The Einsiedlerstein, or Hermit's Rock, is a bold and isolated crag, which rises sheer and abrupt out of the plain to the height of, perhaps, one hundred and fifty feet. It is separated from the fells, or rugged hills, which form the northern boundary of the wide vale of Hayde, by a space of about two or three hundred yards; sufficiently wide to place it, in the days of cross-bows and ballistas, pretty well beyond the reach of insult, but by far too narrow to be of the slightest avail against cannon, and even musketry. In the face of the rock a staircase is cut, by which you ascend to a door, of which the key is kept at a cottage close by, where dwells also your cicerone, or guide. The door being opened, you see before you a continuation of the rocky staircase; with this difference in character, however, between what is passed and what is to come,--that whereas you mounted to the threshold under the canopy of heaven, you now move onwards, or rather upwards, through a cavity cut in the face of the solid stone itself. By-and-bye you come to a landing-place, beyond which, at the extremity of a narrow passage, you behold what used to be the armoury of the castle,--an arched hall, chiselled out, like the gallery which leads to it, from the rock. Here are yet the grooves and niches within which warriors, long since dead, used to suspend their spears and battle-axes, their helmets and coats of mail; and here, in the face of the stone, are chiselled out some armorial bearings; probably the devices worn by the lord of the castle on his shield. We find a tiger couchant, for example, not ungracefully executed; a gate or portcullis, I believe in heraldry an honourable device; with the fragments of what have evidently been other symbols, though time has laid on them his defacing fingers so effectually that you cannot trace them out.