is house was not the only one of its kind, as I was able to convince
myself on walking a few steps out of doors. The actual Luebeck is still
to the eye the Luebeck of the Middle Ages, the old capital of the
Hanseatic League.[B] All the drama of modern life is enacted in the old
theater whose scenery remains the same, its drop-scene even not
repainted. What a pleasure it is to be walking thus amid the outward
life of the past, and to contemplate the same dwellings which
long-vanished generations have inhabited! Without doubt, the living man
has a right to model his shell in accordance with his own habits, his
tastes, and his manners; but it can not be denied that a new city is far
less attractive than an old one.

When I was a child, I sometimes received for a New Year's present one of
those Nuremberg boxes containing a whole miniature German city. In a
hundred different ways I arranged the little houses of painted wood
around the church, with its pointed belfry and its red walls, where the
seam of the bricks was marked by fine white lines. I set out my two
dozen frizzed and painted trees, and saw with delight the charmingly
outlandish and wildly festal air which these apple-green, pink, lilac,
fawn-colored houses with their window-panes, their retreating gables,
and their steep roofs, brilliant with red varnish, assumed, spread out
on the carpet.

My idea was that houses like these had no existence in reality, but were
made by some kind fairy for extremely good little boys. The marvelous
exaggeration of childhood gave this little parti-colored city a
respectable development, and I walked through its regular streets, tho
with the same precautions as did Gulliver in Liliput. Luebeck gave back
to me this long-forgotten feeling of my childish days. I seemed to walk
in a city of the imagination, taken out of some monstrous toy-box. I
believe, considering all the faultlessly correct architecture that I
have been forced to see in my traveler's life, that I really deserved
that pleasure by way of compensation.

A cloister, or at least a gallery, a fragment of an ancient monastery,
presented itself to view. This colonnade ran the whole length of the
square, at the end of which stood the Marienkirche, a brick church of
the fourteenth century. Continuing my walk, I found myself in a
market-place, where awaited me one of those sights which repay the
traveler for much fatigue: a public building of a new, unforeseen,
original aspe