North-east of Straubing--in which general direction the devious river flows for some distance--is to be seen the pyramidal Bogenberg about half a dozen miles away. Before reaching it, however, the river receives some further of the many small tributaries that flow down from the Wald, and passes several pleasant, but not otherwise remarkable villages, notably, where the little Aitrach comes in from the south, the triplet-village of Unter-, Mittel-, and Ober-Öbling. The beautiful hills are here again closer to the river on the left, while the plain on the right becomes more diversified. The first place of interest is found shortly before the point at which the railway from Straubing crosses the Danube to Bogen, where on the left stand the conspicuous buildings of the ancient Benedictine monastery of Ober-Altaich. So many were the Benedictine establishments along this river that Schultes, in his “Handbuch für Reisende auf der Donau,” published nearly a century ago, coming to describe one of them wrote: “‘So soon another!’ I think I hear the traveller and the reader exclaim, who may not be acquainted with the magnitude of this Order.” And he then goes on to summarize thus, in a way to delight those with a taste for statistical tit-bits, the number of notables who had belonged to the Benedictine Order up to the time of Hemmauer: “Sixty-three popes, two hundred and twenty-three cardinals, two hundred and fifty-five patriarchs, sixteen thousand archbishops, forty-six thousand bishops, twenty-one emperors, twenty-five empresses, forty-eight kings, fifty-four queens, one hundred and forty-six imperial and royal children, and four hundred and forty-five sovereign princes and dukes.” The “Kloster” of Ober-Altaich was first founded in the eighth century by a duke who brought Benedictines from Reichenau to people it, and it was built where a chapel had been erected earlier by “the Holy Parminius.” Here, still earlier, had stood a Druidical altar, and Parminius, having destroyed it and with his own hands cut down its sheltering oak, built the chapel which was succeeded by the first Kloster. That was destroyed by the Hungarians in 907, and a couple of centuries passed before it was rebuilt by the Count of Bogen and started on a long period of continuous prosperity. When the Thirty Years’ War was devastating so much of the Continent, Ober-Altaich was not spared, for in 1634 it was destroyed by the Swedes, only to rise, phœnix-like, more splendid than before, thanks to the wealth possessed by the monks. The fresco-paintings in the monastery church illustrate the old-time feeling against Lutheranism, for “monks are drawn exorcising Straubing, and Luther is seen running away in the shape of an unclean spirit, riding on a hog, with the Bible under his arm, a sausage in one hand, and a beer glass in the other.”