ne for them as seemingly as might be.

[Illustration: BINGEN, FROM KLOPP CASTLE.]

Bacharach, if it were not famed in Germany for its wine, according to
the old rhyme declaring that

At Wuerzburg on the Stein,
At Hochheim on the Main,
At Bacharach on the Rhine.
There grows the best of wine,

would or ought to be noticed for its wealth of old houses and its many
architectural beauties, from the ruined (or rather unfinished) chapel of
St. Werner, now a wine-press house, bowered in trees and surrounded by a
later growth of crosses and tombstones, to the meanest little house
crowding its neighbor that it may bathe its doorstep in the
river--houses that when their owners built and patched them from
generation to generation little dreamt that they would stand and draw
the artist's eye when the castle was in ruins. Similarly, the many
serious historical incidents that took place in Bacharach have lived
less long in the memory of inhabitants and visitors than the love-story
connected with the ruined castle--that of Agnes, the daughter of the
count of this place and niece of the great Barbarossa, whom her father
shut up here with her mother to be out of the way of her lover, Henry of
Braunschweig. The latter, a Guelph (while the count was a Ghibelline),
managed, however, to defeat the father's plans: the mother helped the
lovers, and a priest was smuggled into the castle to perform the
marriage, which the father, after a useless outburst of rage, wisely
acknowledged as valid. The coloring of many buildings in this part of
the Rhineland is very beautiful, the red sandstone of the neighborhood
being one of the most picturesque of building materials. Statues and
crosses, as well as churches and castles, are built of it, and even the
rocks have so appealed by their formation to the imagination of the
people that at Schoenburg we meet with a legend of seven sisters,
daughters of that family whose hero, Marshal Schomburg, the friend and
right hand of William of Orange, lies buried in Westminster Abbey,
honored as marshal of France, peer of Great Britain and grandee of
Portugal, and who, for their haughtiness toward their lovers, were
turned into seven rocks, through part of which now runs the irreverent
steam-engine, ploughing through the tunnel that cuts off a corner where
the river bends again.

Now comes the gray rock where, as all the world knows, the Lorelei
lives, but as that graceful myth is familiar to a