Part 16

As it is always better honestly to confess one's ignorance, rather than exist under its torture, with a firm step I walked to the door of the governor of the brunnen; and sending up to him a card, bearing the name under which I travelled, he instantly appeared, politely assuring me that he should have much pleasure in affording any information I desired.

Instantly pointing to the noseless soldiers, my instructor was good enough to inform me, that bottles in vast numbers being supplied to the Duke from various manufactories, in order to prove them, they are filled brimful (as I had seen them) with water, and being left in that state for the night, they are the next morning visited by an officer of the Duke, whose wand of office is a thin, long-handled, little hammer, which at the moment happened to be lying before us on the ground.

It appears that the two prevailing sins to which stone bottles are prone, are having cracks, and being porous, in either of which cases they, of course, in twelve hours, leak a little.

The Duke's officer, who is judge and jury in his own _court_-yard, carries his own sentences into execution with a rapidity which even our Lord Chancellor himself can only hope eventually to imitate. Glancing his hawk-like eye along each line, the instant he sees a bottle not brimful, without listening to long-winded arguments, he at once decides "that there can be no mistake--that there shall be no mistake;" and thus at one blow or tap of the hammer, off goes the culprit's nose. "So much for Buckingham!"

Feeling quite relieved by this solution of the mystery, I troubled the governor with a few questions, to reply to which he very kindly conducted me to his counting-house, where, in the most liberal and gentlemanlike manner, he gave me all the data I required.

The following, which I extracted from the daybook, is a statement showing the number of bottles which were filled for exportation during the year 1832, with the proportionate number filled during each month.

Large. Small. January, 1832 301 25 February 9,235 2,100 March 304,529 95,714 April 207,887 49,562 May 167,706 61,589 June 155,688 14,063 July 76,086 16,388 August 58,848 9,159 September 27,216 9,555 October 23,512 3,297 November 2,323 25 December 151 44 --------- ------- 1,033,662 261,521

Besides the above, there is a private consumption, amounting, on an average, to very nearly half a million of bottles per annum.

It will, I hope, be recollected that by the time a bottle is sealed it has undergone fifteen operations, all performed by different people. The Duke, in his payments, does not enter into these details, but, delivering his own bottles, he gives 17 1/2 kreuzers (nearly sixpence) for every hundred, large or small, which are placed, filled, in his magazines. The peasants, therefore, either share their labour and profits among themselves, or the whole of the operations are occasionally performed by the different members of one family; but so much activity is required in constantly stooping and carrying off the bottles, that this work is principally performed by young women of eighteen or nineteen, assembled from all the neighbouring villages; and who, by working from three in the morning till seven at night, can gain a florin a day, or 30 florins a month, Sunday (excepting during prayers) not being, I am sorry to say, at Nieder-Selters, a day of rest.

For the bottles themselves the Duke pays 4 1/2 florins per cent. for the large ones, and 3 florins per cent. for the small ones. The large bottles, when full, he sells at the brunnen for 13 florins a hundred.

His profit, last year, deducting all expenses, appeared to be, as nearly as possible, 50,000 florins; and yet, this brunnen was originally sold to the Duke's ancestor for a single butt of wine!

On coming out of the office, the establishment was all alive again, and the peasants being in their Sunday clothes, the picture was highly coloured. Young women in groups of four and five, with little white or red caps perched on the tops of their heads, from which streamed three or four broad ribands, of different colours, denoting the villages they proceeded from, in various directions, singing as they went, were walking together, heavily laden with bottles. They were dressed in blue petticoats, clean white shifts tucked up above the elbows, with coloured stays laced, or rather half unlaced, in front. Old women, covering the corks with leather, in similar costume, but in colours less gaudy, were displaying an activity much more vigorous than their period of life. Across this party-coloured, well-arranged system, which was as regular in its movements as the planets in their orbits, an officer of the Duke, like a comet, occasionally darted from the office to the brunnen, or from the tiers of empty bottles which had not yet been proved, to the magazine of full ones ready to embark on their travels.

In quitting the premises, as I passed the regiments of bottles, an operation was proceeding which I had not before witnessed. Women in wooden shoes were reversing the full bottles; in fact, without driving these brown soldiers from their position, they were making them stand upon their heads instead of upon their heels--the object of this military somerset being to empty them; however, every noseless bottle, water and all, was hurled over a wall, into a bin prepared on purpose to receive them; and the smashing sound of devastation which proceeded from this odd-looking operation it would be very difficult to describe.

Having now witnessed about as much as I desired of the lively brunnen of Nieder-Selters, I bade adieu to this well-regulated establishment, feeling certain that its portrait would, in future, re-appear before my mind, in all its vivid colours whensoever and wheresoever I might drink the refreshing, wholesome beverage obtained from its bright, sparkling source. My carriage had long been waiting at the gate: however, having aroused my lumbering and slumbering driver, I retraced my steps, was slowly re-jolted homewards, and it was late before I reached my peaceful abode in the gay, green little valley of Schlangenbad.

THE MONASTERY OF EBERBACH.

Exactly at the appointed moment, Luy with his favourite ass, Katherinchen, appeared at the door of the new Bad-Haus; the day, overcast with clouds, was quite cool, and, under such favourable auspices, starting at twelve o'clock, in less than a hundred yards we were all hidden in the immense forest which encircles that portion of the duchy of Nassau which looks down upon the Maine and the Rhine. For about an hour, the ass, who after the second turn seemed to be perfectly sensible where she was carrying me, patiently threaded her way along narrow paths, which, constantly crossing each other at various angles, seemed sufficient to puzzle even the brain of a philosopher: however, although human intellect is said to be always on the march, yet we often find brute instinct far before it; and certainly it did appear that Katherinchen's knowledge of the carte du pays of Nassau was equal almost to that of "The Duke" himself. Sometimes we suddenly came to tracks of wheels which seemed to have been formed by carriages that had not only dropped from, but had returned back to, the clouds, for they began _à propos_ to nothing, and vanished in an equally unaccountable manner. Sometimes we came to patches bare of timber, except here and there an old oak left on purpose to supply acorns for the swine; then again we followed a path which seemed only to belong to deer, being so narrow that we were occasionally obliged to force our way through the bushes; at last, all of a sudden, I unexpectedly found myself on the very brink of a most picturesque and precipitous valley.

Close above me, standing proudly on its rock, and pointing to a heavy white cloud which happened at the moment to be passing over it, was the great pillar or tower of Sharfenstein, a castle formerly the residence of the bishops of Mainz. The village of Kiedrich lay crouching at a considerable depth beneath, the precipitous bank which connected us with it being a vineyard, in which every here and there were seen flights of rough stone steps, to enable the peasants to climb to their work. By a rocky path, about a foot or nine inches broad, Katherinchen, with Luy following as if tied to her tail, diagonally descended through this grape garden, until we at last reached the village mill, the wheel of which I had long observed indolently turning under a stream of water scarcely heavy enough for its purpose. The little village of Kiedrich, as I rode by it, appeared to be a confused congregation of brown hovels and green gardens, excepting a large slated mansion of the Baron von Ritter, whose tower of Sharfenstein now seemed in the clouds, as if to draw the lightning from the village; and almost breaking my neck to look up to it, I could not help feeling, as I turned towards the east, how proud its laird must be at seeing every morning its gigantic shadow lying across the valley, then paying its diurnal visit to every habitation, thus eclipsing for a few moments, from each vassal, even the sun in the heavens.

After passing Kiedrich, I again entered the forest, and for above an hour there was little to be seen except the noble trees which encompassed me; but the mind soon gets accustomed to ever so short a tether, and though I could seldom see fifty yards, yet within that distance there existed always plenty of minute objects to interest me. The foliage of the beeches shone beautifully clear and brilliant, and there were new shoots, which, being lighter in colour than the old, had much the appearance of the autumnal tint, yet when the error was discovered, one gladly acknowledged that youth had been mistaken for age. The forest now suddenly changed from beech trees into an army of oaks, which seemed to be, generally speaking, about fifty years of age; among them, however, there stood here and there a few weather-beaten veterans, who had survived the race of comrades with whom they had once flourished; but we must drop the military metaphor, for their hearts were gone--their bodies had mouldered away--nothing but one side was left--in fact, they were more like sentry-boxes than sentinels, and yet, in this decayed state, they were decked with leaves as cheerfully as the rest. In this verdant picture, there was one pale object which, for a few moments, as I passed it, particularly attracted my attention; it was an immense oak, which had been struck dead by lightning; it had been, and indeed still was, the tallest to be seen in the forest, and pride and presumption had apparently drawn it to its fate. Every leaf, every twig, every small branch was gone; barkless--blasted--and blanched--its limbs seemed stretched into the harshest outlines; a human corpse could not form a greater contrast with a living man, than this tree did with the soft green foliage waving around it: it stood stark--stiff--jagged as the lightning itself; and as its forked, sapless branches pointed towards the sky, it seemed as if no one could dare pass it without secretly feeling that there exists a power which can annihilate as well as create, and that what the fool said in his heart--was wrong! I, however, had not much time for this sort of reflection, for whenever Katherinchen, coming to two paths, selected the right one, Luy from behind was heard loudly applauding her sagacity, which he had previously declared to be superior to that of all the asses in Nassau--and yet, Luy, in his more humble department, deserved quite as much praise as Katherinchen herself.

He was a slender, intelligent, active man, of about thirty, dressed in a blue smock frock, girded round the middle by the buff Nassau belt: and though, from some cause or other, which he could never satisfactorily account for, his mouth always smelt of rum, yet he was never at a loss--always ready for an expedition, and foot-sore or not, the day seemed never long enough to tire him. The fellow was naturally of an enterprising disposition, and the winters in Nassau being long and cheerless, it occurred to Luy on his march, that were he with Katherinchen and his other two asses to go to England (of which he had only heard that it was the richest country under the sun), they would no doubt there be constantly employed for the whole twelvemonth, instead of only finding lady and gentleman riders at Schlangenbad for a couple of months in the year. His project appeared to himself a most brilliant one, and though I could not enter into it quite as warmly as he did (indeed I almost ruined his hopes by merely hinting that our sea, which he had never heard of, might possibly object to his driving asses from Schlangenbad to London), yet I inwardly felt that poor Luy's speculation had quite as sound a foundation, displayed quite as much knowledge of the world, and had infinitely less roguery in it, than the bubble projects of more civilized countries, which have too often eventually turned out to be nothing more nor less than ass-driving with a vengeance.

After winding my way through the trees for a considerable time, inclining gently to the left, I suddenly saw close before me, at the bottom of a most sequestered valley, the object of my journey,--namely, the very ancient monastery of EBERBACH. The sylvan loveliness, and the peaceful retirement of this spot, I strongly feel it is quite impossible to describe. Almost surrounded by hills or rather mountains, clothed with forest trees, one does not expect to find at the bottom of such a valley an immense solitary building, which in size and magnificence not only corresponds with the bold features of the country, but seems worthy of a place in any of the largest capitals of Europe.

The irregular building, with its dome, spires, statues, and high slated roofs, looks like the palace of some powerful king; and yet the monarch has apparently no subjects but the forest trees, which on all sides almost touch the architecture, and even closely environ the garden walls.

A spot better suited to any being or race of beings who wished to say to the world "_Fare thee well! and if for ever, still for ever fare thee well!_" could scarcely be met with on its vast circumference; and certainly if it were possible for the vegetable creation to compensate a man for losing the society of his fellow-creatures, the woods of Eberbach would, in a high degree, afford him that consolation. A more lovely and romantic situation for a monastery could not have existed; yet I should have wondered how it could possibly have been discovered, had not its history most clearly explained that marvel.

In the year 1131, St. Bernhard, the famous preacher of the crusade (whose followers eventually possessed, merely in the Rhine-gau, six monastic establishments--namely, Tiefenthal, Gottesthal, Eberbach, Eibinger, Nothgottes, and Marienhausen), was attacked by a holy itch, or irresistible determination to erect a monastery; but not knowing where to drop the foundation-stone, he consulted, it is said, a wild boar, on this important subject. The sagacious creature shrewdly listened to the human being who addressed it; and a mysterious meeting being agreed upon, he silently grubbed with his snout, the valley of Eberbach, lines marking out the foundation of the building; and certainly such a lovely stye, for men basking in sunshine, to snore away their existence, no animal but a pig would ever have thought of!

St. Bernhard, highly approving of the boar's taste, employed the best architects to carry his plan into execution; and sparing no expense, a magnificent cathedral--a large palace, with a monastery, connected together by colonnades, as well as ornamented in various places with the image of a pig, its founder--were quickly reared upon the spot; and when all was completed, monks were brought to the abode, and the holy hive, for many centuries, was heard buzzing in the wild mountains which surrounded it: however, in the year 1803, the Duke of Nassau took violent possession of its honey, and its inmates were thus rudely shaken from their cells. Three or four of the monks, of this once wealthy establishment, are all that now remain in existence, and their abode has ever since been used partly as a government prison, and partly as a public asylum for lunatics.

Before entering the great gate, which was surmounted by colossal figures of the Virgin Mary, St. John, and the great St. Bernhard himself, I was advised by my cicerone, Luy, to go to some grotto he kept raving about; and, as Katerinchen's nose also seemed placidly to point the same way, I left the monastery, and through a plantation of very fine oaks, which were growing about twenty feet asunder, we ascended, by zigzags, a hill surmounted by a beautiful plantation of firs; and the moment I reached the summit, there suddenly flashed upon me a view of the Rhine, which, without any exception, I should say, is the finest I have witnessed in this country. Uninterrupted by anything but its own long, narrow islands, I beheld the course of the river, from Johannisburg to Mainz, which two points formed, from the grotto where I stood, an angle of about 120 degrees. Between me and the water, lay, basking in sunshine, the Rhine-gau, covered with vineyards, or surrounded by large patches of corn, which were evidently just ready for the sickle; but the harvest not having actually commenced, the only moving objects in the picture were young women with white handkerchiefs on their heads, busily pruning the vines; and the Coln, or, as it might more properly be termed, the _English_ steam-boat, which, immediately before me, was gliding against the stream towards Mainz. On the opposite side of the Rhine, an immense country, highly cultivated, but without a fence, was to be seen.

Turning my back upon this noble prospect, the monastery lay immediately beneath me, so completely surrounded by the forest, that it looked as if, ready built, it had been dropped from heaven upon its site.

A more noble-looking residence could hardly be imagined, and the zigzag walks and plantations of fir imparted to it a gentlemanlike appearance, which I could not sufficiently admire; yet, notwithstanding the rural beauty of the place, I felt within me a strong emotion of pity for those poor, forlorn, misguided beings, whose existence had been uselessly squandered in such mistaken seclusion; and I could not help fancying how acutely, from the spot on which I stood, they might have compared the moral loneliness of their mansion, with the natural joy and loveliness of that river scenery, from which their relentless mountain had severed them: indeed, I hope my reader will not think an old man too Anacreontic for saying, that if any thing in this world could penetrate the sackcloth garment of a monk, "and wring his bosom," it would be the sight of what I had just turned my back upon--namely, a vineyard full of women! That the fermentation of the grape was intended to cheer decrepitude, and that the affections of a softer sex were made to brighten the zenith of mid-day life, are truths which, within the walls of a convent or a monastery, it must have been most exquisite torture to reflect upon.

As I descended from the grotto, I saw beneath me, entering the great gate of the building, half a dozen carts laden with wood, each drawn by six prisoners. None being in irons, and the whole gang being escorted by a single soldier in the Nassau uniform, I was at first surprised,--why, when they penetrated the forest, they did not all run away! However, fear of punishment held them together: there being no large cities in the duchy, they had no where to run, but to their own homes, where they would instantly have been recaptured; and though, to a stranger like myself, the forest seemed to offer them protection, yet it was certain death by starvation to remain in it.

On entering the great square, I found it would be necessary to apply to the commandant of the establishment for permission to view it. I accordingly waited upon him, and was agreeably surprised at being politely informed by him, in English, that he would be proud and most happy to attend me. He was a fine, erect, soldierlike-looking man, of about forty, seventeen years of which he had reigned in this valley, over prisoners and lunatics; the average number of the former being 250, and of the latter about 100.

As I was following him along some very handsome cloisters, I observed, hanging against a wall, twenty-five pictures in oil, of monks, all dressed in the same austere costume, and in features as in dress so much resembling each other, that the only apparent distinction between them was the name of each individual, whose barren, useless existence was thus intended to be commemorated beyond the narrow grave which contained him. Ascending a stone staircase, I now came to the lower division of the prison, one half being appropriated to women, and the other to men.

Although I had been for the whole day enjoying pure fresh air, yet the establishment was so exceedingly clean, that there was no smell of any sort to offend me. The monks' cells had in many places been thrown by threes into large rooms for tailors, weavers, carpenters, shoemakers, &c., &c.,--each of these trades working separately, under the direction of one overseer. In all these chambers every window was wide open, the walls were white-washed, and the blanched floors were without a stain; indeed, this excessive cleanliness, although highly praised by me, and exceedingly attractive to any English traveller, probably forms no small part of the punishment of the prison, for there is nothing that practically teases dirty people more than to inflict upon them foreign habits of cleanliness. The women's rooms were similarly arranged, and the same cleanliness and industry insisted upon; while, for younger culprits, there was an excellent school, where they were daily taught religious singing, reading, writing, arithmetic, and weaving. Having finished with this floor, I mounted to the upper story, where, in solitary cells, were confined patients who had relapsed, or, in plainer terms, culprits who had been convicted a second time of the same offence.

Many of these unfortunate people were undergoing a sentence of three, four, and five years' imprisonment; and to visit them, as I did, in their cells, was, I can assure my reader, anything but pleasing. On the outside of each door hung a small black board, upon which was laconically inscribed, in four words, the name and surname of the captive--his or her offence--and the sentence. I found that their crimes, generally speaking, were what we should call petty thefts--such as killing the Duke's game--stealing his wood--his grass, &c., &c.