e castle paraded again and again before the eyes of the besiegers,
whose only hope lay in starving out the garrison--the property of the
Sickengens, whose ancestor Franz played a prominent part in the
Reformation and gave an asylum in these very halls to Bucer,
Melanchthon, Oecolampadius and Ulrich von Huetten. Past Rothenfels,
where towering rocks hem in the stream, like the Wye banks in Arthur's
country on the Welsh borders; the scattered stones of Disibodenberg, the
Irish missionary's namesake convent, which afterward passed into the
hands of the Cistercians; Dhaum Castle and Oberstein Church, these two
with their legends, the first accounting for a bas-relief in the great
hall representing an ape rocking a child, the heir of the house, in the
depths of a forest, and giving him an apple to eat,--we come to a
cluster of castles which are the classical ground of the Nahe Valley.
The very rocks seem not only crowned but honeycombed with buildings:
chapels stand on jutting crags; houses, heaped as it were one on the
roof of the other, climb up their rough sides, and the roofs themselves
have taken their cue from the rocks, and have three or four irregular
lines of tiny windows ridging and bulging them out.

Taking boat again at Bingen, and getting safely through the Rhine "Hell
Gate," the "Hole," whose terrors seem as poetic as those of the Lorelei,
we pass the famous Mouse Tower, and opposite it the ruined Ehrenfels;
Assmanshausen, with its dark-colored wine and its custom of a May or
Pentecost feast, when thousands of merry Rhinelanders spend the day in
the woods, dancing, drinking and singing, baskets outspread in modified
and dainty pic-nic fashion, torches lit at night and bands playing or
mighty choruses resounding through the woods; St. Clement's Chapel, just
curtained from the river by a grove of old poplars and overshadowed by a
ruin with a hundred eyes (or windows), while among the thickly-planted,
crooked crosses of its churchyard old peasant-women and children run or
totter, the first telling their beads, the second gathering flowers,
and none perhaps remembering that the chapel was built by the survivors
of the families of the robber-knights of Rheinstein (one of the
loveliest of Rhine ruins) and three other confederated castles, whom
Rudolph of Habsburg treated, rightly enough, according to the Lynch law
of his time. They were hung wherever found, but their pious relations
did not forget to bury them and ato