Christianity had not been able entirely to exorcise, were transferred to the wild mountains and dark caverns of the Old Dominion, and the same unearthly visitants which haunted the old castles of the Rhine continued their gambols in some deserted cabin on the banks of the Sherandah (as the Shenandoah was then called). Since these men left their fatherland, a great Literature and Philosophy have breathed like a tropic upon that land, and the superstitions have been wrought into poetry and thought; but that raw material of legend which in Germany has been woven into finest tissues on the brain-looms of Wieland, Tieck, Schiller, and Goethe, has remained raw material in the great valley that stretches from New York to Upper Alabama. Whole communities are found which in manners and customs are much the same with their ancestors who crossed the ocean. The horseshoe is still nailed above the door as a protection against the troublesome spook, and the black art is still practised. Rough in their manners, and plain in their appearance, they yet conceal under this exterior a warm hospitality, and the stranger will much sooner be turned away from the door of the "chivalry" than from that of the German farmer. Seated by his blazing fire, with plenty of apples and hard cider, the Dutchman of the Kanawha enjoys his condition with gusto, and is contented with the limitations of his fence. We have seen one within two miles of the great Natural Bridge who could not direct us to that celebrated curiosity; his wife remarking, that "a great many people passed that way to the hills, but for what she could not see: for her part, give her a level country." The first German settler who came to Virginia was one Jacob Stover, who went there from Pennsylvania, and obtained a grant of five thousand acres of land on the Shenandoah. Stover was very shrewd, and does not at all justify the character we have ascribed to his race: there is a story that casts a suspicion on his proper Teutonism. The story runs, that, on his application to the colonial governor of Virginia for a grant of land, he was refused, unless he could give satisfactory assurance that he would have the land settled with the required number of families within a given time. Being unable to do this, he went over to England, and petitioned the King himself to direct the issuing of his grant; and in order to insure success, had given human names to every horse, cow, hog, and dog he owned, and which he represented as heads of families, ready to settle the land. His Majesty, ignorant that the Williams, Georges, and Susans seeking royal consideration were some squeaking in pig-pens, others braying in the luxuriant meadows for which they petitioned, issued the huge grant; and to-day there is serious reason to suppose that many of the wealthiest and oldest families around Winchester are enjoying their lands by virtue of titles given to ancestral flocks and herds.