but it is considered so unsafe that it is forbidden to mount it" I started up, not doubting that my girls, with the instinct that young people seem to have to get into places of peril, had gone there. I fancied them tumbling down after their sensible compatriots. I screamed to them, and was answered distinctly — by a well-mannered echo! However, I soon found, by a little ragged boy, that they were loitering unharmed about the old tower, and I got them down before they had time to add to the American illustrations of Konistein.
To-day we have been to Falkenstein. It is one of the highest summits of the Taunus, near those loftiest pinnacles, the Fellberg and Auld Konig. There is a pretty story of a knight having won a daughter of Falkenstein by making a carriage road in a single night up to the castle-wall. The most sensible miracle I ever heard being required of a lover. The elf who lent him spades and pickaxes and worked with him, demanded in payment the fee simple of some wild woodland hereabout. I like this story better than that in Schiller's ballad of the "Lord of Falkenstein." One does not like to mar such a scene as this with the spectre of a treacherous and cruel lover, or to remember, amid this rural peace and beauty, that there are sweet deceived young mothers, whose spirits brood over the graves of the children they in madness murdered. And who that has seen Retzsch's exquisite sketch of the peasant-girl of Falkenstein can forget it? We were there just before sunset. The little stone-built vil-
