For Dilsberg is a quaint place.  It is most quaintly and picturesquely situated, too.  Imagine the beautiful river before you; then a few rods of brilliant green sward on its opposite shore; then a sudden hill—­no preparatory gently rising slopes, but a sort of instantaneous hill —­a hill two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet high, as round as a bowl, with the same taper upward that an inverted bowl has, and with about the same relation of height to diameter that distinguishes a bowl of good honest depth—­a hill which is thickly clothed with green bushes—­a comely, shapely hill, rising abruptly out of the dead level of the surrounding green plains, visible from a great distance down the bends of the river, and with just exactly room on the top of its head for its steepled and turreted and roof-clustered cap of architecture, which same is tightly jammed and compacted within the perfectly round hoop of the ancient village wall.

There is no house outside the wall on the whole hill, or any vestige of a former house; all the houses are inside the wall, but there isn’t room for another one.  It is really a finished town, and has been finished a very long time.  There is no space between the wall and the first circle of buildings; no, the village wall is itself the rear wall of the first circle of buildings, and the roofs jut a little over the wall and thus furnish it with eaves.  The general level of the massed roofs is gracefully broken and relieved by the dominating towers of the ruined castle and the tall spires of a couple of churches; so, from a distance Dilsberg has rather more the look of a king’s crown than a cap.  That lofty green eminence and its quaint coronet form quite a striking picture, you may be sure, in the flush of the evening sun.

We crossed over in a boat and began the ascent by a narrow, steep path which plunged us at once into the leafy deeps of the bushes.  But they were not cool deeps by any means, for the sun’s rays were weltering hot and there was little or no breeze to temper them.  As we panted up the sharp ascent, we met brown, bareheaded and barefooted boys and girls, occasionally, and sometimes men; they came upon us without warning, they gave us good day, flashed out of sight in the bushes, and were gone as suddenly and mysteriously as they had come.  They were bound for the other side of the river to work.  This path had been traveled by many generations of these people.  They have always gone down to the valley to earn their bread, but they have always climbed their hill again to eat it, and to sleep in their snug town.