On the Nahe, that flows into the Rhine, is the little town of Oberstein, whose inhabitants are nearly all employed in cutting and polishing agates, sardonyxes, and various other stones prized by ladies. Precipitous cliffs arise above the town, and contract the space on which houses could be raised, and these rocks are crowned by two ruined castles, the Older and the Newer Oberstein. About half-way up the face of the cliff, 260 feet above the river, can be seen a tiny church, to which ascent is made by flights of steps. The old castle rises above this, and stands 360 feet above the river, but its remains are reduced to a fragment of a tower. Separated from it by a notch in the rocks is the new castle that was destroyed by fire about thirty- five years ago. In the old castle lived in the eleventh century two brothers, Wyrich and Emich von Oberstein. Both fell in love with the daughter of the knight of Lichtenberg, but neither confessed his passion to the other. At last, one day Emich returned to the castle to announce to his brother that he had been accepted by the fair maid; Wyrich, in an impulse of jealousy, caught his brother by the throat and hurled him down the precipice. His conscience at once spoke out, and in the agony of his remorse he had resort to a hermit who bade him renounce the world, grave for himself a cell in the face of the melaphyre clay--the hermit did not give to the rock its mineralogical name--and await a token from heaven that he was forgiven. Accordingly Wyrich von Oberstein scrambled up the face of the cliff as high as he could possibly go, and there laboured day after day till he had excavated for himself a grotto in which to live and expiate his crime. And a spring oozed out of the rock in his cave, and was accepted by him as the promised token of pardon. After a while he obtained that a little church should be consecrated which he had constructed at the mouth of his cave. On the day that the bishop came to dedicate the structure he was found dead. What is supposed to be his figure, that of a knight in armour, is in the chapel. This latter was rebuilt in 1482, and the monument came from the older structure. The chapel has been handed over to the Calvinists for their religious services, which is the humour of it, as Nym would have said.