Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ON THE BANKS OF THE RHINE WHEN Byron went into such raptures over the beauties of the Rhine he did not anticipate the coming of Mr. Cook, or of the tourist, English and American, chaperoned by Mr. Cook; nor did he in his calmest moments imagine what the banks of the Rhine would be like now. Byron saw only that noble river flowing between massive and impressive hills; he saw only those castellated heights, every peak, every scarp hoary with romance and history. He saw not the desirable hotels, the numerous wine and beer gardens, the steamboats and the tourists’ touts. Had he done so he would probably have paused in reflection and might never have written a word about the Rhine. Still, all the hotels, the villas, the railways, tramways, electric lights, steamboats, tugs, barges, tourists, touts, and itinerant troubadours in the world cannot alter, though they may mar, the splendid beauty of the Rhine banks. To wheel beside that classic stream, as I have done, to watch the river broadening and narrowing, to see on every hand great heights uprising, where on the sides vineyards spread in alternating colours, and where hill-peaks are crowned with the crumbling ruins of the castles of the bold Rhenish barons; to see all this is enough, and we can forgive the garish obtrusiveness of the modern. I struck the Rhine at Cologne, the city of scent, where eau de Cologne is dearer than in London, where spires of a splendid cathedral seem to pierce the blue, and where in odd, out-of-the-way corners one finds many traces of old Prussian life?such as it must have been before there was a German Empire. But Cologne is not new to me; I was here at the time of the world’s championships in 1895, and nothing has been altered. I sat in the same seat of the Cafe Bauer, inHohe…