even the whitewash neglected, and
everything poor and tasteless, for in the new State money is deficient,
and no pleasure is felt in adorning public edifices, which are
considered by the citizens as a necessary evil. Most of the houses in
the market-place have pointed gables; they look out on the street, and
betwixt the houses broad rushing gutters pour their water on the bad
pavement, which is made of rough stones. Among the houses stands an
occasional church or abandoned monastic buildings, with buttresses and
pointed arches. The people look with indifference on these remains of
the past, bound up with which there is scarcely any fond remembrance,
for they have lost all appreciation of ancient art; owing to this, the
edifices of the ancient times are everywhere ruined, as the castle of
Marienburg was by Frederic of Prussia. The magistrates have carefully
turned the empty space into a parsonage-house or schoolroom, knocked
out the windows, and made a plaster ceiling; and the boys look from
their Latin grammar with admiration on the stone rosettes and delicate
work of the chisel,--remains of a time when such inutilities were still
erected; and in the crumbling cloisters where once trod monks with
earnest step, they now spin their humming tops; for the "_Circitor
susurrans_," or "Monk," is still the favourite game of this period,
which gentlemen of rank also, in a smaller form, sometimes carry in
their pockets.

There is already much order in the city: the streets are swept, the
dung-heaps, which fifty years before, even in towns of some calibre,
lay in front of the doors--the ancient cleanliness having disappeared
in the war--are again removed by an ordinance, which the councillors of
the sovereign have sent to the superior officials, and these to the
senate. The stock of cattle in the streets is also much diminished; the
pigs and cattle, which not long before 1700 enjoyed themselves amidst
the children at play, in the dirt of the street, are strictly kept in
farmyards and out-houses, for the government does not like that the
cities should keep cattle within the walls, for it has introduced the
_octroi_, and a disbanded non-commissioned officer paces backwards and
forwards near the gate, with his cane in his hand in order to examine
the cans and baskets of the country people. Thus the rearing of cattle
is carried on in the needy suburbs and farms: it is only in the small
country towns that citizens employ agriculture a