Once upon a time there were two brothers, both as valiant and noble knights as ever wore armor or robbed a traveler. Unfortunately they fell in love with the same girl, and as she couldn’t accept both and had to say she would “always be a sister” to the other, the tension in the family circle got very tight. Finally the elder brother saw that the maiden loved the younger best, so he put his broken heart in his pocket, gave the pair his blessing and lit out for the crusades. In those days whenever a man lost out in love or was in danger of being hung for crime, he went to the crusades. The younger brother was very happy for a while, but he happened to visit another country and there he fell in love with another girl, just as much and as eternally in love with her as with the first one. The second girl was wise or else she had been warned of the young man’s record, for she announced the engagement and the marriage followed soon. Girl No. 1 went to a convent with an aching heart, everybody settled down, and even the neighbors quit talking. Just at that time the elder brother returned from the crusades, and when he heard what had happened he thought it was awful. He went to his brother’s castle and challenged him to fight a duel. The younger brother was worked up over the interference of the family in his private affairs and was anxious to fight. The two knights met in a plum-patch back of the convent and prepared to settle which was right. Just as they drew their swords the original girl, who had been informed of what was going on by some busybody, rushed out of the gate, threw herself between the brothers and begged them not to fight for her sake. She made such a good talk that they shook hands and took a drink together as a sign that it was all over. The elder brother offered to marry the girl in the convent, but she refused. The wife of the younger brother ran off with another chivalrous knight and the two brothers were left alone in the world. They built the two castles side by side, and spent all their days together hunting deer and wealthy travelers, and died without ever flirting with another woman (so the legend says). The ruins of the two castles side by side are evidence of the truth of the story.
THE LEGEND OF COW CREEK.
“Fair Bingen on the Rhine” was somewhat of a disappointment. Thousands and tens of thousands of American girls and boys have stood up in front of the school on Friday afternoons, scared stiff with the awful prospect of forgetting the next word, and told their school-mates:
“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers,
There was lack of woman’s nursing,
There was dearth of woman’s tears.”
And when the same moon shone there that shone on fair Bingen on the Rhine, those countless American youths have breathed a sigh for the soldier and several sighs over getting through. Bingen is a good sort of manufacturing town, and the fact that the poet selected the name because of its rhythm and not because it fitted the situation accounts for the success of the poem. After some reflection on the subject among the storied regions of Europe I have come to the conclusion that it is the romancer and the singer who make a country great and interesting, and not any special merit of the place itself. If Cow creek had a few legend-writers in a few years it would rank with the Rhine, the Black Forest, and even the fields of old England. How would this do for a Cow creek legend, a la Europe?
LEGEND OF COW CREEK.