Once in the train bound for Nuremberg, every sight on the road seems to bring one nearer to Mediæval Germany, and is a fitting prelude to its charms. The storied prettiness of the Rhine district left behind, ripening vines give way to festoons of hops and plots of tobacco; you pass through forests of fir and larch, and come to fields of gold brocade where the lupines are in bloom. Woodlands merge into pleasant meadows watered by swiftly-running streams; every village is crowned by a ruined castle; and there are storks’ nests on clustered roofs about the red church spires. Flaxen-haired children are driving flocks of fat geese; here and there is a battlemented monastery; then come tracts of moorland flushed pink and purple with heather; you dive into hill-sides; you sight dark masses of pine-trees beyond a winding river crossed by an occasional ferry; you halt at mediæval towns capped by crumbling yellow walls of palace and prison, and before long at the spick and span station of manufacturing Fürth (where most of the toys and wood-carvings are now made). And then you see a confusion of dusky, jagged roofs pierced by lofty spires and high walls; massive towers loom above the greenery of a steep hill-side, and you know that your goal is reached. This is Nuremberg, the “jewel-casket of the German Empire.” Your first impression is that it should rather be named the city of wonderful roofs. Mighty roofs heave their four and five rows of dormers high in air above a forest of lower dwellings, with roofs of every degree of steepness, covered for the most part with small inverted tiles of reddish-brown hue. This arrangement gives them a soft and curious shagginess that greatly adds to their effect. Driving first round the town, before passing its gates, you see that it is almost entirely surrounded by dark-red walls, studded by numerous steeple-crowned watch-towers, and further guarded by a dry moat a hundred feet wide and fifty deep, now draped with vines and planted with vegetables and fruit-trees. The River Pegnitz runs through the city, and issues from it in two arms at either end; its islands and covered bridges, with smaller bridges (_hinterbrücke_) swung underneath, supply deliciously pictorial incidents of towers and sheds and mills and timber-yards, with fascinating peeps up and down stream into the interior of the town. [Illustration: ST. LAURENCE, GERMANY.] St. Sebald is the patron saint of the older part of the city near the castle, St. Laurence of the portion across the river, dating from the Thirteenth Century.