I have said that the widow Staubach had brought with her to Nuremberg some income upon which to live in the red house with the three gables. Some small means of her own she possessed, some few hundred florins a-year, which were remitted to her punctually from Cologne; but this would not have sufficed even for the moderate wants of herself, her niece, and of the old maid Tetchen, who lived with them, and who had lived with Linda's mother. But there was a source of income very ready to the widow's hand, and of which it was a matter of course that she should in her circumstances avail herself. She and her niece could not fill the family home, and a portion of it was let to a lodger. This lodger was Herr Steinmarc--Peter Steinmarc, who had been clerk to Linda's father when Linda's father had been clerk to the city magistrates, and who was now clerk to the city magistrates himself. Peter Steinmarc in the old days had inhabited a garret in the house, and had taken his meals at his master's table; but now the first floor of the house was his own, the big airy pleasant chamber looking out from under one gable on to the clear water, and the broad passage under the middle gable, and the square large bedroom--the room in which Linda had been born--under the third gable. The windows from these apartments all looked out on to the slow-flowing but clear stream, which ran so close below them that the town-clerk might have sat and fished from his windows had he been so minded; for there was no road there--only the narrow slip of a garden no broader than a balcony. And opposite, beyond the river, where the road ran, there was a broad place,--the Ruden Platz; and every house surrounding this was picturesque with different colours, and with many gables, and the points of the houses rose up in sharp pyramids, of which every brick and every tile was in its place, sharp, clear, well formed, and appropriate, in those very inches of space which each was called upon to fill. For in Nuremberg it is the religion of the community that no house shall fall into decay, that no form of city beauty shall be allowed to vanish, that nothing of picturesque antiquity shall be changed. From age to age, though stones and bricks are changed, the buildings are the same, and the medieval forms remain, delighting the taste of the traveller as they do the pride of the burgher. Thus it was that Herr Steinmarc, the clerk of the magistrates in Nuremberg, had for his use as pleasant an abode as the city could furnish him.