ATHLETIC SPORTS.

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pastime than smoking, your young Preusse takes a pull atbis pipe in preference to tlie oar. The Rhenisli boats, more-over, are still as rüde as our punts, being more like small coal-barges than wherries; whilst the oars in use are exactly oftlie shape of bakers' peels, and formed merely out of a smallpiece of board nailed to the end of a pole. Hence a six-oared turnout, after such a style, would cut even a morebarbarous figure on the water, in the 19th Century, than aMadras catamaran.

From a like cause yachting has never even been heard ofby these European backwoodsmen; so that to them the sightof any craft more elegant or more fast-sailing than a Dutchbärge would be a point of such extreme novelty and wonderas to bring all the wiseacre professors down in a crowd to theshore.

Again, from the greater part of the carts being drawn byoxen, and the trucks by men, women, and boys, even horsesare comparatively scarce, and equestrian exercise indulged inonly by the cavalry and general officers; whilst carriage-airingis confined to the "eine und zwei Spanner" (literally, hackney-cabs with " one or two putters") to be found on the Stands,which last only during the summer, for the accommodationof the foreigners visiting the town. Seidom, however, willa Prussian's purse allow him to know even this recreation;though occasionally the stranger may see some half-dozen ofthe more prodigal of the officers indulging in the rarity ofa ride to Stolzenfels and back, and thus reducing the eighteen-penny fare, by the principle of association, to threepence a-head. Then, certainly, there are the penny - steamboats —little things built out of sheet-iron, so thin that they areno stronger, and hardly more durable, than a tin saucepan;and by these some of the very restless Coblenzers do manage

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