Tradition says she spent the last two years of her life in the strange den I have been speaking of, after having indulged herself in one final, triumphant, and satisfying spree.  She shut herself up there, without company, and without even a servant, and so abjured and forsook the world.  In her little bit of a kitchen she did her own cooking; she wore a hair shirt next the skin, and castigated herself with whips—­these aids to grace are exhibited there yet.  She prayed and told her beads, in another little room, before a waxen Virgin niched in a little box against the wall; she bedded herself like a slave.

In another small room is an unpainted wooden table, and behind it sit half-life-size waxen figures of the Holy Family, made by the very worst artist that ever lived, perhaps, and clothed in gaudy, flimsy drapery. [1] The margravine used to bring her meals to this table and dine with the holy family.  What an idea that was!  What a grisly spectacle it must have been!  Imagine it:  Those rigid, shock-headed figures, with corpsy complexions and fish glass eyes, occupying one side of the table in the constrained attitudes and dead fixedness that distinguish all men that are born of wax, and this wrinkled, smoldering old fire-eater occupying the other side, mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in the ghostly stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight.  It makes one feel crawly even to think of it.

1.  The Savior was represented as a lad of about fifteen
    years of age.  This figure had lost one eye.

In this sordid place, and clothed, bedded, and fed like a pauper, this strange princess lived and worshiped during two years, and in it she died.  Two or three hundred years ago, this would have made the poor den holy ground; and the church would have set up a miracle-factory there and made plenty of money out of it.  The den could be moved into some portions of France and made a good property even now.

CHAPTER XXII [The Black Forest and Its Treasures]

From Baden-Baden we made the customary trip into the Black Forest.  We were on foot most of the time.  One cannot describe those noble woods, nor the feeling with which they inspire him.  A feature of the feeling, however, is a deep sense of contentment; another feature of it is a buoyant, boyish gladness; and a third and very conspicuous feature of it is one’s sense of the remoteness of the work-day world and his entire emancipation from it and its affairs.

Those woods stretch unbroken over a vast region; and everywhere they are such dense woods, and so still, and so piney and fragrant.  The stems of the trees are trim and straight, and in many places all the ground is hidden for miles under a thick cushion of moss of a vivid green color, with not a decayed or ragged spot in its surface, and not a fallen leaf or twig to mar its immaculate tidiness.  A rich