ngs
today, his work would be of kindred inspiration.

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at rather
a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below, and the
descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pews
about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the pew-tops. The
vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was devout in the
praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers. "So simple, and yet
so noble!" she said. She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told them
at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist fell
asleep in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and saw in a vision
the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which gained him her
hand. They did not realize till too late that it was all out of a novel
of Georg Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the church a gift
worthy of an inedited legend.

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the
Nuremberg manner. They missed there the constant, sweet civility of
Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a
little cordiality. They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman
who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs
and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses
of such beauty:

"That kings to have the like, might wish to die."

But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly to
the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a fourteenth-century
patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to the
upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and
waited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nail
artfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and
gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him by
driving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded for the
murder.

She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented to
let them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs, with
their escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass and the
matted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at the
destruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others. She suffered
more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in
sc