I was leaving behind me my last relations, my last friends.

Now I was going into the wide world, and among strangers.
At eight o'clock in the morning I left Altona, and proceeded by railway to Kiel.
I noticed with pleasure that on this railway even the third-class carriages were securely covered in, and furnished with glass windows.

In fact, they only differed from those of the first and second class in being painted a different colour, and having the seats uncushioned.
The whole distance of seventy miles was passed in three hours; a rapid journey, but agreeable merely by its rapidity, for the whole neighbourhood presents only widely-extended plains, turf-bogs and moorlands, sandy places and heaths, interspersed with a little meadow or arable land.

From the nature of the soil, the water in the ditches and fields looked black as ink.
Near Binneburg we notice a few stunted plantations of trees.

From Eisholm a branch-line leads to Gluckstadt, and another from Neumunster, a large place with important cloth-factories, to Rendsburg.
From here there is nothing to be seen but a convent, in which many Dukes of Holstein lie buried, and several unimportant lakes; for instance, those of Bernsholm, Einfeld, and Schulhof.