sion in the little town of
Nassau, the home of the upright and patriotic minister of that name,
whose memory is a household word in Germany. The present house is a
comfortable modern one--a _chateau_ in the French sense of the word--but
the old shattered tower above the town is the cradle of the family. At
the village of Fruecht is the family-vault and the great man's monument,
a modern Gothic canopy, somewhat bald and characterless, but bearing a
fine statue of Stein by Schwanthaler, and an inscription in praise of
the "unbending son of bowed-down Fatherland." He came of a good stock,
for thus runs his father's funeral inscription, in five alliterative
German rhymes. I can give it but lamely:

His nay was nay, and steady,
His yea was yea, and ready:
Of his promise ever mindful,
His lips his conscience ne'er belied,
And his word was bond and seal.

Stein was born in the house where he retired to spend his last years in
study: his grave and pious nature is shown in the mottoes with which he
adorned his home: "A tower of strength is our God" over the house-door,
and in his library, above his books and busts and gathering of
life-memorials, "Confidence in God, singleness of mind and
righteousness." His contemporaries called him, in a play upon his name
which, as such things go, was not bad, "The foundation-_stone_ of right,
the stumbling-_stone_ of the wicked, and the precious _stone_ of
Germany." Arnstein and its old convent, now occupied by a solitary
priest: Balduinenstein and its rough-hewn, cyclopean-looking ruin,
standing over the mossy picturesque water-mill; the marble-quarries near
Schaumburg, worked by convicts; Diez and its conglomeration of houses
like a puzzle endowed with life,--are all on the way to Limburg, the
episcopal town, old and tortuous, sleepy and alluring, with its shady
streets, its cathedral of St. George and its monument of the
lion-hearted Conrad or Kuno, surnamed Shortbold (Kurzbold), a nephew of
Emperor Conrad, a genuine woman-hater, a man of giant strength but
dwarfish height, who is said to have once strangled a lion, and at
another time sunk a boatful of men with one blow of his spear. The
cathedral, the same visited by our Bornhofen friends, has other
treasures--carved stalls and a magnificent image of Our Lord of the
sixteenth century, a Gothic baptismal font and a richly-sculptured
tabernacle, as well as a much older image of _St. George and the
Dragon_, supposed