n along the top, where so many centuries of
sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded
piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth
against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed
themselves in assault. The blood shed in forgotten battles would have
flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there
a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers
dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city. From its ramparts
the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if
one has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it
is here that more than anywhere else one may feast it. The prospect of
tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an
abounding fulness, that all incidents are lost in it. The multitudinous
roofs of red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers,
press upon one another in endless succession; they cluster together on
a rise of ground and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere
disperse or scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city,
beyond which looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of
misty uplands.

A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors
to gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible
museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air
on all the murderous engines and implements of torture. First in German
and then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden,
she winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which
men had been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which
had beheaded eight hundred persons. When she took the established fee
from March she suggested, with a demure glance, "And what more you
please for saying it in English."

"Can you say it in Russian?" demanded a young man, whose eyes he
had seen dwelling on her from the beginning. She laughed archly, and
responded with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of
sight-seers over to the custodian who was to show them through the halls
and chambers of the Burg. These were undergoing the repairs which the
monuments of the past are perpetually suffering in the present, and
there was some special painting and varnishing for the reception of the
Kais