On September 28, Beethoven and his nephew left Vienna for Gneixendorf, intending to stay a week. A night was passed at a village _en route_, and Johann’s estate was reached in the afternoon of the next day--the 29th--but not too late for the composer to walk through the fields with his brother to take a look at the property. The next day the walk was extended to the vineyards on the hill in the forenoon and to Imbach in the afternoon. There Karl pointed out to his uncle some historical monuments: “This is the cloister where Margarethe, Ottocar’s wife, died; the scene occurs in Grillparzer’s piece.” Thus, with other excursions the next day, life at Gneixendorf began. [153] Gneixendorf is a little village on a high plateau of the Danube Valley about an hour’s walk from Krems. It is a mean hamlet, with only one street and that narrow, rough and dirty. The houses are low huts. Wasserhof, as the place is now called, the Beethoven estate, lies opposite the village and is reached by a wagon road which runs a large part of the way along the edge of a ravine, which torrents have cut out of the clayey soil. The plateau is almost treeless but covered with fields and vines. In Beethoven’s time there were two houses on the estate, both large and handsome, each with its garden and surrounding wall. The houses were separated from each other by a road. A generation after Beethoven had been a visitor there the gardens were found neglected and the trees which surrounded the house, a two-storey structure strongly built of stone with a covering of mortar, shut out a view of the surrounding country.[154] Beethoven’s rooms were on the east side, and unless the trees interfered the composer had a magnificent view of the Danubian valley stretching to the distant Styrian mountains. Johann van Beethoven’s possessions compassed nearly 400 acres, most of which he leased to tenants. A lover of hills and forests like Beethoven must have found Wasserhof dreary and monotonous in the extreme, yet the distant view of the Danube seems to have compensated him in a measure, for it reminded him of the Rhine.