Muhlheim is celebrated in verse for the sorrows of three sisters, who, as young ladies will do, fell in love, one after another, as each came to years of indiscretion. The eldest, being forbidden to marry by her father, died in three months; the second, being also forbidden, was obliged to be confined in a mad-house; still the unrelenting old father treated his third and youngest daughter in the same harsh manner, objecting to her very natural wish to marry a brave young esquire: having more spirit than her sisters, or being warned by their fate, this youngest ran away with her sweetheart, and was disinherited by the old curmudgeon, who seems to have loved nothing but his gold. We are not told the after-fate of the youngest, or whether love made up for loss of gold.
CHAPTER XI.
Berncastel by Moonlight.
Berncastel is a delightful, old, tumble-down-looking conglomeration of queer-shaped houses; a mountain-stream hurries through its principal street, if such a heterogeneous jumble of odd gable-ends and door-posts may be called a street: but as it does duty for one, it must receive the appellation.
This street should rather be spoken of in the past tense, for the greater part of it was burnt in 1857; three times the town was on fire in this year, a church and about forty houses being consumed in the last and largest conflagration. As we shall have to revert to these fires again, suffice it to say that the part of the old street nearest the mountain was destroyed.
Berncastel contains some four thousand inhabitants; the tourist passing in a steam-boat would hardly believe so many people were housed in so small a space. This remark will apply to most of the towns and villages on the Moselle, for only a few of the better class of houses are visible from the water in general, the mass of buildings being huddled out of observation as much as possible, and crowded under the base of the impending hills; formerly these Burgs were all walled, which accounts for the crushing.