uniforms; and the Carnival, a high opportunity for fun and display, and specially seized upon to reproduce historic figures and incidents, such as the half-comic Gecker-Berndchen, a typical figure in red and white, the colors of the town, with a shield in one hand and a wooden sabre in the other, shouting the traditional warning cry, "Geck los Geck elans!" the antique procession of burgher youths and maidens, the latter with large white caps and aprons, and the former in three-cornered hats, black breeches and stockings and thick low shoes. Then follows a fancy ball in the Gürzenich House, in which the lineal descendants of the burgomasters and councillors of old come out in ancient family trappings of black cloth or velvet, stiff white ruff and heavy gold chain from shoulder to shoulder, which their forefathers once wore in earnest. Among the museums and other additions of modern taste is the beautiful botanical garden and large conservatory, where flourish tropical plants in profusion—a thing we find in many even of the secondary German towns.

RHEINFELS.

The Rhine itself is becoming so uninteresting that it is hardly worth while lingering on its banks, and as we get near thrifty Holland the river seems to give itself up wholly to business, for between Cologne and Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) are miles upon miles of manufactories, workshops and mills; warehouses connected with coal-mines; dirty barges blackening the water; iron-works and carpet-mills; cloth and paper-mills and glass-works—a busy region, the modern translation of the myth of gnomes making gold out of dross in the bowels of the earth.

"AM THÜRMCHEN," COLOGNE.

Aachen has a double life also, like many Rhine towns: it is the old imperial coronation city, the city of Charlemagne, with a corona of legends about it; and it is also the modern spa, the basket of tempting figs with a concealed asp somewhere within, a centre of fashion, gossip and gambling. How is it that people who profess to fly from the great capitals for the sake of a "little Nature" are so unable to take Nature at her word and confess her delights to be enough for them? They want a change, they say; yet where is the change? The table is the same, high-priced, choice and varied; the society is the same, the gossip is the same, the amusements are the same, the intrigues the same; the costume equally elaborate and expensive; the restless idleness as great and as hungry for excitement: all the artificiality of life is transported bodily into another place, and the only difference lies in the frame of the picture. Exquisites from the capital bring their own world with them, and their humbler imitators scrape together their hard winter's earnings and spend them in making an attempt cavalierly to equal for a short time the tired-out "man of the world" and "woman of fashion." Some come to find matches for sons and daughters; others to put in the thin end of the wedge that is to open a way for them "into society;" others come to flirt; others to increase their business relations; others to out-dress and out-drive social rivals; others to while away the time which it is unfashionable to spend cheaply in the city; others for—shall we say higher? because—political causes: few indeed for health, fewer still for rest. You see the same old wheel go round year after year, with the same faces growing more and more tired and more and more hopeless.

Of Aachen's legendary, historical, romantic side who has not heard?—of the castle of Frankenburg on the outskirts, where Charlemagne's daughter carried her lover Eginhardt through the snow, that their love might not be betrayed by a double track of footsteps; of Charlemagne's palace, where his school, the Palatine, presided over by English Alcuin, was held; and the baths where a hundred men could swim at ease at one time; and Charlemagne's cathedral, of which the present one has preserved only the octagonal apse; of his tomb, where he sat upright after death in imperial robes and on a marble throne (the latter is still shown); of the columns brought from Rome and Ravenna; of the marvellous and colossal corona of wax-lights which hangs by a huge iron chain from the vaulted roof; of the bronze doors of the western gateway, now closed, but whose legend of the Devil is commemorated by the iron figure of a she-wolf with a hole in her breast, and that of a pineapple, supposed to represent her spirit, of which she mourns the loss with open jaws and hanging tongue? The Devil is always cheated in these legends, and one wonders how it was that he did not show more cleverness in making his bargains. The cathedral still claims to possess precious relics—of the Passion, the Holy Winding-sheet, the robe of the Blessed Virgin and the blood-stained cloth in which the body of Saint John the Baptist was wrapped. These involve a yearly pilgrimage from the nearer places, and a great feast every seventh year, when a holy fair is kept up for weeks round the cathedral. There is no better living specimen of the Middle Ages than such gatherings, and no doubt then, as now, there was some undercurrent of worldly excitement mingling with the flow of genuine devotion. Aachen's old cornhouse, the bridge gate and the many houses full of unobtrusive beauties of carving and metal-work lead us by hook and by crook—for the streets are very winding—out on the road to Burtschied, the hot-water town, whose every house has a spring of its own, besides the very gutters running mineral water, and the cooking spring in the open street boiling eggs almost faster than they can be got out again in eatable condition. This is another of the merchant villeggiaturas of Germany; and a good many foreigners also own pretty, fantastic new houses, planted among others of every age from one to eight hundred years.

It is so strange to come upon a purely modern town in this neighborhood that Exefeld strikes us as an anachronism. It is wholly a business place, created by the "dry-goods" manufactures that have grown up there, and are worth twenty million thalers a year to the enterprising owners, who rival French designs and have made a market for their wares in England and America. This is a great foil to old Roman Neuss, with its massive gates, its tower attributed to Drusus—after whom so many bridges and towers on the Rhine are named—and even to Düsseldorf, which, notwithstanding its modern part, twice as large as its old river front, has some beautiful antique pictures to show us, both in the costumes of its market-women, who wear red petticoats with white aprons and flapping caps, and stand laughing and scolding in a high key by their dog-drawn carts, and in its council-house, an early Renaissance building with square, high-roofed turrets overlooking the market-place. In that little house, in a narrow street leading to the market, Heine was born; in that wretched little architectural abortion, the theatre, a critical audience listened to Immermann's works; and in the Kurzenstrasse was born Peter von Cornelius, the restorer of German art. Schadow succeeded him at the head of the Academy, and a new school of painting was firmly established in the old city, which had energy enough left in it to mark out another successful path for itself in trade. The new town is handsome, monotonous, rich and populous, but the galleries and museums somewhat make up for the lack