Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/36



the little band of patriots under Schill fought that desperate fight for Germany's liberation, and were defeated, captured, court-martialed, and sentenced to death at Braunschweig, saved the youngest of the number by assisting him to escape. The Baron, I must explain, was a French officer at this time, by virtue of the Captain's commission he held from Napoleon's brother, Jerome, King of Westphalia; and these men were rebels against the existing Government, so that he risked his own life in saving that of Schill's youngest officer. Bitterly he must have felt the French yoke, when Schill's men, sentenced to death by a court-martial of their own countrymen, who wore the French uniform, were led forth to execution; and in honor to his memory and his ashes, be it said that, according to the printed records I have read, he, and he alone of all the German officers forced to serve under the usurper, had the courage to withhold his consent from the murder of these men.

And yet farther back into the past we traveled, while the sunshine was dancing on the stream gliding by below, and the tones of the wind-harp came sweeping around the heavy walls and into the open window. Across the Weser all was beauty and repose: green meadows covered with peacefully grazing cattle; clumps of trees dotting the valleys and the banks of the stream; hills in the hazy distance, and the picturesque ruins of what had once been the residence of the steward of the Petershagen domains (the Koppel) in the immediate foreground. The air was balmy; the thin, white clouds floating in the sky threw light shadows on the beautiful German earth; and, when I think back of the land so far behind me now, I break out into Heine's pathetic lament:

"O Deutschland—meine ferne Liebe! Gedenk' ich deiner, wein' ich fast."

But when the ice of the cold, German

winter melts under the first soft breath

of spring, the scene is altogether different. Then the angry river, throwing off its winter fetters, covers the banks with its muddy waves, and climbs impatiently up to the broad windows of the upper story of the castle; and at such a time it was, long ago, after this domain had passed from the ecclesiastical grasp into the hands of profane rulers, that the lord of the castle had committed the wife of his bosom to the cold embraces of the roaring flood, thus furnishing the round tower with the ghost to which every old tower in this country is entitled. The reason assigned for this ungallant conduct on the part of the "stalwart Knight" was his overweening affection for some other fair one; but tradition says that the spirit of the wife so summarily dispatched gave him little leisure to dream of his new charmer— the spirit having contracted the unpleasant habit of cowering at the foot of his bed every night he attempted to pass in the castle after his "dark deed."

I leaned far out of the window, to see how deep below me was the Weser; and was told that the present height of the castle was 140 feet. Under the window I again saw the two tiers of loop-holes that ran around two sides of the building, and formerly, in continuation, for a mile or two down the stream, in walls and fortifications long since crumbled into dust. Below these loop-holes were other openings through which a spare light was admitted into some of the upper dungeons; in the lower there was eternal night. During the Seven Years' War and the Thirty Years' War, Petershagen held its own; and there is not a foot of ground for miles around to which there is not some historical interest attached: the very ground still yielding to the plowman at labor in the field its hidden treasures of stone-axes and other war implements used by the native Saxons against the Roman invaders. Iron was not known in this Northern Germany —called Saxony then—at that time;