Old-World places that I know, and August, for his part, did not
know any other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains
all about it, and the gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it.
It has paved streets and enchanting little shops that have all
latticed panes and iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old
Gothic church, that has the noblest blendings of light and shadow,
and marble tombs of dead knights, and a look of infinite strength
and repose as a church should have. Then there is the Muntze
Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery, and looking down
on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river; and there is an
old schloss which has been made into a guardhouse, with
battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and colors,
and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size in his niche
and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close at hand,
is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a
colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very
rich chapel; indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed
past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle
Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and
it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its
monuments and its historic color, that I marvel much no one has
ever cared to sing its praises. The old pious, heroic life of an
age at once more restful and more brave than ours still leaves its
spirit there, and then there is the girdle of the mountains all
around, and that alone means strength, peace, majesty.

In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved, irregular square where the grand church
stands.