hes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry. A
tile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries of
sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded
piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth
against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed
themselves in assault. The blood shed in forgotten battles would have
flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there
a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers
dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city. From its ramparts
the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if one
has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it is
here that more than anywhere else one may feast it. The prospect of tower
and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an abounding
fulness, that all incidents are lost in it. The multitudinous roofs of
red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, press upon one
another in endless succession; they cluster together on a rise of ground
and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere disperse or
scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond which
looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of misty uplands.

A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors to
gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible
museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air on
all the murderous engines and implements of torture. First in German and
then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she
winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which men had
been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which had
beheaded eight hundred persons. When she took the established fee from
March she suggested, with a demure glance, "And what more you please for
saying it in English."

"Can you say it in Russian?" demanded a young man, whose eyes he had seen
dwelling on her from the beginning. She laughed archly, and responded
with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of sight-seers over
to the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers of
the Burg. These were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of the
past are perpetually suffering in the pre