The town itself is very curious, much more like some large Swiss village, such as one remembers in the Upper Valais or the Hasli-Thal, than any other cathedral town that I know in northern Europe. The streets are all absurdly irregular, bending and twisting about in every possible direction, and full of half-timbered houses, which are all corbelled forward and seem generally to be very ancient. I think, indeed, that I have never seen more picturesque grouping of old buildings, but it is difficult to imagine how they can have preserved their old character so intact; there is absolutely, I believe, not one shop with a shop front or display of its wares of any kind, and hardly more than one modernized house, and this is a smart little inn with a nice garden, and a large Speise-Saal whose walls were literally covered with English prints, many of them old and very good. The population of the place consists nevertheless of some seven or eight thousand persons. The churches have some very remarkable features, of which the most singular is a kind of narthex at the west end, not forming part of the fabric, but built within the churches, the main groining extending on over it to the west end, and a large gallery being formed above it. The best example of this is in S. Peter’s, and I shall leave, for the present, a detailed description of it. The cathedral is a great, rude, desolate-looking church with but few remains of any interest, save at the west end, out of the centre of which rises a fine simple Romanesque steeple. This has five single-light windows in the stage above the roof, and four three-light windows above them. Then above this belfry stage is on each face a steep gable, filled in with openings of varied shapes--on one side, a large circular window, with three other small openings, and on another side three large windows of three lights, and a very small circular window. These gables are not the full width of the tower, and from the angles between them rise four tall and massive pinnacles, slightly ornamented with corbel tables under the eaves, and covered with steep pyramidal metal roofs. The spire is of metal, octagonal in section,--the angles of the octagon springing from the apices of the four gables, and from the internal angles of the four pinnacles. The size and solidity of this remarkable tower give great grandeur to it, and whilst in the treatment of its lower part we see the type of so many of the towers of later date in this district, in that of the spire we see the precursor of those noble spires rising from simple gabled towers which are the glory of Lüneburg and Lübeck.