Do you know in what year the fairies left the Rhine ?--long before Murray's "Guide-Book" was wrote--long before squat steamboats, with snorting funnels, came paddling down the stream.

Do you not know that once upon a time the appearance of eleven thousand British virgins was considered at Cologne as a wonder?
Now there come twenty thousand such annually, accompanied by their ladies'-maids.

But of them we will say no more--let us back to those who went before them.
Many, many hundred thousand years ago, and at the exact period when chivalry was in full bloom, there occurred a little history upon the banks of the Rhine, which has been already written in a book, and hence must be positively true.

'Tis a story of knights and ladies--of love and battle, and virtue rewarded; a story of princes and noble lords, moreover: the best of company.

Gentles, an ye will, ye shall hear it.
Fair dames and damsels, may your loves be as happy as those of the heroine of this romaunt.
On the cold and rainy evening of Thursday, the 26th of October, in the year previously indicated, such travellers as might have chanced to be abroad in that bitter night, might have remarked a fellow-wayfarer journeying on the road from Oberwinter to Godesberg.