Still, I am told that as recently as last year, a pretty peasant girl from the neighborhood of Hamburg appeared on a certain evening at a ball, with a large ruby on her finger. She professed to have received this gem from an Earth Spirit, who had appeared to her at the entrance to the Faunus mines. The gossips of the village were not satisfied, however, with the account, and suspected the Gnome to have been an English Gnome, who was travelling abroad for his health and courting pretty girls for his amusement. This conviction {279}was so strong that the poor girl had to leave the country in disgrace. This is the last Gnome that has been mentioned in that part of Germany. [Illustration: 299] [Illustration: 303] XII. {283}Elementary Spirits of the Water.--_Petrarch at Cologne.--Divine Judgment by Water.--Nixen and Undines.--A Furlough till Ten o’clock.--The White-footed Undine.--Mysteries on the Rhine.--The Court of the Great Nichus.--Nix-COBT, the Messenger of the Dead.--His Funny Tricks.--I go in Search of an Undine._ “After leaving Aix-la-Chapelle, I had stopped at Cologne, on the left bank of the Rhine, which I then found completely covered with several rows of women, a countless and charming multitude.... “Adorned with flowers or aromatic herbs, the sleeves {284}pushed up above the elbow, they dipped their soft white hands and arms into the river, murmuring certain mysterious words which I could not understand. “I questioned some people. They told me it was an ancient custom of the country. Thanks to these ablutions and certain prayers which accompanied them, the river carried down with it all the diseases, which would otherwise have attacked them during the coming year. I answered, smilingly: ‘How happy the people of the Rhine must be if the kind river thus takes all their sufferings to distant countries! The Po or the Tiber have never been able to do as much for us.’” These are the words which Petrarch wrote in one of his familiar letters, written on St. John’s Eve. This letter, as precious by its date as by its contents, proves beyond all question, that in the fourteenth century the Rhine was popularly worshipped and adored on the very days on which the summer solstice is celebrated by bonfires after the manner of the old fire worshippers. Unfortunately the Christians ended by appealing to the elements, to Fire or Water, as to a judicial authority. The popular notion that the elements were perfectly pure and would hence instinctively reject every impure substance, led naturally to ordeals {285}by water. The accused was undressed; his hands and feet were tied crosswise, the right hand to the left foot and the right foot to the left hand, and thus bound he was thrown into a river or any watercourse that was deep enough. If he floated, he was guilty and instantly burnt; if he sank and remained for some time at the bottom of the water, he was considered innocent--but he was drowned.