day was appointed for the
wedding of the princess. When they were married, the giant had a great
feast and he and all his servants got drunk. So the princess mounted his
black horse and rode away over the mountains, till she reached this
valley. She stood on that square rock which you see there opposite to
us, and when she saw her knight on this side, where we are, she danced
for joy, and the rock is called the _Tanzplatz_, to this very day. But
when the giant found she had gone, he followed her as fast as he might;
then a holy bishop, who saw the princess, blessed the feet of her horse,
and she jumped on it across to this side, where his fore feet made two
marks in the rock, though there is only one left now. You should not
laugh at this, for if there were giants then, there must have been very
big horses too, as one can see from the hoofmark, and the valley was
narrower then than it is now. My dear man, who is very old now, (you see
him through the bushes, there, digging,) says it was so when he was a
child, and that the old people living then, told him there were once
four just such hoof-tracks, on the _Tanzplatz_, where the horse stood
before he jumped over. And we cannot doubt the words of the good old
people, for there were many strange things then, we all know, which the
dear Lord does not let happen now. But I must tell you, lieber Herr,
that the giant tried to jump after her and fell away down into the
valley, where they say he lives yet in the shape of a big black dog,
guarding the crown of the princess, which fell off as she was going
over. But this part of the story is perhaps not true, as nobody, that I
ever heard of, has seen either the black dog or the crown!"

After listening to similar gossip for a while, I descended the
mountain-side, a short distance to the Bulowshohe. This is a rocky shaft
that shoots, upward from the mountain, having from its top a glorious
view through the door which the Bode makes in passing out of the Hartz.
I could see at a great distance the towers of Magdeburg, and further,
the vast plain stretching away like a sea towards Berlin. From Thale,
the village below, where the air was warmer than in the Hartz and the
fruit-trees already in blossom, it was four hours' walk to Halberstadt,
by a most tiresome road over long ranges of hills, all ploughed and
planted, and extending as far as the eye could reach, without a single
fence or hedge. It is pleasant to look over scenes where nat