The vicinity of these works is a healthful resort for invalids, who find the atmosphere more highly charged with saline particles than the shores of the sea itself. In the neighborhood of the mighty wall of wood are boarding-houses, as at the sea-shore, and in the pleasant, shady side the ladies sit with their needle-work or books in hand, inhaling the invigorating air, and enjoying the quietest, coolest, and most bracing climate in hot weather, and on the outskirts of the fashionable world. On the bank of the river we found a place to stay, and from it made excursions into the regions beyond. A rock, rising one thousand feet perpendicularly from the water, held on its giddy summit the tottering remnants of the fortress of one of the petty tyrants of the olden time, and a circuit of five or six miles, in a broiling day, brought us by a path that no wheels can traverse to the height. Tradition tells of the last of the barons who held his court in these walls; how his daughter was loved and wooed by his rival chieftain, whose castle still stands erect across the river a few miles below and in full view of this; how the “cruel father” refused to give his daughter to his foe, and the lover lured her by the arts of love to aid him in his daring scheme to capture her father’s castle and compel him to surrender her in exchange for his liberty and his home; how the stratagem succeeded, and the circumvented parent threw himself headlong from the rampart into the frightful abyss, and the lovers, after destroying the stronghold, removed to their castle below, and became the ancestors of a distinguished family of an unpronounceable German name. All this tradition tells, and to write it all out would be perhaps worth the while of some one who has nothing better to do. Our next stopping-place was Homburg, one of the more modern, but the most brilliant of the watering-places in Europe. Like some of our own cities, it has rapidly rushed into _notoriety_; that is just the word for the reputation it has made for itself, and by which it has made its fortunes and ruined the fortunes of thousands who have sought its hospitalities.