younger days I had been defrauded of my fair share of tower-climbing.
Hohenfels had a saying that most travelers are a sort of children, who
need to touch all they see, and who will climb to every broken tooth
of a castle they find on their way, getting a tiresome ascent and hot
sunshine for their pains. "I trust we are wiser," he would observe,
so unanswerably that I passed with him up the Rhine quite, as I may
express it, on the ground floor.

I marched to the cathedral, determined to ascend, and when I saw the
look of it changed my mind.

The sacristan, in fact, advised me not to go up after he had taken my
fee and obtained a view of my proportions over the tube of his
key, which he pretended to whistle into. We sat down together as I
recovered my breath, after which I wandered through the nave with
my guide, admiring the statue of the original architect, who stands
looking at the interior--a kind of Wren "circumspecting" his own
monument. At high noon the twelve apostles come out from the famous
horologe and take up their march, and chanticleer, on one of the
summits of the clock-case, opens his brazen throat and crows loud
enough to fill the farthest recesses of the church with his harsh
alarum.

A portly citizen was talking to the sacristan. "I hear many objections
to that bird, sir," he remarked to me, "from fastidious tourists: one
thinks that a peacock, spreading its jewels by mechanism, would have
a richer effect. Another says that a swan, perpetually wrestling with
its dying song, would be more poetical. Others, in the light of late
events, would prefer a phoenix."