answered Ferdinand, "for they are knights, and I am none, and moreover are my elders; but all the rest I can easily command, partly by love and partly by authority, if you will delegate some power to me to rule them as I think best, when you are not present."

"I will, I will, good youth," replied the count; "at supper-time I will do it publicly, with thanks for what you have already done. You shall be my master of the household for the time, and in that character you must show not only every kind attention to Count Frederick himself, but to his favourite followers."

"There is sufficient good accommodation provided for his knights, my lord," answered Ferdinand; "I saw to that before I went to the hall. Every thing is ready for seven, and I see but five."

"Good faith, there are others that he cares for more than his knights," answered the count. "There is the priest; ay, and the jester too. My old friend seems full of strange phantasies, and we must humour them. This fool whom he has with him saved his life in the Holy Land, it seems; and though he is at times somewhat insolent, even to his lord-as all such knavish fools are-not only does he bear with him patiently, but, ever keeping in mind this one service, sets him at table with his knights, and listens to him like an oracle. He and the priest must sit with us, and we may draw diversion from the man, if nought else. Be sure that you are civil to him, my good youth, for Count Frederick's friendship may stand me in good stead. Then there's a youth,-there he stands, talking with Mosbach, a down-looked, quick-eyed lad, who seems a favourite too."

"What is his name, my lord?" asked Ferdinand, turning his eyes in the direction of the group of which the count spoke. "Martin of Dillberg," said his lord. "He is a gentleman by birth, it seems, but of no very high nobility. Not like the Altenburgs," he continued, with a smile and a flattering tone, " whose very blood is wealth. So now go, Ferdinand, and see that all be arranged as I have said; for I must hie me back again, and lead this good lord to his apartments. You do the same for the others; and let the trumpet sound some minutes before supper, that we may all be gathered in the other hall."

Thus saying, he left him; but in the meanwhile some words of interest had passed between Adelaide and Count Frederick, who had remained with her near one of the windows, while the few attendants who had followed them grouped together talking at the other end of the chamber.

I have known your father long and well, my dear young lady." he said, as soon as they entered; and I knew your uncle better still,a noble and high-minded man he was, as sportful as a child, yet with the courage and the conduct of a sage; and I must look upon you almost as a daughter. Thus, if I do so sometimes, and seem more familiar and more concerned about your happiness than our young acquaintance might warrant, you will forgive me.'

Kindness needs no forgiveness, my noble lord," replied Adelaide, thinking she remarked something peculiar in the prince's tone, though she knew not well what.

"Yes, for it may sometimes seem impertinent," answered Count Frederick. "But methinks, my child, if I can read the clear book of

your eyes aright, you are one who can see very speedily what are the motives of words or actions that to some might seem strange. I am preparing you for the demeanour of an odd old man-but I think I have said enough."

"I do not know, my lord," replied Adelaide, casting round her eyes in some doubt and confusion; "enough to awaken curiosity, but not to satisfy it."

'Perhaps not enough to win confidence," replied Count Frederick; "yet as I never knew that it could be gained by words, I must leave deeds to speak for me, and will only tell you more, that I have seen and spoken with a friend of yours, and that if you should need at any time aid and protection, you will have it from Frederick of Leiningen." "A friend of mine!" said Adelaide, in surprise.

"Yes, indeed," replied her companion, "and a good friend too; who told me that a time was coming when you might need support; and I promised to give it. But I must hear more myself before I can speak further. In the meantime, keep what I have said to your own bosom, but trust me as far as you will when you have need-What is it now, Herr Narren?" he continued, as his jester approached him. "What is it that you want?"

What do I want?" said the man in motley. Good faith, Uncle Frederick, my answer, to be pertinent, must be as long as a dictionary. First, I want lands and lordships, and a purse well stored; then I want wit, at least so men tell me; and I judge myself that I want a pretty wife. Sure I ought to have one or the other, though both cannot go together; for a pretty wife takes away a man's wit, and a man who has wit has not a pretty wife. Then I want boots of untanned leather, broidered with gold, and a well-darned doublet, which the heir of heaven knoweth right well I have not got.-Give you good luck, fair lady; are you the daughter of this castle?"

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I am the daughter of its lord," replied Adelaide, with a smile. "Then you are the daughter of the castle," answered the jester, and its only-begotten child."

"How do you prove that, Herr von Narren?" asked Count Frederick, seeming to enjoy very much the man's dull jokes.

"Now cogitate," replied the jester. "Is not the castle made of stone-all lord's hearts are made of stone too. He is the lord of the castle; and if she is the daughter of his heart, she is the daughter of a stone. The castle is made of stone-ergo, she is the daughter of the castle."

"It halts, it halts," cried Count Frederick; "your argument is lame of one foot."

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My father's heart has never been of stone to me," replied Adelaide, gently.

"Perhaps you never cut it, or you would have found it so, pretty blossom," said the jester, more gravely than was his wont; and then turning to Count Frederick, he was about to continue in his usual strain, when their host entered, and in courteous terms, and with the ceremonious manners of the day, besought his noble guest to follow him to the apartments which had been prepared for him. The party in the little hall then separated; and Adelaide retired to her own chamber, through passages and corridors now crowded with men carrying up the baggage with which the horses had been laden

THE VALLEY OF THE MEUSE.*

THE goodly fellowship of tourists who wend their way to Germany at this period of the year, are generally in such a hurry to get there, for fear any unforeseen accident, any sudden call of business, should oblige them to retrace their steps before they can "say they have seen the Rhine," that they seldom think of inquiring about anything else than this, "How soon shall we get to Cologne?" and look neither to the right nor the left till they get there. And pretty considerably disappointed are they, as we imagine, when they do find themselves in its dirty, narrow streets, very much resembling those of that Cockney Cologne Gravesend; and rush incontinently to buy boxes of the "veritable eau de Cologne "just as the Gravesend tourists buy bags of the veritable shrimps of that ancient and interesting wateringplace. And when they manage to poke their noses through the end of a long guttery gullet of a street, and sniff the breath of the brownish-yellow Rhine, crawling sluggishly between its low banks, very incontinently do they begin to compare the opposite bank with that of Tilbury, and to speculate upon the difference in breadth of the two rivers; and choking perhaps with the oleaginous cookery of the German Gasthoff, entertain for a moment something like a vain desire that they might be back again at the "Falcon" to refresh their memories of an old familiar spot, "too early seen unknown, and known too late." No doubt but next day, when they find themselves steaming up the river to Coblentz, and pay their respects to the Seven Mountains by the way, this disloyal feeling leaves them, and their faculties begin to open to a perception of the grand and picturesque; and by the time they have steamed back again they have got the panorama book by heart, and have nothing more to desire but to get comfortably home to the Hill of Ludgate, or Corn, or Denmark, or Hampstead, (which they begin to think rather meanly of,) and to tell the Joneses all they saw and all they didn't see.

And did we say that in all this fortnight's tour they saw nothing but Cologne and the Rhine? If so, we wronged them much. They saw everything that was to be seen at Antwerp, and Mechlin, and Brussels, and Liège, perhaps even at Ghent and Bruges; cathedrals, townhalls, pictures, lace, and so forth; and all inspected in a wonderful short space of time. It is really charming to see one of these inquiring tourists go through the accustomed processes, with an instinct as if he had been born to it, and accustomed to it all his life. Arrived at Antwerp, he is seized upon by a commissionaire, a sort of licensed highwayman, who whilst he robs you himself, prevents your being robbed by anybody else. Having chosen his hotel, he calls for a "bang," Anglice a bath, and having therein fairly cleansed himself of all tincture of cockneyism, resigns himself as mildly as a new babe to his taskmaster, and in the brief space of an hour and a quarter which it wants to feeding time, is conducted to the cathedral, where he hoists himself up its six hundred and sixteen spiral steps, and peers through the five hundred and twenty pipes of the organ; takes a look at the famous

A Tour through the Valley of the Meuse, with the Legends of the Walloon Country and the Ardennes, by Dudley Costello. London: Chapman and Hall.

Rubenses, and then, ho presto! to St. Jacques, with its twenty-four marble altars, and then to St. Paul's, and seven other saints; besides museums, botanic gardens, town-halls, &c., which appear to have been established for no other purpose than to increase the toil and petty cash expenditure of English travellers. And what it is at Antwerp, it is at Ghent, and Bruges and Brussels, and all the rest of them.

Instead of following the herd in this well-beaten track, let us sneak off the road with Dudley Costello, who tells us of fresher fields and pastures green, on the banks of the little, modest, but wild and rugged Meuse, whose history is as wild and rugged as itself. Mr. Costello recommends himself to us as a travelling companion by the motto which he has chosen from Chateaubriand, "Un voyageur est une espèce d'historien; son devoir est de raconter fidèlement ce qu'il a vu ou ce qu'il a entendu dire;" and accordingly, mingling anecdote and old legend with graphic description, we speed on our way with him.

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We start up the stream from Liège, the busiest and wealthiest commercial town of Belgium, and which has always been a place of note and importance in the history of these parts. "From a very early period the Liègeois," says Mr. Costello, like their Flemish brethren of Ghent and Bruges, are distinguished for an ardent love of liberty, and a firm determination to maintain the rights and privileges which, as the city grew in importance, they wrung from their successive rulers. Alternately oppressed by the harsh control of their bishops, who exercised a power both spiritual and temporal, and the tyranny of the nobles, who constituted a numerous and formidable body, the history of Liège is, for several centuries, the recital of one continuous strugglethe struggle of the many against the few-the weak against the strong -whose parallel may be found in the history of feudal Europe, in all save the terrific visitations which it endured at the hands of its merciless masters."

Hallam tells us that "no taxes were raised in Flanders, or indeed throughout the dominions of Burgundy, without consent of the three estates." And in a note we have the following curious particulars :—

"It was very reluctantly that the Flemings granted any money. Philip once begged for a tax on salt, promising never to ask anything more; but the people of Ghent, and, in imitation of them, the whole country, refused it. Upon his pretence of taking the cross, they granted him a subsidy, though less than he had requested, on condition that it should not be levied if the crusade did not take place, which put an end to the attempt. The States knew well that the duke would employ any money they gave him in keeping up a body of gens-d'armes like his neighbour the King of France; and though the want of such a force exposed their country to pillage, they were too good patriots to place the means of enslaving it in the hands of their sovereign."

What a picture does this one passage give of these troublous times, when the rough burghers of a border country preferred to stand the brunt of the fire and sword of their enemies, to placing the means of defence in the hands of a prince whom they did not choose to trust; when every man's hand was against every man, and the now peaceful farm-house and homestead were fortified for defence and aggression, as we see to this day.

It is in this point of view that the Valley of the Meuse, with its mouldering relics, but its still living impressions and memories of the

past, is so interesting to intellectual observers of the world; whilst its thousand legends, compounds of truth and falsehood, in the proportion of one to ninety-nine, are sufficient to entrance the lover of the marvellous. It is said by somebody that mountainous countries are the proper birthplaces of poetry; certainly they appear to be of romancing; and Mr. Costello informs us that the predilection to this habit still exists to a large extent amongst the primitive inhabitants of the Meuse district.

At the Chateau of Freyr, (famous in diplomatic history, as the place where the famous Treaty of Commerce was signed between France and Spain in 1675,) "the gardener's son was our cicerone, and a youth of less intelligence it is perhaps difficult to meet with. His discourse, as he led us through the woods, was chiefly about serpents, and he questioned us very particularly in regard to the quantities which he had heard existed in England. He then dilated upon the adders of Freyr, which he said were as thick as a man's body, and very numerous ! No doubt, if he had been pressed on the subject, he would have peopled the caverns with dragons; but we prudently ab stained from asking more than the modern history of the grotto, leaving to other authorities the responsibility of deriving the name Freyr from the Scandinavian Venus, Friga."

Again, concerning this grotto, which was accidentally discovered about twenty-five years ago, our author tells us

"Some bones and two or three skulls are shown; but whether they are the relics of ancient sacrifices, the remains of venerable hermits, or the disjecti membra of refugees or murdered travellers, tradition is silent. Our guide said that an iron vessel and a poniard were also found when the grotto was first opened; but as his tendency was evidently towards the marvellous, we were willing to suppose them merely an accompaniment to his gigantic adders."

Amongst other popular customs, now grown obsolete, Mr. Costello gives a curious account of the Stilters of Namur, who used to fight in a kind of tournament in lists regularly marked out, and guided by a code of laws as punctilious as any in the range of chivalry.

But we must hasten to Dinant, which our author recommends as head-quarters to those who would explore the Walloon country, and afterwards the Forest of Ardennes, as what Englishman ought not to do, who pretends to true allegiance to his great poet Shakspeare? For, to quote, par parenthese, the words of our author

"It is here truly the scene as Shakspeare has painted it, a perfect picture of sylvan beauty. Except the green and gilded snake,' and the lioness, with udders all drawn dry,' that lay in wait for Orlando's elder brother, all the features of the Forest of Arden,' in As You Like It,' are drawn to the life. The truth of the description arises of course from the poet's quick sense of the beauties of nature, and his ready apprehension of all that unites to render forest scenery delightful, whether in England or beyond the Meuse. Nurtured in tradition, and steeped in the recollection of the days when he

did lay him down within the shade

Of waving trees, and dreamed uncounted hours,'

the Forest of Ardennes was to him as real an object as the woods that bordered the Avon; and thus the scenery of his unrivalled comedy is as true as the personages with whom he has filled these wilds are instinct with life. At every step we meet with

'Oaks, whose antique roots peep out

Upon the brooks that brawl along the wood;'