plants which hang from the dripping rocks above. Above this grotto the path leads into a road, which ascends a glen to the top of the platform, where stands the village of Hartheim. We mean to devote the day to a ramble in the volcanic scenery of the Eifel. From Hartheim we strike across a burnt-up, dreary, swelling upland to Gillenfeld, which is some eight English miles distant. This region bears the same relation to Bertrich that Arabia Deserta does to Arabia Felix. We are attracted by a fine specimen of an extinct volcano, looking like a miniature Vesuvius in form, behind which is a fringe of trees. On arriving there we find the fringe is the edge of a basin, which might be compared to a round fish-pond in a garden, save that it is vastly larger. And the moss on its margin is represented by beech-woods of moderate size. This basin is the Pulver Maar, or Powder Mere, so called from the volcanic gravel of which the banks consist, the grains of which are about the size of the gunpowder used for blasting rocks, soft to the touch, clean, and of a dull purple colour. This little tarn is a more perfect specimen of a volcanic crater lake (of which there are several in this country) even than the Lake of Laach, which some think may have been produced by other causes, and is not strictly circular. The Pulver Maar is 1,266 feet above the sea-level, and the rim of the crater 1,495; it is 6,700 feet round, and 2,300 in diameter, and in some places nearly 300 feet deep. The water has no visible inlet or outlet, but is always fresh, and of the usual green colour of lakes, not of the lovely blue of the Laacher See. It produces fish of several kinds, and crawfish of remarkably good flavour, as we found at the inn at Gillenfeld.
Alf, on the Moselle.
