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A sweet-faced mother superior, carrying on the work begun twelve hundred years before her time, willingly displays her little refuge and declaims its history. It is the oldest hospice in Europe save one, the Hotel Dieu in Paris, she says. And she recalls with a trace of justifiable pride that even the infidels of the Revolution, who reverenced neither king nor God, bowed their respects to the superior in charge and passed on without touching it.
Up the long flight worn down by the feet of suppliants innumerable, — come here to seek spiritual aid and temporal blessing at the shrine of the saint, — the way leads to the Romanesque walls of the ancient church. The chapel of Sts. Peter and Paul is built upon a rocky eminence and is reached by two staircases from north and south. The one from the north is the more important. When the ceremonial for which the town is famous came to its end on this mound, it was from this direction that the Pied Piper procession of pilgrims wound out of the town.
There is little that is beautiful about the old church except purity of architectural line, extreme simplicity of construction, and that ineffable charm that comes with mellowing age. Its interior is whitewashed its altar and furnishings carved wood of no great pretensions,
A picture to the right of the choir, said to date from 1554, shows St. Willibrord in a vision bestowing his approval upon the annual pilgrimage. Some of the saint's vestments, his haircloth shirt, and an arrow — supposed to be one of those which killed St. Sebastian, — are among the precious relics displayed in a case beneath the picture. The Roman sarcophagus which contained all that was mortal of St. Willibrord prior to the removal of the dust to the basilica in 1906 is to be seen beneath the high altar.
So much for the glories that were Echternach's. What remains of them can be seen quickly and with small expenditure of effort. There is little use in asking the quiet townsfolk to repeat the legends of the place, or in lingering in the gardens in the hope of meeting a communicative ghost. The traditions of Echternach are too poignantly historical to have been translated into fairy stories. The harmless wraiths that leave their tombs, to roam beneath the beeches, take no mortals into their confidence.
But once a year the abbey town stirs itself from its peaceful sleep. The spirits of the dead monks troop down from the abbey cemetery. The feet of the live burghers slip into the most comfortable shoes available. And there begins a religious ceremony like nothing else in Europe, a pageant as dignified as it is startling, and as weirdly unnatural as it is hallowed by usage — the famous dance of the Springprozession / Sprangprozessioun.
