With the wars of religion this peace and prosperity came to an end and for two hundred years all the duchy was devastated by all the armies of Europe, from those of Francis I to the obscene hordes of the French Republic. It had never revolted against the Catholic religion nor against its varied rulers, and its reward was a slow and savage extermination. Cities were burned and their names forgotten; great abbeys and churches like those of Orval and Clairefontaine were utterly extinguished; tall castles that crowned every height of land were blown up with gunpowder; fields and farms became waste land; and through starvation, massacre, and exile the population was reduced to a tithe of its former numbers, and at last, by the republic that came to bring liberty, taxed into an all-engulfing penury. The era of enlightenment had not been wholly happy in its action on Luxembourg, but it was free at last, and, in 1867, independent, as it remained until that memorable day in August, 1914, the day of broken treaties, when the little Grand Duchess backed her motor-car across the bridge, closing it with a pathetic barrier in the vain protest of honour against a force that did not recognise the meaning of the word or the existence of the thing it signified. Luxembourg to-day is not a place where one may go to revel in the artistic memorials of a great past; the great past is there, and its memory is still green, but even more than Brabant or Champagne has it borne the grievous harrowing of endless wars and recrudescent barbarisms, not the least destructive of these visitations being the nineteenth century in its satisfying completeness, which saw many an abbey and old haunted castle dismantled, reduced to road-metal, and carted away for the value inherent in its raw material, or turned to inconceivably base uses from all of which some pecuniary profit might be obtained. Once it was as rich in enormous castles as any country in the world that happily has a mediæval past. Bourscheid on its great hill, lordly and dominating still and a wilderness of vast crags of masonry, in spite of all that man could do; Brandenbourg, rigid and riven in its ring of mountains; Esch, split into towering and sundered fragments on the raw cliffs overhanging the Sûre; Hollenfel, Clervaux, spared by war to fall victim to the contemptuous neglect of owners who preferred pseudo-Gothic villas with all modern conveniences; Beaufort, with its noble proportions and its beauty of a later and more gracious mediævalism; Vianden, most fascinating of all with its dizzy gables, and its chapel still intact in spite of the wide ruin of its surroundings. And every castle ruin is haunted to heart’s desire, crowded with attested ghosts whose consistent habits and dependable visitations are a peculiar joy in a world that until a twelvemonth ago could not believe in the impossible and promptly discounted the improbable. Any peasant in