showed us a wide and beautiful landscape, made up of wavy distances of woody hills, and a nearer prospect of undulating expanses of green lowlands, on the one hand, and castle-graced crags and ridges on the other, with the shining curves of the Neckar flowing between.  But the principal show, the chief pride of the children, was the ancient and empty well in the grass-grown court of the castle.  Its massive stone curb stands up three or four feet above-ground, and is whole and uninjured.  The children said that in the Middle Ages this well was four hundred feet deep, and furnished all the village with an abundant supply of water, in war and peace.  They said that in the old day its bottom was below the level of the Neckar, hence the water-supply was inexhaustible.

But there were some who believed it had never been a well at all, and was never deeper than it is now—­eighty feet; that at that depth a subterranean passage branched from it and descended gradually to a remote place in the valley, where it opened into somebody’s cellar or other hidden recess, and that the secret of this locality is now lost.  Those who hold this belief say that herein lies the explanation that Dilsberg, besieged by Tilly and many a soldier before him, was never taken:  after the longest and closest sieges the besiegers were astonished to perceive that the besieged were as fat and hearty as ever, and were well furnished with munitions of war—­therefore it must be that the Dilsbergers had been bringing these things in through the subterranean passage all the time.

The children said that there was in truth a subterranean outlet down there, and they would prove it.  So they set a great truss of straw on fire and threw it down the well, while we leaned on the curb and watched the glowing mass descend.  It struck bottom and gradually burned out.  No smoke came up.  The children clapped their hands and said: 

“You see!  Nothing makes so much smoke as burning straw—­now where did the smoke go to, if there is no subterranean outlet?”

So it seemed quite evident that the subterranean outlet indeed existed.  But the finest thing within the ruin’s limits was a noble linden, which the children said was four hundred years old, and no doubt it was.  It had a mighty trunk and a mighty spread of limb and foliage.  The limbs near the ground were nearly the thickness of a barrel.

That tree had witnessed the assaults of men in mail —­how remote such a time seems, and how ungraspable is the fact that real men ever did fight in real armor!—­and it had seen the time when these broken arches and crumbling battlements were a trim and strong and stately fortress, fluttering its gay banners in the sun, and peopled with vigorous humanity—­how impossibly long ago that seems!—­and here it stands yet, and possibly may still be standing here, sunning itself and dreaming its historical dreams, when today shall have been joined to the days called “ancient.”