Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/35



held out a good long siege, when vats and bins were well filled, which, I feel sure, the gentlemen who wore the mailcoat over the priestly robe took good care of. Near the kitchen is a heavy, well-secured door: the entrance to the dungeons and cellars underground. Only the upper tier'of these cellars is now in use: they are remarkably well finished and well preserved; but the entrance to the dungeons below has been closed, to prevent accidents, since the stairs leading down have crumbled away, and there is no safe passage to reach them. Standing where one of these had formerly existed, a stone thrown below will raise a ghostly clatter among the chains and other remnants of a barbarous past. I am assured in all sincerity that the good Bishops once seated here had a humane trick of bringing their prisoners into these dungeons, fettering them to the chains fastened in the walls for this purpose, and leaving them there to die the easiest way they could. Here, also, is the entrance to a subterranean passage extending from here all the way under the river to a monastery—Lokkum— some two miles away on the other side. When hard besieged, this passage, the entrance to which was not generally known, afforded the Bishops safe retreat to their faithful allies across the stream.

"That was the romantic age," I said to myself as I emerged from the lower world, and my eye passed along the two wings of the house, and rested on the "year of our Lord 1549." But the thing looked grand, it is not to be denied: huge blocks of stone, piled smoothly over each other, and graceful devices in cornice and balustrade, hewn out of the same imperishable material, weatherstained and often dismantled, but glorious still amid the dust of the past and the irreverent light of the new, realistic day. Fallen greatness! Departed glory! I can not help drawing a little sigh as I begin to mount the stone-steps

(deeply scooped out, every one, from the "tramp of ages") of the round tower; and I hang my head a little as I think of the white-haired lady, once the mistress of these echoing halls and broad corridors, who has long since found a home on our own shore, and had charged me, particularly, to visit her old heimath in the Vaterland. I drop my eyes, partly because it makes me sad to think of all the changes that have passed over her venerable head, partly because I had been told that this particular tower was the habitation of one particular ghost, often seen on the narrow gallery running around the tower above, by people who had the hardihood to look up while mounting the winding staircase. A wide gallery connected the tower with large, old-fashioned rooms in the upper, inhabitable story of the castle, with windows looking out on the Weser. I was conducted to the best room, and invited to a seat on the divan, in the windowsill. If this sounds like a "traveler's story," I must remind the reader that the walls of the castle were the width of any ordinary-sized room, and a little table and two chairs found room there, besides the divan I occupied. My kindly entertainers always took their afterdinner coffee here; and as they dispose of dinner early in this country, we had still a long, pleasant afternoon before us, and I prepared to listen with eager attention to all that was told me about Petershagen and the surrounding country.

There was at least one tie between me and these people: the love for the gray-haired lady whose home this had been. It was her brother, by the way, who at the breaking out of the last German war was Adjutant-General to the Elector of Hesse; and, loyal to his Prince, was taken prisoner with him and held captive in the Fortress of Mindeny only an hour's drive from here. And it was her father who, in 1809, when