Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/271

Rh valley are superb, and the silver-flashing Rhine lies fair and peaceful;—a noble view, of peaks sun-smitten or dimmed by cloud or mist, of rich-hued distances, of ancient castles niched in allurement or standing upon austere cliffs, of houses and orchards, of cattle and of smiling-fields.

There is a charming enclosed old garden on the very edge of the cliff, where rosemary and box once grew, and glorious roses, yellow and red and white, and where stately ladies, silk-clad, stately walked. Not open to sight or to attack, that garden, for at either end stood a little tower, round and domed, where guards stood watch. Walled about and curtailed was the life of the fine ladies of those bygone days, even as this garden was walled, and they must often have envied the freedom of the village maids whom they could watch, at work or at play, in the plain below.

An old bell still hangs in a tower, overlooking the perpendicular cliff, and one cannot but think of how it clangored its alarm when men-at-arms were seen approaching along the river or when the warlike Swiss descended from their defiles.

There are some half-dozen castled ruins within the confines of Liechtenstein, and some half-dozen other ruined piles frown back from the Swiss side of the river—ghosts of the passions of the past. One, on the Liechtenstein side, looms above the village of Balzers, and bears in the neighborhood the fame of never having been captured, although it has stood for a thousand years. It stands on the summit of a rocky mass, rising steeply on every side out of the level land. Never was a grimmer or dourer pile; for so narrowly did it escape capture in 1499, when the Swiss scarred it with a lumbering piece of artillery, that the baron built up all the windows and openings, reducing them to the narrowest of slits.

The "Watch on the Rhine" in the centuries past meant something very different from the present usage of the phrase. For every merchant with laden pack-horses, every owner of a cargo going toward the Lake of Constance and thence toward the cities of Germany, was likely