The railway sets us down outside the walls of the city. As we walk from
the station toward the Frauen Thor, and stand beneath the crown of
fortified walls three and a half miles in circumference, and gaze at the
old gray towers and picturesque confusion of domes, pinnacles and
spires, suddenly it seems as if our dream of a feudal city has been
realized. There, before us, is one of the main entrances, still between
massive gates and beneath archways flanked by stately towers. Still to
reach it we must cross a moat fifty feet deep and a hundred feet wide.
True, the swords of old days have been turned into pruning-hooks; the
crenelles and embrasures which once bristled and blazed with cannon are
now curtained with brambles and wall-flowers, and festooned with
Virginia creepers; the galleries are no longer crowded with archers and
cross-bowmen; the moat itself has blossomed into a garden, luxuriant
with limes and acacias, elders, planes, chestnuts, poplars, walnut,
willow and birch trees, or divided into carefully tilled little garden
plots. True it is that outside the moat, beneath the smug grin of
substantial modern houses, runs that mark of modernity, the electric
tram.

But let us for the moment forget these gratifying signs of modern
prosperity and, turning to the left ere we enter the Frauen Thor, walk
with our eyes on the towers which, with their steep-pitched roofs and
myriad shapes and richly colored tiles, mark the intervals in the
red-bricked, stone-cased galleries and mighty bastions, till we come to
the first beginnings of Nuremberg--the Castle. There, on the highest
eminence of the town, stands that venerable fortress, crowning the red
slope of tiles. Roofs piled on roofs, their pinnacles, turrets, points
and angles heaped one above the other in a splendid confusion, climb the
hill which culminates in the varied group of buildings on the Castle
rock. We have passed the Spittler, Mohren, Haller and Neu Gates on our