es the new
house of the family of Sayn-Wittgenstein, built in the year 1848. As we
push our way down the Rhine we soon come to the little peaceful town of
Neuwied, a sanctuary for persecuted Flemings and others of the Low
Countries, gathered here by the local sovereign, Count Frederick III.
The little brook that gives its name to the village runs softly into the
Rhine under a rustic bridge and amid murmuring rushes, while beyond it
the valley gets narrower, rocks begin to rise over the Rhine banks, and
we come to Andernach.

Andernach is the Rocky Gate of the Rhine, and if its scenery were not
enough, its history, dating from Roman times, would make it interesting.
However, of its relics we can only mention, in passing, the parish
church with its four towers, all of tufa, the dungeons under the
council-house, significantly called the "Jew's bath," and the old
sixteenth-century contrivances for loading Rhine boats with the
millstones in which the town still drives a fair trade. At the mouth of
the Brohl we meet the volcanic region again, and farther up the valley
through which this stream winds come upon the retired little
watering-place of Toennistein, a favorite goal of the Dutch, with its
steel waters; and Wassenach, with what we may well call its dust-baths,
stretching for miles inland, up hills full of old craters, and leaving
us only at the entrance of the beech-woods that have grown up in these
cauldron-like valleys and fringe the blue Laachersee, the lake of
legends and of fairies. One of these Schlegel has versified in the "Lay
of the Sunken Castle," with the piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned;
and Simrock tells us in rhyme of the merman who sits waiting for a
mortal bride; while Wolfgang Mueller sings of the "Castle under the
Lake," where at night ghostly torches are lighted and ghostly revels are
held, the story of which so fascinates the fisherman's boy who has heard
of these doings from his grandmother that as he watches the enchanted
waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel trick, and he plunges in to
join the revellers and learn the truth.

Local tradition says that Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking
here by night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny
fashion, and founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This
deserted but scarcely ruined building still exists, and contains the
grave of the founder; the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed,
is almo