the steep bank on which
the "lookout" is perched. The winding Ahr, coming from the tufa-plateau of
the Eifel and watering a pretty valley full of old castles and churches,
rolls its waters into the Rhine in this neighborhood, and in summer no
trip is so pleasant to the citizens of Bonn and Cologne, and indeed to
many tourists if they have time to breathe. But in winter the scenery is
worthy of the New World. The dark rocks and narrow slits of valleys piled
with snow and crusted with ice, the locked waterfalls and caves with
portcullises of icicles let down across their mouths, make a pendant for
the splendid and little-known scenery of American mountains in January. By
one of the castles, a ruin belonging to the Steins of Nassau, poetically
called _Landskroene_, or the "Land's Crown," from its beautiful situation
on a basalt hill, is a perfectly-preserved chapel perched on the top of
the rock, where, says the legend, the daughter of the besieged lord of the
castle once took refuge during a local war. The sacristy has an unusual
shape, and is hewn out of the rock itself; and here it was that the maiden
sat in safety, the rock closing over the cleft by which she had crept in,
and a dove finding its way in every day with a loaf to feed her, while a
spring within the cave supplied her with water. Legends have grown over
every stone of this poetic land like moss and lichen and rock-fern; and at
Beul, a small bathing-place with a real geyser and a very tolerable circle
of society, we come across the universal story of a golden treasure sunk
in a castle-well and guarded by a giant. The old, world-forgotten town has
its hall of justice and all the shell of its antique civic paraphernalia,
while at present it is a sleepy, contented, rural place, with country
carts and country riders by families crowding it on market-days, and
making every yard of the old street a picture such as delights the
traveller from cities whose plan is conveniently but not picturesquely
that of a chess-board. The baths, like those of Schlangenbad, are in great
favor with nervous women, and like that neighborhood too, so has this its
miniature Olivet and Calvary, the devout legacy of some unknown crusader,
who also founded at Ahrweiler the Franciscan monastery called Calvary
Hill. These "calvaries," in many shapes and degrees, are not uncommon in
Catholic Germany; "stations of the cross"--sometimes groups of painted
figures, life-size, sometimes only small s