The Argosy — page 225: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

208 In the Black Forest. vistas, chequered by deep lights and shadows; above all, their grand, restful solitudes—the latter a feature that should be made conspicuous by reiteration. To all wanting change of scene, tired with town life—wearying | from its very superabundance—the Black Forest offers healing in- fluences of a sure kind. Especially it commends itself to the pedes- trian. With a companion, rather than alone, to break the monotony of silence, and to share his impressions, he may throw himself into the shady depths during the scorching mid-day hour, and while away the time in a thousand fancies. In such gratefully cool retreat he will revel in the pine scents, the pure air, the deep silence, the flashes of blue sky that open and close as the trees above him sway in the wind. All the while his delicious rest and reveries are undisturbed, unbroken, » unmolested by intrusion. Health is taken in with every passing hour ; troubles (show me the happy man without them) fall off and are for- gotten; he enters into the purest happiness, of a selfish sort, that exists. We passed through a narrow, wooded valley for a considerable dis- tance, until, at Oppenau, the hills opened out and became more fertile. This morning it was a smiling, sunny valley, all lights and shades. Oppenau seemed a thriving little town, and like some others in the Forest, was destroyed by the French in the seventeenth century. We clattered noisily through the long street bordered by white houses, with their gabled roofs and green shutters: a noise that never fails to bring the good folk with haste to their doors. For curiosity is not confined to one particular people or country, but seems indigenous to the feminine element of all nations. | We did not stay to gratify any curiosity beyond a mere gaze and a wonder, but hurried on towards Petersthal. Here we are in the region of the “‘ Kniebis Baths,” a colony of watering-places much fre- quented, and quite fashionable in their way during the summer season. People come to drink the waters, a combination of iron and carbonic acid gas, not particularly agreeable to the taste. But what will not man go through to heal real or imaginary ills? The hypochondriac, indeed, is most of all to be pitied, for his ills are beyond remedy. ‘¢Vou cannot minister to a mind diseased.” The watering-places, five in number, are Freiersbach, Petersthal, Griesbach, Antogast, and Rippoldsau. Petersthal was one of the few places where women went about in costumes; wonderful head-dresses, something like inflated Alsatian bows; angels with wings, but wings, from their position, more suggestive of horns—not usually worn by angels. Some of these costumes in distant parts of Europe (not that the Black Forest is distant, but where the railway has not penetrated, © it is so for all practical purposes—unsophisticated and primitive)— some of these costumes, I say, in far-away places, are as heathenish as the tattooing and painting savages delight in: utterly beyond all common sense and beauty. Gomicbooks,..Go m