ed it; they have blurred
the faces and figures in passing till their features are scarcely
distinguishable; and the sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed
themselves back into the mother-marble. It is of the same tradition and
impulse with that supreme glory of the native sculpture, the ineffable
tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which climbs a column of the church within,
a miracle of richly carven story; and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg
sculptor doing great things today, his work would be of kindred
inspiration.

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at
rather a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below,
and the descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in
the pews about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the
pew-tops. The vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was
devout in the praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers. "So
simple, and yet so noble!" she said. She was a very romantic vergeress,
and she told them at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how
the artist fell asleep in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and
saw in a vision the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which
gained him her hand. They did not realize till too late that it was all
out of a novel of Georg Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the
church a gift worthy of an inedited legend.

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the
Nuremberg manner. They missed there the constant, sweet civility of
Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a
little cordiality. They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman
who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs
and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses
of such beauty:

"That kings to have the like, might wish to die."

But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so
willingly to the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a
fourteenth-century patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a
lower jaw hinged to the upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for
their astonishment, and waited, with a toothless smile, to let them
discover the bead of a nail artfully figured in the skull; then she gave
a shrill cackle of joy, and gleefully explained that the wife of this
patrician had killed him by driving a nail into his temple, and had been
fi