and driving willing gangs of his species all over the
world.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE CASTLE OF AUERBACH.]

There is a funny, not over-reverent, legend afloat in Trier to account
for the queer dwarf bottles of Mosel wine used there: it refers to a trick
of Saint Peter, who is supposed to have been travelling in these parts
with the Saviour, and when sent to bring wine to the latter drank half of
it on his way back, and then, to conceal his act, cut the cup down to the
level of the wine that remained. These measures are still called
_Miseraebelchen_, or "wretched little remainders."

The Mosel has but few tributary streams of importance: its own course is
as winding, as wild and as romantic as that of the Rhine itself. The most
interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not the
castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards
lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand--all this it has in common
with the Rhine--but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient
craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with
dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland
gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to
say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting
country--unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe--lies in a small
triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of
the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names of the High Eifel, with the High
Acht, the Kellberg and the Nuerburg; the Upper (_Vorder_) Eifel, with
Gerolstein, a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty village; and the
Snow-Eifel (_Schnee Eifel_), contracted by the speech of the country into
Schneifel. The last is the most curious, the most dreary, the least
visited. Walls of sharp rock rise up over eight hundred feet high round
some of its sunken lakes--one is called the Powder Lake--and the level
above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with
herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral,
gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough [Symbol: T] and set in a
heap of loose stones. It is a great contrast to turn aside from this
landscape and look on the smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of
the valley of the Mosel proper; the long lines of handsome, healthy women
washing their linen on the banks; the old ferryboats crossing by the help
of antique c