becoming so uninteresting that it is hardly worth
while lingering on its banks, and as we get near thrifty Holland the river
seems to give itself up wholly to business, for between Cologne and Aachen
(Aix-la-Chapelle) are miles upon miles of manufactories, workshops and
mills; warehouses connected with coal-mines; dirty barges blackening the
water; iron-works and carpet-mills; cloth and paper-mills and
glass-works--a busy region, the modern translation of the myth of gnomes
making gold out of dross in the bowels of the earth.

Aachen has a double life also, like many Rhine towns: it is the old
imperial coronation city, the city of Charlemagne, with a corona of
legends about it; and it is also the modern spa, the basket of tempting
figs with a concealed asp somewhere within, a centre of fashion, gossip
and gambling. How is it that people who profess to fly from the great
capitals for the sake of a "little Nature" are so unable to take Nature at
her word and confess her delights to be enough for them? They want a
change, they say; yet where is the change? The table is the same,
high-priced, choice and varied; the society is the same, the gossip is the
same, the amusements are the same, the intrigues the same; the costume
equally elaborate and expensive; the restless idleness as great and as
hungry for excitement: all the artificiality of life is transported bodily
into another place, and the only difference lies in the frame of the
picture. Exquisites from the capital bring their own world with them, and
their humbler imitators scrape together their hard winter's earnings and
spend them in making an attempt cavalierly to equal for a short time the
tired-out "man of the world" and "woman of fashion." Some come to find
matches for sons and daughters; others to put in the thin end of the wedge
that is to open a way for them "into society;" others come to flirt;
others to increase their business relations; others to out-dress and
out-drive social rivals; others to while away the time which it is
unfashionable to spend cheaply in the city; others for--shall we say
higher? because--political causes: few indeed for health, fewer still for
rest. You see the same old wheel go round year after year, with the same
faces growing more and more tired and more and more hopeless.

[Illustration: "AM THUeRMCHEN," COLOGNE.]

Of Aachen's legendary, historical, romantic side who has not heard?--of
the castle of Frankenburg on the outskirts