apital was
trolley-wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a
hotel lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an
elevator which was so modern that it came down with them as well as went
up. All the things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention
were as nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the
sense of a world elsewhere outlived. In Nuremberg it is not the quaint
or the picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and
the commonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the
gothic spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely
sweetness, of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive
grace and beauty almost never. It is the architectural speech of a
strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people's fancy; such as it is it was
inexhaustible, and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.

They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the
ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture. It was a
sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little
inside of the city gate to a trolley-car. The conductor with their fare
demanded their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know
where they wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose;
and the conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the
public garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would
make the most favorable impression upon strangers. It was in fact so
like all other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted
alleys, that it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of
Nuremberg, and they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches,
where they rested from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt
to appropriate the charm of the city.

The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy
(flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said
was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o'clock table d'hote
they took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city.
Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and
shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall
beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, or
broad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry. A
tile-roofed open gallery ra