"There are two articles of traffic peculiar to this spot Millstones—" She puts her hand on my lips here, and I am unable to continue my reading, while she goes on: "I remember the legend now. It was a certain Siegfried, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, who, on his return from the Crusades, was persuaded by slanderous tongues to believe his wife had been faithless to him."
"The wretch!—the Count, I mean."
"So he was. He drove her out a wanderer upon the wide world, and she fled across the Rhine into that mountain country you see yonder, which then, as now, was all impenetrable forest There she passed years and years of solitary existence, unknown and friendless. There were no Mr. Dodds in those days, or, at least, she had not the good fortune to meet with them."
I sigh deeply under the influence of such a glance, Tom, and she resumes,—
"At last, one day, when fatigued with the chase, and separated from his companions, the cruel Count throws himself down to rest beside a fountain; a lovely creature, attired gracefully but strangely in the skins of wild beasts—"
"She did n't kill them herself?" said I, interrupting.
"How absurd you are! Of course she did n't;" and she draws her own ermine mantle across her as she speaks, smoothing the soft fur with her softer hand. "The Count starts to his feet, and recognizes her in a moment, and at the same instant, too, he is so struck by the manifest protection Providence has vouchsafed her, that he listens to her tale of justification, and conducts her in triumph home,—his injured but adored wife. I think, really, people were better formerly than they are now,—more forgiving, or rather, I mean, more open to truth and its generous impulses."
"Faith, I can't say," replied I, pondering; "the skins may have had something to say to it." Here she bursts into such a fit of laughter that I join from sheer sympathy with the sound, but not guessing in the least why or at what.
We soon left Andernach behind us, and rolled along beside the rapid Rhine, on a beautiful road almost level with the river, which now for some miles becomes less bold and picturesque.
At last we arrived at Coblentz to dinner, stopping at a capital inn called the "Giant," after which we strolled through the town to stare at the shops and the quaintly dressed peasant girls, whose embroidered head-gear, a kind of velvet cap worked in gold or silver, so pleased Mrs. G. that we bought three or four of them, as well as several of those curiously wrought silver daggers which they wear stuck through their black hair.