I left you turning the corner of Bingen, now let me describe what there presented itself. On the left a beautiful picturesque town, with tower and picturesque-looking steeples placed each exactly on the spot an artist would have selected, with hills and woods on each side and a bridge running over a small river which emptied itself in the Rhine. Immediately before us, on a small islet, stood the Tower of Mausthurm, or the Mouse turret, so called from a tradition that a Baron once locked up a number of his Vassals in a tower and then set fire to it and consumed it and its inhabitants, in consequence of which certain mice haunted him by day and by night to such a degree that he fled his Country and built this solitary Tower on its island. But all this would not do. The Mice pursued him to his Island, and the tale ends in his being devoured by them there. On both sides the river hills covered with vines and woods rose abruptly, and on the right, tottering on a pinnacle that frowns over the flood, stood the Castle of Ehrenfels.... It would be quite impossible, and indeed unnecessary (as my sketch-book can best unfold the tale), to describe all we saw. For above 100 miles, with little interruption, the same scenery presented itself, attaining its superlative point of grandeur in the neighbourhood of Lorich and Bacharach. It might be called a perfect Louvre of old Castles, each being a chef d'œuvre of its species. I could almost doubt the interference of a human hand in their creation. Placed upon elevated and apparently impossible crags, they look more like the fortresses of the Giants when they warred against the Gods than any thing else. But the Castles were not the only points of attraction. Every mile presented a village as interesting as the battlements which threatened to crush them to death from above. Each vied with its neighbour in picturesque beauty, and the people as well as the buildings in these remote nooks and corners partook of the wild character of the scenery. A shower of rain and close of the day induced us to make Bacharach our sleeping-place. The Landlord, with his night-cap on his head and pipe in his mouth, expressed no surprise at our appearance. The coffee and the milk and the hock came in due season when he had nodded acquiescence to my demand, and he puffed away with as much indifference as if two strange Englishmen had not been in his house. We found good clean beds, and should have slept very well but for the deep-toned Bell of the Church within a few yards of us, which tolled the time of night every half-hour, and for a watchman who, by way of murdering the little sleep which had survived the sound of the Bell, sounded with all his might a cow-horn, and then, as if perfectly satisfied that he had awaked every soul in the village, bawled out the hour and retired, leaving them just time to fall asleep again before the half-hour called for a repetition of his exertions.