jugs, fit ornaments for a palace, in the hands of rustics, or lying about on a rough pine shelf. The father, a tall, pale-faced man, with a somewhat careworn expression, stopped the noise of the wheels as soon as he heard of a visitor from London, and talked about that which he understood best—his business. Full thirty years had he sat at the bench, training up his children to the work one after another, but had not realized all the benefits he once hoped for. The brittle ware came to him in boxes from Prague, forty-five miles, and, when polished, was sent back in the same way; he having to bear the loss of whatever was broken while in his hands. "Look here," he said, showing me a large handsome jug; "my daughter spent a whole month over that jug, and then, as you see, broke the handle off. So I must keep it, and lose fifteen florins." To him it was useless: he could only place it apart with other crippled specimens—memorials of misfortune. "Ah! if glass would not break, then he would not be poor. However," he added, "we always get bread. God be thanked! And our bit of land helps." Cutters and polishers earn about four florins a week. He thought it good that young men got away to England, for they not only earned great wages, but escaped the remorseless military service. "A young man is not safe here: perhaps he works for twelve, eighteen months, and thinks he will be left quiet for the rest of his term, when all at once comes a sharp order, and he must away to Italy for a year or two."

Then he set his treadle going, to show me that in Bohemia the polisher holds his glass against the bottom of the wheel, and, consequently, has the work always under his eye; while, in England, he holds it against the top of the wheel, and must be always turning it over to look at the surface.

Higher up the slope we came to another house, where, instead of the harsh sound of grinding, we heard but a faint, busy hum. A change came over RÖschen's manner as she entered, and saw a young man sitting at a lathe; and their greeting, when he looked round, was after the manner of lovers before a witness. On being told that I had come to see glass engraving, the young man plied his wheel briskly, and, taking up a ruby tazza, in a few minutes there stood a deer with branching antlers on a rough hillock in its centre—a pure white intaglio set in the red. I had never before seen the process, and was surprised by its simplicity. All those landscapes, hunting-scenes, pastoral groups, and whatever else which appear as exquisite carvings in the glass, are produced by a few tiny copper wheels, or disks. The engraver sits at a small lathe against a window, with a little rack before him, containing about a score of the copper disks, varying in size from the diameter of a halfpenny down to its thickness, all mounted on spindles, and sharpened on the edge. He paints a rough outline of the design on the surface of the glass, and, selecting the disk that suits best, he touches the edge with a drop of oil, inserts it in the mandril, sets it spinning, and, holding the glass against it from below, the little wheel eats its way in with astonishing rapidity. The glass, held lightly in the hands, is shifted about continually, till all the greater parts of the figure are worked out; then, for the lesser parts, a smaller disk is used, and at last the finest touches, such as blades of grass, the tips of antlers, eyebrows, and so forth, are put in with the smallest. Every minute he holds the glass up between his eye and the light, watching the development of the design; now making a broad excavation, now changing the disk every ten seconds, and giving touches so slight and rapid that the unpractised eye can scarcely follow them; and in this way he produces effects of foreshortening, of roundness, and light and shade, which, to an eye-witness, appear little less than wonderful.

The work in hand happened to be tazzi, and in less than half an hour I saw deer in various positions roughed out on six of them, and three completely finished. Then the engraver fetched other specimens of his skill from up-stairs—a dish with a historical piece in the centre, and vignettes round the rim—a bowl engirdled by sylvan scenes, where fauns and satyrs, jolly old Pan and bacchanals, laughed out upon you from forest bowers and mazy vineyards—all, even to the twinkling eyes, the untrimmed beards, and delicate tendrils, wrought out by the copper wheels.

The merchants at Prague took care that he should never lack work, and, according to the quality, he could earn from four to eight florins a week, and save money. Beef cost him 11 kreutzers the pound, veal 10, and salt 6 kreutzers. His bread was home-made. The lathe was his own: it cost forty florins; and the house, and the long strip of ground that sloped away behind, half hidden by the orchard. He did no field-work, but left that to his mother, who lived with him, and hired labourers. "It goes better in the house where a woman is," he said, with a glance at RÖschen.

The cleanliness and order of his own room—workshop though it was—justified his words. And though old habit would not yet permit him to sit with open door and window, he did not aggravate summer-heat by stove-heat, but had a cooking-place in an outer shed. His house had four rooms, of which two up-stairs, and a loft—all built of wood. The floor of the room above formed the ceiling, all the joints covered by a straight sapling split down the middle, resting on joists big and strong enough to carry a town-hall. Between these massive timbers hung pictures of saints, a drawing of trees, and a guitar. The engraver could play and sing, and recreated himself with music in the evenings, and on Sundays.

He had heard that the English were fond of music, and thought there must be plenty of good singing among the working-people; and it surprised him not a little to be told that the Islanders' love for sweet sounds went far—far beyond their power of producing them. "Ah!" interrupted RÖschen, "my brother writes that there is no music in his English workmates' singing."

The engraver thought it a great privation, and could not well comprehend how the evenings could pass agreeably without a little music at home. "And when you are away from home," he went on, "it seems still better. Like all the young men here, I have been a soldier, have marched to Bucharest, to Pesth, to Trent, and Innsbruck, and what should we do on those long marches, and in dull quarters, if we could not sing?"

Concerning the military service, he thought it a hardship to be obliged to serve, whether or no, but compensated by advantages. It added to a young man's knowledge and experience to march to distant lands, to see strange scenes, and strange people. You could always tell the difference between one who had travelled, even as a soldier, and a stay-at-home; the one had something to talk about, the other had nothing. Then, the pleasure of coming home again—a pleasure so sweet, that the thought of marching forth once more could hardly embitter it. For his part, he had been at home eighteen months, glad to resume his craft, and for the present saw no prospect of a call to arms. But there remained yet one year of his term unexpired, and he was liable at any moment to get an order requiring him to leave everything, and march. "Who can tell," he said, "how hard it is to go away so suddenly, to leave the little home, and all friends? Right glad shall I be when the year is over."

RÖschen looked as if she would be glad too, and, to make me aware of all the young man's cleverness, she took down the frame of trees from the wall and put it in my hands. I then saw that what looked like a coloured drawing was a picture made of insects. The engraver had a taste for natural history, and with a collection of beetles of all sizes, black, brown, green, gold, and sapphire, had constructed the group of trees which, when looked at from the middle of the room, showed as a highly-finished drawing. You saw here and there a withered branch shooting from the foliage—it was nothing but the horns and legs ingeniously placed, and those deep hollows in the trunks, places where owls may haunt, are produced by an artful arrangement of wings.

Then RÖschen would have him fetch down his trays of moths and portfolio of drawings. The moths had all been collected in walks about the neighbourhood, and were carefully preserved and labelled. The drawings showed the hand of an artist. The engraver had begun to learn to draw in school at the age of eleven, and had practised ever since, for without good drawing one could not engrave glass. He spoke of RÖschen's youngest sister as a real genius, who would one day outstrip all the engravers in Ulrichsthal.

Bohemia was the first to rival, and soon to excel, Venice in the art of glass-making. In her vast forests she found exhaustless stores of fuel and potash, and quartz and lime in her rocks, and produced a white glass which won universal admiration until about the beginning of last century, when English manufacturers discovered the process for making flint-glass with oxyde of lead as an ingredient. There was nothing superior to this glass, so it has been said, but the diamond, and the Bohemians, finding their craft in danger, introduced coloured glass, frosted glass, and pleasing styles of ornament. This practice they have since kept up. Their works are mostly situate in the great forests on the Bavarian frontier, where fuel and labour are alike cheap: the managers are well taught, and have a good knowledge of chemistry, and by striving always after something new, reproducing at times long-forgotten Venice patterns, they have achieved a reputation due more to the taste and elegance displayed in the forms of their manufactures than to their quality. From the rude forest villages the articles are sent all across the kingdom to the northern districts, where, as we have seen, the finishing touches that are to fit them for stately halls and drawing-rooms, are applied by the hands of humble cottagers.

We were about to leave, when the engraver asked if I would not like to try my hand at the lathe, and, without waiting for an answer, he brought out a small, plain beaker of thick glass, and begged me to cut a forget-me-not upon it as a memorial of my visit. The process looked so easy, that I thought there would be no great risk in an attempt, so I sat down, spread out my elbows to rest upon the cushions, put my foot to the treadle, and the glass to the wheel. Whiz—skirr-r-r-r, and there was a fine white blur which, by a stretch of fancy, might have been taken for a cloud. Karl—as RÖschen called him—took the beaker, and, leaning across me as I sat, speedily converted the blur into a rose, and bade me try again. I presented the opposite side, and this time with better effect, for the result was a very passable forget-me-not. I have seen many a worse on A Trifle from Margate.

RÖschen then said something about meeting in the evening, and we made haste home, for it was dinner-time. Immediately on arrival she proceeded to roll out a small piece of dry brown dough into a thin sheet, which she cut into strips, and these strips, laid three or four together, and shredded down very thin, produced an imitation of vermicelli, which was thrown into the soup.

Now all was ready, and a proud woman was the mother as the soup was followed by two kinds of meat, stewed and roast—salad, potatoes, and a cool, slightly acid preserve, made from forest berries. And for drink there was pale beer from the Wirthshaus. She did not fail to remind me of my promise to "eat a plenty."

Nor, after we had sipped our coffee, did RÖschen fail to remind me of my morning's surrender, and pointing to the high hill-top, about two miles off, she said, "I mean to take you up there." So, as my docility remained unimpaired, we braved the hot sun, and had a very pretty walk over broken ground, and down into a bosky valley, watered by a noisy brook, before we reached the hill-foot. Then flowery meads, and presently the shadow of a forest, where we regaled ourselves with a second dessert of juicy bilberries and wild strawberries, both growing in profusion. From a little clearing, not far from the top, we saw heaving darkly against the blue, the hills of the Saxon Switzerland. The last bit was steep and pathless; but at length we came out upon a little hollow platform, the summit of a precipice, from which, the trees diverging and sinking on either hand, there was a grand view over the vale we had left, and far away, over field and hamlet, meadow and coppice, to a wavy line of hills, gray, purple, green, and brown, blended on the horizon. We sat for an hour; and after scanning the principal features RÖschen pointed out the details, naming every house and field within a great sweep. Each man's little property lay distinctly mapped out, and we could see the neighbours and her sisters working in the sunshine.

Our way back led us across the hay-field, where the lasses were bustling to finish in time for some evening's diversion, the nature of which was a secret. I proposed to help them, threw off my coat, seized a fork, and flung the hay up to the lass in the wagon quicker than she could trim it. RÖschen took a rake, and had enough to do in gathering up the heaps which, pitching too vigorously, I sent clean over the wagon. All at once, as I was stooping, down came a mountain on my back, and the three lasses, taking advantage of my fall, came piling heap on heap above me—Pelion upon Ossa—till I was well-nigh smothered, and they went almost wild with laughter. They sat down to recover themselves; but when they saw me, after laborious thrust and heave, come creeping ingloriously out, their jocund mirth broke out again, and provoked me into a spirit of retaliation.

"As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure,

The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure."