ck. Its
streets are trim and clean, and its houses likewise, with a brilliancy
of fresh paint which is consistently and proverbially Dutch. Beneath
one's foot is a sea of cobblestones all worn to a smoothness which
argues the tramp of countless hordes of feet over centuries of time, if
paving-stones have really been invented so long. With all its air of
prosperity and providence, Muenchen-Gladbach is not a highly interesting
town in which to linger.

Its name is compounded of its prefix, meaning _monk's_, with its
original patronymic, Gladbach. The monks of Gladbach were a part of the
establishment which founded the minster church of Gladbach, an old abbey
or monastic edifice which stands to-day, a great transeptless
thirteenth-century structure with an elevated choir reached from the
nave by two flights of ten or a dozen steps.

The crypt is entered from between these two flights of steps, and forms
all that is left to mark the primitive church.

The round-arched style and Gothic, of a sort, intermingle in the nave in
bewildering fashion until one wonders in what classification it really
belongs. The openings from the aisles to the nave are pointed, while
above is an unpierced triforium with a clerestory of round-headed
arches.

In the aisles are what Jacobean architects called fanlights, a series of
peculiarly shaped openings like an oddly shaped fan. They are distinctly
Rhenish; indeed they are not acknowledged to be found elsewhere, and
hence may be considered as one of the chief points of distinction of
this otherwise not remarkably appealing church.

There are no aisles in the choir, which dates from the thirteenth
century and terminates with a multi-sided apse pierced by long lancet
windows.

The Stadt Kirche of Gladbach, or the parish church as it properly takes
rank, is still a Catholic edifice and shows the advantage of having been
kept in active use. There is nothing musty or moss-grown about it, but
in every way it is as warmly appealing as the monks' church is coldly
unattractive.

There is no marked choir termination, its great aisles extending
completely to the rear with just a suspicion of a rudimentary pentagonal
apse to suggest the easterly end. This is a common enough arrangement in
German churches, which more frequently than not, in the fourteenth
century, the date of this structure, possessed nothing but a squared-off
east end, after the English manner of building.

At the westerly end is