Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/344

336 peasants from the banks with pretty costumes, among which a close cap of gilt filagree and a great silver-gilt bodkin stuck behind are conspicuous. There is one unfortunate German lady with no protector, and herself obliged to protect six children, mostly healthy boys. These are ever and anon trying to commit suicide, either by leaning over the river, or balancing themselves over the opening to the engines. During the progress of the table-d’hôte in the cabin the halest of these boys comes tumbling down the cabin-stairs, with his head resounding on the floor. He rubs the place to show that no harm is done, except to his mother’s feelings. That table-d’hôte in the cabin is a mistake, and those who wish to see the scenery will do well to dine à la carte above. The wind upon deck is the excuse offered to remonstrants.

There is a painter on deck, sketching the clergy and laity, who appear half-conscious and not displeased at the compliment, while another is trying to get memoranda of the shapes of the hills and castles, and convents, and bits of old walls, and quaint churches and quainter houses which pass as in a dream. One of the grandest parts is close to Alf, where a valley opens, which leads to the baths of Bertrich and the wilder scenery of the Eifel. But Cochem is apparently the cynosure of the Moselle. It is a place for which Nature has done her best, and mediæval art its best also, to make it a quarry of gems for modern painters. As the steamer does not stop at the stations, but the passengers who wish to be set down must hail a boat, and the stations are much like one another, we are insensibly carried past Brodenbach, where we intended to alight, and disembarked at Aiken, just beyond. In consequence of asking there of the parish priest, the direction of the humble inn, we pass the evening with him at his most hospitable bachelor establishment. He is great in the antiquities of the Moselle, and in the produce of his own vineyard, both white and red. In the morning he has to say mass at Brodenbach, and offers to conduct us thither, and put us on the way to the Castle of Ehrenburg, the chief sight of these parts.

The village of Ehrenburg is shrouded in a luminous mist. We come upon an exquisite picture. The rays of the morning sun are piercing the mist from the left, and strongly illuminating a vine which hangs on an old house in the foreground, and the golden moss on a cottage in the middle distance; to the right is a quaint old bridge, some high trees and a stream; above all appears high up, as if suspended, the ghost of a great castle—a veritable castle in the air. A winding way conducts presently to it, and we are in the midst of the extensive remains of the Castle of Ehrenburg. It is shown by an old man who lives there in a kind of house built at the bottom of a spacious winding vault which leads up by an inclined plane to the interior of the hold.

The view from the chief tower is very comprehensive: in the distance, beyond the Moselle, appear the volcanic summits of the Eifel, bringing to mind the strange country of the Puy de Dome, in France. This is one of the castles which belonged to that Sickingen who figured in the Reformation period. The grand and romantic loneliness of its site is similar to that of another castle of the same family, hidden away in a woody basin, near the village of Sauerthal, in the country behind Caub, on the Rhine, and the descendant of whose owner is still said to be living as a humble peasant in a farm on the mountain.

From Ehrenburg we strike across the upland, and in a pleasant walk of about seven miles cross the Hunsrücken, a spur of which here forms the narrow neck of land which divides the rest of the Moselle from the Rhine. A winding path, shaded with beech, leads down on hydropathic Boppard. A knapsack properly stored, and a pool in a mountain stream, supply all the needs of a toilette after the walk. At Boppard we come again on the railway and the Rhine steamer, the nineteenth century, and respectability, with the intention of taking another walk in the still unsophisticated Moselle country at the first opportunity.