its nicknames, "the German Athens," but here were, in this southern and
unfashionable suburb, only a few modern structures, and most of the
quaint and rather picturesque dwellings, overhanging the stores, dated
anterior to the filling up of the town moat in 1791.

The stranger was clearly fond of antiquarian spectacles, for his eye,
though too youthful to belong to a Dryasdust professor, and unshaded by
the almost universal colored spectacles of the learned classes, gloated
on the mansions, once inhabited by the wealthy burghers. They were
irregular in plan and period of erection; the windows had ornamental
frames of great depth, but some were blocked up, which gave the facades
a sinister aspect; the walls had not only ornamental tablets in stucco,
but, in a better light, would have shown rude fresco paintings not
unworthy mediæval Italian dwellings. Many of the fronts resembled the
high poops of the castellated ships of three hundred years ago, and they
cast a shadow on the muddy pavement. As they resembled ships, the slimy
footway seemed the strand where they had been beached by the running out
of the tide.

As the darkness increased, the amateur of architecture became more
solitary in the streets where the peasants in long black coats, their
holiday wear, were hurrying to leave by the gates, and the storekeepers
had renounced any hope of taking more money, in this ward, gloomy,
neglected and remote from the mode, no display of goods was made after
dark. But the man, finding novel effects in the obscurity, continued to
gaze on the rickety houses and bestowed only a transient portion of his
curiosity on the few wayfarers who stolidly trudged past him to cross a
bridge of no importance a little beyond his post.

One or two of the passengers, rather those of the gentler sex than the