Re-visiting the Mouse Tower

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Re-visiting the Mouse Tower - Back in the middle of the 1950s, I was stationed in Germany. One of the typically soggy, foggy, drippy, rainy, cloudy days it happened that I had a day off of work and was able to take a short automobile ride up the highway along the Rhine River. Along the way there came a view of a small island in the middle of the river on which sat a little tower-like structure at which I pointed my black and white film camera and clicked the shutter button. That tower, as I learned later, was built and owned by a fellow - a greedy fellow at that - known as Bishop Hatto. He ruled over a small area and constructed the tower and used it for his collecting of tolls from Rhine River traffic passing by. Now then, this Bishop Hatto guy was no big time benefactor of the people in his domain over whom he ruled. His storage barns for the grains and other products from nearby farm fields were typically stuffed with edibles. But once, when the Rhine River flooded and spilled water over the land, causing the people to become hungry and desperate for Bishop Hatto's help - he kept it all to himself, sparing none for those over whom he ruled. Instead of helping the population with food from his overstuffed barns, Bishop Hatto invited them into the barns and then had the barns burned down with the people inside. This resulted in a plague of mice that came looking for whatever grain and other edibles might remain from the burned-down barns. So many mice on the move toward Bishop Hatto's barns frightened the greedy fellow. He escaped the plague of mice and made it to the safety of his tower in the middle of the Rhine River. But Bishop Hatto had under-estimated the ability of all of those mice. The mouse horde managed to swim to the tower on the little island in the Rhine River. Once there, the mice attacked Bishop Hatto and ate him up, bones and all. The Mouse Tower, as it came to be called, has been there in the middle of the Rhine River since the middle 900s, providing a lesson for all to remember. Image: The Mouse Tower on the Rhine River near Bingen, Germany - Gus Kilthau