Luxembourg knew better, and not only the ruins but the whole duchy is honeycombed by the midnight prowlings of an entire population of delectable phantoms, while the stories and legends of their commerce in the past with lords and ladies and knights and monks and bishops form a literature in themselves. In spite of its losses, the land was one of infinite and unfamiliar charm; a land of wide and high plateaus cut by many winding river courses, each a possible journey of varying delights. Our and Sûre and Black Erenz; Alzette and Clerf and White Erenz, with many others of minor flow, cut the duchy in every direction, all at last finding the goal of their waters in the magical Moselle, as it flows past old Roman Trèves on its devious way to the Rhine. And it was a kind of little earthly paradise as well, for the fifty years of its well-earned peace. A land of farms and gardens and pastures, of contented little villages and river-bordered hamlets, and a kindly and devoted people. Coal and iron have left little mark, though the efficient Baedeker (to whom shall we go for guidance on our journeys in the long days to come?), in one of his concise and unpremeditately dramatic paragraphs does say: “18½ M. _Weilerbach_, for the iron-foundry of Weilerbach and the former summer-house of the Abbots of Echternach, magnificently situated amidst wood”--an antithesis of startling illumination. Protestantism passed it by, except for purposes of plunder, and it has always been unanimously and enthusiastically Catholic, with a record for public and private morality that puts any and every other part of Europe to sudden shame. What is to be its future when the great storm that is cleaning the soiled world of its dust and ashes of false ideals and burnt-out superstitions sweeps away into the hollows of a night that is only in its darkness the promise of a new day? Who shall say? but any one can weave his vision, and to some it already appears that, with the meting out of inadequate earthly reward for irreparable bodily suffering, will come the lands to the east as far as the Kyll, with to the south Saarbourg, and the far side of the Moselle to the Hochwald, including ancient Trèves, no longer a forgotten relic of an old imperialism but a greater and better and more potent Hague, a central city of Europe and of peace, where, under the united guarantees of all the states, is permanently sitting a great council of ambassadors for the devising of measures of common interest, the adjustment of international differences, the preservation of a righteous peace between nations, and with authority to suppress any violation of treaties or any wilful aggression of one state against another, by calling into the field against the offender all the military and naval forces of all the other powers signatory to an European Treaty of Permanent Peace and represented in the council of ambassadors.