, where Charlemagne's daughter
carried her lover Eginhardt through the snow, that their love might not be
betrayed by a double track of footsteps; of Charlemagne's palace, where
his school, the Palatine, presided over by English Alcuin, was held; and
the baths where a hundred men could swim at ease at one time; and
Charlemagne's cathedral, of which the present one has preserved only the
octagonal apse; of his tomb, where he sat upright after death in imperial
robes and on a marble throne (the latter is still shown); of the columns
brought from Rome and Ravenna; of the marvellous and colossal corona of
wax-lights which hangs by a huge iron chain from the vaulted roof; of the
bronze doors of the western gateway, now closed, but whose legend of the
Devil is commemorated by the iron figure of a she-wolf with a hole in her
breast, and that of a pineapple, supposed to represent her spirit, of
which she mourns the loss with open jaws and hanging tongue? The Devil is
always cheated in these legends, and one wonders how it was that he did
not show more cleverness in making his bargains. The cathedral still
claims to possess precious relics--of the Passion, the Holy Winding-sheet,
the robe of the Blessed Virgin and the blood-stained cloth in which the
body of Saint John the Baptist was wrapped. These involve a yearly
pilgrimage from the nearer places, and a great feast every seventh year,
when a holy fair is kept up for weeks round the cathedral. There is no
better living specimen of the Middle Ages than such gatherings, and no
doubt then, as now, there was some undercurrent of worldly excitement
mingling with the flow of genuine devotion. Aachen's old cornhouse, the
bridge gate and the many houses full of unobtrusive beauties of carving
and metal-work lead us by hook and by crook--for the streets are very
winding--out on the road to Burtschied, the hot-water town, whose every
house has a spring of its own, besides the very gutters running mineral
water, and the cooking spring in the open street boiling eggs almost
faster than they can be got out again in eatable condition. This is
another of the merchant _villeggiaturas_ of Germany; and a good many
foreigners also own pretty, fantastic new houses, planted among others of
every age from one to eight hundred years.

It is so strange to come upon a purely modern town in this neighborhood
that Exefeld strikes us as an anachronism. It is wholly a business place,
created by the "dry-go