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 NOTES AND TESTIIONTES. 349

has ever taken, there are few whkh feed the imagination with
more tearful visions of misery and despair than were reflected
from thii dark, impenetrable mirror, framed five hundred feet
deep in granite. When I considered that all the enormities of
whi:h this structure had been the occasion and the theatre, were
perpetrated in the quest of water, in all ages and countries the
consecrate-l emblem of truth, I was struck for the thousandth
time with the resemblance which runs through all the forms of
human perversity.
 While pondering the question whether France had gained
any more sub-tantial advantage from her. endless and sangui-
nary ce. lesiastical wars than from the sinking of this dismal pit,
which the dews of heaven, that fall alike upon the unjust and
the jui.t, made superfluous, my guide led me to another part of
the Iort, where .he showed me an opLnin; like a closet in the
wall, about three feet dlep aud li;gh, and, perhaps, Ibur feet
long. litre, she informed me, Amauriy, one of the earliest pro-
prietors of the chateau, ruifined his wife, a young woman of
only seventeen years, for infidelity to him during his absence
with the Crusaders in the Holy Land in 1170. He hung her
suspected paramour upon the mountain immediately opposite,
and confined Bertha-that was her name-in this mural
sepult hre, which was too small to admit of her standing erect or
lying prostrate, or, indeed, of stretching her limbs in any direc-
tion. The only view ofthe outer world that she could get, was
through a little window, cut so that she could see the remains of
her lover dangling from a distant tree. After some ten years
of indescribable misery, deLath released her from her prison and
from her brutal jaler.
 The good old woman, who related this legend tearfully,-
although I have no doubt she had told it a thousand times
be.fre, gave great thrce to her denunciation of the cruel cru-
sader by adding that, "Aller all, Bertha was innocent." I fear,
however, that this was a slight rhetorical embellishment, which,
as a woman and a sister, she felt at liberty to indulge me with;
for I have since seen a historical sketch of Pontarlier and its
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