Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/191

188 we came into Germany. The fellow was a stranger and an alien from this worthy household, I am sure; he had a most un-German expression.

The castle has been, till recently, a state-prison, and is now occupied by invalid soldiers. We were led through dark passages and up a winding stone staircase to the apartment where prisoners were put to the rack; and we were shown another gloomy den, where there were two uprights and a transverse beam, and beneath them a trap-door; if not satisfied with so much of the story as these objects intimate, you may descend and search for the bones which you will certainly find there! In another apartment are some mediocre paintings on the wall, done with only a gleam of light by a poor fellow who had thus happily beguiled weary years of imprisonment. On the whole, the castle was not so interesting, not nearly so striking as I expected. Nothing is left to indicate the rude luxury of its lordly masters; its aspect is merely that of an ill-contrived prison.

we got back to the inn an old man, who seemed an habitué, asked us, in very good French (which Germans of the inferior orders never speak), to walk into the garden. Such a pretty garden, with its towers, its fragment of the old castle-wall, its bowers and wreaths of grapes, and such grapes; oh, you would go mad if you could see them, remembering your seasons of hope and despair over