Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/189

186 observation. He has just crossed the deck to say to me, "I have let them know what a tall place America is; I have told them that an American steamer will carry 2000 people and 1000 bales of cotton, and go down the river and up twice as fast as a Rhine steamer." He has not told them that a Rhine steamer is far superior in its arrangement and refinement to ours. These little patriotic vanities are pleasant solaces when one is three thousand miles from home—but truth is better.

Braubach.—We arrived here at half past three, having passed about fifty miles of the most enchanting scenery on the Rhine. Imagine, my dear C., a little strip of level land, not very many yards wide, between the river and precipitous rocks; a village with its weather-stained houses in this pent-up space; an old chateau with its walls and towers, and at the summit of the rocks, and hanging over them, for the rocks actually project from the perpendicular, the stern old Castle of Marksburg, and you have our present position. Murray says this castle is the only one of the strongholds of the middle ages that has been preserved unaltered, the beau ideal of an old castle; and this is why we have come to see it. I am sitting at the window of the chateau, now the Gast-haus zur Phillipsburg. Under my window is a garden with grapes, interspersed with fruit-trees and flowers, and enclosed by a white paling, and finishing at each end with the old towers of the