smen, and
the pretty girls ready to flirt with the students and give away the prizes
at an archery-meeting or a regatta, ever think of these musty old legends
looked up by scholars out of convent chronicles and peasants' fireside
talk? The difference between past and present is not greater or more
startling than is their likeness, the groundwork of human nature being the
same for ever. Especially in these old lands, how like the life of to-day
to that of hundreds of years ago in all that makes life real and intense!
The same thing in a mould of other shape, the same thoughts in a speech a
little varied, the same motives under a dress a little less natural and
crude--even the same pleasures in a great degree, for the wine-flask
played fully as great a part in old German times as it does now.

[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE AT WORMS.]

"Holy Cologne" seems at first an impersonation of the olden time, but its
busy wharves, crowded shipping and tall warehouses tell us another tale.
Indeed, Cologne is more rich than holy, and its commercial reputation is
quite as old as its religious one. The country around is flat and
uninteresting, but Cologne merchants have made Bruehl a little paradise in
spite of this; and their country-houses of all styles, with balconies,
verandas, porches, piazzas, English shrubbery and flower-gardens,
conservatories and gay boats, lawns and statues, make even the monotonous
banks of the sluggish Rhine beautiful in spite of Nature. Then comes a
reminder of old times--the towers and fortifications, which are still
standing, though now turned into public gardens and drives that stretch
out both on the river and the land side; but the former, _Am Thuermchen_,
forming a sort of parapeted quay, crossed by massive battlemented
gateways, is the most fashionable and commands the best views. The trees
almost hide the shipping, as their predecessors no doubt did eighteen
hundred years ago and more, when the Ubier tribe of barbarians, a
commercial as well as warlike people, undertook to ferry over the whole of
Caesar's army to the right bank of the Rhine in their own boats. The quays
swarm now with hotels, and these in summer swarm with strangers from all
countries--pilgrims of Art and Nature, if no longer of religion--and the
old town becomes in their eyes less a solid, real city with a long history
than a museum opened for their special behoof. And indeed these German
places seem to take kindly to this part, for