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THE KIIINE SLOPES AND THE THKEE CASTLES.

a time, however, we began to make out the bits of brass onthe soldier's uniform, and to teil whereabouts our guide wasstanding. Presently we were able to discover, close besidethe old corporal, a beam that slanted up on end, like a craneprojecting from the ground, and having a rüde windlass at-tached to its base. This was the apparatus, the veteran toldus, by which those who were condemned to confinement—andindeed death (for the one seemed bat the necessary consequenceof the other)—in the " dog-hole," were let down into the pitbelow. Then our guide lifted up a broad trap in the floor, andas we stood at the edge and craned our neck over the terribleopening we could see, by the light that struggled in belowthrough the single chink—no bigger than a musket-slit inthe wall—and which feil in a faint blue patch at the bottom,that the hole was like a large well—thirty feet deep the oldsoldier said it was—though it seemed to us, in the thickgloomwhich pervaded it, to be as deep as if one were looking downinto the tube of some martello-tower sunk in the rock. Intothis pit the wretched prisoners were lowered from the rüdecrane above, and the old man made the windlass whirl roundand rattle again, in order to realise to us the rate at whichthey were shot into it. By the same means the food was letdown to the victims for the few weeks or days that humanexistence could hold out in such a place.

We could not help thinking of the " good old times," asthey are called, as we peered down into the black dismalwell, and thanking our stars that we lived in days when the" nobles" troubled their heads with other things than ingeniousschemes for the torture of those who objected to be plunderedby them. We hear fine things of the knights of old, butstern history teaches us that these same knights were—onthe shores of the Rhine at least—unmitigated bandits orhighwaymen — fellows who would have swung upon the gal-