He
went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where
for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the
island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From
Ruegen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cuestrin to
survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of
_Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for
exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles,"
and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the
_Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever
you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through
the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he
first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen
inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both
ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have
experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and
"not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They
are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish
people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends
visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden
Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk
to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe.
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