Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/117

Rh church and the parishioners are Catholics. Farther up the valley is Tüchersfeld, Protestant. Next parish above that is Pottenstein. That place is Catholic. Some forty years later when I visited it, the statues of the saints in the church had been refurbished, gilded and silvered, and the metal glazed over with transparent crimson and blue paint to make them look like coloured foil.

The Catholic churches are tawdry, the Lutheran village churches are shabby.

The castle surmounting a spire of rock, which when I first saw Pottenstein was a ruin, forty years later had been bought and restored by a Nürnberg apothecary. It has puzzled people how those living in such eagle nests were supplied with water. This was done by catching the rain that fell on the steep-tiled roofs, and conveying it by pipes into huge tanks cut in the rock under the castles. The roofs are so picturesque, and so characteristic a feature, that we fancy they were designed for artistic effect. Actually they served a most practical purpose.

But to return to Muggendorf.

In 1873, twenty-nine years later than that early visit to the Franconian Switzerland, I went with my wife to Muggendorf. We left the postwagen at Ebermannstadt and walked on. As we approached the village, I recalled how that on the left hand was a gooseberry hedge. Now my father and mother, being very fond of gooseberry-fool, desired to obtain some of the fruit. But, ''Ach! Du lieber Gott! es ist straflich verboten''. Government, in its solicitude for the governed, forbade the selling and the eating of unripe gooseberries. So we had to induce the owners to look another way whilst we gathered the fruit, and then to hold their hands behind their backs and look intently at the cock on the church-spire whilst some money was pressed into their palms.

As we approached Muggendorf, there, sure enough, were the gooseberry bushes. At that time a storm of rain came on, and we had to run for it, and plunge into the Krone. A girl came to the door and inquired what we desired. I asked to be taken in for a night or two, and stated that I had lodged there twenty-nine years before.

"Möglich" said the stolid damsel. "But as I am aged only twenty-four, I do not remember the circumstance."