Grows pinewood, to the topmost height; pine-trees far aloft look quietly down upon you, over sheer precipices, on your intricate path.

On the slopes of the Hills is grass enough; in the intervals are Villages and husbandries, are corn and milk for the laborious natives,--who depend mainly on quarrying, and pine-forest work: pines and free-stone, rafts of long slim pines, and big stone barges, are what one sees upon the River there.

A Note, not very geological, says of it:-- "Elbe sweeps freely through this Country, for ages and aeons past; curling himself a little into snake-figure, and with increased velocity, but silent mostly, and trim to the edge, a fine flint-colored river;--though in aeons long anterior, it must have been a very different matter for torrents and water-power.

The Country is one huge Block of Sandstone, so many square miles of that material; ribbed, channelled, torn and quarried, in this manner, by the ever-busy elements, for a million of Ages past! Chiefly by the Elbe himself, since he got to be a River, and became cosmic and personal; ceasing to be a mere watery chaos of Lakes and Deluges hereabouts.

For the Sandstone was of various degrees of hardness; tenacious as marble some parts of it, soft almost as sand other parts.