Of course, much of what we see is modern; the choir is fairly early for Gothic in Germany, having been begun in 1248 and finished just seventy-five years later; the transepts followed at once, and the lower portion of the nave, but interest died out and some time during the fifteenth century work completely stopped. During the Renaissance nothing was done except to mess up the forlorn interior with pseudo-classic ineptitudes, and finally the Revolutionists came over to turn the whole thing into a storage place for hay. In 1823 royalty conceived the scheme of restoring the ruin and completing the entire design in accordance with certain original plans which had been preserved. It is said, possibly with truth, [Illustration: COLOGNE] that the first architect, Master Gerard, sold his soul to the devil as the price for these same plans, and if so he would perhaps have done better had he followed the practice of the master masons of a century earlier in France, who preferred to deal with other spiritual powers and not on the basis of trade. However this may be, the work went on at the expense of all Germany, and was finally completed in 1880, at a cost of some five millions of dollars. As it stands, then, it is largely the work of restoration and of nineteenth-century talent; hence, if in the fortunes of war it should be subjected to the hail of shell and shrapnel from French and British batteries, so working out the hard old Israelitish law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and suffering even as Reims has suffered, the world would look on with far different sentiments since, apart from its windows (some of them) and pictures and tombs, nothing would be lost that could not be replaced and after a better fashion; for after all when you say the most you can for the nineteenth century it will generally be admitted that, even in Germany, it was not a stimulating era so far as creative or even archæological Gothic art is concerned.