sacristy has an unusual shape, and is hewn out of the rock itself; and here it was that the maiden sat in safety, the rock closing over the cleft by which she had crept in, and a dove finding its way in every day with a loaf to feed her, while a spring within the cave supplied her with water. Legends have grown over every stone of this poetic land like moss and lichen and rock-fern; and at Beul, a small bathing-place with a real geyser and a very tolerable circle of society, we come across the universal story of a golden treasure sunk in a castle-well and guarded by a giant. The old, world-forgotten town has its hall of justice and all the shell of its antique civic paraphernalia, while at present it is a sleepy, contented, rural place, with country carts and country riders by families crowding it on market-days, and making every yard of the old street a picture such as delights the traveller from cities whose plan is conveniently but not picturesquely that of a chess-board. The baths, like those of Schlangenbad, are in great favor with nervous women, and like that neighborhood too, so has this its miniature Olivet and Calvary, the devout legacy of some unknown crusader, who also founded at Ahrweiler the Franciscan monastery called Calvary Hill. These "calvaries," in many shapes and degrees, are not uncommon in Catholic Germany; "stations of the cross"—sometimes groups of painted figures, life-size, sometimes only small shrines with a framed picture within—mark the distances up the hill, at the top of which is a representation of the crucifixion; and as the agony in the garden is not included in the "stations," there is generally at the foot of the hill an additional shrine in a natural cave or surrounded by artificial rock-work. The prettiest part of the Ahr valley is at and about Walporzheim, which the Düsseldorf artists have, by reason of its famous wine quite as much as of its romantic scenery, chosen for the place of their frequent feasts, half picnic, half masque, when their get-up rivals that of any carnival, not even excepting that of the "Krewe of Komus" or those other displays peculiar to Belgium and Holland of which the late celebration of the "Pacification of Ghent" was an example.

COURT OF JUSTICE, AHRWEILER.

The Rhine once more! and now indeed we shall hardly leave it again, but this is the last part in which we can enjoy the peculiar beauties that make it different from any other river in the world. The Swiss Rhine is a mountain-torrent, the Dutch Rhine a sluggish mud puddle, but the German Rhine is an historic river. Quite as legendary as historic, however; and perhaps that has made its charm in the eyes of foreigners even more than its national associations, dear to the native mind; and here, between Rolandseck, Nonnenwerth and Drachenfels, poetry takes precedence of history, and we do not want the antiquary to come and shatter the legend of Roland of Roncesval's fidelity to the Lady of Drachenfels, even after her vows in Nonnenwerth convent, with his pitiless array of dates and parade of obvious impossibilities. But I pass over the legendary details that make this region so interesting. What will better bear repetition is some description of the scenery lying inland from the shores, the natural Quadrilateral, containing minor mountains, such as the Siebengebirge (or the Seven Hills) and the Bonner Alps, and encircling also the volcanic region between Honnef and Dollendorf. These hills with their step-and-terrace formation were once fortified by Valentinian against the formidable Frankish hordes, and German poetry early began to find scenery in them worthy of its national epic, and so laid the scene of the Saga of Wilkina among these mountains and valleys. Here, above the legends of Roland and Siegfried and the Christian captive, who, exposed to the dragon of the rock, vanquished him by the cross, so that he fell backward and broke his neck, is the solid remembrance of castles built on many of these Rhine-hills, defences and bulwarks of the archbishops of Cologne against the emperors of Germany. But Drachenfels keeps another token of its legend in its dark-red wine, called "dragon's blood." (Could any teetotaller have invented a more significant name?) One has often heard of the unbelieving monk who stumbled at the passage in Scripture which declares that a thousand years are but as one day to the Lord, and the consequent taste of eternity which he was miraculously allowed to enjoy while he wandered off for a quarter of an hour, as he thought, but in reality for three hundred years, following the song of a nightingale. The abbey of Heisterbach claims this as an event recorded in its books, and its beautiful ruins and wide naves with old trees for columns are, so says popular rumor, haunted by another wanderer, an abbot with snow-white beard, who walks the cloisters at night counting the graves of his brethren, and vainly seeking his own, which if he once find his penance will be over. This part of the Rhine was the favorite home of many of the poets who have best sung of the national river: a cluster of townlets recalls no less than five of them to our mind—Unkel, where Freiligrath chose his home; Menzerberg, where Simrock lived; Herresberg, Pfarrins's home; Königswinter, Wolfgang Müller's birthplace; and Oberkassel, that of Gottfried Kinkel. Rhondorf shows us a monument of one of the last robber-lords of Drachenfels, and Honnef a smiling modern settlement, a very Nice of the North, where the climate draws together people of means and leisure, littérateurs, retired merchants and collectors of art-treasures, as well as health-seekers. These little colonies, of which most of the large cities on the Rhine have a copy in miniature, even if it be not a bathing-place, are the places in which to seek for that domestic taste and refinement which some hasty and prejudiced critics have thought fit to deny to the Fatherland.

DRACHENFELS.

The scenery of the Rhine begins to lose its distinctive features as we near Bonn: plains replace rocks, and the waters flow more sluggishly. Bonn is alive enough: its antiquities of Roman date are forgotten in its essentially modern bustle, for the heart of its prosperity is of very recent date, the university having been founded only in 1777, and after the troubles of the Revolution reorganized in 1818. It has grown with a giant growth, and has reckoned among its professors Niebuhr, Schlegel, Arndt, Dahlmann, Johann Müller, Ritschl, Kinkel, Simrock and other less world-famous but marvellous specialists. Then there is the memory of Beethoven, the honor of the town, which is his birthplace and has put up a monument to him, and the last modern element that has effaced the old recollections—the numerous English colony—not to mention the rich foreigners whom perhaps the university, perhaps the scenery, and perhaps the heedless fashion that sets in a tide now toward this place, now toward that, have drawn to the new Bonn. Poppelsdorf Castle, now the museum of natural history, and the fine groves and gardens attached to it, now a public promenade, have the brisk, business-like look of a "live" place: the building, it is true, is modern, having been built in 1715. But if we are obstinate enough to search for signs of the days when archbishops ruled instead of dukes and kings, we shall find old remains, the cathedral of course included, and nowhere a more