The climax of my quest was reached when, after traveling all this distance and finally reaching the “Mayen” on the railroad, I didn’t really reach it after all! It proved to be “West Mayen”--a new section of the old town--or rather a new rival of it--and from West Mayen I had to walk to Mayen proper, or what might now be called East Mayen--a distance of over a mile. I first shook my head in disgust, and then laughed. For there, in the valley below me, after I had walked a little way, I could actually see the town my father had described, a small walled city of now perhaps seven or eight thousand population, with an old Gothic church in the center containing a twisted spire, a true castle or _Schloss_ of ancient date, on the high ground to the right, a towered gate or two, of that medieval conical aspect so beloved of the painters of romance, and a cluster or clutter of quaint, many-gabled, sharp-roofed and sharp-pointed houses which speak invariably of days and nations and emotions and tastes now almost entirely superseded. West Mayen was being built in modern style. Some coal mines had been discovered there and manufactories were coming in. At Mayen all was quite as my father left it. I am sure, some seventy years before. * * * * * Those who think this world would be best if we could have peace and quiet, should visit Mayen. Here is a town that has existed in a more or less peaceful state for all of six hundred years. The single Catholic church, the largest structure outside of the adjacent castle, was begun in the twelfth century. Frankish princes and Teuton lords have by turns occupied its site. But Mayen has remained quite peacefully a small, German, walled city, doing--in part at least--many of the things its ancestors did. Nowhere in Europe, not even in Italy, did I feel more keenly the seeming out-of-placeness of the modern implements of progress. When, after a pause at the local graveyard, in search of ancestral Dreisers, I wandered down into the town proper, crossed over the ancient stone bridge that gives into an easily defended, towered gate, and saw the presence of such things as the Singer Sewing Machine Company, a thoroughly up-to-date bookstore, an evening newspaper office and a moving-picture show, I shook my head in real despair. “Nothing is really old” I sighed, “nothing!”