“Dear me,” I thought, “how Mayence has grown. My father wouldn’t know it.” (Baedeker gave its population at one hundred and ten thousand). “How Germany has grown in the sixty-five years since he was here. It used to be a town of three or four thousand. Now it is a large city.” I read about it assiduously in Baedeker and looked at the rather thriving streets of the business heart, trying to visualize it as it should have been in 1843. Until midnight I was wandering about in the dark and bright streets of Mayence, satisfying myself with the thought that I was really seeing the city in which my father was born. For a city of so much historic import Mayence was very dull. It was built after the theories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with, however, many modern improvements. The Cathedral was a botch, ornamented with elaborate statues of stuffy bishops and electors. The houses were done in many places in that heavy scroll fashion common to medieval Germany. The streets were narrow and winding. I saw an awful imitation of our modern Coney Island in the shape of a moving circus which was camped on one of the public camping places. A dull heavy place, all told. Coming into the breakfast-room of my hotel the next morning, I encountered a man who looked to me like a German traveling salesman. He had brought his grip down to the desk and was consuming his morning coffee and rolls with great gusto, the while he read his paper. I said to him, “Do you know of any place in this part of Germany that is called Mayen?--not Mayence.” I wanted to make sure of my location. “Mayen? Mayen?” he replied. “Why, yes. I think there is such a place near Coblenz. It isn’t very large.” “Coblenz! That’s it,” I replied, recalling now what my father had told me of Coblenz. “To be sure. How far is that?” “Oh, that is all of three hours from here. It is at the juncture of the Moselle.” “Do you know how the trains run?” I asked, getting up, a feeling of disgusted disappointment spreading over me. “I think there is one around half-past nine or ten.” “Damn!” I said, realizing what a dunce I had been. I had just forty-five minutes in which to pay my bill and make the train. Three hours more! I could have gone on the night before. I hurried out, secured my bag, paid my bill and was off. On the way I had myself driven to the old “Juden-Gasse,” said to be full of picturesque medieval houses, for a look. I reached the depot in time to have a two-minute argument with my driver as to whether he was entitled to two marks or one--one being a fair reward--and then hurried into my train. In a half hour we were at Bingen-on-the-Rhine, and in three-quarters of an hour those lovely hills and ravines which make the Rhine so picturesque had begun, and they continued all the way to Coblenz and below that to Cologne. CHAPTER XLIV A MEDIEVAL TOWN