ne out of fashion now, and the
peacemaking queen would have a harder task to perform now that the two
parties have come to an open collision. There is the old "German house" by
the bank of the Mosel, a building little altered outwardly since the
fourteenth century, now used as a food-magazine for the troops. The church
of St. Castor commemorates a holy hermit who lived and preached to the
heathen in the eighth century, and also covers the grave and monument of
the founder of the "Mouse" at Wellmich, the warlike Kuno of Falkenstein,
archbishop of Treves. The Exchange, once a court of justice, has changed
less startlingly, and its proportions are much the same as of old; and
besides these there are other buildings worth noticing, though not so old,
and rather distinguished by the men who lived and died there, or were born
there, such as Metternich, than by architectural beauties. Such houses
there are in every old city. They do not invite you to go in and admire
them: every tourist you meet does not ask you how you liked them or
whether you saw them. They are _homes_, and sealed to you as such, but
they are the shell of the real life of the country; and they have somehow
a charm and a fascination that no public building or show-place can have.
Goethe, who turned his life-experiences into poetry, has told us something
of one such house not far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein,
beneath the fortress, and which in familiar Coblenz parlance goes by the
name of "The Valley"--the house of Sophie de Laroche. The village is also
Clement Brentano's birthplace.

The oldest of German cities, Treves (or in German _Trier_), is not too far
to visit on our way up the Mosel Valley, whose Celtic inhabitants of old
gave the Roman legions so much trouble. But Rome ended by conquering, by
means of her civilization as well as by her arms, and _Augusta
Trevirorum_, though claiming a far higher antiquity than Rome herself, and
still bearing an inscription to that effect on the old council-house--now
called the Red House and used as a hotel--became, as Ausonius
condescendingly remarked, a second Rome, adorned with baths, gardens,
temples, theatres and all that went to make up an imperial capital. As in
Venice everything precious seems to have come from Constantinople, so in
Trier most things worthy of note date from the days of the Romans; though,
to tell the truth, few of the actual buildings do, no matter how classic
is their look