Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/196

Rh gave his name to the village is preserved. He looks like an honest German, and, though his head had been crowned with a fresh garland of roses last Sunday, and plenty of cherubs were hovering round him, I fancied he would have liked better a pipe in his mouth and a table before him, and the cherubs converted into garçons, to serve him with Rhine wine and Seltzer-water.

We took a boy from the steps of "The Lily" to cross the river with us and guide us up the Schweitzer Thai (the Swiss Valley). We followed the pathway of a little brook resembling some of our mountain-haunts. Die Katz hung over our heads half way up a steep, which Johanne (our guide) told us was higher than the Lurlieburg. It may be, but there is nothing on the Rhine so grand as this pile of rocks, which look with scorn on the perishable castles built with man's hands. It is in the whirl- pool in their deep shadow that Undine, the loveliest of water-nymphs, holds her court. No wonder it requires, as says the faith of the peasants of St. Goar, the miraculous power of their canonized hermit to deliver the ensnared from her enchantments.

We walked a mile up the valley, and loitered at little nooks, so walled in by the hills that we looked up to the sky as from the bottom of a well. To us it appeared clear and blue as a sapphire, but we were sprinkled with rain so sparkling that L. said the sun was melting and coming down in drops! I amused myself with finding out as much of my little guide's history as could be unlocked with the