Mr. George wished to stop at Bonn for half a day to visit a celebrated university that is there. The buildings of this university were formerly a palace; but they were afterwards given up to the use of the university, which subsequently became one of the most distinguished seminaries of learning in Europe. Mr. George wished to visit this university. He had letters of introduction to some of the professors. He wished also to see the library and the cabinets of natural history that were there. He invited Rollo to go with him, but Rollo concluded not to go. He would have liked to have seen the library very well, and the cabinets, but he was rather afraid of the professors.
So, while Mr. George went to visit the literary institution, Rollo amused himself by rambling about the town, and looking at the quaint old churches, and the houses, and the fortifications, and in strolling along the quay, by the shore of the river, to see the steamers and tow boats go up and down.
At length he went to the hotel. The hotel was just without the gates, near the river. There was a garden between the hotel and the river, with a terrace at the margin of it, overlooking the water, where there were tables and chairs ready for any person who might choose to take coffee or any other refreshments there. Mr. George's room was on this side of the hotel, and being pretty high it overlooked the gardens, and the terrace, and the river, and afforded a charming view. Up the river, on the other side, about three or four miles off, the Sieben Gebirgen were plainly to be seen, the summits of them tipped with ancient ruins.
After Rollo had been sitting there about half an hour, Mr. George came home. It was then about one o'clock.
"Well, Rollo," said he, "we are going up the river. I have engaged the landlord to send us up in a carriage to some pleasant place on the bank of the river among the mountains, where we can spend the Sabbath."
"Why, what day is it?" asked Rollo.
"It is Saturday," replied Mr. George.
Rollo was quite surprised to find that it was Saturday. In fact, in travelling on the Rhine, as there is so little to mark or distinguish one day from another, we almost always soon lose our reckoning.
"What is the name of the place where we are going?" asked Rollo.
"I don't know," replied Mr. George. "I cannot understand very well. He is going to send us somewhere. How it will turn out I cannot tell. We must trust to the fortune of war."
Mr. George often called the luck that befell him in travelling the fortune of war. "If we were contented," he would say, "to travel over and over again in places that we know, then we could make some calculations, and could know beforehand, in most cases, where we were going and how we should come out. But in travelling in new and strange places we cannot tell at all, especially when there is no language that we can communicate well with the people in. So we have to trust to the fortune of war."
Mr. George, however, determined to make one more effort to find out where he was going; and so, when the carriage came to the door, and he and Rollo were about to get into it, he asked the porter of the house-who was the man that "spoke English"-what the name of the place was where they were going to stop.
"Yes, sare," replied the man. "You will stop. You will go to Poppensdorf and to Kreitzberg, and then you will go to Gottesberg, and then you will go to Rolandseck, where there is a boat that will take you to Drachenfels, or to Koenigswinter."
He said all this with so strong a German accent, and pronounced the barbarous words with so foreign an intonation, that no trace or impression whatever was left by them on Mr. George's ear.
"But which is the place," asked Mr. George, speaking very deliberately and plainly,-"which is the place where we are to be left by the carriage to stay on Sunday? Is it Rolandseck or Koenigswinter?"
"Yes, sare," said the porter, making a very polite bow. "Yes, sare, you will go to Rolandseck, and to Kreitzberg, and to Gottesberg, and if you please you can stop at Poppensdorf."
"Very well," said Mr. George. "Tell him to drive on."
This is a tolerably fair specimen of the success to which travellers, and the porters, and waiters, who "speak English," attain to, in their attempts to understand one another. In fact, the attempts of these domestic linguists to speak English are sometimes still more unfortunate than their attempts to understand it. One of them, in talking to Mr. George, said "No, yes," for no, sir. Another told Rollo that the dinner would be ready in fiveteen minutes, and a very worthy landlord, in commenting on the pleasant weather, said that the time was very agregable. So a waiter said one day that the bifstek was just coming up out of the kriken. He meant kitchen.
The place where the porter, who engaged the carriage for Mr. George, intended to leave him, was really Rolandseck. Rolandseck is the name of a ruined arch, the remains of an ancient tower which may be seen in the engraving a little farther on, upon the height of land on the left side of the view. The lofty ruin on the right, farther in the distance, is Drachenfels. At the foot of Drachenfels, a little farther down the river,-and we are looking down the river in the engraving,-is a town called Koenigswinter, which is the place that people usually set out from to ascend the mountain, a great number of donkeys being kept there for that purpose. Beneath the tower of Rolandseck, near the margin of the water, is a row of three or four houses, two of which are hotels. The land rises so suddenly from the river here, that there is barely room for the road and the houses between the water and the hill. In fact, the road itself is terraced up with a wall ten or fifteen feet high towards the water, and the houses in the same manner from the road. You enter them, indeed, from the level of the road; but you are immediately obliged to ascend a staircase to reach the principal floor of the house, which is ten or fifteen feet above the road, and the gardens of the house are on terraces raised to that height by a wall. Thus from the gardens and terraces you look down fifteen feet over a wall to the road, and from the road you look down fifteen feet over a wall to the water. Along the outer margin of the road is a broad stone wall or parapet, flat at the top and about three feet high. All this you can see represented in the engraving.
In the middle of the river, opposite to the hotels, is a very beautiful island with a nunnery upon it. This island is called Nonnenwerth. Now, in regard to all these castles and churches, and other sacred edifices on the Rhine, there is almost always some old legend or romantic tale, which has come down through succeeding generations from ancient times, and which adds very much to the interest of the locality where the incidents occurred. The tale in respect to Rolandseck and Nonnenwerth is this: Roland was the nephew of the great monarch and conqueror, Charlemagne. He became engaged to the daughter of the chieftain who lived in Drachenfels, the ruins of which you see in the engraving crowning the hill on the right bank of the river, some little distance down the stream. In a battle in which he was engaged, he killed his intended father-in-law by accident, being deceived by the darkness of the night, and thinking that he was striking an enemy instead of a friend. After this, he could not be married to his intended bride, the etiquette of those days forbidding that a warrior should marry one whose father he had slain. The maiden, in her grief and despair, betook herself to the nunnery on the island near her father's castle, and Roland, since he could not be permitted to visit her there, built a tower on the nearest pinnacle of the opposite shore, in order that he might live there, and at least comfort himself with a sight of the building where his beloved was confined. The story is, however, that the unhappy nun lived but a short time. Roland himself, however, continued to live in his tower, a lonely hermit, for many years.