elds, arcades and arches, towers and turrets, light and
shade, harmony and irregularity, all, in a word, that old cities have,
and old Teutonic cities beyond all others; and when the Metzgersprung is
in full riot round the Marienplatz, or on Corpus Christi day, when the
King and the Court and the Church, the guilds and the senate and the
magistracy, all go humbly through the flower-strewn streets, it is easy
to forget the present and to think that one is still in the old days
with the monks, who gave their name to it, tranquil in their work-rooms
and the sound of battle all over the lands around them.

It was the Corpus Christi day in Munich now, and the whole city, the new
and the old, had hung itself with garlands and draperies, with pictures
and evergreens, with flags and tapestries, and the grand procession had
passed to and from the church, and the archbishop had blessed the
people, and the king had bared his handsome head to the sun and the Holy
Ghost, and it was all over for the year, and the people were all happy
and satisfied and sure that God was with them and their town; especially
the people of the old quarters, who most loved and clung to these
ceremonials and feasts; good God-fearing families, labouring hard,
living honestly and wholesomely, gay also in a quiet, mirthful, innocent
fashion--much such people as their forefathers were before them, in days
when Gustavus Adolphus called their city the golden saddle on the lean
horse.

The lean horse, by which he meant the sterile plains, which yield little
except hay, looks rich with verdure in the mellow afternoon light, when
midsummer is come, and the whole populace, men, women, and children, on
Sundays and feast-days pour out of the city gates eagerly to their own
little festivities under the cherry-trees of the little blue and white
coffee-houses along the course of the river, when the beanflowers are in
bloom. For out of the old city you go easily beyond the walls to the
grey glacier water of "Isar rolling rapidly," not red with blood now as
after Hohenlinden, but brilliant and boisterous always, with washerwomen
leaning over it with bare arms, and dogs wading where rushes and dams
break the current, and the hay blowing breast-high along the banks, and
the students chasing the girls through it, and every now and then upon
the wind the music of a guitar, light and dancing, or sad and slow,
according as goes the heart of the player that tunes it. At this sea