ilization.

The Porta Nigra, for instance--called Simeon's Gate at present--dates
really from the days of the first Merovingian kings, but it looks like a
piece of the Colosseum, with its rows of arches in massive red
sandstone, the stones held together by iron clamps, and its low,
immensely strong double gateway, reminding one of the triumphal arches
in the Forum at Rome. The history of the transformation of this gateway
is curious. First a fortified city gate, standing in a correspondingly
fortified wall, it became a dilapidated granary and storehouse in the
Middle Ages, when one of the archbishops gave leave to Simeon, a
wandering hermit from Syracuse in Sicily, to take up his abode there;
and another turned it into a church dedicated to this saint, tho of this
change few traces remain. Finally, it has become a national museum of
antiquities. The amphitheater is a genuine Roman work, wonderfully well
preserved; and genuine enough were the Roman games it has witnessed,
for, if we are to believe tradition, a thousand Frankish prisoners of
war were here given in one day to the wild beasts by the Emperor
Constantine. Christian emperors beautified the basilica that stood where
the cathedral now is, and the latter itself has some basilica-like
points about it, tho, being the work of fifteen centuries, it bears the
stamp of successive styles upon its face....

The Mosel has but few tributary streams of importance; its own course is
as winding, as wild and as romantic as that of the Rhine itself. The
most interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not
the castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards
lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand--all this it has in
common with the Rhine--but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes
in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes
strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are
like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the
extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This
grotesque, interesting country--unique, I believe, on the continent of
Europe--lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier
and the Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine; it goes by the names of the
High Eifel, with the High Acht, the Kellberg and the Nurburg; the upper
(Vorder) Eifel, with Gerolstein, a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty
village; and the Snow-Eifel