Accordingly, it was long before the sentence of dissolution went forth against the monastery of Allerheiligen--that sentence which was to produce a change in the place and all around it as momentous as that other sentence which some seventy years later went forth against Baden-Baden. It was not till 1802 that the monastery of Allerheiligen was dissolved; and its extinction was due then not to any reason or pretext drawn from the conduct of the inmates, but to the religious dissensions and political quarrels of princes and governments. But the doom was all the more irrevocably certain. In all the countries in which monasteries have been abolished and Church property confiscated tales eagerly spread, and by no means wholly disbelieved even by the spoilers themselves, are current of the "judgments" and retribution which have sooner or later fallen on those who have been enriched by the secularization of Church property or who have taken part in the acts by which the Church has been dispossessed. But rarely has what the world now calls "chance" brought about what the Church would call so startlingly striking a manifestation of the wrath of Heaven against the despoilers of "God's house." St. Norbert was the original founder of the Premonstratensian rule. And it was precisely on St. Norbert's Day next after the dissolution of the monastery of Allerheiligen that a tremendous and--the local chroniclers say--unprecedented storm of thunder, lightning and hail broke over the woodland valley and the devoted fabric in such sort that the lightning, more than once striking the buildings, set them on fire and reduced the vast pile to the few picturesque ruins which now delight the tourist and the landscape painter. Could the purpose and intent of the supernal Powers have been more strongly emphasized or more clearly marked? Truly, the scattered monks may have been excused for recalling with awe, not unmingled with a sense of triumph, the prophetic denunciation of their foundress Uta, which has been cited above, against whoso should undo the pious deed she was doing. For more than six hundred years her work had prospered and her will had been respected, and now after all those centuries the warning curse was still potent. Neither thunder nor lightning, nor the anger of St. Norbert, however, availed to rebuild the monastery or recall the monks. Their kingdom and the glory thereof has passed to another, even to Herr Mittenmeyer, _Wirth und Gastgeber_, who has built a commodious hostelry close by the ruins, which are mainly those of the church, and on the site of the monastic buildings, and who distributes a hospitality as universal, if not quite so disinterested, as that practised by his cowled predecessors. There, for the sum of six marks--about a dollar and a half--per diem you may find a well-furnished cell and a fairly well-supplied refectory, and may amuse yourself with pacing in the walks where St. Norbert's monks paced, looking on the