Crucifixes and Madonnas, carried by freshets over barren fields, brought fertility. The devil, too, figured more largely in the narratives of days before printed books formed the basis of education. He generally appeared in the persons of giants and witches, which latter were his agents by special contract. Their freaks had all shades of enormity, from the slight teasing of the housewife in her baking and churning to the peril of life and limb and endless perdition. The devil sometimes coming in one of these forms endangered the lives of the quiet people of the city by formally dismissing the watch between the hours of eleven and twelve o'clock at night. So hundreds of things which he has become too genteel in our day to practise. The founding of the city was near the close of that great movement known as the crusades. What a world of material these furnished to be used in popular education! The feats of knights, instead of assuming distinct forms and being stereotyped and told to them in books, were surrendered to the popular mouth for preservation and propagation. Saints, angels, and demons attached themselves from time to time to these circulating myths. Original characters often dropped out, and the discrimination of the wisest believer in the real and ideal, became confused. Then came the period of the Hussite war. This gave rise to many a miracle of divine judgment. The Bohemian mocker of the holy mass, or of some wonder-working statue of the Virgin, is pursued with divine vengeance. The Jews--how suggestive the name, in the history of mediæval Europe, of mystery, miracle, and murder!--were early allowed to settle in Munich. They were assigned to a particular street. In the year 1285 a story was started--it had been long stereotyped, and editions of it circulated in every part of Christendom--of the murder of a Christian child. A persecution of the Jews was the result--one hundred and forty were burned in their own houses--and the poor Israelites must doubtless suffer without redress, although many of them were then, as they now are, bankers and brokers to the spiritual and temporal lords. Not far from the same time the ducal mint was destroyed, because the people were enraged to find the metal in their coin growing alarmingly less. For this the city must pay a fine.