enemy, in a land like Germany, with its prodigious subdivision of
independent states and free cities, were far greater than they could
have been in any one great continuous principality.

In many fortified places these passages had existed from the middle
ages. In Klosterheim they had possibly as early an origin: but by this
period it is very probable that the gradual accumulation of rubbish,
through a course of centuries, would have unfitted them for use, had
not the Peasants' War, in the time of Luther's reformation, little more
than one hundred years before, given occasion for their use and repair.
At that time Klosterheim had stood a siege, which, from the defect of
artillery, was at no time formidable in a military sense; but as a
blockade, formed suddenly when the citizens were slenderly furnished
with provisions, it would certainly have succeeded, and delivered up
the vast wealth of the convents as a spoil to the peasantry, had it not
been for one in particular of these subterraneous passages, which,
opening on the opposite side of the little river Iltiss, in a thick
_boccage_, where the enemy had established no posts, furnished the
means of introducing a continual supply of fresh provisions, to the
great triumph of the garrison, and the utter dismay of the
superstitious peasants, who looked upon the mysterious supply as a
providential bounty to a consecrated cause.

So memorable a benefit had given to this one passage a publicity and an
historical importance which made all its circumstances, and amongst
those its internal mouth, familiar even to children. But this was
evidently _not_ the avenue by which Maximilian had escaped into
the forest. For it opened externally on the wrong side of the river,
whilst everybody knew that its domestic opening was in one of the
chapels of the _schloss_; and another circumstance, equally