rbs and quainter faces are everywhere,
and the whole seems quite in keeping with the background of
fifteenth-century houses that hedges it in on every side. Could John the
Magnanimous, who rises up in bronze in the midst of the assembly, come
to life, he would never guess that three and a half centuries have
passed since he fell into his last sleep.

This same John the Magnanimous it was who founded the institution which
gives Jena its fame and distinguishes it from all the other quaint
hypnotic clusters of houses that nestle similarly here and there in
other picturesque valleys of the Fatherland--I mean, of course, its
world-renowned university. It is but a few minutes' walk from the
market-place, past the home where Schiller once lived and through the
"street" scarcely more than arms'-breadth wide beyond, to the site of
the older buildings of the university. Inornate, prosaic buildings they
are, unrelieved even by the dominant note of picturesqueness; rescued,
however, from all suggestion of the commonplace by the rugged ruins of
the famed "powder-tower" jutting out from the crest of the hill just
above, by the spire of the old church which seems to rise from the
oldest university building itself, and by the mountain peaks that jut up
into view far beyond.

If you would enter one of the old buildings there is naught to hinder.
Go into one of the lecture-halls which chances at the moment to be
unoccupied, and you will see an array of crude old benches for seats
that look as if they might have been placed there at the very inaugural
of the institution. The boards that serve for desks, if you scan them
closer, you will find scarred all over with the marks of knives, showing
how some hundreds of successive classes of listeners have whiled away
the weary lecture-hours. Not a square inch can you find of the entire
desk surface that is un-scarred. If one would woo a new sensation, he
has but to seat himself on one of these puritanical old benches and
conjure up in imagination the long series of professors that may have
occupied the raised platform in front, recalling the manner of thought
and dogma that each laid down as verity. He of the first series appears
in the garb of the sixteenth century, with mind just eagerly striving to
peer a little way out of the penumbra of the Renaissance. The students
who carve the first gashes in the new desks will learn, if perchance
they listen in intervals of whittling, that this World o