High over walls and houses, as we fly along the railway, towers the cathedral, with its ancient crane still erect on its unfinished tower. Who designed this huge building? Alas! centuries before his work is complete, the name of the architect is lost. Six hundred years ago the work was begun, but the glory of God is the plea on which it has been prosecuted, and upon that altar the humble designer has sacrificed his fame! And as it fades from the sight, memory recalls another scene which, four centuries ago, was witnessed beneath the shadow of this great pile. In a small upper room, with rude appliances, and a scanty store of materials, two men are seen curiously putting together the letters of a movable alphabet, arranging them into the form of tiny pages, and with slow deliberation impressing them, page by page, on the anxiously moistened paper. The younger of the two is William Caxton, the father of English printing. Here he learned the then young art which has since rendered him famous in his native land. How would William Caxton admire, could he now for a moment be carried into the printing-office of a metropolitan journal, and see with what marvellous speed and certainty the operations he watched so anxiously at Cologne are now conducted. But as the quick thoughts course through our mind, we rush as quickly along towards Dusseldorf. We have now left the country of hedgerows of timber and of visible fences, and divisions of the land. Open, flat, and rich, it stretches inward from the Rhine, often light, and sometimes sandy or gravelly; all cultivated on the flat, all neat and clean, but naked, at this season, both of animal and vegetable life. A few sheep sprinkled over one field, and a rare man or woman trudging along beside deep ditches, were the only symptoms of moving life we saw between Cologne and Dusseldorf; while pollard trees here and there, and long rows of unpollarded poplars by the highway-sides, where a village was near, as tamely represented the vegetable ornaments which beautify an English landscape.