lying in his place. Shuddering, he averted his gaze, and turned it towards the chapel-door, where he had left his companion. But, oh! horror upon horror! As he looked, he saw the long, loose, dark outer garment fall from the limbs of the pilgrim he saw his form dilate and expand in height and in breadth, until his head seemed to touch the pale crescent moon, and his bulk shut out from view all beyond itself: he saw his eyes fiery and flaming like globes of lurid light and he saw his hair and beard converted into one mass of living, scorching flame. The fiend, for such he was, now stood revealed in all his hideous deformity. The long, crooked claws of the demon were stretched forth to fasten and seize on the hapless count, who with vacillating step, like a bird under the eye of a basilisk, involuntarily, though with a perfect consciousness of the awful situation in which he was placed, and the fearful fate which awaited him, every moment drew near and nearer to him. The victim reached the chapel-door-he felt all the power of that diabolical fascination-another step, and he would be in the grasp of the fiend who grinned to clutch him. But the fair boy that spake from the grave suddenly appeared once more, and flinging himself between his wretched brother and the doorway, obstructed his further progress forward. "Avaunt! foul fiend!" spake the child aloud. His voice was like a trumpet-note. "Avaunt to hell! My brother is no more thine. Thou hast no longer power over him. Your hellish plot has failed. He is free, and he shall live and repent!" As he said this, he clasped Ulric in his little arms; and they became, as it were, at once encircled by a beatific halo, which lighted up the chapel like day. The fiend fled howling like a wild beast disappointed of his prey. The remains of his ancestors were again replaced in their coffins by the count, long ere the morning; and on their desecrated graves he poured forth a bitter flood of repentant tears. With the dawn of the day he quitted the Castle of Rheineck, and never more entered it during his lifetime. It is said that he traversed the land in the garb of a lowly mendicant, subsisting upon the alms of the charitable and the kind; and it is likewise told that he did penance at every holy shrine from Cologne to Rome, whither he was bound to obtain absolution for his sins from the father of the Christian world. Years afterwards he was found dead at the foot of the ancient altar, in the ruined chapel of this his paternal abode. The castle went to wreck and ruin from thenceforward; and for centuries nought ever dwelt within its walls save and except the nightbirds and beasts of prey which frequented the adjacent forests. The castle was rebuilt by a new race of possessors, into whose hands it passed after the lapse of time; the ruins of the old tower, already alluded to, are all that remain of the original structure. It is still firmly believed by the peasantry of the vicinity, that in the first and last quarters of the moon, when her pale beams fall faintly on these fragments of the past, the spirit of Ulric, the last of the old Lords of Rheineck, still sweeps around them at the hour of midnight, and is occasionally visible to belated wanderers. HAMMERSTEIN. Hammerstein, supposed by some antiquarians to derive its name from its presumed founder, Charles Martel (the Hammer); by others, from certain forges or iron-works (Eisenhammer) in its vicinity, is of very great antiquity-a fact which these conjectures in themselves would be amply sufficient to establish. Of its early history, however, little is known; and the most remarkable circumstance connected with it in the middle ages is the siege it sustained in the year 1020. The particulars of that siege are rather romantic, and not by any means uninteresting. Otho, count of Hammerstein, the head of his noble race, was lord of this strong castle and of the large possessions appertaining to it, about the beginning of the eleventh century. He likewise owned the Wetterau, which impinged upon the territories of the Archbishop of Mainz, and was thereby the cause of continual feud between him and Erkenbold, the prelate who then ruled over that powerful see. The archbishop put forward pretensions to a portion of the |