curious one than the Kreuzberg, a place of pilgrimage, where the church of 1627 has replaced an old wood-shrine: its rich gateway was intended to represent the front of Pontius Pilate's palace at Jerusalem, and on it are frescoes of the various scenes of the Passion. Within this thirty marble steps lead up into a vestibule in imitation of the Scala Santa in Rome, and pilgrims went up these stairs only on their knees. The vaults used until lately to contain a quantity of dried or mummied bodies of Servite monks (that order once had a convent here), reminding one of the ghastly Capuchin crypts in Rome, in Syracuse and in Malta. This neighborhood is rich in pilgrimage-shrines and legends, and Simrock has preserved a tale of the Devil which is a little out of the common run. He and the Wind, it is said, once went by a certain Jesuit church in company, and the former begged the latter to wait a moment for him, as he had some business within. The Devil never reappeared, and the Wind is still blowing perpetually round the building, waiting and calling in vain. The old myth of Barbarossa waiting in his cave, his beard grown round and round the stone table on which he leans his sleepy head, which in another form meets us in the Mosel Valley, repeats itself in Wolfsberg, not far from Siegburg, near Bonn. I wonder whether the English anglers and oarsmen, and the pretty girls ready to flirt with the students and give away the prizes at an archery-meeting or a regatta, ever think of these musty old legends looked up by scholars out of convent chronicles and peasants' fireside talk? The difference between past and present is not greater or more startling than is their likeness, the groundwork of human nature being the same for ever. Especially in these old lands, how like the life of to-day to that of hundreds of years ago in all that makes life real and intense! The same thing in a mould of other shape, the same thoughts in a speech a little varied, the same motives under a dress a little less natural and crude—even the same pleasures in a great degree, for the wine-flask played fully as great a part in old German times as it does now.

MARKET-PLACE AT WORMS.

"Holy Cologne" seems at first an impersonation of the olden time, but its busy wharves, crowded shipping and tall warehouses tell us another tale. Indeed, Cologne is more rich than holy, and its commercial reputation is quite as old as its religious one. The country around is flat and uninteresting, but Cologne merchants have made Brühl a little paradise in spite of this; and their country-houses of all styles, with balconies, verandas, porches, piazzas, English shrubbery and flower-gardens, conservatories and gay boats, lawns and statues, make even the monotonous banks of the sluggish Rhine beautiful in spite of Nature. Then comes a reminder of old times—the towers and fortifications, which are still standing, though now turned into public gardens and drives that stretch out both on the river and the land side; but the former, Am Thürmchen, forming a sort of parapeted quay, crossed by massive battlemented gateways, is the most fashionable and commands the best views. The trees almost hide the shipping, as their predecessors no doubt did eighteen hundred years ago and more, when the Ubier tribe of barbarians, a commercial as well as warlike people, undertook to ferry over the whole of Cæsar's army to the right bank of the Rhine in their own boats. The quays swarm now with hotels, and these in summer swarm with strangers from all countries—pilgrims of Art and Nature, if no longer of religion—and the old town becomes in their eyes less a solid, real city with a long history than a museum opened for their special behoof. And indeed these German places seem to take kindly to this part, for they rival each other in modern amusements and gauds set out to lure the light-minded. Music-halls and beer-gardens, theatres and cafés, illuminated promenades and stalls full of tempting flagons labeled "genuine eau de Cologne," are cunningly arrayed to turn away the mind from the stately antique churches and houses of Cologne. Every one has heard of the cathedral, many have seen it, and more have seen at least photographs of great accuracy, and pictures of it which, if less strict in detail, give it a more lifelike look and include some of its surroundings. The church of St. Gereon, a martyr of the Theban Legion massacred at Cologne to a man for refusing to worship the imperial ensigns, under which no one denied that they had fought like lions, is a massive Romanesque building older than the cathedral, dating from the days of Constantine and Saint Helena. The church of the Holy Apostles is a basilica with rounded apse and four octagon towers, one at each corner of the nave. St. Peter's church, the interior terribly modernized by the Renaissance, has for an altar-piece Rubens's picture of the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. The Gürzenich House, now used for public balls and imperial receptions, is a magnificent fifteenth-century building, adorned with dwarf towers at each corner, a high, carved and stone-roofed niche with statue over the round-arched door, transom windows filled with stained glass, and carvings of shields, animal heads, colonnettes and other devices between and above these windows. The council-house or town-hall has a beautiful colonnade supporting arches, and a quaint nondescript creature whose abyss-like maw opens wide and gapes horribly at the beholder each time the clock strikes. A bas-relief in the hall represents a curious incident in the civic history of the town, the successful struggle of Burgomaster Gryn with a lion, the show and pet of some treacherous nobles who invited Gryn to dinner, and under pretence of showing him their very unusual acquisition, pushed him into the stone recess and closed the gate upon him. The burgomaster thrust his hand and arm, wrapped in his thick cloak, down the animal's throat, while he pierced him through and through with the sword in his other hand. The struggles between Cologne and her archbishops were hot and incessant, much as they were in other ecclesiastical sovereignties. Of these there is no longer a trace in the present, though the might of the burghers exists still, and the city that was once called the kernel of the Hanseatic League, and boasted of its Lorenzo de' Medici in the person of the good and enlightened Matthias Overstolz, has now almost as proud a place among merchants as Hamburg or Frankfort. Before we pass to more modern things let us not forget the shrine of the Three Kings in the cathedral, which is simply a mass of gold and jewelry, in such profusion as to remind one of nothing less than the golden screen studded with uncut gems called the Palla d'Oro at San Marco, directly behind the high altar, and the Golden Frontal of St. Ambrose at Milan—golden altar it might more fitly be named, as each side of the altar is a slab of solid gold, almost hidden by its breastplate of precious stones. The same warrior-archbishop, Conrad of Hochstaden, who, driven from Cologne, transferred his see to Bonn, was the first founder of the cathedral, though in those days of slow and solid building to found was not to finish. The cathedral is not finished even yet. The present scenes in which Cologne shines are many—for instance, its lively market on the Neumarkt, and the country costumes one sees there each week as the stalls and carts, easily drawn by dogs and donkeys, are set up in the square; the parade of the old guard, called the "Sparks of Cologne" from their scarlet