sh race saw many
vicissitudes in the great wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, being the last important place on the great trading-route
from Poland to Berlin. It has annual fairs which are relics of these
olden times, interesting mediaeval churches, and a town-house bearing
on its gable the device of the Hanseatic League,--an oblique rod
supported by a shorter perpendicular one.

To the southeast, a few miles out on the Goerlitz Railway, is
Wusterhausen, in the picturesque region of the frequented
Mueggelsberge,--itself made memorable by an episode in Carlyle's pages.

No more fascinating trip can be taken in summer, after Berlin and
Potsdam have been visited, than to the wild and beautiful
Spreewald,--a combination of forest and morass not yet wholly redeemed
to the civilization of Europe, but holding in its remoter depths a
genuine relic of the old barbarism. The Goerlitz Railway skirts this
forest for twenty-five miles before reaching Luebben, some two hours
from Berlin in a southerly direction. This is the best point of
departure from the train for a visit to the forest, which is cut by
more than two hundred arms of the Spree, some parts of the wood only
to be reached by boats or skates. Here, in their villages reclaimed
from the swamps, live the descendants of the aboriginal Wends, who
have preserved intact their language, their manners, and their modes
of dress. This Venice of North-central Germany has for streets the
water-ways of the Spree, and for palaces the log huts of the
aboriginal race; but no views of Nature are more exquisite than some
of those in the Upper and Lower Spreewald.

Twenty-two miles west of Potsdam, on the Havel, is the city of
Brandenburg,--the old Brennabor of the Slavic people who fortified it
before the beginning of modern history. The Castle of Brandenburg may
share with the celebrated and beautiful one of Meissen, near Dresden,
the honor of being the oldest in Germany. Conquered from the original
owners by the Emperor Henry I. in 927, it was by them retaken. More
than two centuries afterwards, Albert the Bear captured and kept it,
and thenceforth styled himself First Margrave of Brandenburg. For six
hundred years this old town shared in all the strifes of that
turbulent and passionate time between the midnight of the Dark Ages
and the dawn of modern history, and its old buildings will tell much
of its forgotten story to any one who lays his ear beside their
ancient st