the dungeons under the
council-house, significantly called the "Jews' bath," and the old
sixteenth-century contrivances for loading Rhine-boats with the millstones
in which the town still drives a fair trade. At the mouth of the Brohl we
meet the volcanic region again, and farther up the valley through which
this stream winds come upon the retired little watering-place of
Toennistein, a favorite goal of the Dutch, with its steel waters; and
Wassenach, with what we may well call its dust-baths, stretching for miles
inland, up hills full of old craters, and leaving us only at the entrance
of the beech-woods that have grown up in these cauldron-like valleys and
fringe the blue Laachersee, the lake of legends and of fairies. One of
these Schlegel has versified, the "Lay of the Sunken Castle," with the
piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned; and Simrock tells us in rhyme of
the merman who sits waiting for a mortal bride; while Wolfgang Mueller
sings of the "Castle under the Lake," where at night ghostly torches are
lighted and ghostly revels held, the story of which so fascinates the
fisherman's boy who has heard of these doings from his grandmother that as
he watches the enchanted waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel
trick, and he plunges in to join the revellers and learn the truth. Local
tradition says that Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking here by
night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny fashion, and
founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This deserted but
scarcely-ruined building still exists, and contains the grave of the
founder: the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed, is almost
whole in the oldest part of the monastery. The far-famed German tale of
Genovefa of Brabant is here localized, and Henry's son Siegfried assigned
to the princess as a husband, while the neighboring grotto of Hochstein is
shown as her place of refuge. On our way back to the Rocky Gate we pass
through the singular little town of Niedermendig, an hour's distance from
the lake--a place built wholly of dark gray lava, standing in a region
where lava-ridges seam the earth like the bones of antediluvian monsters,
but are made more profitable by being quarried into millstones. There is
something here that brings part of Wales to the remembrance of the few who
have seen those dreary slate-villages--dark, damp, but naked, for moss and
weeds do not thrive on this dampness as they do on the d