rear, and elsewhere at fit
distance from its courts, a native architecture prevailed; and at no
great remove the Marches found themselves in a simple German town again.
There they stumbled upon a little bookseller's shop blinking in a quiet
corner, and bought three or four guides and small histories of Ansbach,
which they carried home, and studied between drowsing and waking. The
wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort
of literature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths
completely, and only made their way perilously out with the help of
cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seeking
their nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in
the distance. They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, and
better qualified than they would otherwise have been for their second
visit to the Schloss, which they paid early the next morning.

They were so early, indeed, that when they mounted from the great inner
court, much too big for Ansbach, if not for the building, and rung the
custodian's bell, a smiling maid who let them into an ante-room, where
she kept on picking over vegetables for her dinner, said the custodian
was busy, and could not be seen till ten o'clock. She seemed, in her
nook of the pretentious pile, as innocently unconscious of its
history as any hen-sparrow who had built her nest in some coign of
its architecture; and her friendly, peaceful domesticity remained a
wholesome human background to the tragedies and comedies of the past,
and held them in a picturesque relief in which they were alike tolerable
and even charming.

The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soil of fable, and above
ground is a gnarled and twisted growth of good and bad from the time
of the Great Charles to the time of the Great Frederick. Between these
times she had her various rulers, ecclesiastical and secular, in various
forms of vassalage to the empire; but for nearly four centuries
her sovereignty was in the hands of the margraves, who reigned in a
constantly increasing splendor till the last sold her outright to the
King of Prussia in 1791, and went to live in England on the proceeds.
She had taken her part in the miseries and glories of the wars that
desolated Germany, but after the Reformation, when she turned from
the ancient faith to which she owed her cloistered origin under St.
Gumpertus, her people had peace except when their last