oyal family and paid the mistress of
the house an informal friendly visit, taking "five-o'clock tea" in the
English fashion, and with a retinue of two or three attendants making the
tour of the close-shaven lawns, the firm gravelled walks and the broad and
frequent flights of steps that led from one terraced flower-garden to
another. These were courtly and educated descendants of terrible scourges
of mankind in old days--of Sayns who were simply robbers and highwaymen,
levying bloody toll on the Coblenz merchants' caravans, and of
Brandenburgs who were famous for their ravages and raids. Times have
changed no less than buildings, and the houseful of pictures and treasures
is no more unlike the robber-nest destroyed in war by other robbers than
the young Bonn student is unlike his rough-and-ready forefathers.

As we push our way down the Rhine we soon come to another such contrast,
the little peaceful town of Neuwied, a sanctuary for persecuted Flemings
and others of the Low Countries, gathered here by the local sovereign,
Count Frederick III. He gave them each a plot of land, built their houses
and exempted them from all dues and imposts, besides granting them full
freedom of worship; but not for them alone was this boon, for as other
wars made other exiles, so were all and every welcome to Neuwied, and the
place even now contains Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites and
Quakers, all living in peace together. The United Brethren (or Moravians)
founded a colony here in 1750. The honesty of these people is proverbial,
their simplicity of life is patriarchal, and the artist at least will not
object to their manners, for the sake of the pleasing costume of their
women, whose white caps look akin to the peaceful, rural background of
their life, red and blue bands on these caps respectively distinguishing
the married from the unmarried women. The little brook that gives its name
to the village runs softly into the Rhine under a rustic bridge and amid
murmuring rushes, while beyond it the valley gets narrower, rocks begin to
rise over the Rhine-banks, and the scenery after Andernach becomes again
what we so admired at Bingen and Bornhofen.

[Illustration: ORTENSTEIN.]

Andernach is the Rocky Gate of the Rhine, and if its scenery were not
enough, its history, dating from Roman times, would make it interesting.
However, of its relics we can only mention, _en passant_, the parish
church with its four towers, all of tufa,