Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/154

Rh botaniste," said Madame M. He showed us a rich collection of American plants, and I stood amid the mosses and ferns, my old friends of the ice-glen, feeling very much as if I ought to speak to them as they did to me!

We drove, by a road that reminded me of the drives through the Connecticut River meadows, to Godesberg. There was one pretty object, the like of which we shall never see in our Puritan land—a high and beautifully-carved stone cross. It marked the spot where two cavaliers—brothers—fought for their lady-love, and the unhappy surviver erected this cross, hoping the passers-by would stop to say a prayer for the soul of his brother.

There is a cluster of hotels at Godesberg, and some villas belonging to the Cologne noblesse; it is a favourite summer retreat We went to see the ruins of the Castle of Godesberg. They crown an isolated mount, which looks, in the midst of the surrounding level, as if it were artificial; but it is one of those natural elevations which, being castellated and strongly fortified, make up so much of the romantic story of the middle ages, and, with their ruins, so much of the romantic embellishment of the present day. This Castle of Godesberg has its love story, and a true and tragic one. It was here that the Elector of Cologne who married Agnes of Massfeldt held out against his Catholic enemies. His marriage made his conversion to Protestantism somewhat questionable; and the separation and misery in which the unhappy pair died was probably