day a beggar-woman, with many children, who solicited alms of him, was dismissed with a curse. As she went away she prayed that the knight might have twelve sons at once to consume his substance and reduce him to the same state of penury in which she lived. The lady, in consequence of the curse, bore him twelve sons at a birth. He ordered eleven of them to be drowned like Rüden (puppies) in the Main. But, for the sake of the gentle mother, the water fairies protected them and saved them, to become in distant parts knights of renown. After the grim father’s death they returned, and became a powerful family in those parts, but still bore the name of the “Puppies of Collemberg.” It is most probable that the story had its foundation in an heraldic cognisance.
On the road we meet a number of young women, with enormous coffin-like coffers on their heads, and are told that it is the day on which there is an annual flitting of farm-servants. The coffers contained their “things,” called in America “plunder,”—perhaps, in some cases, not without reason. In Burgstadt itself there is little interesting besides an ancient town-hall; but on the hill above are the remains of an elliptic fortress of stones, still eight feet high in some places, and the whole 4503 feet in circumference. The Romans appear to have included it in their fortified lines. In the forest of Burgstadt are found huge stones called Hainfässer; two of these, fifteen feet long, were apparently intended to be sawn into pillars, but the work was interrupted at an earlier stage than in the case of the columns which we shall presently come to at Klein-Henbach. It is but a short distance now to Miltenberg, a welcome assurance after a broiling day’s walk. The “Angel” inn opens its hospitable wings to shelter us.
On the site of Miltenberg there appears to have been a settlement in the times of the Romans near to the extreme limit of their circumvallation, which was commenced as early as the reign of Tiberius. About the end of the fourth century an inundation of Alemans and Suabians poured in upon the colony, and carried away every vestige of civilisation. In later times the town was on the limit of the old province of Franconia. It was the constant object of the Electors of Mainz, as well as of the Emperors, to conciliate it to their interests, on account of its advantageous position.
In the tenth century there was no town on the present site of Miltenberg, but the town of that date stood on the left bank of the Mud. It is called Vachhusen in a chronicle of Ludwig, the German, in the year 856. It was utterly destroyed by the Huns in 910. .png)
Gate Tower at Miltenberg.When the remnant of the inhabitants returned, they divided themselves between Klein-Henbach and a place which arose under the protection of the Castle Miltenberg, which may have been as old as the Roman occupation. This castle became the property of the archiepiscopal see of Mainz after the death of Duke Otto, of Bavaria, in 985. That Miltenberg was formerly a place of much more importance than now, is testified by the distance between the two entrance-gates which are now standing. What is now a vacant space between the gate on the Mud and the town, was formerly occupied by buildings which were destroyed by fire by the Margrave Albrecht in 1552. Nothing definite is known about the castle till it came into possession of the Archbishops of Mainz. Adalbert, who renewed the fortifications of the castle at Aschaffenburg in 1122, is said to have had the chief hand in fortifying this castle. The heraldic wheel of Mainz is everywhere seen on the carved escutcheons about the walls. In 1803 the building passed into the possession of the Prince of Leiningen. It now belongs to a gentleman who has purchased several castles about the Rhineland, with the praiseworthy object of their preservation. He alters nothing, but merely lends a hand now and then to arrest the ravages of Time, and turns the interior into a flower-garden. Of the beautiful effect of flowers amongst old ruins, any one may judge who has seen New College Garden in Oxford. Eppstein, on the Taunus, owes its present state of preservation to the reverent care of this enthusiastic archæologist, a very Old Mortality of ruined castles. The view from the castle of Miltenberg is one of the most delightful that can be conceived; the river comes to the town in the shape of a horse-shoe. The forms of the hills are seen in profile. The old fortifications wind up the slopes round the castle with towers at intervals, like those of Bellinzona in Italian Switzerland. Miltenberg is certainly the eye and gem of the Main.
